August 21, 1968 is the day the Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia & ended the Prague Spring, reinstalling Communist terror. Last week was the 55th an., so I wrote about a Prague Spring movie that was recently restored for this year’s Karlovy Vary film festival, The Fireman’s Ball, by Miloš Forman. Read the whole thing at the Acton Institute Religion & Liberty Online website:
Miloš Forman was an incredibly famous director in the 1980s, when his Amadeus (1984) won eight Oscars out of eleven nominations, & Ragtime (1981) also received eight nominations, period pieces about music’s potential for social transformation, overcoming prejudices or conventions, & making a new world. Similarly, in the ‘70s he made very well-regarded pro-counterculture & antiwar movies like Taking Off (1971) & the musical Hair (1979), & especially his adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), which won five Oscars out of nine nominations, including Best Picture & Best Actor for Jack Nicholson.
The beginning of Forman’s astonishingly successful Hollywood career, however, was a scandal about his 1967 film, The Firemen’s Ball, his last in his native Czechoslovakia. The comedy was a very popular satire, its success somehow connected with the collapse of Communist ideological censorship & terror (de-Stalinization) & the social revolution of the 1960s, the replacement of the older WWII generation by younger, more radically egalitarian 1968-ers. Forman also got an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film & an invitation to compete in Cannes (but the festival was shut down by radicals like Godard in support of the May 1968 riots).
Last year, I wrote about another Prague Spring movie, The Joke, directed by Jaromil Jireš & written by Milan Kundera, adapting his own debut novel. Also over at Acton:
his year, at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, the major film attraction in Eastern Europe, there was a memento of the Prague Spring. The Joke was a big success at the time & also acquired fame for being banned by the communist authorities during the period called “normalization,” that is, the restoration of totalitarianism, including censorship, after the brief interlude of freedom earlier in the 1960s. As a result, most people saw it only 20 years later, after the fall of communism in Europe. Now, finally, there’s a beautiful version of the film that highlights the cinematography & music.
The movie is set in early ’60s Czechoslovakia but constantly flashes back to the previous decade, juxtaposing the early enthusiasm many young people felt for communism with the general cynicism to follow. It’s the story of a bitter man, Ludwik Jahn, who suffered in a Stalinist show trial for a politically incorrect remark that was hardly more than a joke. As a college student in the 1950s, Ludwik, angry that his girlfriend Marketa cares more about communism than about him, sends Marketa a postcard reading:
Optimism is the opium of mankind!
A healthy spirit stinks of stupidity!
Long live Trotsky!
Let me also share a podcast about the Prague Spring, about the HBO movie Burning Bush, directed by Agnieszka Holland, concerning the aftermath of the young student Jan Palach’s self-immolation in Charles Square, in Prague, in protest against the renewed Communist slavery.
Or, if you prefer Spotify:
Burning Bush is truly must-see. The "must" there is something like if it were to cost you 100$ to see it, you still should. Two reasons.
First, it is one of the very best cinematic portrayals of communist totalitarianism, and especially of the late-era kind most similar to the various totalitarian moves being made in our societies today (see my posts on Morrissey, or see M. Taibbi this week on how youtube is proving itself determined to learn NOTHING from the Mo. v. Biden revelations or Twitterfiles and is tripling down on censorship https://www.racket.news/p/youtube-hits-orf-again-as-censorship). Much of the totalitarianism in this film is conducted as a media-slander program--no-one is imprisoned, tortured, etc., but it's still as diabolic and anti-liberty as can be.
Second, the heroine is a (based on real-life) model of the "strong" or "empowered" female character we hear so much pining-for and hyping-of in film-circles today, but seldom get convincing portrayals of, but rather, lots of "Mary Sues."