The Prague Spring as reflected
in Czech postcommunist cinema
Jan Čulík, University of
Glasgow
It is
extremely interesting to analyze how the momentous events of the Prague Spring
of 1968 are seen in the contemporary Czech Republic. In this sense, it is
useful to examine how the events of 1968 are presented in post-communist Czech
cinema. Some three hundred feature films have been made in the Czech Republic since
the fall of communism. They present Czech society with a fairly consistent
system of values.[1]
In this brief talk, I will look at two of these feature films dealing with the
events of 1968 from the postcommunist perspective. The perception of the Prague
Spring is grossly distorted within them. It is perhaps not terribly surprising
that the vision of the Prague Spring offered by these two pictures is quite
closely related to the image of the Prague Spring that is consistently presented
by the Czech right-of -centre daily newspapers.
The
current Czech president Václav Klaus (who also happens to be right of centre),
is well known for his disdain for the Prague Spring of 1968. In his view, the
events of 1968 were a minor power struggle between two Communist Party factions
without wider relevance to society. This is, indeed, also the view of the
predominantly right wing Czech media. In their view, (reformist) communists can
never be given benefit of the doubt.
In
2005, analyst Stanislav Holubec, looking back at the
1968 Prague Spring,[2]
outlined four current interpretations of the events of that year:
Jan Křeček has analysed[3]
485 articles dealing with the issue of the 1968 Prague Spring which were published
between 2000 – 2007 in the leading Czech right-of-centre daily newspapers Mladá fronta Dnes (The Youth Front Today)[4]
and Lidové noviny (People´s
Newspaper) in 2000 – 2007. He has discovered that in these articles, the
two newspapers fully support Holubec´s interpretation number 1. The view that
the Prague Spring was an irrelevant “internal struggle of two factions of the
same criminal Communist Party” is offered by both newspapers as the dominant
“common sense” view; all the other views are marginalised as “ideological” and “eccentric”:
“1968 failed to
fill [photographer] Jan Saudek with enthusiasm. He saw that year as a power
struggle, organized by one communist party faction against the other. In
principle, he says, I cannot trust anyone who has once been a member of the
Communist Party. To believe in ‘socialism with a human face’ would have been
the same as to put one´s trust in [some form of] ‘benign’ Nazism!”[5]
“Antonín Procházka was not enthusiastic about 1968. He
says: ‘It is just the communists playing in their own sandpit.’ And the
developments have proved me right.”[6]
Mladá fronta
Dnes and Lidové noviny do not beat about the bush: The Communists have always
been criminals:
“The expression ‘socialism with a human face’ is an
empty slogan (...) It is important to watch who is hiding behind these human
faces. Surely Hitler also had a human face, as did Joseph Mengele, Mussolini,
Stalin and Gottwald. Arafat and Saddam and bin Laden also have human faces
because each person does have a face. What matters is what is hiding behind the
human faces and especially what we learned was hiding behind these human faces thirty-five years ago.”[7]
“They do not want to admit that they are guilty of
[introducing] the most disgusting form of communism, of annihilating the political
and social elites and of destroying a functioning private sector. Not to
mention the murders of their political opponents. The fact that a handful of
these people has realised that the system needs reforming can never fully cancel
out their guilt – they destroyed democracy.”[8]
“You see, these people of 1968 are so insolent that
they do not realize that they had lived as highly favoured citizens within the
communist regime for a part of their lives. Many of them did harm to their
neighbours and to all decent people.”[9]
Křeček points out that in Czech newspapers
the events and ethos of 1968 are being interpreted in terms of current
political processes in the Czech Republic, without regard to the historical
context. In the view of Mladá fronta Dnes and Lidové
noviny, what people did in 1968 was a futile, absurd attempt to square the
circle. Dubček´s concept of the “Third Way” is singled out for particular scorn:
“The anniversary of [the Warsaw Pact invasion of] 21
August has again opened the debate about various possible ‘third ways’, i.e.
attempts to eat your cake and have it. Attempting to merge what is impossible to merge.
Then the result is neither socialism, nor capitalism and it is reminiscent of
an attempt to create a symbiosis of water with fire. (…) The Czech communists
are still flaunting their own version of the Third Way. These days, they talk
about democracy, but if, God forbid, they happened to assume power again, the ‘
rule of the working classes’ and ‘the class struggle’ and all the talk about ‘imperialism’
and ‘ the People´s Militia’ and the other achievements of Marxism-Leninism
would quickly be reinstated.”[10]
After dismissing the events of the 1968 Prague Spring
and the ethos of the reform era as criminal, or at least irrelevant, Mladá fronta Dnes is of the opinion that
the Soviet armies would invade anyway – because this is simply what the
Russians are like – they invade:
“The tanks were always ready to invade. When talking
about 21th August 1968, people speak of disappointment, of shock. But it was no
shock. We must admit that the Soviet tanks have always been ready to invade. “[11]
The whole period of communist rule in Czechoslovakia, from
the communist takeover in 1948 until the fall of communism in 1989, was the
rule of a criminal regime, in the opinion of Mladá fronta Dnes and Lidové noviny. There was non-stop terror: it would be foolish to try to distinguish periods
of differing ethos or to dare to imply that there were attempts at liberalization
during this forty-year period of “criminality”. The notion that there may have
been a period when certain individuals were trying to do away with the excesses
of the totalitarian system, is not permissible. There was simply no freedom in
communist Czechoslovakia; total freedom was on offer only in the capitalist
West. Of course, “half-communists”, like writer Ernest Hemingway, failed to
recognise this:
“The American generation which had gathered together around
in the drawing room of the self important half-communist Ernest Hemingway,
called itself ‘a lost generation’. (...) They cried into their palms and
‘rebelled’ in a country which was free. But the only truly lost generation is
the generation which spent the most important years of their lives between 1938
and 1989 in [what are now] postcommunist countries. This generation has never
known freedom.“[12]
People in the Czech Republic are now totally
uninterested in the Prague Spring:
“The theme of the Prague Spring seems now definitively
closed. People remember it less and less. Most Czechs have regarded any form of
socialism as deeply suspect for a long time now. They see all attempts to
reform socialism as attempts to square the circle. (...) No wonder that
according to opinion polls, 43 per cent of young people aged 14 – 18 do not
know what the expression ‘August 68’ means and 30 per cent of them don’ t have
a clue even if you tell them that this was when the Prague Spring was defeated.“[13]
And, indeed,
as I discovered while teaching in the Czech Republic in February – April 2008,
most of today´s university students seem unaware and uninterested in the ethos
and the events of 1968. Its protagonists, the once famous writers and
filmmakers, are to today’s 20 – 25 year olds a bunch of senile fuddy duddies.
It would appear that coverage in the official media, the current establishment
image of the “heroes” of 1968, actively dissuades young people from studying
the ethos and the events of 1968, or literature relating to it.
1968
is the topic of two Czech postcommunist feature films, Rebelové (Rebels, 2001) by Filip Renč, and Pelíšky (Cosy Dens, 1999) by Jan
Hřebejk. Both these films are misrepresentations of the events of 1968,
but let us concentrate on the nature of this misrepresentation: What does it
tell us about contemporary Czech society? The misinterpretations seem to be
closely connected to the ethos which Czech right of centre papers disseminate
about the events of the Prague Spring.
Rebelové is a retro-musical whose
primary aim is to create an entertaining framework for a number of original
pop-songs from the second half of the 1960s. Rebelové sets itself up as a film about young people in love. Just
before the final oral examinations at a secondary school in a small Czech town
called Týniště (most contemporary Czech films take place in small towns)
three girl students from the school meet three boys. These have just deserted
from the army, where they were doing their compulsory national service, and are
hoping to escape to the West. A train loaded with timber regularly leaves
Týniště for the West and the boys plan to hide in one of its carriages.
Considering
that the boys have just deserted from the army and are trying to defect, they
seem to be remarkably laid back. They spend a pleasant afternoon with the girls
at a fairground in the small town and then they all organise a party in a
derelict farmhouse. Eventually, a local railway guard betrays them to the
police (their desertion had been widely reported on television and their
mugshots broadcast) but two of the three boys still successfully manage to jump
on to the train and defect. Only one of them, Šimon, who has fallen in love
with student Tereza, stays behind with her and is arrested and imprisoned.
But
imprisoning soldiers for desertion was far from characteristic of the Prague
Spring, and, mainly, in 1968, people did not need to use illegal means to get out from under the
Iron Curtain: people travelled freely to the West. Moreover, this was a time
when people did not flee from Czechoslovakia: they were proud of what was going
on in their country. 1968 was a year of pride and hope. It was interesting to
get involved.
The
film concentrates on young people and their courtship, mostly in a school
environment. We also follow the final oral examinations at the local secondary
school, with grotesque looking teachers in charge. (Teachers in contemporary
Czech film are almost always grotesque and authoritative.) There is one
concession to the ethos of the Prague Spring: the examination questions are
both about Lenin and Masaryk.
The
local priest, Šimon´s relative, complains for twenty years that the state has
not given him a penny for the repairs of his church. Yet his Baroque church has
been perfectly restored the way churches have been painstakingly renovated all
over the Czech Republic only since the fall of communism.
It is
supposed to be a sign of liberalisation that Tereza´s father is able to open a
private restaurant in the town. This restaurant looks like a typical private
business from the postcommunist era; it is quite different from those few
hastily opened, amateurish private enterprises of 1968, which lacked infrastructural
backup, furniture and equipment as well as capital.
The
authors of Rebelové have not
understood that the salient developments took place in politics and the arts in
1968, not in the economy. Under the influence of contemporary neoconservatism,
they have been led to believe that liberty equals consumerism. But in 1968, the
people took part in a nationwide debate on the national predicament, on the
economy, on communism and on the crimes of Stalinism which had been committed
in the 1950s. This debate was widely reflected in the media. Unlike the 1990s
in Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring was not marked by a quick growth of the
private enterpreneurial sphere.
A
passionate nationwide political debate culminating in the cultural and
political developments of the previous few years was a typical feature of the
Prague Spring, rather than the setting up of private restaurants. Yet the film ignores
this political debate – historically wrong, and typically for the period of
normalization as well as for the postcommunist era – the protagonists pursue their
narrow, private, personal interests.
In
1968, everyone, even secondary school pupils, had been dragged into politics.
It was impossible to avoid participation. When Šimon says something about “the
free world”, another of the deserters tells him to “watch what he is saying”.
But in 1968, people were not afraid to speak openly in public.
At
one point, a presenter on TV talks to a high military official about soldiers
deserting from their national service. They both speak a language peppered with
Stalinist ideological clichés. This is also historically inaccurate –
journalists in 1968 used normal, natural human language without ideology, and
so did politicians.
When
Tereza comes upon her father by the river, fishing, and listening to the Voice
of America on his transistor radio, the father is pleased that he had “found a
spot where he can listen to the broadcast without it being blocked out by
jamming. But the broadcasts of the Voice of America for Czechoslovakia were not
jammed in the second half of the 1960s, nor in fact were they jammed in the
1970s and 1980s.
The
popular songs of the 1960s, which Rebelové
reintroduces to the public, were often remarkable works of art, with genuine
poetry for lyrics, carrying profound metaphorical meanings. Czech culture of
the 1960s was multilayered. While it was popular and accessible, it also
operated on the level of considerable sophistication and originality, dealing
with profound, timeless issues. These profound pop songs were an integral part
of the nationwide political debate. All this is lost in Rebelové. The songs are replayed in a new, superficial context.
The
film serves as remarkable evidence of the great historical vacuum and
misunderstanding of the cultural and
political situation in Czechoslovakia in the second half of the 1960s. Rebelové is comically inauthentic – as
though Renč were making a movie about a totally different country. This
would not matter if Rebelové was
merely an entertaining, non-political framework for the well-known popular
songs. But Renč has been trying to recreate a historically accurate,
legitimate, political image of 1968.
It is in this sense that the film is a failure. While Renč is trying to
create an image of a historical reality, he has produced an image of the
post-1968 invasion era, the so called “normalization” of the 1970s and 1980s,
with occasional elements of today.
Pelíšky (Cosy
Dens, 1999) is one of several attempts by director Jan Hřebejk and his
scriptwriter Petr Jarchovský to depict various traumatic periods in Czech history.
Pelíšky ostensibly deals with the
period from winter 1967 until the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968.
Pelíšky zooms in on the life of two
families who live in a villa in a leafy suburb of Prague: the family of
anticommunist former member of the antifascist resistance Kraus and the family
of a communist military officer Šebek, who had been forcibly moved into Kraus´s
villa. Such “representation” of the Czech nation in 1967-1968 is grossly clichéd.
Most people in Czechoslovakia in this period supported democratic socialism –
but such individuals do not appear in Pelíšky.
Thus “a film has been made about 1968 without the people of 1968,” as Czech
film critic Jaromír Blažejovský says.[14]
Just
as Rebelové, Pelíšky is historically inaccurate, having nothing in common with
the ethos of the second half of the 1960s. Again, the film really shows
lifeduring normalisation, when, as a result of renewed oppression after the
invasion, people´s attitudes changed and they began avoiding public life, going
into internal emigration and concentrating on their private lives within their “cosy
dens” – in their flats and their family environment. Pelíšky highlights this ethos of infantility and the return to the
family , which was at the same time, from the early 1970s, connected with the
emergence of consumerism.
The
privacy of family life is at its most intense during Christmas festivities. Contemporary
Czech films still, possibly as a result of the normalization ethos, concentrate
on private lives within the family environment and they quite often feature
Christmas family celebrations. The Christmas celebrations in the Šebek family extensively
document the new childishness of the normalisation era. The men at the Christmas
dinner table argue about childish nonsense – for instance, trying to guess how
tall the bear codiac is or they go to the bathroom to compete how long they can
hold their breath under water.
Yet
the Czechs and Slovaks in the second half of the 1960s behaved much more like mature,
politically aware citizens within the open societies in the West. Let us quote
a couple of lead headlines on the front page of Literární listy published during the Prague Spring, a newspaper which
had a printrun of 300 000 (that would be about 2 million in the British context):
“Reason and Conscience”[15]
“Freedom and Reponsibility”[16].
None of the mature, active, political attitudes of the citizens of 1968 are
reflected in this film.
There are factual errors. Shortly before
Christmas 1967, Eva, the teacher, comes to school with a copy of Literární listy (although she does not
at all behave as actively as a reader of that influential cultural political
weekly would have done). But the first issue of Literární noviny did not come out until 1st March 1968. Communist
ideological slogans, printed in yellow on a red background, such as “Build up
your country, you will strengthen peace!” were not displayed in public places
during the second half of the 1960s, and certainly not in 1968. That is a
feature of the 1950s and then again of the 1970s and 1980s.
The
teenage heroes of Pelíšky are not
interested in politics even during the most heady days of the Prague Spring –
these events are not even recorded. But private life is a feature of the 1970s
and 1980s. In this film, the adults behave like oppressed and helpless
individuals of the 1970s and 1980s. They have a choice – they can either helplessly
rave in frustration at the communist regime, like the anticommunist Kraus, or
they can parrot communist clichés, like the officer Šebek or teacher
Mašlaň. But even those communists like Šebek, who support the regime, are
unable to share in any of its power. Communists are just as helpless as anticommunists. This is, of course, a typical
feature of Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia of the 1970s and 1980s.
In
line with oppression during the normalization period, politics plays a minimal
role in Pelíšky. The film mocks pro-regime
and anti-regime attitudes in equal measure. Both the anticommunist Kraus and
the communist Šebek are shown as abnormal personifications of exaggerated political
ideologies. The normalization message is clear: We do not want to get involved
in politics. We wish to lead a quiet, secluded, family life. What remains if we
cannot behave as active citizens? Family customs and the peace of one´s home.
Pelíšky is not a film about 1968: it
is a film of the 1970s and 1980s, the period of “normalization” which has
marked the consciousness of the Czech nation much more deeply than the Prague Spring.
It creates the false impression that 1968 was irrelevant and that the Warsaw
Pact invasion was somehow arbitrary, it happened as a bolt from the blue,
without reason.
If we
accept post-communist Czech cinema as a vehicle for the expression of
contemporary Czech attitudes to the present and the past of their society, it
is becomes obvious that the neostalinist period of the 1970s and the 1980s, after
the 1968 Soviet invasion, is still a vivid, traumatic experience in the mind of
Czech filmmakers. Whenever they try to make a film about history, it is a statement
about the traumas of the normalisation of the 1970s and 1980s. The ethos of the
Prague Spring is invisible in these films which have been ostensibly made about
1968. The image of the Prague Spring that these films present is closely
related to the disdainful attitude of the current Czech right-wing press, which
also has its roots in the traumatic experience of the post-1968 invasion
“normalization” of the 1970s and 1980s.
[1] See Jan
Čulík, Jací jsme: Česká
společnost v hraném filmu devadesátých a nultých let (What we are
like: Czech Society in Feature Film of the 1990 and 2000s), Host, Brno,
2007; selected excerpts in English: http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/Slavonic/CzCin.htm
[2] Stanislav Holubec, "37 let od Pražského
jara“ (37 Years since the Prague Spring),
http://www.sds.cz/view.php?cisloclanku=2005071503.
[3] In a paper, delivered at the international
conference "Czech Media and Czech Society in the 1960s“, 19th March 2008,
The Goethe Institute, Prague.
[4] In 2007, the average daily printrun of Mladá fronta Dnes was 301 444 copies per day, of Lidové noviny 70 355 copies per day. They are the leading “serious”
daily newspapers in the Czech Republic and they are right of centre. Apart from
them there is Hospodářské noviny
(The Economic Newspaper, right of centre, 59 986 copies per day in 2007),
and Právo (The Right, left of centre,
153 944 copies per day in 2007). For all the circulation data, see http://www.abccr.cz/tabgraf96-soucasnost/2007/deniky07.htm.
[5] Josef Moucha, “Jan Saudek považuje fotografie
za poselství” (Jan Saudek regards his photographs as a message), Lidové noviny, 11th May,
2000, p. 32.
[6] Luděk Navara, “Jak chudý hoch z vesnice
na Hrad přišel” (How a poor village boy came to the Castle), Mladá fronta Dnes, 9th
September, 2004, p. 6.
[7] David Jan Novotný, “Hokej s lidskou
tváří” (Ice-hockey with a Human Face), Mladá
fronta Dnes, 24th April, 2004, p. 6.
[8] Zdeněk Malý, “Osmašedesátníci
spoluvytvářeli totalitu” (The people of 1968 helped to bring about the
totalitarian system), Lidové noviny,
2nd September, 2004, p. 14.
[9] Josef Letošník, “Václav
Klaus dobře ví, o čem mluví” (Václav Klaus knows what he is talking
about), Mladá fronta dnes, The Hradec
Králové region, 12th March, 2005, p. 3.
[10] Jan Truneček, “Třetí cesta – pokus o
kočkopsa” (The Third Way – an attempt at creating a cat in the shape of a
dog), Mladá fronta Dnes, 29th
August, 2000, p.7.
[11] Vladimír Bystrov, “Okupace musela přijít”
(The Occupation had to Come). Mladá
fronta Dnes, 20th August, 2005, p. 8.
[12] Vladimír Kučera, “Ztracené generace.
Před srpnem 1968 i po něm” (Lost Generations. Before August 1968 and
After), Mladá fronta Dnes, 21st
August, 2002, p. 8.
[13] “Vzpomínky na Pražské jaro 1968 blednou” (Memories of the 1968 Prague Spring are fading), Lidové noviny, quoting Die Welt, 23rd August, 2000, p. 10.
[14] Film a doba 4, 2001, p. 180.
[15] Karel Kosík, “Rozum a svědomí”, Literární listy, vol. 1, no. 1, 1st March, 1968, p. 1
and 3, http://archiv.ucl.cas.cz/index.php?path=LitL/1.1968/1
[16] Miroslav Jodl, “Svoboda a odpovědnost”, Literární listy, vol. 1, no. 6, 4th April 1968, p. 1 and
13, http://archiv.ucl.cas.cz/index.php?path=LitL/1.1968/6