ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the film Living in Prague directed by Otokar Vavra. In Vavra's Prague portrait, the influence of Walter Ruttmann's Berlin and Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera is almost tangible. The Czech filmmaker's variation on the city symphony concept adapts many of the motifs and editing techniques introduced and established by Ruttmann and Vertov quite literally, including the one-day time span, the suicide scene from Berlin, or the fire department from Man with a Movie Camera, relocated in Prague. Vavra had studied architecture and the film juxtaposes, often by means of low-angle shots, the old and classical buildings of Prague to its new and modern architecture. After World War II Vavra would become one of the co-founders and teachers of the Prague Film Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts.