Happiness in Twenty Years

Series of astonishing documentary sequences illustrating the Czech experience, from the arrival of the Russian liberating tanks after World War II to the 'confessions' of the show trials, from chunks of Stalinist newsreel to the first blossoming of what was to become the cinematic new wave in the café theatre satires of the '60s. Its argument is achieved visually: although it does inevitably relish the tatty absurdity of the whole iconography of the Stalinist period, the film also carefully charts its progress so that we actually see a visual expression of a political idea forming on the screen as crowds harden, literally, into massed ranks.