Open AccessRetro Reappropriations
Author(s) -
Veronika Pehe
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
view
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2213-0969
DOI - 10.18146/2213-0969.2014.jethc060
Subject(s) - sensibility , television series , postmodernism , politics , czech , sociology , series (stratigraphy) , aesthetics , media studies , political science , art , literature , philosophy , law , geology , linguistics , paleontology
The first post-1989 rerun of the 1970s television series Třicet případů majora Zemana (The Thirty Cases of Major Zeman) in the Czech Republic generated a heated controversy in the media. This article will examine why Major Zeman became such a contested topic and present an analysis of responses to the series. The paper suggests that the rescreening consolidated a particular ‘retro’ reception of the series, which reappropriates socialist popular culture and ascribes it with an ostensibly apolitical, postmodern, ironic sensibility. The paper will consider how such a response can be reconciled with more explicitly political approaches to the series, arguing that retro has a political agenda of its own.