Rudolf Vohnout

I never expected to be a projectionist. I was originally a telephone mechanic in the ore mines. There were problems in the cinema at the time. The projection booth didn't connect to the auditorium, so you had to go around the whole community center. There was communication equipment, but it wasn't synchronized. When the usher in the hall pressed the "turn up the sound" button, the booth would light up, for example, the "light up the hall" window. Well, since a former classmate of mine worked there, he asked me if I could fix it. And that was actually the beginning of me getting interested in projection.

Cinema as such had to do economic and political work. It had to have results in both directions. But one excludes the other. To be a cinema, it had to have a film that was preferably from the West. To do well politically, it had to be from the East, but then again, hardly anyone went to those.

There have been failures, for example with The Witch's Hammer. The film was shown all over Czechoslovakia, but it was banned in the South Bohemia region and in Pribram. We don't know why, but it was banned here. However, there was a film club here, so we screened it at least within the club. And even though the film clubs were a bit more relaxed, the manager went on the carpet. I'm sure she got some kind of imaginary slap for that.

It's also worth noting how the accessibility of films to young people was once determined. Every film had to go through a screening in front of an expert committee before it could be shown in the cinema. When the movie "Shveik" went to the screening, probably on that committee sat deserving leaders and officials who were concerned about the purity of morals of the youth. Therefore, when asked by the policeman Bretschneider, "Mr. Innkeeper, there used to be a picture of the Emperor hanging here," the innkeeper Palivec said, "Yes, there was. But the flies were shitting on it, so I put it in the attic." This was a moral faux pas, so the film was off-limits to young people. If these moralists ever went to the cinema and found out how young people normally talk to each other, their hair would stand on end in horror.

By contrast, the Soviet war film "...and the mornings are quiet here" was shown compulsorily for schools, even though it contains a scene where the female engineers go to the sauna to relax and walk around naked on a widescreen. The question remains whether this film would have been compulsory for youngsters if it had not been a Soviet film.

We also had an interesting German film here, Helga. There was the whole birth, completely. It was interesting that a lot of the guys who were sitting down in the hall holding the wife's hand went through the film calmly. Then when it got going, their dolls rolled and they had to go for a drink. The funny thing was, that happened to me. I was sitting in the theater with my wife and a colleague was showing. I had been screening since 8:00, and I got so sick in the booth that I flew into the restaurant for a drink and went back out again.

One time we were showing the Alibi series of detective stories. The movie was about five reels long. I told my colleague that since it was a detective story, it wouldn't matter if someone switched the tapes. But she did, albeit unintentionally. And people came out of the theater saying, "Man, that was so convoluted. I didn't know how it was gonna turn out until the last minute."