Another excellent BBC documentary whose part one has ties to Berlin by way of Unser Sandmännchen...and that's good enough for us! Enjoy!
From Tim Dowling at The Guardian:
These days it's easy to think of the eastern bloc as a bygone parallel universe that we can occasionally revisit and mine for its cool graphics. Or maybe it's just easy for me. The Lost World of Communism series (Saturday, BBC2) is full of the sort of faintly absurd official footage (programme two opens with the sight of hundreds of Czechoslovakian men doing synchronised calisthenics in their pants) that can make the whole era seem quaintly, harmlessly lame.
In fact, these scenes provide a chilling counterpoint to the reality, which here comes in blurry snatches smuggled out of the country at considerable risk, including jumpy footage of the hut erected outside Vaclav Havel's country home to shelter the police who followed him when he walked his dog. Most chilling of all are the scenes from show trials. They look like clips from cheaply made, badly acted courtroom dramas, which is more or less what they were - everyone, including the accused, is reading from a script.
It is the little samples of popular culture, however - the Czech-language version of Somethin' Stupid, the terrible-looking cowboy movie that was meant to parody western capitalism - which resonate, and it's a story in which popular culture played a vital role. Marta Kubisova, the pop star of the Prague Spring, recorded the unofficial anthem of the resistance in secret just after the Soviet invasion. It was the arrest of a beardy rock band called the Plastic People of the Universe (for "organised disturbance of the peace") which led to Havel founding the civil rights movement Charter 77.
Then there is Karel Gott, the regime-approved pop star of the post-invasion "normalisation", a man who clearly still thinks he was Czechoslovakia's answer to Elvis, when he wasn't even their answer to Englebert Humperdinck. "In the 1970s and 80s I had become so popular," he says, "not only in the west and here, but in the vast Soviet Union." The government, he says, used his amazing popularity to bring in foreign currency (I don't know about you, but he never got any of mine). They also managed to persuade him to sign their anti-Charter 77 charter. "I didn't know it was an anti-charter," he says now. "I thought it was an attendance list." So he didn't mean to join forces with the regime in opposing civil rights; he just wanted everyone to know he was there that day.
Technical Information:
Title: The Lost World of Communism
Director: Peter Molloy/Bill Treharne Jones
Year: 2009
Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: PAL
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.53 GB
Programs used: ImgBurn
Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 16:9/4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~7800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps
Audio: English- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None on source
Episode List:
Episode One: A Socialist Paradise
Episode Two: The Kingdom of Forgetting
Episode Three: Socialism in One Family
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The Lost World of Communism Megaupload Links