Depiction of the Countryside in the Czech Film in the Early 1950s on the Example of the Film Slepice a kostelník [The Hen and the Sexton]

Czechoslovak film Slepice a kostelník [The Hen and the Sexton] was premiered in 1951. Its directors Oldřich Lipský and Jan Strejček made the film based on a theatre play by Jaroslav Zrotal. The movie is an example in which way the then Czechoslovak communist propaganda depicted the Czech countryside of that time. The film included topics accentuated by the totalitarian propaganda – the fight against acts of sabotage, the importance of collectivization of the agricultural sector, the worker-peasant alliance, and the task of young generation. Simultaneously, the movie worked with the expressions of folk culture, when it was shot in the ethnographic area of Slovácko (in the Uherský Brod environs). The creators used local folk costumes and folklore (folk songs and dances). Prague actors tried to speak local dialect of the Slovácko region. The film can be placed in the context of the then Czechoslovak cinematography, which, based on the resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from April 1950, was supposed to deal mainly with ongoing topics of the then society, and to capture them in the spirit of socialist realism.