The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath The first major political upheaval in the Soviet bloc took place in Czechoslovakia. After internal struggles, in January 1968, reformer Alexander Dubcek took control of the Czech Communist party. Dubcek encouraged debates, even raising the possibility of a multiparty system. By late June, reform was in the air. Over sixty scientists, artists, and scholars signed the “Two Thousand Words” manifesto, calling for workers’ self-management, criticism of party authority, and rejection of old-line communism.
The “Prague Spring” had enormous influence on culture. “In the last few weeks,” the film director Jan Nemec said, “I have been possessed by such a feeling of joy and liberation—maybe madness—nothing holds me any more.”'2 The banned films of 1967 were made available, and New Wave directors felt at liberty to experiment.
But the euphoria was short-lived. On August 20, 1968, the USSR ordered 500,000 Warsaw Pact troops to invade Czechoslovakia. Government officials were flown to Moscow in handcuffs. With Soviet backing, conservatives halted reforms. In April 1969, DubCek’s successor Gustav Husak oversaw “normalization”—that is, elimination of the 1968 reforms and punishment of rebellious individuals. Thousands of intellectuals and artists were forbidden to write, perform, or teach. Within two years, almost 200,000 Czechs emigrated.
Officials banned any films that exuded the Prague Spring spirit of social critique. A striking example is Jifi Menzel’s Larks on a String. Menzel had already established an international reputation with Closely Watched
Trains (1966) and Capricious Summer (1967; p. 462). Larks on a String is set in 1948, when, as a title ironically informs us, the working class took power in Czechoslovakia. Professionals, intellectuals, and waiters now sort scrap in a junkyard. Menzel mixes comedy, romance, and satire in his characteristically poignant way. In the opening scene, the hero and heroine portray loyal socialist workers for a staged newsreel; ostentatious posters and banners conceal the junkyard behind them (Color Plate
23.1). Completed in 1969 but denied release, Larks on a String was charged with “contempt for the working class” and kept Menzel out of filmmaking for five years.
Normalization forced changes in the Czech film industry. The film-unit production system was abolished, and control was recentralized. One studio head went to prison. The new regime demanded that political subjects be treated in an affirmative, heroic way—a return to Socialist Realism. Expectably, officials complained of the New Wave’s experimentation and “pessimism.” In 1973, four previously released New Wave films, including The Firemen’s Ball and Report on the Party and the Guests, were banned.
The attacks destroyed the Czech New Wave. Many of the best directors emigrated. Milos Forman had already planned to leave, but the repressions drove out Jan NemeC, Ivan Passer, Jan Kadar, and others. Of the New Wave filmmakers who stayed, most were denied work until the mid-1970s. For example, Vera Chytilova, director of Something Different (1963) and Daisies (1966), managed to make the modernist fantasy The Fruit of the Garden (1969) before the new freeze set in. For the next six years she submitted scripts and sought projects. She was put off, denied permission to attend foreign festivals, and finally judged “elitist” and “uncommitted.” 13 Not until Chytilova wrote a letter to President Husak charging officials with illegality and sexism was she permitted, II 1976, to return to directing.
For a few months, it appeared that democratic reform could alter a Communist society, but the invasion put into action what would be known as the “Brezhnev doctrine,” the policy that the USSR would intervene in any satellite showing signs of dissent. The Prague rebellion showed that free discussion could lead to dangerous political unrest, and most Communist regimes pulled back from the liberalizing of the mid-1960s. The Prague Spring of 1968 warned eastern European artists that another thaw had ended.
A parallel debacle took place in Yugoslavia. In Zagreb, intellectuals had launched critiques of Soviet-style communism since the early 1960s. These humanistic Marxists, much like the leftists of the West, declared their
23.37, left The calculated effrontery of Makavejev’s WR: in a cult-of-Stalin fiction feature, the leader declaims that the USSR will fulfill Lenin’s legacy. This is followed by...
23.38, right... a shot of a patient receiving electroshock therapy.
Opposition to any social institutions “which cripple human beings, arrest their development, and impose on them patterns of simple, easily predictable, dull, stereotyped behavior.” 14 In the same period, the Central Committee of the Yugoslavian party demanded economic reform. During the events of the spring of 1968, students occupied Belgrade University. Tito intervened to break the strike, and government repression intensified. By 1972, the rising Croatian nationalist movement provoked the government to arrest, try, and purge political dissenters.
Yugoslavian film culture of the late 1960s strongly resembled that of western Europe. Politically and erotically outspoken, Yugoslavian New Film infuriated conservative factions. Zika Pavlovic’s Ambush (1969) and Krsto PapiC’s Handcuffs (1969) saw traces of the Stalinist past continuing into the present, while Aleksandar PetroviC’s The Master and Margarita (1972) compared current attacks on cinema to Stalinism. The Zagreb Film Festival of 1970 took as its theme “Sexuality as an Effort to Achieve a New Humanism.” As pressures increased after 1968, official critics labeled the New Films “black films” because of their “defeatism” and “nihilism.”
Dusan Makavejev offered the most scandalous black film of the era in WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971). Like his earlier works, it juggles newsreel footage, extracts from older fiction films, and a story; it is also, centrally and explicitly, about sex. A biography of Wilhelm Reich, a psychoanalyst and radical sex theorist, is mixed with Direct Cinema footage of current erotic practices in the United States, newsreels of the Chinese revolution, and a grotesque story about Milena, a Yugoslavian woman who believes that “communism without free love is a wake in a graveyard.” WR epitomizes counterculture irreverence, not least in its outrageous juxtapositions (23.37, 23.38). In suggesting that erotic freedom would revitalize Marxism, Makavejev was attacking Communist prudery head-on.
In the early 1970s, the government denied distribution to WR, The Master and Margarita, and other black films. PetroviC, who had won worldwide fame with
I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967), was forced out of his post at the Film Academy. The party expelled Makavejev and PavloviC; Makavejev joined the band of wandering directors exiled from eastern Europe.
Polish cinema experienced a government crackdown like that in Czechoslovakia, but it recovered more easily. In the spring of 1968, the Polish government was debating the need for economic reform. In May, an uprising at Warsaw University was suppressed. The Creative Film Unit system, which had operated since the mid-1950s, was replaced by a centralized organization. Venerated figures like Aleksander Ford were removed from their supervisory positions.
After workers’ strikes in the early 1970s, however, Wladyslaw Gomulka lost control and was replaced by a more concessive leadership. The freer atmosphere reanimated Polish cinema. The production units were reorganized in 1972, with filmmakers having even more control than they previously had. A literature-based cinema won favor with audiences and solidified the production units. Andrzej Wajda returned to the center of Polish cinema with Landscape after Battle (1970), Wedding (1972), and Land of Promise (1975). Several new talents appeared, most notably Krzysztof Zanussi, a former physics student who brought his scientific training to bear on contemporary dramas in The Structure of Crystals
(1969), Illumination (1972), and Balance (1974).
Other eastern European cinemas flourished in the postinvasion era. In Romania, which had only loose ties to the USSR, the late 1960s saw a liberalization. More experimentation was permitted, and in the early 1970s decentralized production units were formed. The Bulgarian government created a production-unit system in 1968, and three years later it installed new management in the industry. The nation’s most celebrated film was Todor Dinov and Hristo Hristov’s Iconostasis (1969), somewhat similar to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev in its echoes of folk and religious art (23.39). After 1971, Bulgarian cinema underwent a renaissance, with several films winning international recognition.
It was Hungary, however, that moved to the forefront of eastern European cinema in the aftermath of the Prague Spring. The economic reforms created in the late 1960s remained intact, and decentralized planning and a mixed economy continued well into the mid-1970s. A critical political cinema continued in Hungary, and the four production units were each making about five films per year. Because directors such as Miklos Jancso, Marta Meszaros, and Istvan Szabo were closely tied to western trends, they are considered later in this chapter.
Dissent and Stagnation in the USSR While there was no “Moscow Spring,” the early 1960s spawned a USSR youth movement of sorts. Students scrutinized the history of communism and debated party conduct. Liberals and religious believers formed dissident and prodemocracy organizations. Writers circulated samizdat (“self-published”) articles and books. When Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, protesters crowded Red Square.
Facing a declining economy and a conflict with China, Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev sought detente with the West while dealing harshly with dissent on the home front. Christians and intellectuals were imprisoned or sent to mental hospitals. Physicist Andrei Sakharov’s Human Rights Committee was steadily undermined by the secret police. In 1970, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature, but when his novel The Gulag Archipelago (1973) revealed the horrors of Stalin’s prison camps, he was deported and forbidden to return. (He moved to Vermont in 1976 and finally returned to Russia in 1994.)
In cinema, production averaged about 130 features annually. But the new freeze demanded a return to Socialist Realism, now called “pedagogical realism.” Energetic factory workers and World War II heroes came back to the screen. Some of the more idiosyncratic directors of the New Wave, such as Vasily Shukshin, produced well-crafted literary adaptations. In the late 1960s, Andrei Konchalovsky had proposed a film on Che Guevara, but he too turned to safe sources, such as novelist Ivan Turgenev for A Nest of Gentlefolk (1969).
In the regional republics, however, intense antiRussian nationalism created a “poetic cinema.” Alexander Dovzhenko’s peasant lyricism offered filmmakers a distant precedent (p. 129), and Sergei Paradzhanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) reopened the way toward a personal treatment of folk material. Georgy Shengelaya’s Pirosmani (1969) used the artist-biography genre to treat a folk painter, a subject that carried nationalistic connotations but also justified experi-
23.39 Iconostasis: the icon painter and his creation.
23.40 In Solaris, the hero kneels before his father as the camera retreats to a God’s-eye perspective.
Ments in abstract shot design (Color Plate 23.2). Similar efforts were Ukrainian Yuri Ilienko’s White Bird with a Black Mark (1972) and Georgian Otar Ioseliani’s Pastorale (1977).
Two other directors associated with the poetic tendency emerged as central to the new Soviet cinema. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, suppressed in 1966, premiered in Paris in 1969. After widespread acclaim abroad it was released in the USSR. By then Tarkovsky had completed his third feature, Solaris (1972), widely touted as Russia’s answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey (p. 627). Its ambiguous depiction of the hero’s delusions is motivated by its space-travel premise, but typically Tarkovskian are passages of mystical contemplation: weeds coiling under water, an endless freeway, and the awesome final images (23.40). Tarkovsky wanted to avoid an ideological message: “The image is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected as a drop of water.” 15
The reflection of the artist’s world is carried to an extreme in The Mirror (1975), a poetic blend of childhood memories, documentary footage, and fantastic imagery. As Tarkovsky’s voice recites his father’s poetry offscreen, the camera slides across a room, moving from a cat lapping a puddle of milk to the mother at the window,
23.41 The Mirror: the enigma of memory and fantasy.
23.42 In The Color of Pomegranates, the tableau shot recalls folk art.
23.43 Sayat Nova’s death in The Color of Pomegranates.
Tearfully watching the rain. A barn burns in a downpour; a man is almost blown over in a windy landscape; a woman levitates (23.41). While the mainstream Slave of Love (Nikita Mikhalkov, 1976) was enjoying worldwide
Success, Soviet authorities declared The Mirror incomprehensible and gave it a cramped, unprofitable release.
Paradzhanov remains the most vivid example of how the personal became political in the Soviet cinema. After his Ukrainian feature Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (p. 460) won international success, Paradzhanov used his new fame to protest the treatment of dissidents. In 1968, he was arrested on charges of “Ukrainian nationalism”; after his release he was transferred to an Armenian studio, where he made The Color of Pomegranates in 1969. Although the script is based on the life of the Armenian poet Sayat Nova, a prologue tells us that the film will not be a conventional biography. Long-take shots frame characters, animals, and objects in rigid frontal tableaux (23.42). Editing serves merely to link these shots or to cut jarringly into the static portraits. The film’s mise-en-scene presents Sayat Nova’s poetic imagery: waterlogged books opened out to dry on rooftops, carpets bleeding as they are washed, chicken feathers scattering over the dying poet (23.43). Although Paradzhanov’s style differs drastically from Tarkovsky’s, both directors contemplate the changing textures of objects through time.
The Color of Pomegranates was probably the most shockingly experimental film made in the USSR since the late 1920s. It was immediately shelved, although a shorter, revised version (the one currently available) achieved limited release in 1971. Forbidden to direct, Paradzhanov fought back. He wrote a pamphlet on his problems and those of Soviet cinema. In January 1974, he was accused of homosexuality, trafficking in stolen art objects, and “incitement to suicide.” He was sentenced to several years at hard labor.
In the eastern bloc, Socialist Realist policy obliged the artist to serve society—or rather its representative, the Communist party. The major eastern European directors such as Chytilova, Jancso, and Makavejev believed that their visions were in harmony with some socialist position, even if that position was not currently in favor. But the poetic cinema of Tarkovsky and Paradzhanov presented the artist’s vision as independent of all needs of the collective. Their highly personal films thus boldly challenged the Soviet orthodoxy and echoed trends in the West that sought political liberation in the unconstrained imagination of the individual.
The year of the Prague Spring, 1968, also marked the height of social protest in western countries. As in the Third World and eastern Europe, young people played a key role.
22.3 Tfce Godfather
27.6 Do The Right Thing
By 1966, many students were questioning authority and rejecting traditional American values. Some were drawn to the New Left, a diverse movement propounding a spontaneous, libertarian Marxism opposed to orthodox Soviet varieties. University students were central to the New Left in the United States, Britain, France, Japan, West Germany, and even Franco’s Spain. Another element in youth politics was loosely known as the counterculture. It spanned a range of alternative lifestyles, free-flowing eroticism, immersion in rock music, experiments in communal living, and drug use in the name of expanded consciousness. Although some counterculture bohemians considered themselves apolitical, many felt allied with the New Left.
The international politics of youth focused on several issues. A central one was America’s role in the Vietnam War, which steadily intensified after American planes began bombing North Vietnam in 1965. U. S. organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society actively opposed the war. This opposition began as protest but hardened into resistance, as young men refused the draft and activists blocked induction centers. Between 1967 and 1969, resistance turned to confrontation, with activists occupying buildings and fighting police in the streets.
By then, the issue of Vietnam had become part of a broader push for social change. Throughout the First World, the student movement launched a critique of post-World War II capitalist society. The university was seen as a machine of social control, cranking out well-behaved managers and technicians. Around the world, students protested crowded classes, poor facilities, impersonal teaching, and irrelevant programs. The Berkeley free-speech movement of 1965 became a prototype of campus rebellion around the world.
The Vietnam War, the weakness of traditional left parties, the consumption-based economies of the West, and the specter of neocolonialism led students to question their culture. Many charged that western society created an artificially “normal” life in order to restrain impulses toward freedom and self-management. Wilhelm Reich, who saw fascism as springing from sexual repression, and philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who attacked the irrationality of “one-dimensional society,” introduced the generation of the 1960s to a wide-ranging social critique. Yippies and other countercultural groups attacked “Amerika” in less theoretical terms. “The left,” declared Jerry Rubin, “demands full employment for all—we demand full unemployment for all.”i6
Other social movements shaped the radical politics of the period. In the United States, the black-power movement emerged around 1965. While the civil rights movement stressed legal and nonviolent reform, black power called for a more aggressive stance—crystallized in the public mind by the militant Black Panther party, founded in 1966. African American students protested segregation and demanded black studies programs. During the same period the women’s liberation movement reemerged in the United States and Britain, influenced by the civil rights movement and reacting against sexism, found even within the New Left leadership. Gay and lesbian groups, which had become more outspoken in the early 1960s, often joined the New Left and the counterculture.
By the end of 1967, many social-protest movements had converged. There began two years of political upheaval unparalleled in the West since World War II. The events of 1968 led many to believe that western society was on the brink of social revolution.
In that year, when students in Madrid closed the university, over a thousand were sent to military service. In Germany, student leader Rudi Dutschke was shot in the head. In the insurrection that followed, police killed two people and arrested a thousand. In London, a peace march sparked a battle between police and 20,000 demonstrators. At Japan’s Nihon University, students locked administrators in their offices and shut down classes. Italian students’ seizure of universities was supported by strikes among workers and high school students.
Similar tremors shook 200 U. S. campuses, notably Columbia, San Francisco State, Wisconsin, and Michigan. In April, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated and riots broke out in scores of ghettos. Two months later, Robert Kennedy, widely perceived as America’s best hope for moderate social change, was also assassinated. At the Democratic Convention in Chicago, police assaulted thousands of demonstrators protesting President Johnson’s prosecution of the Vietnam War. By the end of the year, armed black students were occupying Cornell University buildings, and 400,000 American students claimed to be revolutionaries.
For many historians, events in Paris during May 1968 typify the radical energies and frustrations of the period. The Stalin worship of the 1950s had turned many French students against the Communist party. Trotskyite and Maoist factions quarreled. Other groups, such as the Situationist International, injected a freewheeling critique of the consumer society. Housing shortages, unemployment, the unions’ collusion in keeping wages down, and vastly overcrowded universities led to an explosive situation.
At Nanterre and the Sorbonne, students confronted administrators and police, demanding university reforms and social change. Mass marches were met with tear gas
World History
