Barrandov Studios – A Brief History

Barrandov Studios – A Brief History Barrandov Studios is one of the largest and oldest film studios in Europe. Since the founding of the studio in 1931, over 5,000 Czech and foreign films have been made here. Filmmaking is a complex activity that requires the collaboration of multiple services, disciplines and crafts. The key advantage of the studio is that it provides the vast majority of them in one place - on the famous "Barrandov Hill above Prague", where its film dream factory was located in the early 1930s by its founding fathers - the Havel brothers. From 1930s' avant-garde Prague film studio to Nazi and Communist propaganda machine, Barrandov Studios has suffered for art's sake. The symbiotic relationship between the studio and the Czech nation began in 1931. The catalyst came from civil engineer Václav Havel, the father of the celebrated dissident and playwright who would become president after the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Already at their opening, Barrandov Studios was considered the most cutting-edge and technically advanced in Europe. It was a brief golden age of Czech cinema, the likes of which was not again to be seen until the New Wave in the 1960s.

The Munich Agreement of 1938 and the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia the following year was to see the successful studio become a tool for the occupying Nazi forces. Barrandov Studios was soon expropriated from their Czech owners. The German occupiers gradually increased their shares in the company. Once the takeover was complete, the Nazi propaganda machine headed by Joseph Goebbels was quick to make the most of Barrandov Studios. The Nazi occupiers constructed three more sound stages which would become known as the "New Halls" as an addition to the original "Havel Halls." The fate of the Czech nation and that of the studio were intertwined with the Communist coup of 1948, which heralded the beginning of four decades of another sort of dictatorship. Barrandov's position as a prime site for film and televisual production was again harnessed for the production of propaganda, with a short reprieve. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution, the fate of Barrandov Studios and that of the Czech nation were once again dramatically linked. The end of Communism once again bought a major transition and a change of ownership, this time from it being a state-run entity to being cast back onto the choppy waters of free market capitalism. Several major Hollywood productions have been made here, including Mission Impossible, The Bourne Identity, Casino Royale, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Zookeeper's Wife, and others. Return to Private Lives