Mention Czech cinema and most people will think of the Film Miracle of the 1960s, when artists like Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel and Vera Chytilova took advantage of the political thaw to deliver a courageous series of humanist comedies and surreal satires, writes David Parkinson.

But the Czech film industry has a proud history that dates back to the silent era, when Karel Lamac, Martin Fric and Gustav Machaty produced cultured melodramas that were much admired in central Europe and beyond.

Machaty's legacy has proved the most enduring and three of his films are screening at the National Film Theatre this week. Born in Prague in 1901, Machaty started out as a cinema pianist. He entered the film industry as an actor, but quickly moved into direction with Teddy Wants to Smoke (1919). However, it was during his four-year stint in Hollywood in the early 1920s that he learned his craft, as an assistant to both D.W.Griffith (the 'Father of Film') and the extravagant maverick, Erich Von Stroheim.

On returning home, he scored commercial success with The Kreutzer Sonata (1926). But the influence of his mentors was more readily evident in the sophisticated sex dramas Erotikon (1929) and Ecstasy (1933). Revealing but never voyeuristic, moral yet non-judgmental, these films also reveal Machaty to be a master of his art. Combining mainstream and avant-garde techniques, he fashioned subtly seductive images to evoke the overpowering emotions of young love, while portraying the base society that both censures and exploits such innocence. Erotikon chronicles the fall from grace of Ita Rina, a young girl who finds herself at the centre of a romantic intrigue following a night of passion at a provincial railway station. In less assured hands, the contrast between the storm and Rina's seduction by Olaf Fjord would have been pure melodrama. But, Machaty avoids sensationalism, even when the now pregnant Rina becomes embroiled in events over which she has no control. Restored to its full length, with the inclusion of once-censored scenes, this bears comparison with anything being produced in Hollywood at the time, with Rina's performance irresistibly recalling the teasing allure of Louise Brooks and the vulnerability of Garbo.

Having made his sound debut with the third film in this short season, From Saturday to Sunday (1931), Machaty completed Ecstasy, which has the dubious distinction of being one of Adolf Hitler's favourite films. He owned a personal copy and spent hours watching Hedy Kiesler running naked through the woods, en route to her encounter with the man who would change her life.

Kiesler would go to Hollywood to find fame as Hedy Lamarr. But never again would she deliver a performance of such untainted naturalism or erotic energy, as she did as the child bride who shuns her engineer lover after her impotent husband commits suicide on account of her treachery. Machaty contrasted her confusion with some of the most lyrical imagery of his career. But it didn't impress either Pope Pius XII, who banned it, or Hedy's husband, the German munitions baron, Fritz Mandl, who spent a fortune buying and destroying prints to spare his wife's blushes. Every bit as poetic as Machaty, but less well known outside his homeland, is Frantisek Vlacil. The second strand of this overview of Czech cinema, screening at the Riverside Studios, explores the career of this contemporary of the new wavers, who used metaphor and formal experimentation to circumvent censorship.

In 1998, Marketa Lazarova (1967) was voted the best Czech film of all time. Although set in medieval times, its allegorical intent is clear, as it compares a band of pillaging feudal lords with the oppressive Communist regime. Shades of Eisenstein, Jancso and Antonioni are detectable in both the compositional strategy and its symbolism. But, Vlacil (who meticulously researched the period) doesn't spare us the horrors of this violent era, staging the various raids and even a beheading in chilling detail.

Also set in the Middle Ages, Valley of the Bees (1967) is an imposing study of paternal hypocrisy, religious intolerance and sexual awakening. Again the visual elements take precedence over the narrative, which centres on a young man's struggle to reclaim his inheritance after his father hands him over to the Teutonic knights. Only Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky has made such visual capital from this neglected period.

The season also includes Adelheid (1969), a controversial look at the expulsion of the Germans from the Czech lands after the Second World War and Smoke on the Potato Fields (1976), which focuses on the relationship between a city doctor and a country nurse as they transform an underfunded surgery.