By Stephen Weeks

For me, the week of the June general elections was notable for three other things: the failure of a parliamentary bill opposed by President Václav Klaus that would have subsidized the Czech film industry, the decision by the U.S. Army to give its troops ethics lessons in the wake of alleged atrocities in Iraq, and the showing on TV Nova of the movie The Mummy. Curiously, I found these three topics intimately related.

The president vetoed the film–funding bill because he thinks cinema is a commercial business and therefore shouldn't be subsidized — especially at the expense of other arts. I believe the way the subsidy was proposed to have been funded (through a tax on TV broadcasters and on movie tickets and the sales and rental of home videos and DVDs) was wrong, but that the fundamental idea was right.

Yes, cinema is a commercial business. With the substantial amounts of money movies cost, it has to be. But it is also extremely influential. It is influential because it is a medium of communication, and can be very effective at it, too. Unfortunately, most of the 'art' films that get most of the subsidies in Europe and elsewhere don't succeed in communicating — either because these limp-wristed efforts aren't good movies (Britain's Lottery-funded films have in the main been total disasters), or because their 'authors' don't actually want to communicate anything.

I gave a lecture to some film students last year. I criticized the incomprehensible outline of a script by one of the students, and he turned on me saying that it didn't matter if I didn't understand it because the film (if made) would only be intended for him. And he, apparently, understood it. If the few million it would cost were his, then what the hell. ...

So what about the other arts? Painting, ceramics, poetry — most of these can tick over and provide their creators with a living. Opera and orchestral music usually can't survive on ticket sales and most countries rightly subsidize these. Architecture's expensive, but it exists only to serve an economic function. Sculpture isn't so lucky.

The old socialist system here, which insisted on a work of sculpture for every new large public or commercial building, wasn't actually a bad idea. And if that means today it equates to a tax on real estate developers, then that's no bad thing. However, literature here is in a fix.

There is a buoyant market for Czech authors within the country, but sales agents report that they can sell hardly any new works for translation to foreign markets. There are few big literary stars who are Czech, and almost no rising ones. Maybe here too is a case for some subsidy — to see that the Czech cultural voice is heard around the world. The British Council, for example, finances the translation of English works into many languages, and the United States gets its literature out simply by market imperialism.

Don't underestimate the power of the book. For millions of people, quite a few of them American, the only book they will have read in the past two years (or maybe ever) is The Da Vinci Code. Because it's so 'big' in terms of a sales phenomenon, then it has a certain respectability, and millions of its readers actually believe as true what it posits as pure fiction! I think we should insist that the descendants of the Bourbons, or whoever, show us the palms of their hands and prove it all wrong.

The movie of that book probably also has a certain international credibility. Big U.S. blockbusters are unstoppable. Like – The Mummy – which was presented here dubbed into Czech for TV. It presents the all-American values: Dumb-assed action heroes let loose in the science of Egyptology.

These characters, all sporting two handguns and a rifle each, even while having dinner, blast their way through the movie. They point and shoot at anything remotely strange, curious or brain-challenging (and there's plenty of that in Egyptian archaeology). And for good measure, anything that resembles a Muslim gets shot down automatically, without a tremor of remorse. The death of the old (European) pilot gets a two-second nod, but native corpses pile high without a single shake of the head.

"But it's only fiction," you're saying. "Everyone knows it's not like that!" And this is where you are wrong. In Iraq, we have recently seen that U.S. troops shoot first and think afterward. Three weeks of 'ethics lessons' aren't going to change an entire culture, despite the persistent notion on the other side of the Atlantic that people's emotions, like car engine problems, can be 'fixed.'

So maybe we can look at the failure to subsidise Czech movies the other way round. Do we really want a country where market forces obliterate the Czech cultural point of view in favor of that of the United States, especially in such a powerful medium as cinema? I remember as a child, when Britain had these worries, that there was a system that levied a box-office tax on successful imported films (i.e., American ones) and redistributed it for new production to successful British producers.

This also kept producers on their toes because to get the free money you had to make movies that people wanted to watch. And, as a child, I did watch exciting and entertaining detective movies in which the Metropolitan Police did not carry guns — nor did the villains! This seems incredible now, having had so many years since of being brainwashed by American gun culture.

So maybe not in the way first proposed, but perhaps by some other more effective method, the unique voice of Czech culture, as expressed in movies, should be helped against the veritable tsunami of American imports. When Hollywood is good, it has the power and determination to be very good; but when it's just crudely exploitative and rotten, then it is not only bad but dangerous too.