Diafilm: An Almost Forgotten Genre

The diafilm only prospered in the ex-communist countries, and its heyday was in the 50's and 60's. In addition to catering for the "natural" audience of this medium with adventure stories exalting pioneer morality and animal fables symbolically addressing issues of "socialism", the golden age of diafilm produced a mass of silly tales about the emancipated communist woman working in the factory, the tricks and glorious successes of hog-breeding in socialist cooperative farms, heroic sailors revealing a counterrevolutionary conspiracy, and the wise peasant and his son battling the potato beetles. Stretching the possibilities of diafilm resulted in such comic attempts as trying to present a soccer game or an ice-skating championship with a medium that cannot represent movement.

The Diafilm Medium

Diafilm-a shiny celluloid strip with 20 to 40 frames, colored or black-and-white, telling a story. It is projected on the wall of a darkened room with the help of a primitive-looking instrument that squeaks every time you turn the knob to advance the film, and smells horribly when the strong bulb inside heats up. The audience- kids, workers, students, or peasants, depending on the topic of the film-- sit in the back of the room and look at the image as it comes wobbling into their view, and listen as the person "operating" the projector reads out the short text underneath the picture. "The Zrinyi pioneers were marching toward their summer camp through beautiful landscapes in merry mood." All of the above pertains to the "definition" of diafilm- how else can we explain what it is (or rather, was )? We could say: it's sort of like a film, but it doesn't move. Or: It resembles a comic strip, but it is projected. But all these parallels don't describe dialfilm well, because it is a cultural phenomenon specific to the Eastern European region.