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FROM NEW REALISM TO FAIRY TALES: Czechoslovakia, 1945-1955

Mira Liehm and Antonin J. Liehm


THE FIRST NATIONALIZED CINEMA AFTER WORLD WAR TWO

Before the end of the war, proposals for the nationalization of Czechoslovak cinema prepared by
Czech film-makers during the Nazi occupation were sent to London and Moscow on microfilm. The final
wording of the nationalization decree, issued in Prague on August 11, 1945, was not entirely in
keeping with the original, looser, conception, but film is clearly referred to in the document as
“cultural activity.” And when Czechoslovakia’s president, Eduard Beneš, declared, “If there is
anything in our country ripe for nationalization, it is film!” he was simply giving voice to the
old central European conviction that financing the development of culture is the task of the state.

After the war, Czechoslovakia had a special position in this part of the world. A country with a
liberal tradition, it had a well-developed industry that for the most part had not suffered the
ravages of the war; the West had a bad conscience with respect to Czechoslovakia because of Munich,
and the Soviet Union justifiably saw it as a country in which it was popular; the two groups of
war-time political representatives, those in London and those in Moscow, had come to an agreement
during the war, and thereby avoided the fratricide that took place, for example, in Poland;
cultural life began to develop with the same intensity as did the revival of the economy.

For reasons similar to those that had at one time held true in the Soviet Union, film represented
the most homogeneous and the most committed segment of the cultural sphere. The man who became the
head of the film section at the Ministry of Information was Vítězslav Nezval, the surrealistic
poet. Directors and writers had their say wherever it was a matter of artistic creation;
fulfillment of the dream of the late thirties seemed within reach. The Prague studios (where
Russians, Poles, and others soon came to shoot their films) were the scene of the completion of two
feature films started before the end of 1945: Rosina the Foundling (Rozina sebranec) a
seventeenth-century historical film directed by Otakar Vávra, and the first film that Václav Krška
directed independently, Magic of the River (Řeka čaruje). In 1946, 10 feature films were completed,
and 18 were produced in each of the two years that followed. For the most part they were done
hastily, carried more by enthusiasm, good will, and practiced hands than by anything else. They
were also wartime stories, stories from the Nazi occupation (the best was Men Without Wings, Muži
bez křídel – 1946, directed by František Čáp) or films that had originated during the war (for
example, another historical film of Vávra’s, The Mischievous Bachelor, Nezbedný bakalář – 1946).

One of the things that survived from the prewar period was the ability – fortified during the war –
to transpose good literature to the screen (e.g., Vávra); another thing that survived was the
poetic lyricism of Čáp and Krška. Continuing this dual tradition, Vávra filmed the lyrical story of
adolescence, Presentiment (Předtucha – 1947), and Krška made a film of the poetically stylized
biography of a Czech violinist (Paganini’s contemporary, Josef Slavík) entitled The Violin and the
Dream (Housle a sen – 1947). But new impulses began to become evident. The strongest of them, the
influence of the British new realism, was already apparent among young film artists. To begin with,
these new film-makers strove to remove the theatricality from film language. A major contribution
to this effort was made by Bořivoj Zeman (b. 1912) in Dead Among the Living (Mrtvý mezi živými –
1946), a psychological study about fear and courage that was based on a script by Elmar Klos, who
also codirected. Jiří Krejčík (b. 1918) was another film-maker who believed in documentarist
approach. But he made his debut with an adaptation of some short stories by the nineteenth-century
classic Czech writer, Jan Neruda, Week in a Quiet House (Týden v tichém domě – 1947).

It was Jiří Weiss’s first feature film, Stolen Frontier (Uloupená hranice – 1947), that made the
first real splash. Weiss had made two medium-length fiction films during the war in London for the
British Crown Film Unit (John Smith Wakes Up and Before the Rate), but it was the Munich-inspired
Stolen Frontier, which told the story of the inhabitants of a Czech frontier village at that
crucial period, which confirmed the emergence of a mature artist with an original style.

A second event was the film The Strike (Siréna – 1946), directed by Karel Steklý (b. 1903), which
received the first and only Golden Lion of St. Marc (at the Venice Film Festival) to be awarded to
a Czech film. Even before the end of the war, Steklý, who for long years had been a scriptwriter,
had finished a film adaptation of the popular novel by Marie Majerová that was to be the basis for
Strike, a film set early in the century in a mining area near Prague. After his initial film, the
mediocre Turning Point (Přelom – 1946), he brought together a number of prewar avant-garde stage
and screen artists-among whom were E. F. Burian, whose music for the film also won an award at
Venice, cameraman Jaroslav Tuzar, and others – to create Strike, a film that joined social pathos
with avant-garde poetics and period color. Steklý never made a good film after that. The success of
Strike, however, reminded Europe that there was such a thing as Czechoslovak cinema and fortified
its self-confidence at a time when the period of postwar advancement was just beginning.

The third important event was Jiří Trnka’s (1912-1970) first feature-length puppet film, The Czech
Year (Špalíček – 1947), confirming the fact that when public funds and the free development of
talent meet, they can bring success to public film-making in a small country where no immediate
return on the production investment can be expected. The fact that it was folk art that inspired
The Czech Year was no coincidence – it was simply the end result of Trnka’s development of one of
the creative notions of the Czech prewar avant-garde, primarily represented by E. F. Burian, and
also by Josef Trojan, who thereafter was Trnka’s indispensable collaborator in the sphere of music.

Slovakia, which did not produce any independent feature fiction films before 1945, began to do so
under the new nationalized cinema, although for a while with such Czech directors as Frič and
Cikán. The first Slovak director to make a feature film was the star of the prewar Jánošík, the
actor Palo Bielik (b. 1910), who shot Fox Holes (Vlčie diery) in 1948. (The interior scenes were
shot in Prague, as the construction of the first studio at Koliba in the Slovak capital of
Bratislava was not completed until 1950.)

Work at the former Baťa Studios – now the Gottwaldov Studio at Kudlov –  resumed, not only with the
production of documentaries and popular science films, but also with activity at the animated film
studio by Hermína Týrlová and Karel Zeman.

In 1947, the first Czechoslovak film in color was made, Vladimir Borský’s (1902-1962) Jan Roháč of
Dubá (Jan Roháč z Dubé).

During this period, the political future of Czechoslovakia was uncertain. Czechoslovakia – along
with Yugoslavia – was the only country where the Communist Party was a great political force (38
percent in the 1946 elections). Czechoslovakia also was the only country in this part of Europe
with a highly developed industrial base and a democratic tradition. All this led to the idea that
the advance toward socialistic development would take its own path, in cooperation of course with
the Soviet Union, but without any direct interference, and without any obligation to copy the
Soviet model. These ideas also survived for a short time in the leadership of the Czechoslovak
Communist Party, even after the Communists took power in 1948 and forced the abdication of
President Eduard Beneš.

In 1948, Vávra made a film that was for years to remain his best. After filming a parable about the
danger of atomic warfare (Krakatit – 1947), based on the prewar novel by Karel Čapek, Vávra filmed
Silent Barricade (Němá barikáda – 1948), which was set during the few days of the Prague uprising
against the Nazis in early May 1945. For the first time Vávra toppled the barrier that literature
had built in front of his camera and indicated that he could become a spokesman for reality,
observed in all its immediacy. Also in 1948, Krejčík made his third – and very mature – film,
Conscience (Svědomí). The coauthor of the script was Vladimír Valenta, who was to spend years in
prison, and who would not return to film as an actor and scenarist until the sixties. Psychological
realism based on the restraint of the actors’ expression – that was the style that Krejčík
developed in the story that was almost identical to that of the later Spanish film, J. A. Bardem’s
Death of a Cyclist. And he encountered as sharp a reaction from the establishment as did Bardem.

Martin Frič also seemed to be catching his second breath, and after Tales from Čapek (Čapkovy
povídky – 1947) and the interesting Lost in Prague (Návrat domů – 1948), filmed from a script by
Leopold Lahola, about a soldier’s bitter return to his homeland, he created a successful parody of
a commercial tear jerker, The Poacher’s Ward (Pytlákova schovanka – 1948).


THE CHANGE AFTER 1948

Illusions about the “Czechoslovak path to socialism” only lasted a few months after the February
1948 takeover, or more exactly, until the split between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in June of
that year. During the years that followed, the Soviet Union desperately tried to impose the
experience of Stalin’s Russia onto an industrial, liberal, central European country. Attempts had
been made even earlier to apply the Zhdanov resolutions and laws to Czech and Slovak culture. As
long as there was comparatively broad freedom of speech and expression, however, the absurdity of
such efforts was apparent even to those who were faced with the task of fulfilling Moscow’s
demands. Czech culture on the one hand followed its traditional strong socialistic inclinations,
and on the other hand continued to nourish a strong individualistic avant-garde movement. But when
in the latter half of 1948, the position and prestige of the Communist Party was ensured by force,
freedom of expression was gradually liquidated, and an atmosphere of fear and suspicion became
dominant, there was nothing to prevent Czech and Slovak culture from being measured by Zhdanov’s
yardstick.

Three leading representatives of the avant-garde responded to the attack on their movement and its
heritage with suicide: poet Konstantin Biebl, choreographer Saša Machov, and theatrical director
Jiří Frejka. Also, many talented people fled abroad, including a sole film-maker – František Čáp,
who started his second successful career in Yugoslavia.

The first targets of the Zhdanov-line criticism were the best films of 1948: Conscience (the very
title called attention to undesirable problems), the “neorealism” of The Silent Barricade, and the
“intellectualism” of The Poacher’s Ward. And of course the poetic melancholy lyricism of Trnka’s
new puppet film, The Emperor’s Nightingale (Císařův slavík – 1948). What followed was a swarm of
schematic films. One of them, however, remains surprisingly fresh. It is Katka (1949), a story that
encourages young girls in Slovak rural areas to leave the farms and go into industry. After it met
with official rejection in Slovakia, its director, the young and avid Communist, Jan Kadár (b.
1918), went to Prague, where he was offered a helping hand by Klos.

Weiss was criticized for The Last Shot (Posledni výstřel  – 1950), which showed the end of the war
in a large steel mill. Singled out for criticism were the film’s lack of pathos and the fact that
Weiss had given the leading roles to nonprofessional actors, following in the footsteps of British
and Italian film-makers. At that time, and to a large extent still today, socialist realism
required, among other things, theatrical acting and professional actors.

Even the most notable member of the prewar theatrical avant-garde, one who really believed in the
“truth” of Stalinism – E. F. Burian – was unsuccessful. His second film, We Want to Live (Chceme
žít – 1950), about the unemployed before World War Two, was cut by 30 per cent in length because it
was guilty of “formalism and naturalism.”

In 1950, though, two other films were produced that had pioneering significance. The first was The
Distant Journey (Daleká cesta), the work of Burian’s pupil, stage director Alfred Radok
(1914-1976). Radok took a dime-a-dozen story of a pleasant lad who, under the Nazi occupation,
risks his life for his Jewish sweetheart, and made of it an expressionistic tale of the Terezin
ghetto and the struggle for human dignity, a visionary film frequently inspired by surrealist
poetics. Labeled as existentialistic, the film was banned for years. Only occasionally did it turn
up in one small-town movie theater or another; but it was sold to distributors abroad, where it
gained for its director a reputation as one of the great Czech postwar film talents. In 1953, Radok
succeeded, under difficult conditions, in making the first Czechoslovak musical, The Magic Hat
(Divotvorný klobouk), based on a classical comedy by V. K. Klicpera. But the genre and the method
used were so unusual that Radok was proscribed in the film industry, to return only one more time
with Old Man Motorcar (Dědeček automobil – 1956) – a clever art-nouveau film about the beginnings
of the automobile.

Another important debut of an entirely different sort was the feature-length graduation project by
two students of the Film Academy (FAMU – Filmová fakulta Akademie múzických umění), Vojtěch Jasný
(b. 1925) and Karel Kachyňa (b. 1924), The Clouds Will Roll Away (Není stále zamračeno – 1950).
Spending long months at a farm in the border region resettled by Czechs after the so-called Sudeten
Germans were expelled to Germany following the war, they captured, in a semidocumentary manner, the
struggle of man against the difficult conditions there and particularly his struggle within
himself. The film was not only an expression of a unique talent, but also a confirmation of the
unity of postwar artistic impulses and their aesthetic solutions in different parts of Europe. But
that was all that was needed to move the authorities to bury in the archives this evidence of the
possibilities of a nationalized cinematography and its film school (FAMU was established by decree
on October 25, 1945). The two young directors were banished to the limbo of making propagandistic
documentaries for several years.

The inconsistency of the establishment (as proven, for example, by the fate of Distant Journey), as
well as the differences in traditions and in interpretations of dogma, led to varying applications
of Zhdanovism in each of the Eastern European countries. Thus, in the 1950-1951 period, director
Miroslav Hubáček (b. 1921) made his debut with a good detective film In the Penalty Zone (V
trestném území), Martin Frič made a two-part intellectual comedy about the limitations of unlimited
power, The Emperor’s Baker and The Baker’s Emperor (Císařův pekař and Pekařův císař), in the spirit
of Prague’s Liberated Theater of the thirties, with one of this theater’s founders, Jan Werich, in
the title role. Something like that would have been unthinkable in the Soviet Union, as would
Weiss’s film about the beginnings of the labor movement, New Warriors Shall Arise (Vstanou noví
bojovníci). This picture, one of Weiss’s best films, was based on the autobiographical novel by
Czechoslovak president, Antonín Zápotocký, with emphasis in the film’s key scene on democracy and
the right to vote.

The Soviet model was used in making biographical films about artists, scientists, and inventors
from the period of the nineteenth-century Czech “national rebirth.” The director of many of them
was Václav Krška, but the best was made, again, by Martin Frič – The Mystery of Blood (Tajemství
krve – 1953).

The April 1950 resolution on cinema issued by the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist
Party attempted to combine the criteria spelled out in the original Soviet resolutions of 1946-1948
with the criticisms against schematism and lack of conflict formulated in later resolutions and
policy statements. One result, of course, was not at all surprising: fewer films, but all of them
heavy-handed. In 1951, only 8 films were made, as compared to 24 in 1950.

Soon a wave of arrests and trials, first of non-Communists and later of Communists hit
Czechoslovakia. In November 1952, 11 death sentences were handed down in a trial in Prague in which
the main defendant was the secretary general of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Rudolf
Slánský. Most of the defendants and the condemned were Jews. At the same time, the campaign against
“cosmopolitanism” reached its peak and Czechoslovak film settled on its own Stalinist style,
“national in form, socialist in content.”

The first to capture the style of the times was Otakar Vávra. After The Silent Barricade he did not
make any films for four years; at the end of this period, which was filled with struggles with
others and with himself, came the color super-production Lining Up (Nástup – 1953), about the
Communists’ battle with reactionaries between 1945 and 1948 in the Czech border area. The film was
not only a political illustration of the party interpretation of recent history, but also a
formally faithful imitation of the Soviet style for color films of those years. The same is true of
Vávra’s subsequent work, the Hussite trilogy, John Huss (Jan Hus – 1955), Jan Žižka (1956) and
Against All (Proti všem – 1957), based on the Czech classic by Alois Jirásek about the struggle of
adherents to the Czech Reformation in the fifteenth century against the Pope and the Emperor. Only
the first part of this trilogy bears traces of Vávra’s own style. By means of these films, Otakar
Vávra succeeded in securing his position in Czechoslovak film, but he lost his artistic authority.

As is often the case in such situations, the ones to take advantage of the new trend were people of
lesser talent, including Karel Steklý, who, in 1956, made the worst version to date of Hašek’s Good
Soldier Schweik (Dobrý voják Švejk), K. M. Walló (b. 1914), and Vladimír Vlček (b. 1919). The
latter had graduated from the Soviet Film Academy shortly after the war, and, along with V.
Belyayev, was codirector of one film in a series of “documentaries” about the Eastern European
countries, New Czechoslovakia (Nové Československo). He made his independent debut in 1952 with
Tomorrow There Will Be Dancing Everywhere (Zítra se bude tančit všude), a color film about “joyous”
youth made in operetta style. Then, entirely in the spirit of Chiaureli, he filmed another
autobiographical book by Zápotocký, Red Glow Over Kladno (Rudá záře nad Kladnem – 1956), a film
that surpassed even Vávra’s Lining Up. After two unsuccessful adaptations of modern Czech classics,
Vlček made the first Czechoslovak coproduction with France, an undistinguished film entitled In the
Currents (V Proudech – Liberté surveillée – 1957). Soon thereafter he became the first Czech
director to emigrate to the West.


ANIMATED FILM

Might it be said, then, that no sooner had nationalization opened new possibilities for
Czechoslovak film-making, than it turned around and eliminated them by establishing strong central
control and stifling artistic guidelines? Yes and no. In these years, for example, great
development took place in animated film, with both Jiří Trnka and Karel Zeman turning out a large
portion of their life’s work.

Nationalization established excellent material conditions for the successful development of
animated film in the period before television, by ridding it above all of worries about profit and
the market. The creators of animated films, working in well-equipped studios, felt no need to
pursue lucrative contracts or commercial advertising film orders, nor to run a successful style
into the ground to satisfy a passing spectator interest. On the contrary, the doors to the studios
were open to the largest possible number of artists, to a multiplicity of styles, and to
experimentation with new animated techniques. This was the contribution of the Prague “Bratři
v triku” Studio and the animated film studio in Gottwaldov, where Hermína Týrlová created
delightful puppet films for children.


TRNKA AND ZEMAN

Jiří Trnka began as a painter, a Czech heir to Odilon Redon. In the sixties, an exhibition of his
paintings and graphic art created a sensation, first in Prague, and later in a number of Western
European cities. But he had years of puppet-making experience as well. “The unexpected
possibilities of the use of trick technique in cartoon film amazed me,” he said,


but at the same time they instilled a longing in me to take three-dimensional puppets on the screen
where “everything’s possible” – puppets that can move not only on a plane but in three dimensions.
From the very beginning, I insisted on my own conception of the stylization of the puppets, always
with an individual – but unchanging – facial expression, as opposed to the ones who change their
expression thanks to various techniques. Which  – as practice proved to us – is not so much in
keeping with realism, but leads rather to naturalism, instead. Puppet film has unlimited
possibilities, and would be capable of use in any of the genres of acted film. But of course there
it could do no more than imitate. Puppet film is unique and original only where it oversteps the
limits of acted film, wherever stylization, pathos or lyricism as presented by live actors would
appear improbable, ludicrous, and uncomfortable (From an interview with J. Brož in Czechoslovak
Film No. 6, 1955).


Trnka’s best interpreter, Jaroslav Boček, who himself later became a director of animated films,
wrote:


Puppet film entered the cinematography of the world with The Czech Year and Song of the Prairie
[Árie prérie – 1949] not as a plaything or a supplement, but as a self-sufficient poetic work.
Trnka joined the ancient art of the puppeteers with the most modern art of film, and arrived at
exceptional charm that soon brought him worldwide success. As to material, development covered the
legendary antiquity of Old Czech Legends [Staré pověsti české – 1953], through the recent past in
the adaptation of Hašek’s Švejk [Schweik – 1955] to the present in Obsession [Vášeň – 1961] all the
way to a vision of the future in Cybernetic Grandma [Kybernetická babička – 1962]. He worked on
native themes like the fairy tale Bayaya (1950) or the Czech Year, but he also reached for foreign
literature, like Hans Christian Andersen’s Emperor’s Nightingale [Císařův slavík – 1948],
Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream [Sen noci svatojánské – 1959], or The Archangel Gabriel and
Mother Goose [Archanděl Gabriel a Paní Husa – 1964] adapted from Boccaccio. In spite of this broad
range, he is the most consistent philosopher of human destiny. He asks about the essence of Czech
heroism in Bayaya, and finds it in a fidelity to homeland and a rejection of evil, and in Old Czech
Legends in defense of one’s country and one’s heritage. And at the same time he makes fun of noisy
soldiering and force and robbery. In The Emperor’s Nightingale and in Cybernetic Grandma, he asks
about the conflict between man and technology, and man and knowledge, and he finds the solution
that will prevail over the horrors of machines. He seeks the meaning of human life and finds it in
love, in work, in simplicity, and in creative enthusiasm. At a time when Czechoslovak art was
answerable to temporary needs of propaganda, Trnka polarized the entire development of
cinematography with his orientation toward permanent values and ideas that for years comprised both
the development of national history and the essence of Czech culture (Film a doba No. 5, 1965,
Prague).


Karel Zeman did not possess Trnka’s gift of poetic vision and philosophical profundity, but
inclined instead toward playfulness, experimentation with materials, and contemporaneity. His
Christmas Dream (Vánoční sen – 1945) soon became a classic of its genre, his serial about Mr.
Prokouk (1947-1955) an example of combining art with the needs of the times, his Treasure of Bird
Island (Poklad z Ptačího ostrova – 1952), King Lávra (Král Lávra – 1950) and Inspiration (Inspirace
– 1948) evidence of his effort to breathe life into static materials (paper, glass, etc.). In A
Journey to Primeval Times (Cesta do pravěku – 1956) he once again combined live actors (a group of
boys) with puppets, using animation to bring the world of prehistoric flora and fauna to life. He
remained faithful to this practice in all the films that followed – Baron Münchhausen (Baron Prášil
– 1961), A Jester’s Tale (Bláznova kronika – 1964). Eventually, inspired by the work of Jules Verne
– the source of his major triumph, The Invention of Destruction (Vynález zkázy – 1957) – he made On
a Comet (Na kometě – 1970) more than 10 years later.

How can we explain that in the period of the most rigid dogmatism such original talents could
emerge in the sphere of animated films – and not only in Czechoslovakia – talents so ill-fitted to
the image of the times? The reply is not too complicated. The nationalization presented a secure
material foundation for the extant talent. Directly after the war, film production was
decentralized into small, ultimately autonomous workshops, headed by experienced producers,
artists, directors or scenarists. In the creative atmosphere of these small collectives, the
successes of the early postwar years were born. It was just this organization that was the first to
fall victim to the Zhdanov line, which required central control over every phase of the creative
and production process. This was not very feasible, however in the sphere of animated film.
Production in this area is by nature craftsman-like – work is only possible in small groups, where
the responsible person is the author of the artistic concept. Scripts for animated, and
particularly for puppet films, are difficult for the layman to understand, and the world of
dreamlike fairy-tale fantasy in which they move is on the periphery of consciousness, difficult to
measure by criteria that authorities at all levels are accustomed to using. So these authorities
were presented with the finished work, which frequently received disapprobation – most of Trnka’s
films did – but which were defended from the consequences of disapproval both by their artistic
quality and by the immediate international response that they evoked, both of which were more than
rare at that time. Thus, in the sphere of animated film, a model of organization was formed that
was later to facilitate the development of feature film – both in Czechoslovakia and in other
Eastern European countries.


VÁCLAV KRŠKA

In the first half of the fifties, though, such things were still unthinkable. Everyone felt the
influence of the prevailing Stalinist attitude. In the film world, the one who felt it most acutely
was, paradoxically, the very one who rediscovered himself because of it. In the years from 1949 to
1956, Václav Krška filmed five biographical films and one opera. The times ripped him away from his
poetic, imaginative lyricism, his striking pictures of the Czech countryside, and his tense
sensualism. It tossed him in the direction of the biographical genre, the content and the esthetic
conventions of which had clear limitations. But at the same time, in 1953 and 1954, he managed to
make two films, one right after the other, based on a stage play and a novel by his compatriot from
southern Bohemia, Fráňa Šrámek, an impressionistic, pacifist poet who spoke for the young people
who were eventually killed on the battlefronts of World War One. The two films were Moon Over the
River (Měsíc nad řekou – 1953) and Silvery Wind (Stříbrný vítr – 1954). Until 1950, Šrámek’s
position in Czech literature and film was tolerated, apparently because late in his life his
pacifism had developed into a sympathy for communism. But in the early fifties, his voice was too
different to be tolerated. The Spectator, with his hypocritical and puritan morality, could not
help but be repelled by a nostalgia for the passing of a generation, by a sorrowful farewell to a
youth that had never fully experienced life, as shown in Krška’s sensitive interpretation of Moon
Over the River, and above all by Krška’s sensitivity to the awakening sensuality of adolescent
youths as depicted in the film version of Silvery Wind. For a while, Moon Over the River slipped
through on the weight of Šrámek’s name. But Silvery Wind was banned straight away, and Krška
returned to biography and opera.

Two years passed; Silvery Wind was rehabilitated. Its belated premiere late in 1956 gave notice
that Czech film was entering a new stage.



In: Liehm, Mira and Liehm, Antonin J. 1977. The Most Important Art. Soviet and Eastern European
Film After 1945. University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 96-111.