If there was an art mentality, it could be applied to Czech cinema. As you know, the Czech film school was formed to a large extent during the Soviet period and, accordingly, under the influence of the Soviet film school. One can imagine the acuteness of the framework of socialist realism - many Czechs perceived the whole complex of forms of this art as something enemy and unnatural. Using the so-called socialist realist forms, the directors tried at the same time to express their protest barely noticeably, subtly - so that an alien culture could not touch the native Czech and thereby desecrate it.
The film “Kerosene lamps” to describe as a protest would be wrong. At the same time, it is permeated with amazing expression. The compositional features of the film are striking mainly: it is a movement from comedy, which sometimes turns into farce and grotesque, to not just a tragic, but also an obviously expressionist ending. The first notes of the protest are barely perceptible at first, but as the plot develops, all the emotional power and pain of the protest collapses, like the painful reasoning of one of Dostoevsky's characteristic heroes.
It is necessary to clarify the background of the protest: it is clearly ethical in nature. As you know, the Czechs were madly worried about the changes in the mentality of the younger generations that came with the Soviet government. By artificially establishing “social morality” from above, the authorities achieved the final loss of the most important quality of the Czech mentality – namely, their natural, living ethics. For many Czechs, this trait is associated with childhood - and this is perfectly reflected in the film. Only here the tragedy of the whole people in a particular work of art seems to be concentrated in the framework of a personal tragedy.
The forms of expression of this idea are simple and even inflexible in their rigidity. A young girl turns into an old woman. Her husband becomes a living corpse. No less significant are the “decorations”: city holidays, city residents, their songs, colors, behind them, all this is important and has its own meaning.
Separately, it is worth noting the image of the maid, at the end tortured by her own position and the absolute inability to respond to outside violence. Perhaps this is the image of the Czech Republic of that time?