ABSTRACT
The Czech and Slovak ‘New Waves’ describe a film group in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s, whose activity ended abruptly in 1968 with the invasion of the troops of the Warsaw Pact countries. Although many Slovak directors of the ‘New Wave’ studied at the Film Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and worked in the Czech parts of the country, their films were perceived as either Czech or Slovak. Driven by the protagonists’ needs to create spaces where an alternative lifestyle is possible, in both films they are established as refuges. Furthermore, the spaces represent the attempt to override the dominant spatial order permanently. However, through their inversion of convention, rather than a new form of spatiality, these spaces could be better described as a carnivalesque world upside-down. Even though 1968 in Czechoslovakia was less of an uprising of the youth than in the West, a distinct youth culture in dissociation from their parents emerged.
