The Art of Dissent (2021) Movie Script

[melancholy music]
[James] Born in 1963,
my first
historical memories began
with 1968's chaotic TV news.
Cameras from around the world
influenced
my understanding of History.
I have always
seen through a lens.
[piano music]
Like many who grew up
during the Cold War,
I hid under
my grammar school desk
waiting for the
nuclear holocaust.
Trained first as a
professional photographer,
I later became
a History professor.
When I began my PhD
at the University of Chicago,
in October 1989,
I watched the fall of communism,
and was mesmerized
by the images of dissidents
leading non-violent revolutions.
-[clamoring]
-[applause]
What happened in Czechoslovakia,
before and after 1989,
seems incredible, today.
A real life fairy tale
about the dissidents
who slayed totalitarianism
with words
of rationality and love
seems like a necessary
antidote to our troubled times.
As a scholar and a filmmaker,
I believe that dissidents
can teach us something important
about courage.
[uplifting music]
This film fuses
how I see with what I know.
[music crescendo]
[James] Winston Churchill coined
the term The Iron Curtain,
in a 1946 speech
given in Missouri.
An Iron Curtain has descended
across the continent.
[James] This expression,
while true,
also obstructed
our views in the West
of cultural life
behind the Curtain.
Archival film reveals
a more complex story.
Let's start in 1968,
a year of two possibilities.
In America,
and throughout
much of the world,
the story was grim.
In April,
Dr Martin Luther King Jr
was assassinated in Memphis.
In May, workers
and students in Paris
nearly took down the government
of Charles de Gaulle.
In London,
protesters demonstrated
against American Imperialism
in Vietnam.
Will you give me your vote?
[crowd] Yeah!
-Will you give me your hand?
-Yeah!
[James] In June, Robert Kennedy
was slain in California
during his run
for the Presidency.
In August,
the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago
spiraled into chaos.
By the middle of the year,
the US had over
500,000 combat troops
committed in Vietnam.
As a war fought ostensibly
to stop the spread of communism
in Southeast Asia,
American intervention
was not going well at all.
[harp music]
Yet in Czechoslovakia,
throughout the spring
and summer,
things were going
extraordinarily well.
The renowned
Prague Spring Music Festival
was underway,
beginning
with a tribute to Smetana.
And inside
the BBC Studios in London,
a young Czech playwright
named Vclav Havel
was being interviewed
about his play, The Memorandum.
[interviewer] ...about
a particular situation
prevailing in Czechoslovakia
at that time.
The inspiration came,
of course, from my experience
in our country,
but I didn't want
to write it only
as a play about our country,
because I thought that
these problems are more general.
[interviewer] Well,
your play was produced there,
how was it received?
Did people take it as being
critical of Czechoslovakia?
I think that people
understood it very well,
how I wanted.
Havel, thank you very much.
[singing in Czech]
[James] Havel's 1965 play
lampooned Communist bureaucracy
in Czechoslovakia.
In his trademark style,
he played with language,
and his characters
invent an artificial one
to facilitate their work.
Within a year
of his BBC interview,
Havel and others,
such as the stunning
Marta Kubisov,
were banned and put
on the path of dissent.
Artists in Czechoslovakia
had real confidence,
because since 1965,
cultural life had
been opening up.
Musical artist
Marta Kubisov's career
was in full swing.
She might have
conquered the world
had not the summer of '68
ended so tragically.
[harmonizing]
1968's dark horse,
Alexander Dubcek,
came into power in January
as the first Secretary
of the Communist Party
of Czechoslovakia.
This bold, but naive politician
sought to do something
that others couldn't,
introduce basic freedoms
within the Soviet sphere
of influence in Europe.
This reform
was called the Prague Spring.
Dubcek announced
freedom of the press
and made other moves to suggest
that he was going to open up
the political process.
But it was a dangerous game,
which the Soviet leader,
Leonid Brezhnev,
and the Warsaw Pact allies
demanded that he stop playing.
[piano music]
Bizarrely, the chilling
lessons of the Soviet crushing
of Hungary in 1956,
didn't stop him.
Dubcek gave this interview
on the way to meet the Soviets
and his allies in Bratislava.
[James] Among those best known
for trying to understand Dubcek,
is the renowned
Oxford historian,
Timothy Garton Ash.
He believed in Socialism
with a human face.
And as we know,
he came back absolutely shocked
from his meetings
with Soviet leaders.
I think the irony of history
is that Central Europe,
including Czechoslovakia,
benefited
from Dubcek's illusions
21 years later in 1989,
because in some sense
Gorbachev shared that illusion
that you could have
a gradual reform of Communism
to make Socialism
with a human face.
[James] As final preparations
for the invasion
of Czechoslovakia
were being planned,
international celebrities
gathered in Prague to sing
for a TV show called Europarty.
This amazing footage has not
been rebroadcast for 50 years.
The cast included
the Moody Blues,
Marta Kubisov
and Shirley Besse.
The Moody Blues sang
"Nights in White Satin"
on the Charles bridge.
The next day,
during the invasion,
they were escorted
by the British military
to the airport.
-Shirley.
-Hello.
Shirley Besse, how long
have you been singing?
Oh, professionally
for about 16 years.
[James] Shirley Besse
chose to sing
James Bond's "Goldfinger"
on the construction site
for the Communist government's
new federal assembly building
in Wenceslas Square,
built on the location
of the demolished
Prague stock market.
Europarty wasn't the only
film crew shooting on location
in Prague during the invasion.
Filming for
The Bridge of Remagen
was disrupted as well.
Its cast and crew
were put under house arrest
and forced to flee a week later.
The presence
of the American tanks
was a bizarre coincidence.
The invasion began on the
night of August 20-21st
with 500,000 Warsaw Pact troops.
This unique color film
was captured
by a Catalonian businessman,
and it remained in his suitcase,
unseen, for 50 years.
[piano music]
Dubcek and several
of his colleagues were kidnapped
and taken to the Kremlin
to be interrogated.
There, Brezhnev
revealed that the invasion
would now
be about the narrative.
He ordered Dubcek to repudiate
the Prague Spring reforms
and publicly declare
that he was responsible
for unleashing
counter-revolutionary forces.
He agreed
only to pause the reforms,
but that
was a massive concession.
Jacques Rupnik is a Professor
of Political Science in Paris.
One of the most fascinating
things from that...
discussion,
I dare not call it negotiation,
in Moscow,
between Dubcek and Brezhnev,
after August '68,
when they are taken as prisoners
to Moscow
and engage in discussion.
Dubcek says to Brezhnev,
"Why did you do that?"
"Because what
we were trying to do
was making socialism
terribly attractive
in Europe as a whole,
because we were combining
socialism with democracy
and this would be attractive
to people in Western Europe,
so this would be a great boost
for the communist parties
in Western Europe."
And Brezhnev
cuts him off and says,
"We're not interested
in Communist parties
in Western Europe,
they're useless.
They're dead wood. Bah.
They've always been
useless and they still are.
We are interested
in preserving the territory
that the Red Army conquered
and paid for the high price
in World War II."
[James] But the lessons
are in what happened next.
[Jacques] The population
here embarked,
during one week,
on really something spectacular,
which is now
in all the textbooks
about civic resistance,
which was how,
without violent action,
without call to arms,
simply peaceful
civic resistance,
including removing
all the road signs,
including not giving
the occupying armies
any access
to water and food, etc.,
you can actually
create a situation,
where a unanimous population
mobilized against
a massive invasion
from the Warsaw Pact
can prevent the political
outcome that was planned,
because the outcome
that was planned
is that, yeah, we take
Dubcek and his colleagues
as prisoners to Russia,
farewell to them,
and there is a group
of trusted comrades so to speak,
who would take over.
That was certainly the plan
of the Russian embassy here,
and of the Secret Services, etc.
But it didn't work out.
[James] When Dubcek
returned from Moscow,
having capitulated
on his Prague Spring reforms
at the hand of his captors,
some prominent artists,
including Kubisov,
continued to hold out hope.
[James] Dubcek reversed
his Prague Spring promises
by signing the Moscow protocols.
In resuming office,
he asked citizens to suspend
democratization
and accept censorship,
which in a sense,
meant performing
an historical lobotomy
on themselves.
Many chose exile,
others would stay and resist.
Here Kubisov is,
in October 1968,
singing "A prayer for Marta,"
which became a
pice de rsistance
or kind of de facto
National Anthem
for those who opposed
normalization.
[applause]
[James] On January 16th, 1969,
Jan Palach, a young history
and political economy student
at Charles University,
set himself on fire
in Wenceslas Square.
His self-sacrifice to protest
the beginning of normalization
shook the nation to the core.
Hundreds and thousands
of people took to the streets
in the ensuing days.
In the letter left
behind in his jacket,
he called himself
'Torch Number 1'
and encouraged others
to follow his example.
Several did.
At this time,
Toms Halk
studied in the same faculty
as Jan Palach, in Prague.
[Tomas] I organized a requiem
at the mass for Jan Palach
in the St. Thomas Church
in Prague
and I brought
the death mask of Jan Palach
from the faculty
to the church and back.
I realized he left a letter
saying
that he is the Torch Number One,
and then will follow the others,
and I realized
we are all now in the position
of the Torch Number Two.
It is a challenge.
And how could
I answer to this challenge?
He wanted to wake up
the conscience of the nation
and this was for him more
important than his own life.
So I realized I also
must do something
and I think it was the beginning
of my idea to be a priest.
I walk the night...
Shirley Besse performs
"What Now My Love"
for Europarty
only five months before,
on the very spot where
Jan Palach took his own life.
The compression
of history is palpable.
What now my love
Now that you're gone
I'd be a fool
To go on and on
No one would care
No one would cry
If I should live
Or die
What now my love
Now there is nothing
Only my last
Goodbye
[applause]
[James]
In his televised address,
following
Jan Palach's self-immolation,
the young playwright
held nothing back.
You will know that
there is one image
of Tiananmen Square,
which is Tank Man,
the man standing
in front of the tank,
and Jan Palach
is in a way that image
for the crushing
of the Prague Spring,
and in that sense,
well beyond the frontiers
of Czechoslovakia,
he became a symbol of that.
Because the danger
was that the Soviet Union
would succeed
in what it set out to do,
which bore the very significant
name "normalization."
[piano music]
[James] In February 1969,
right after Jan Palach's death,
the internationally
renowned novelist,
Graham Greene, visited Prague.
He is interviewed
by Karel Kyncl.
[Graham] I have
a tremendous admiration
for the almost
superhuman courage.
And this wasn't
an expression of despair.
It was no more suicide,
it seems to me,
than a soldier who tries to take
an impregnable position
at the loss of his life,
knowing
that his life will be lost.
[cheering]
[James] There was one
symbolic act of revenge.
The Czechoslovak National
Ice Hockey team beat the Soviets
in March 1969
in Stockholm, Sweden.
[festive music]
Dubcek's final act in office
was to oversee
the implementation in 1969
of the Baton Law,
which allowed police
to use clubs with impunity
against protesters.
The brutality of the Baton Law
no doubt contributed to the fact
that this was the last
major protest for 20 years.
This protest
was on the first anniversary
of the invasion in 1969.
Artists and activists
were driven underground.
[shouting over megaphone]
[police sirens]
[James] The borders
were closed in 1969.
Marta Kubisov
and others were soon targeted
by the regime.
[violin music]
[James] Normalization
was a culture
of sensory deprivation
in an age of oversaturation.
Before she was banned,
Kubisov released a final movie
in 1969 by Jan Nemec.
This song
is called "Ring-O-Ding."
[Timothy] I think
that the nearest I could come
to a short definition
of normalization
is the attempt
by a variety of means,
ranging from coercion,
to cajolement, to persuasion,
to return a society
to Soviet norms.
So the normalization
refers to the norms
of a Soviet-type system.
Not to normal in the sense
you or I might consider normal.
Normalization means that
every individual
in offices, in institutions,
at the university,
and in the Communist
party itself,
has to recant.
If you don't recant,
not only you are sacked
from the institution,
you lose your job, and you go--
You know,
the ultimate punishment,
this is the irony
in a Communist regime,
was to be demoted
to the working class.
You go and work in a factory,
or you become a night watchman,
you become a window cleaner,
so this
is the ultimate punishment.
[grim music]
[James] During normalization,
a Swedish film crew
made an important
undercover documentary
depicting everyday
life for dissidents.
Rudolf Battek was an important
civil rights activist
and opponent of the regime.
He would spend many years
in prison for his opposition.
Karel Kyncl, the journalist
who interviewed Graham Greene,
was banned
from the Communist party.
He was fired
from his position in television
and spent many months in prison.
He found himself selling
ice cream at the train station
before going into
political asylum in England.
[Karel] I am looking
for a job all the time,
but it's not so easy, you know.
I was refused a job
by some 15 employers.
One example, I tried to become
a stoker
in the National Museum
in Prague,
and I was told
that it is impossible
because the National Museum
is a cultural institution
and the people like myself
will never be allowed to work
in a cultural institution again,
even as a stoker.
Maybe I will be allowed to work
as a construction worker,
as a window cleaner,
maybe I will become taxi driver.
I don't know.
There are hundreds and thousands
of my former colleagues,
newspapermen, writers,
philosophers, historians,
and the like,
who are exactly
in the same situation.
[Jacques] So this
is the other side
of normalization,
there's a purge,
and then there
is the implicit social contract
that is being
imposed on society.
"You give up any attempt
to meddle in politics,
in the public sphere,
which is our realm,"
this is what the Communist
party is under control.
In exchange for what?
"We will guarantee a slow,
but steady increase
of your living standards
and you will reach
a kind of consumer society,
a mediocre version
of the consumer society."
And this is how you buy social
consent of a defeated society.
First you have
to defeat it, of course,
and then you offer this bargain.
[James] Eda Kriseov
was a young journalist in 1968.
She was also banned
and began to write novels
as she volunteered
in a mental hospital.
[Eda] Yes, I was desperate.
I was worrying
that I will get crazy.
So I went
to the mental hospital.
Paradoxically,
in the mental hospital
where everything was locked
and there were bars everywhere
I felt free,
because everybody
was quite free,
everybody had
their papers on head,
so they can tell
whatever they wanted.
And so the situation
outside, this normalization,
seemed to me much more crazy.
It was the whole country
that was a mental hospital,
because what was white before
was declared to be black.
It was all based on lies.
[solemn music]
[James] Michael Zantovsky
has a PhD in Psychology
and worked as a psychologist
in a mental asylum in Prague,
and later became
a close collaborator
with Vclav Havel,
and a diplomat.
[Michael] Having spent
10 years of my life
within a mental institution,
which I did after I graduated,
was the best training
for politics and diplomacy
one could conceivably get.
Unlike in the Soviet Union,
where psychiatry was clearly
abused for political purposes.
In Czechoslovakia,
it was more that the regime,
the powers that be,
were very scornful
and neglectful of anyone
who was handicapped
in a physical or mental way.
And they prefer to lock
them up behind walls
and forget about them.
And this paradoxically made
the institute where I worked,
and other such places,
relatively very liberal
and free minded.
You could organize
seminars about psychoanalysis,
which was not allowed,
to discuss
philosophical questions,
because who cares
what the crazies discuss.
And the place served
as an asylum occasionally
for some of the dissidents
and it was also one
of the reasons why people
like Havel were attracted to it,
and the paradox was that
there were the things
happening outside
during the normalization,
the oppression,
the censorship, the jailings,
all the absurdities,
and so, one could
easily get the illusion
that as long as I stayed
inside the hospital,
I was living in a normal world.
And the moment I went outside,
I felt I was in a madhouse.
[orchestral music]
[James] Spartakida
was a public celebration
showing a happy,
sportive and vibrant society.
[James] Philosophers
understood that nothing
comes from nothing,
and so did Vaclav Havel.
In 1975, he refused to accept
the silence of the mad house
and went public
in his attack on the regime
with his open letter
to Gustav Husk.
Havel argues that Husk
used all the powers of the state
including the media,
to lull citizens
into a parallel, spidery world
of lies and hatred.
Havel's urgent voice
to find the very essence
of the dissident movement
in Czechoslovakia.
[music continues]
[funky music]
I grew up reading works
by Henry David Thoreau,
an author who rejected
civil society,
but now I think
about civil society this way.
For dissidents like Havel,
civil society was more
like Thoreau's
Walden,
an escape from the
soul-crushing police state.
Civil society came
to life in seminars
where dissidents
could discuss philosophy
and other prohibited topics.
But where did these
dissidents come from?
[Timothy] There's a degree of,
as it were,
chance and arbitrariness
about why this particular term
became established.
If one takes it from its roots,
it's
dis sedere,
to sit apart,
which is, in a sense,
not what they were doing,
because actually they were
engaging themselves in society,
but I think the term
dissident has actually gone
from Communist rule,
Eastern Europe,
across the world,
so now we talk about
dissidents everywhere.
I think properly understood,
what it means is a small group
of people who are
fundamentally in disagreement
with the prevailing
political system
and who are working to change
it by extra-systemic means,
as well perhaps
as intra-systemic.
But it's
the extra-systemic means,
be it civil resistance,
be it social self-organization,
be it cultural expression.
[James] In 1975,
the Helsinki Accords
formalized relations
between Soviet bloc countries
and the West.
[James] Although a central
feature of the Helsinki Accords,
Husk never mentioned
the topic of human rights,
but his regime
did promote fashion.
[James] This fashion show
took place in 1975
in celebration
of the 30th anniversary
of the Soviet liberation
of Czechoslovakia.
[rock music]
[James] Counter-cultural
musicians used alternative use
of fashion to reclaim
their identity and to reject
what was called First Culture,
the culture and fashion
of the Communist state.
The Canadian Paul Wilson
was the lead singer
for the Plastic People
of the Universe
from 1970 to 1972,
and he helped the band
with its English lyrics.
He worked closely
with Ivan Jirous,
an important
music critic in Prague,
who wrote
a seminal samizdat text.
[Paul] His essay
on The Third Musical Revival
predates Havel's famous letter
to Gustav Husk
by several months.
These were two people
coming from two different
circles of dissent
that actually were both
highly skilled articulators.
And so he articulated
his version of it,
Jirous articulated
his version of it.
They finally got together.
They met.
He listened
to the Plastic People's music
and they read
each other's essays
and they decided
that they were going to--
that Havel was going to come
to the next big
Plastic People concert.
[rock music]
[James] The Plastic People
of the Universe
was an apolitical
counter-cultural rock group
that formed
after the invasion in 1968.
Its name came
from a song by Frank Zappa.
[Paul] He discovered
that the music scene
was where he thought
the really radical things
were happening,
because he said these people
are completely in touch
with the West,
so there's no filter
between having
a Velvet Underground record
or a Rolling Stone record
and actually trying to do
the music yourself.
There was no censorship
on music at that point.
Pop music could come flowing in,
so the Rolling Stones
could put out a record one week
and the next week,
it would be in Prague.
Whereas in the world
of intellectuals,
if someone wrote
a book of philosophy
it might take 10 years
to get to Prague.
He felt that
the young, music enthusiasts
and the long-haired
hippies were more radical
in their refusal, " Le rfus,"
you know, whatever,
"global",
than the intellectuals
that he knew.
[rock music]
[Josef] After '68,
they understand that guitar
can change
the political system and so on,
so they said if the band
don't lay on the public,
they don't have long hair,
and be well dressed.
So the Plastic People said,
"No, we will be dressed
like we like,
and the hair,
we'll have like we like."
The Plastic People started
with a little bit of conflict
between government,
because we don't
have a permission.
Slowly we tried
to find a way how to play
and police tried to find
a way how to stop it.
Many other young people come
and said it is the right way
how to play the music,
not like TV and such idiots.
[James] Here is a good example
of the official music
the state wanted on television.
[cheerful music]
[James] The music shown here
was part of a curious game show.
Skillfully, the regime
used art against itself
to attack
counter-cultural artists.
The footage shown here
was shot by Josef Dlouhy,
an aspiring filmmaker.
Made in 1974 without a permit,
Dlouhy's material
was confiscated by the police
in 1975 and made
into this documentary,
broadcast on television
to demonize the group.
[James] In 1976,
the campaign against
the Plastic People
and other groups heated up.
Four dissidents
were sent to prison.
In his closing statement
the defense attorney
for the musicians responded
to the charge of vulgarity
by quoting a 1922
letter from Lenin,
"All bureaucracy is bullshit."
We were the working class.
[laughs]
We were fucking intellectuals.
What was the question?
[James] I asked Brabenec
what it was like to be sent
to prison for playing music.
That's the question?
You don't have any
more stupid question?
It was very easy.
I expected that.
I expected that,
but it wasn't so easy.
But it was very important.
I recommend it still.
I recommend to friends
of mine, which are younger,
for example, 50 years.
It's very important experience.
[Josef] But Vclav Havel heard
musicians are in the prison.
When we were arrested,
he organized
the protests against it.
[James] Vclav Havel was one
of the first important writers
to defend the musicians.
This defense unified dissidents.
Havel gave this struggle
its coherent subterranean logic.
[Ivan] He became
close friends with those groups
of small rock musicians
and others,
mostly unofficial,
mostly harassed by police a lot.
And I think that he was attached
not so much by their music,
but their personalities,
by their independent
way of life.
In a sense, an inner freedom.
The less
they were free externally,
the more
they were free internally.
And the freedom
was reflected in their music.
[James] Havel's country
house was called Hrdecek,
and dissidents and other
musicians often met there.
[Tony] Havel gave them
a great deal of cover.
There was a big barn there,
and they recorded
a couple of their sessions,
which I later put out
on records in that barn.
And people would come
under cover of darkness
and there would be an audience.
There was a funny,
aesthetic thing going on,
and these things are never
totally separated from politics.
The idea of dovednost, okay,
which is skill or ability,
was in this underground scene
and among the artists
that I talked to,
was less important
to them than
soudrznost,
which means keeping together
or solidarity, right,
and so, the important thing
for a band was to be together,
not to be good.
[James] Jirous wrote
the establishment's
unbearable pressure
coalesced underground community.
This unity gave the dissident
movement in Czechoslovakia,
its distinctive character.
I think it went even
deeper than that.
As Plato said,
"Music is a barbarous
expression of the soul,
a site for wonder and terror.
Among those not afraid
to consider this
was the eminent
philosopher, Jan Patocka.
Patocka's defense
of the Plastics brought gravitas
to the cause.
[Jacques] Patocka's lectures
were a great, great experience.
It was so nice to see
somebody who is now thinking,
who is now creating
the philosophy,
who is not just speaking
about philosophy.
[James] After being banned
following the invasion,
Jan Patocka could only teach
in private underground seminars.
Although miles apart
socially, he understood
the Plastic People's
predicament perfectly.
[Jacques] And then he became
the first speaker, spokesperson
of Charter 77 with Vclav Havel
and Vclav Hjek.
[James] After the trial
of the rock musicians,
a small dissident group
formed Charter 77,
which framed its critique
on the government's
unkept Helsinki commitment
to free speech and human rights.
The argument was simple.
The government
should follow its own laws.
Husk was not amused.
Two hundred and forty two
people signed their names
to the to the original
Charter manifesto.
Havel was arrested
and put in solitary confinement
where he would spend
the next four and a half months
in prison, an experience
that nearly broke him.
Jan Patocka
was brutally interrogated
and died a few days later.
[somber music]
The police state
harassed him even in death
by flying a helicopter
over his grave,
while he was being laid to rest.
It was dirty business.
There was this very strong
campaign in the media
against Charter,
against Patocka, against Havel.
[James]
In response to Charter 77,
the Czechoslovak Communist Party
organized this public submission
of all of its artistic
and cultural associations.
[applause]
[James] Ota Ornest,
director, actor, and playwright,
who signed Charter 77 was forced
to make this staged confession
filmed in a fake
office in prison.
Normalization is the use
of civilized violence,
that is you target
violent repression,
serial repression,
on the so-called dissidents,
on the people who are
not accepting the bargain.
So you have a very tough
repression against them,
which is of course assigned
to all the others.
This is what might happen
to you if you step out,
if you join that,
if you sign Charter 77,
or if you refuse to recant.
[James] Kamila Bendov
and her husband, Vclav Benda,
were among those who resisted.
Along with Havel and others,
they founded
the Committee for the Defense
of the Unjustly Prosecuted
or VONS.
[James]
There were huge repercussions
for Benda and his wife.
Their anguish and resolve
are captured in this interview
just before Vclav Benda
was arrested and sent to prison
in 1979
with Vclav Havel and others.
[James] Vclav Benda described
this dissident activity
as the parallel polis
in his most important essay
written during this period.
This parallel community
has its own seminars,
its own press, its own foreign
policy and domestic agendas,
and other such things.
After being banned,
Kubisov participated
in Charter 77 as a spokesperson.
We were living
under the control of police,
so we need a community.
And in this community there were
people of different opinions.
There were these
reformed communists,
then there were non-communist,
the people who were even
in prison during the 70s.
Different kinds of people,
and we were all put together
by the outside pressure.
In the period
of forbidden fruit,
there were philosophical
seminars, unofficial,
there was samizdat editions
and a lot of activities,
which secret police watched,
sometimes interfered,
but always it was somewhat
possible to find a hole
or something like that.
Limited freedom.
And the more limited,
the stronger it is,
because you can enjoy
the environment,
if you know
that if you go somewhere,
it would not be possible.
There is this thing
about circles.
And it was a very
important thing,
because the group
that became best known
as the Charter 77
was a relatively little group.
And what many people
don't understand
is that there was a much wider
network of groups and people,
and Ivan Havel, the brother
of Vclav, was the initiator
or a key player
in a number of these networks.
[James] The circle tightened
more when Havel, Benda,
and others connected
with Charter 77 were arrested
and tried for treason in 1979.
During his 1979 to 1983
incarceration,
Vclav Havel began to write
personal letters to his brother,
Ivan and his wife, Olga.
I think half way through
he finally decided
that this was a text
he was writing,
not for just his personal
and family use,
but for public.
[James]
Mystical and philosophical,
Havel's prison letters
became a life raft
to which he clutched,
while he was lost to the world.
His words became his oars,
his food, his water,
his record of dreams
and nightmares.
On this raft,
his wisdom built as steadily
as the callouses on his hands.
Through this correspondence,
we see the glimmers of a man
who would become President.
The art of dissent here,
hits its highest form
in one of the master
pieces of literature
rationed at one letter per week
in an absolutely compact,
philosophical prose.
Stay in the prison is something
which makes in people
a certain ability
to act much more strongly
than otherwise.
Communists thought
it the other way around.
They thought
that they would be in prison
and they would be quiet.
[Havel] That special house,
what you see now,
it isn't dream of Corbusier,
but I think more
dream of George Orwell,
because it is house of police,
which it built three months ago.
And the whole day,
every day, they live inside
and they follow all my steps
and everything what I do
in my country house.
Sometimes they are here
also during the night,
but mainly, only during the day.
They are my new neighbors.
I'm sorry
for that short interruption,
but police car drove
around our house
and we are a little
bit afraid they see us.
[James] Wanting
to provoke self-censorship
and the internalization
of the police state,
the regime simply brought
the prison to Havel's backyard,
but it didn't work,
not at least as intended.
What it did do
was bring into focus, Havel,
as a number one
opponent of the regime.
[barking]
In April 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev
came to Prague.
Gorbachev had already announced
his plans for the restructuring
of the Soviet Union,
and in 1988,
he introduced Glasnost,
the opening of society.
This was a dramatic
historical pivot,
one that left communist leaders
in Eastern and Central Europe
stranded with no hope
of Soviet intervention.
Two months later,
Ronald Reagan famously heated up
the conversation
with his remarks
at the Brandenburg Gate
in Berlin.
Mr. Gorbachev,
tear down this wall.
[shouting and applause]
Long live Havel!
[James] As the winds of change
blew across the collapsing
Soviet empire,
the youth took
to the streets in Prague
for the first time since 1969.
[Czech announcements]
This is how the state-controlled
media informed the public
about the protests.
[suspenseful music]
[screaming]
[singing]
[James] In December of 1988,
Vclav Havel and others spoke
in public
for the first time in decades.
[James] Marta
Kubisov sang in public
for the first time
in two decades.
She sang the Czech
and Slovak National Anthem.
[cheering and applause]
[singing in Czech]
Vclav Havel was arrested
again in 1989, in January,
for trying to lay
a flower at the site
where Jan Palach
had burned himself.
He was sentenced
to nine months in prison,
but released in May
for good behavior.
He went right back
to his dissident work.
[applause]
[laughs]
[James]
And then it happened so fast,
but the revolution still came
slowly to Czechoslovakia.
The communist governments
of Poland and Hungary fell
in the summer of 1989,
and well before the Berlin Wall
fell in November,
two big waves of refugees
fled East Germany
during the Summer and Fall.
They first went to Hungary
and then Czechoslovakia.
Unable to deal with the throngs,
Czechoslovakia closed
its borders with Hungary,
which created
a political crisis in Prague
at the end of September
when thousands of refugees
set up camps on the grounds
of the West German Embassy.
Havel later said
that the refugee crisis
was a clear sign that
the communist game was up
in Eastern and Central Europe.
I remember watching the news
programs of these events
and thinking the same thing.
But the fall of communism
was not inevitable.
I have never
forgotten this image
which I saw on TV at Harvard.
The next month, the storm
that had already passed
over East Germany,
Poland and Hungary,
burst over Czechoslovakia
on November 17th 1989,
when students organized
a peaceful protest
in central Prague.
The police response was brutal.
Undeterred, students and
protestors raised their hands
and held
out their famous hybrid V,
one finger for peace
and one finger for victory.
And in this void,
dissidents in Prague
spontaneously created
a group called the Civic Forum,
which began
to organize public meetings
on November 19th
in the Magic Lantern Theatre.
The parallel polis
had come out of hiding.
[chattering]
[Timothy] I remember
the discussion
in the Magic Lantern Theatre,
when someone said,
'But should we call
it a revolution?'
Because in history revolution
has always meant violence
and we're determined
to be non-violent.
So that was kind of important,
but his great contribution
was to turn it
into the beginning
of what should
be a fantastic story.
[cheering]
1989 was of course, a totally
spectacular acceleration
of history.
Because the Poles had been
undermining their system
for a long time and they had
already free elections in June.
The Hungarians had
opened the iron curtain
during the summer of 1989.
The Berlin Wall fell at
the beginning of November.
The Czechs were still not.
So Czechoslovakia
came at the end,
but with
a formidable acceleration,
a formidable speed,
and of course,
a formidable leader,
which became the
embodiment of that change,
and that actually carried
through the legacy
from the dissident period
into the new era
of the democratic
transformation of the country.
So when I get to Prague,
after the fall of
the Berlin Wall,
and that's important,
I go and meet Havel
in the beer cellar,
and I say to him, 'Vclav,
in Poland, it took ten years,
in Hungary it took ten months,
in East Germany
it took ten weeks,
maybe in Czechoslovakia
it will take ten days,
and he's so enchanted
by this, that he summons
over the samizdat cameraman,
and I had to say that again
to the camera.
Apart from the fact that
I'm absolutely delighted
to be here,
it seems to me that the history
of the revolutionary
end of communism
in East/Central Europe
is accelerating.
In Poland it took ten years,
in Hungary it took ten months,
in East Germany
it took ten weeks,
perhaps in Czechoslovakia
it will take ten days.
I'll never forget the moment
when somebody in the vast crowd
takes out of their pocket
the keys,
and starts shaking the keys
and everybody else does,
and suddenly 300,000 people
are shaking their keys,
an extraordinary sound.
[cheering]
So we had that
magical, velvet revolution,
theatrical quality to it,
which I think distinguished it,
plus the fact that it
was the, as it were,
the remarriage of '68 and '89.
I was actually standing behind,
just behind Dubcek and Havel,
when they spoke from the balcony
of Svobodn slovo.
[applause]
[cheering]
[applause and cheering]
[James] In the middle
of the Velvet Revolution,
Jaroslav Hutka returned
to Prague from exile.
He was one of the original
signatories of Charter 77.
A Dutch film crew captured
this magical moment
and his detention at the airport
where he was held
for several hours
until a massive crowd
appeared to bring him home.
[cheering and applause]
[Jaroslav] I wanted to be here
at the moment when it happened,
because I didn't
believe it could happen.
That day, it was
the biggest demonstration,
and maybe the most important
demonstration in Prague,
so and suddenly, I was there
with a song about freedom,
and it was just what should be
at that moment at that place.
So it was a nice
comeback of a songwriter,
[laughs] as a fairytale.
And Havel came to me and said,
'Jarda, it's not a concert.
We are putting down
the government!'
[laughing]
[audience singing]
[cheering and applause]
[cheering]
[speaking Czech]
[applause]
[Lucas] I'm asking
you a specific question.
Do you support what
this person is doing?
[Lucas] No, I'm asking you
whether you support the person?
[speaking Czech]
[James] I watched a lot of film
about the Velvet Revolution,
but this interaction stood out,
because it revealed
an important question.
What is the role of the press
in a post-communist society?
I wanted to know
why Edward Lucas asked
these questions,
so I went to London.
[Lucas] One of the things
I found annoying about Havel
was his unwillingness
to be a leader
and his unwillingness to take
on the physical responsibility
of being the leader
of the opposition
and ultimately,
the candidate for President.
And I found this idea
of, oh, I'm just a playwright,
um, was, um,
it got on my nerves a bit,
and I felt that he was playing
both sides of the thing.
On the one hand pretending
to be reluctant,
and on the other hand someone
was producing stickers saying
whatever it was, Havel Na Hrad,
or Havel for President,
or something.
I thought it was my job to try
and push him a bit on this,
because I thought the
Czechs and Slovaks
have the right to know
if someone's running
an election campaign.
And if we're moving now into
a free political system,
part of that involves the press
asking uncomfortable questions.
And that was probably my job.
I wasn't sure anyone
else was going to ask
questions like that.
I was pushing the rules
a bit by pushing him.
And I think he took
it in quite a good-humored way.
[James]
The Presidency in Czechoslovakia
is more ceremonial
than powerful,
unlike America.
It's a parliamentary system.
Havel's first transition
came with clothing.
And it's said that
dissidents didn't wear suits.
But on the day
of his inauguration,
Havel had to go into his closet
and pull out his.
He had lost a lot of weight
in his recent stints in prison,
so his trousers
were a little too big.
To compensate he pulled
them high above his waist
with the hopes
that as he walked,
they would fall.
But they didn't.
And people loved it.
During these dizzying
first months of 1990,
Havel wrote a lot of
speeches and traveled freely
for the first time on State
business around the world.
[upbeat music]
He was the only world leader
who mobilized the heart
and placed it on the windshield
of his presidential car.
He chose the heart
as his symbol,
because of its the Latin root,
cor,
or courage.
He loved to drive
from the big castle
to his small one,
in the country.
And on this visit,
he took his first look
inside the embellished
Orwellian cottage
where the regime's
tormentors had lived.
When Havel
reluctantly accepted the idea
that he would be the President,
one of his conditions
was that he would be allowed
to take a group
of people that he trusted
and that he was used
to working with.
[Eda] And he asked some of us
to follow him to the castle,
because you know there
was the castle he inherited
the office of Husk,
of this Communist president,
and so it was like
conquering the castle.
And so we went there,
and we were about ten,
and we had only some
bodyguards who knew karate,
and there were
hundreds of soldiers.
So there was quite a
Kafkaesque situation.
We were like conquerors
of the castle.
Such a big castle you know.
Havel wanted to physically
show that the castle
was not Franz Kafka's castle,
but it was a place
belonging to the people.
And so he let the people in.
He let the rock musicians in.
He let the concerts in.
Same thing with the goosesteps
of the castle guard,
and with the uniforms
of the castle guard,
which were the hated
Soviet-style uniforms.
And he asked his friend,
Theodor Pistek,
an Oscar winner as the
costume designer for Amadeus
to design the new uniforms
for the castle guard.
And the new uniforms look
a little Mozartian, that's true.
You know just because of that,
they are very unthreatening.
They signal,
"we're not going to shoot you."
[Eda] It's a fairy tale, but...
in that time
we believed in fairytales.
We were all romantic,
also Havel.
We were thinking that, yes,
that everything is possible,
and it was.
[piano music]
[rock music]
[James] In those first years
after the Velvet Revolution,
history and artists rushed in.
The Rolling Stones
and Frank Zappa,
and a lot of others,
hung out with most
famous dissident on Earth.
All the while Havel underwent
metamorphosis from dissident
to intellectual President.
[Shirley] Is he here yet?
[James] And when Frank Zappa
flew from Moscow to Prague,
America's childhood sweetheart,
Shirley Temple Black,
was at the airport to greet him.
I've never heard him. [laughs]
[James]
During his historic visit,
Frank Zappa seized
the opportunity to meet
with his namesake band,
the Plastic People
of the Universe.
And I learned a couple
of words in Russian.
What the fuck is going on here?
And this is the question
that the communist party
must be asking right now
about Czechoslovakia.
Mary, do you speak
Czechoslovakian?
I would say, without a doubt.
[laughs]
[joking with journalists]
And it's been my great pleasure
to welcome to the White House
a man of tremendous
moral courage,
one of the heroes of the
of the revolution of 89,
the President
of Czechoslovakia, Vclav Havel.
[James] In February 1990,
Vclav Havel
delivered his famous speech
to the joint session
of the US congress.
The speech
was translated by Paul Wilson.
The English was read
by Michael Zantovsky.
What a team.
[in Czech]
If the hope of the world
lies in human consciousness,
then it is obvious that
intellectuals cannot go on
forever avoiding their share
of responsibility for the world
and hiding their
distaste for politics
under an alleged need
to be independent.
I think that you Americans,
should understand
this way of thinking.
Wasn't it the best minds
of your country,
people you should
call intellectuals
who wrote your famous
Declaration of Independence,
your Bill of Human Rights,
and your Constitution?
And who above all,
took upon themselves
the practical responsibility
for putting them into practice?
They inspire us all.
They inspire us despite the fact
that they are
over 200 years old.
They inspire us to be citizens.
[applause]
Tom Stoppard called
it the Havel effect.
His ability to be a star magnet.
So it wasn't just stars,
it was everybody.
He had this ability to
kind of attract attention.
He began to see
himself or understand
that he was a kind
of a celebrity.
Well, what can I say?
Very few actors can
unravel their audiences
as quickly as President
Havel did with Congress.
I thought it was wonderful.
[Arthur]
My name is Arthur Miller.
As a member of PEN,
I'm very proud that another
member of our organization
has become
the President of Czechoslovakia.
I welcome him
as the world's first
avant-garde President.
[James] In 1990,
two of the world's most
acclaimed conductors,
Rafael Kubelk
and Leonard Bernstein,
returned to Prague
Spring Music Festival
after a 43 year boycott.
Kubelk opened this festival
with Smetana's M Vlast.
Bernstein,
fittingly closed it out
with Beethoven's 9th Symphony.
[applause]
You think
you're watching a fairy tale,
but I'm an historian.
I have to ask
the tough questions,
like how did the end
of the Soviet Empire
affect Czechoslovakia?
The first order of business
was to remove the Soviet army.
In April 1990,
Havel flew to Moscow
to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev
and to sign a pact
that would remove
the Soviet military
from Czechoslovakia,
ending a 22 year occupation
ordered by Brezhnev
in August 1968.
[James] Havel charged
Michael Kocb, a rocker,
to oversee the removal
of the 73,500 Soviet troops
and all the military hardware
left in the country
by June 1991.
Student artist David Cerny's
meteoric rise to fame
was born in his defiant act
of painting over the one
Soviet tanks that served
as a memorial
for the Second World War,
a monument that offended many.
The tank was painted over
and over and over again.
How do you paint the legacy
of the Soviet Empire?
[James] The post-communist era
was riddled with difficulties.
Slovak separatism emerged
as a major question,
one that Havel viewed
through a post-colonial lens.
[applause]
[applause]
[James] The page
turned on the fairytale
of the Velvet Revolution
when eggs tossed
by Slovak Nationalist hecklers
forced Havel
off the stage at a celebration
of the founding
of the State of Czechoslovakia
in Bratislava in October 1991.
[cheering]
[piano music]
[James] A year later,
Alexander Dubcek was buried
after an automobile accident.
As a Slovak, his death
almost symbolically ended
the dream of a unified state.
The Czech Republic
and Slovakia separated
on January 1st, 1993.
[applause]
When the government
of the new Czech Republic
was formed,
Vclav Klaus cemented
his grip on power
as the country's
first prime minister.
Havel was re-elected
as president,
but fatally, he did not
consolidate power with a party,
unlike Klaus, who built
an effective political party
known as ODS,
or Civic Democratic Party.
So this is a new situation.
There is Havel the dissident.
There is the president.
He, I think,
plays a crucial role
in the democratic transition.
But then comes the breakup
of the State and a new era,
where his former
dissident friends
and their view of politics
is being sidetracked
and the full priority is given
to economic transformation,
privatization of the
economy, and all that.
And that is run by
technocrats, by economists,
and their man is Vclav
Klaus, the other Vclav,
the main rival, if you want,
on the political
scene of Vclav Havel.
Yes, this will be this
conservative free-marketeer,
very nationalist,
and who became the symbol
of the great
economic transformation.
He appeared on the scene
the moment it became clear
that they were no longer
going to be dissidents,
they actually had
a real prospect of power.
And he was always
interested in politics
as the pursuit of power.
Power, in the service
of certain policies;
whereas Havel
and other dissidents
saw politics as a mean
to achieving certain ideals
an ideal
of sort of Neo-Masarykian ideal
of Czechoslovakia,
a realization of certain values.
[James]
Klaus' arrival on the scene
signals a shift
to the focus on economics.
His government created
a voucher system,
which transferred ownership
of state enterprises
to private citizens.
It was often difficult
to tell who owned what,
and where the money was going.
A self-devowed Thatcherite,
he promised that the invisible
hand would regulate the market.
Klaus did not have an easy task.
[James]
As the police state disappeared,
drug syndicates pounced
on the opportunity
to build fortunes in
this new Wild West.
It was downright scary.
Bodies were pulled
from murky waters.
It's really important
to understand
that from the point of view
of the new governments
in post-communist Europe,
the first challenge
was trying to turn the fish soup
back into the aquarium,
that's to say
the command economy
into a market economy.
And Havel had absolutely
no idea how to do that.
He knew how to write plays,
not how to transform
a command economy.
And Klaus did have that idea.
And that was the other great
asymmetry between them.
[James] And the question became
what roles should journalists
and intellectuals play
in a free society.
[James] After 1989,
dissidents transitioned
into intellectuals
in the public sphere.
Writers in Europe,
like George Orwell,
Albert Camus, Jean-Paul
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
had already set the standard.
It was natural for Czechs
to consider the role
of intellectuals anew.
Their first task
was to make sense
out of the 1990s.
[applause]
[James] I asked
Timothy Garton Ash
how Havel responded
to his criticism
about the separation
of intellectuals from politics.
I was arguing that you cannot
be simultaneously intellectual
and politician.
These are actually
two different roles.
And he was very resistant
to this argument,
because he never,
ever, to the end of his life,
even after he'd
been the President
for more than a decade,
wanted to think about
himself just as a politician.
And I think that's right,
I think he's someone
who had great
political intelligence,
who was deeply
engaged in politics,
but wasn't in the conventional
sense, a politician.
[James] Support for dissidents
from world leaders
was an essential part
of the survival of
dissident movement.
This is why Havel immediately
supported the Dalai Lama
from the beginning
of his presidency
and also writers
like Salman Rushdie.
Havel's support for
dissidents never wavered.
He used the power
of his office to help dissidents
targeted by
authoritarian regimes
and religious radicals.
The support of Vclav Havel
was very important to me.
The fact that Vclav Klaus
didn't like it, well, I'm sorry,
but it didn't really
bother me very much.
He have some
moral authority on this planet.
Many people is regarding
President Havel as something,
the symbol of freedom.
So moral authority there.
So his support
is immense benefit.
[piano music]
[James] By the late 1990s,
it was clear that something
had gone wrong with the
post-communist transformation.
I asked David Cerny,
who painted
the tank pink in 1991,
how the 1990s
were reflected in his art.
His reply was puzzling.
He told me that he sculpted
the famous
upside down, dead horse,
ridden by King Wenceslas,
as a reaction to Havel's
bad mood speech in 1997.
So I pulled the
film and had a look.
This is what I found.
In 1997, Havel drew
a line in the sand.
As a former dissident
in high office,
but with no real power,
he used the Presidency
to critique power
and the corruption
of politicians
in the democratic state.
Klaus' party had just brought
down the entire government
in a corruption scandal
in November 1997.
It was a total shock.
Here Havel faithfully
returns to the principles
of the art of dissent.
This speech was less a swan
song for the Velvet Revolution
as it was a reassertion
of the dissident.
[applause]
[James] Havel listened
carefully to how the media,
and Klaus, responded
to his speech.
It's clear now that
Velvet Revolution synced
with the era of globalization,
which brought with it,
new economic, political,
and environmental challenges.
And a new debate
about the role of intellectuals.
But what went wrong
and why the king
and the dead horse?
[piano music]
[words echo]
[Timothy] They didn't pay enough
attention to the rule of law,
which is a precondition
for efficient
and uncorrupt administration.
And then I think that they
should be much more careful
about corruption and
upholding the rule of law,
in particular the whole
privatization progress, process.
Klaus' slogan "speed is more
important than accuracy"
stored up just a
heap of problems
which we are coping
with to this day.
How did that happen?
Was it merely because the
dissidents were ill-prepared
for this, for this situation?
Was it perhaps something deeper,
that is,
1989 was the first revolution
which did not propose
an alternative model of society.
It wanted to be a democratic,
market economy
integrated
into Western institutions.
And that is fine,
except what if you're imitating
something that is in crisis?
[scoffs] As we have
discovered later on.
So basically, you then
are trapped into this system.
You want to go for something
that allegedly works,
to be normal.
You don't want normalization,
communist-style,
you want a normal democracy
with a market economy.
Well, the normal is in crisis,
and you reproduce that crisis,
and therefore you're on the same
boat with everybody else
in trying to look for
alternatives to that.
So I think 30 years on,
it's like a river that
has gone on flowing
and other tributaries
have flowed into it.
I think
we're in a different landscape,
and it's quite difficult
now to say that comes
from the stream of 1989
as opposed to what
happened subsequently.
But I think that they're
absolutely surmountable,
these problems,
they are in many ways
the problems that we have
in Britain, or Sweden,
or Germany,
they're the familiar problems
that indeed
the United States have,
the problems of populism
that we all have today.
And so in an ironical sense,
one could say that the fact
that they have problems
shows that Central Europe
has become part of the West.
[solemn music]
[James] Vclav Havel
died on December 18th, 2011.
[applause]
[bell tolling in distance]
[applause]
[keys rattling]
[James] As an American
professor,
I am aware of the prevalence
of anti-intellectualism
in my country.
But from a career of teaching,
and over the course
of making this film,
simple truths have
emerged for me.
Human resilience
and the unending
quest for freedom
are history's driving forces.
The lens has shown us that
in working with limited means
and undaunted determination,
dissidents subverted adversity.
They struggled
with no certainty of success
in defense of the future,
and they created
a transformative community
in this experience.
The true beauty of
the art of dissent
is revealed not only
in what dissidents achieved
in responding to oppression,
but how they carried
these lessons into the future.
This consciousness
is what Havel
called "the Horizon of Being,"
where the past,
present, and future fuse
into a call for action.
This is why I believe the lens
is our most powerful tool,
because our future
goes where our minds go.
And our minds
go to where our eyes go,
to the horizon.
[music swells]