Czechoslovakia 1968 is a 1969 documentary short film (14 minutes) directed by Denis Sanders and Robert M. Fresco.
It is a thumbnail history of Czechoslovakia, emphasizing the "Prague Spring
" of 1968, a period of liberalization in Czechoslovakia under the leadership of Alexander Dubcek. The film records the ruthless crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks sent on the orders of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. It was assembled by the United States Information Agency.
There were no American film crews on the streets of Prague; the footage was smuggled out of the country by diplomats and later assembled into a film. Co-director Robert M. Fresco then approached Soviet media agency Sovfoto and asked for pre-1968 material, claiming to be making "an educational film." The Russians bought it, and turned over the stills and stock footage that make up the first half of the movie.
Tropes:
- Documentary: A quite powerful one documenting the ruthless crushing of the Prague Spring by the Soviets and the brave defiance of the crowds in Prague.
- Film the Hand: The last shot of the movie is a Soviet soldier reaching out to cover up the lens of a camera.
- Gratuitous English: Someone took the trouble to scrawl "Go home Ivan!" on a wall in English.
- The Ken Burns Effect: Used occasionally. There's a dramatic pan up a photo of a female Jewish prisoner during the Nazi occupation. There's a zoom in on a Soviet star underlining the Russian takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1945.
- La Résistance: The people of Czechoslovakia, taking to the streets, doing what they can to resist the Soviet takeover.
- Letting the Air out of the Band: Played deadly serious. The rousing, inspiring music playing over the footage of Dubcek and the Prague Spring suddently lurches to a halt. Then we see the first clips of Soviet tanks.
- Monochrome to Color: Significantly, the sepia-toned stock footage and stills starts to give way to more color clips as Dubcek arrives on the scene and the Prague Spring begins. Then the film suddenly flips back to sepia tones as the Russian tanks roll in.
- Road-Sign Reversal: Czechs are shown reversing street signs in an effort to confuse the Soviets.
- Silence Is Golden: To make the film more accessible to international audiences, there is no narrator. There isn't any spoken dialogue at all. It's basically a Silent Movie, although there are sound effects as well as music.
- Stock Footage: Stock footage and stock photos make up the entire movie.
- Time-Passes Montage: The first half of the movie is this. The film starts with a Kodak Carousel slide projector showing stills of Czechoslovak life. The Carousel continues to click through, but the stills become interspersed with stock live footage. The film keeps cutting back to the slide projector turning, and it becomes apparent that the numbers on the slide projector represent the years we are seeing. The first slide is #18, for 1918 and the birth of independent Czechoslovakia after World War I. The film lingers on slide #38 for a long while as stock footage tells the story of the Munich Agreement and the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia.
