The 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia is given some new perspective in the documentary Reconstruction of an Occupation (Rekonstrukce okupace), which had its world premiere at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival this weekend. The movie is almost entirely composed of newly-discovered film from the invasion, and newly-filmed interviews with those who appeared in the footage.
Some years back, Czech filmmaker Jan Šikl was given boxes full of professionally-shot footage of the 1968 invasion that had been sitting in a garage, passed through numerous hands and unseen for more than 40 years.
The footage painted a different picture of the invasion than Šikl had become accustomed to, and he set out to locate the people glimpsed in the films to hear their stories. After his search was broadcast on Czech Television, many of those people came forward – as did others who had their own previously-unshared footage to show the filmmaker.
Reconstruction of an Occupation opens with Šikl telling the story of how he put the film together, but soon transitions to the footage itself and the stories of those featured within. There’s no singular narrative to the documentary beyond that premise, but the resulting film gives us a unique perspective on the events of 1968, putting a human face on the invasion and its aftermath.
One witness recounts how she was standing less than a meter from a man holding a Czech flag who was shot dead by Soviet troops, the flag falling on top of him and soaking up his blood. He must have been targeted because he was waving a flag, she reasons. Another tells the story of her teenage brother, who was shot in the back by Soviet troops while running away. She accompanied her mother to the hospital, who asked if her injured son had been taken in. He was there, they told her, but he wasn’t injured; he was dead.
Two other men interviewed in Reconstruction of an Occupation were luckier; they were shot but survived. One shows Šikl a jacket with two bullet holes in it, the other a blood-stained shirt with an entry and exit hole in the shoulder, unwashed since 1968.
Other stories are lighter, even humorous. One man calls in to say that he recognized a bridge in the footage, which had collapsed under the weight of the Soviet tanks and sent them plunging into the river below. “The sign read 5t,” he says, referencing the tonnage limit on the bridge. “They must have thought it stood for five tanks.”
Most in the Czech Republic are familiar with widely-shared photography from the ‘68 invasion, of lines of tanks rolling through the streets and young Czechs walking up beside them in protest. But it wasn’t always peaceful; some threw molotov cocktails at the tanks, and some Soviet troops shot indiscriminately into the crowds.
In one frightening sequence, a cameraman recounts how he filmed the tanks rolling through Prague from his second-floor office window, and how a soldier fired back at him. In his footage, we see the soldier raise his rifle toward the window before the cameraman ducks out of the way.
These stories and many more are recounted in Reconstruction of an Occupation, an invaluable compilation of not only the never-before-seen footage of the Warsaw Pact invasion, but also interviews with those both behind and in front of the camera during the historic events.
Many were young students during the invasion, which set a tone that would follow in Czechoslovakia for the next twenty years. Šikl speaks with a cameraman who refused to join the communists and lost twenty years of his career; later, a factory manager who joined the party in order to take care of his family. Fifty years later, neither regret their decision, but both remain deeply affected by it.
The occupation didn’t just end the flourishing Prague Spring cultural movement, but cast a pall over Czechoslovakia that would last for the next twenty years. Reconstruction of an Occupation is an important document of the everyday people caught up in the Warsaw Pact invasion, and how it permanently changed the course of their lives.
