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man Polanski shot Oliver Twist
there, saying afterwards:
- I’ve shot at all the world’s
major film studios and I think
this is the best! We could not
film anywhere else like at Bar-
randov...
While we walk around the
large open space behind the
studio, which sprawls over an
area of 16 hectares, we come
across the colossal scenery
of an Italian Renaissance
city and St. Peter’s Square in
Rome. Although most scenery
installations are destroyed once
shooting is completed, due to
them belonging to the produc-
tion company, these sets for the
TV series
Borgias
remained at
Barrandov and can be hired for
the purposes of filming other
movies and series. Here Prague
residents sometimes organize
imaginative gala events.
The Barrandov Film
Studios were located wisely
and built skilfully with real
Czech premeditation in 1931,
in order to fulfil the needs of
organising film shooting, which
has not changed much in the
last 80 years, despite technical
advancements.
The emergence of Bar-
randov was the undertaking
of a Czech family of pre-war
entrepreneurs with a famous
surname – Havel. It was back
in the 1920s that the two Havel
brothers purchased this great
area of land, an entire bare hill
just five kilometres from the
centre of Prague, and named
it after French geologist and
palaeontologist Joachim Bar-
rande, who had investigated the
fossil remains of trilobites in
the rocks of this site.
The founders of Prague’s
Film City, Vaclav and Miloš
Havel, are the father and uncle
of the first democratically
elected Czech president, Vaclav
Havel, the writer and dissident
who was so loved among the
world’s cultural elite that the
Rolling Stones responded to
the country’s emergence from
the darkness of socialism by
donating lighting for the presi-
dential residence and office of
Hradčany Castle, which rises
majestically over the capital
of the Czech Republic and the
River Vltava. The masterful
lighting of the palace illuminat-
ed the stage of one of Europe’s
most successful transitions,
which began with the “Velvet
Revolution”: a gathering of the
masses who adopted the cry:
“Havel to the Castle!” Havel at
Hradčany!
Precisely sixty years earlier,
on the adjacent Prague hill, in
a wooded area like that from a
fairy tale, upstream along the
Vltava, the Havel brothers of
the previous generation had
built their film studios. First
they opened a restaurant there
and constructed a number of
luxury villas, and only then
did they build their film city.
That was the period of the first
golden age of Prague’s Holly-
wood. Some eighty films a year
were shot there. When Hitler
occupied the then Czechoslo-
vakia, his propaganda minister
decided to expand Barrandov
and build a large and modern
facility like the one Berlin had
at the time.
Alongside the Havel’s
existing wooden studios of
2000 square metres arose
studios 4-5-6, twice the size
and divided into three sound
stages with sliding doors,
with three floors of balconies
for placing lighting. And that
studio with its wooden floor,
built in the 1940s, is still in full
swing and perfect condition,
and it is precisely wooden floor
that allow for a warm sound of
a higher quality than in many
newer buildings of the same
purpose.
The Czech “new wave” of
the 1960s, during which the
country’s national cinematogra-
phy became famous worldwide,
was the studios’ most fertile
artistic period. In the 1970s,
when Soviet military interven-
tion prompted the regime to
introduce a restrictive culture
policy towards authors, the
work only transformed – many
very popular adaptations
of fairy tales and children’s
movies were shot here, while
famous Yugoslav director
Veljko Bulajić also spent seven
months at Barrandov in 1975,
recording one of his big hits,
the spectacle
The Day That
Shook The World
, about the
Sarajevo Assassination of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and
featuring Maximilian Schell
and Christopher Plummer,
which was screened in fifty
countries.
e
to adapt anything!”. The film
was later nominated for an
Oscar and another 50 interna-
tional awards.
Forman’s return to the
Prague film studios 12 years
after he was forced to abandon
them for political reasons,
brought the global film industry
to this great meeting place for
film and the studio was quickly
converted into a European
Hollywood. Ten years later, Ro-
Danas je Barandov
potpuno privatizovan,
u vlasništvu je
slovačke kompanije
Moravia Steel i
ponovo radi dobro i
mnogo.
e
Today Barrandov
is fully privatised,
owned by Slovakian
company Moravia
Steel, and is again
working well and
plentifully.
