Czechoslovakia 1968 (1969)

Pretty Good

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Robert Fresco's and Denis Sanders's "Czechoslovakia 1968" looks mainly at Czechoslovakia's history from its founding through the Warsaw Pact invasion that eviscerated the political liberalization. Consisting entirely of footage with no dialogue, it shows the country's days as a predominantly agricultural society, and then the Nazi occupation, and then Soviet takeover. A good trick that the documentary uses is to slow the background music right before the 1968 invasion.Beyond this, the events shown in the documentary need to get seen in the context of everything that happened in 1968. The Vietnam War dominated the international scene, and the liberalization in Czechoslovakia - commonly known as Prague Spring - reflected the hippie movement and anti-war movement in the US. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy caused much of the Civil Rights Movement to collapse. There was also the student uprising in Paris that the DeGaulle government crushed. One of the most important events was the demonstration outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, protesting the election of the pro-war Hubert Humphrey. In fact, Richard Daley called in the Illinois National Guard at almost the same time that Soviet tanks entered Prague.And then there were the Olympics in Mexico City. A number of students saw that the world's attention would be focused on the city, and so they wanted to draw attention to political issues in Mexico (in particular the government's ban on protests). When they converged in Tlatelolco, the Mexican army opened fire on them. Despite the government's hope that this would suppress anything political at the games, John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists to draw attention to racism in the US, and Věra Čáslavská looked down while the Soviet anthem played to protest the invasion of her country.And finally, Nixon got elected president. Nineteen sixty-seven had seen the Summer of Love, and then the following year ended the era of idealism. Alexander Dubček's reforms gave way to full-scale authoritarianism. It's for these reasons that I often say that the Eastern and Western Blocs had more in common than most people admit.Anyway, it's a good documentary. What happened in the world in 1968 must never get forgotten.

This short won the Academy Award for Documentary Short. There will be mild spoilers ahead: This is a short composed entirely of archival footage. It begins at the end of World War I and ends in 1968, after covering the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. The technique used is showing a slide projector moving through the years and showing images.The first seven minutes cover most of that time, from 1918 to the end of the "Prague Spring". The transition from the heady days of the "Prague Spring" to tanks in the streets is unsettling.The editing job done to put this together is excellent. It's a very effective piece which is most pertinent today given what's going on between Russia and the Ukraine. The scenes from 1938, showing Chamberlain, Hitler and the Germans taking over, with Hitler's insistence that he was acting to "protect" Germans living in the Sudetenland rings rather familiar for some reason. The more things change, the more they stay the same.This short can be seen on the internet and is well worth searching out. Recommended.