Openness as a creative principle: Home movies, found footage, and their second life in the documentary film ‘Reconstruction of Occupation’
by Irena Řehořová
Introduction
The opening sequence from Rekonstrukce okupace (Reconstruction of Occupation, 2021), a documentary by Jan Šikl, starts with a montage of shots portraying joyful and, in some cases, rather intimate moments of everyday life. These scenes include for example a young girl on skates, a grandmother sledding with her grandson, a boy fishing, a baby on a couch, and young lovers lying on the grass. The aesthetic qualities of these images clearly indicate their historical origin. They are excerpts from home movies, predominantly shot on 8mm films, meticulously selected by the filmmaker to set a specific frame for the images that will follow shortly: footage of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops, which took place on 21 August 1968.
The transition between both types of scenes is seamless. The images of tanks and military vehicles driving in the streets smoothly intertwine with the most ordinary moments from private lives of Czechoslovak citizens. The two spaces, private and public, as well as the two different temporalities, small moments of the quotidian on one hand and large history on the other, remain closely connected. As we continue to witness footage from home movies, the moment of the invasion is captured from the private space of home, either through a window of the apartment or from a safe space on the roof.
In another sequence later in the movie, we see an elderly man in his apartment, examining a film reel. The reel contains footage he filmed on the day of the invasion and stored in a closet for five decades. In a somewhat disappointed tone, he poses a rhetorical question: ‘But who should I show this to? Myself? Nobody cares.’ The two sequences from Rekonstrukce okupace mentioned above encapsulate some of the main themes that I would like to address in this article, revolving around the practice of reusing home movies and found footage in newly created works. The first sequence clearly reveals what makes private amateur footage unique material for documentary films dealing with the past: they are great for exposing the clash between private, everyday life, and large history. The latter sequence is remarkable because it raises the question of how home movies can be given a meaningful second life and why it might be important to open them for new interpretation, possibly in a different context and for different purposes than they were originally created for.
Of course, these topics are not new. The uniqueness of visual testimonies offered by private amateur cinematography has been explored at least since the 1980s. At that time, as Patricia Zimmerman remarks in the seminal book Mining the Home Movie, ‘scholarly and archival interest in both the United States and Europe has signalled a move to consider visual historical evidence from sources other than commercial production houses, as a way to expand visual representation and to represent a wider and more diverse range of historical experience’.[1]
In the same context, Zimmerman also points out the abundance of experimental and documentary films that emerged since the 1980s which built upon the hybridisation of source materials and gave voice ‘to unknown everyday figures of political history’.[2] Filmmakers were captivated by the personal, intimate, and often overlooked stories captured in home movies, which offered a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people and their everyday experiences. This enhanced attention brought a shift in the perception and meaning of home movies. Their primary function has been to serve as ‘externalized memory’ of a family, as Ernst van Alphen states,[3] but when they are relocated from private space and presented in new contexts they can become valuable testimony of past times and society and significantly contribute to the formation of cultural memory.
The multiple approaches to employing different types of archival footage in documentary films have already been explored by many scholars, along with the formal, aesthetic, and ethical complexities of this creative practice.[4] With digitisation, the accessibility of archival materials has radically changed and the possibilities to appropriate and to reuse pre-existing images by artists and filmmakers have expanded exponentially, giving the concept of appropriation a new relevance. As Jamie Baron summarises,
digital technologies have made pre-existing recordings significantly easier to acquire, re-edit, and manipulate. Indeed, audiovisual appropriation is now a practice in which almost anyone with access to a computer can participate.[5]
Rekonstrukce okupace is an example of such creative practice and belongs to documentaries that do not merely employ archival footage as a supplementary source or in an illustrative manner. On the contrary, access to home movies and found footage from the occupation era was a fundamental impulse for its creation. In this respect, the documentary is worth attention both as an attempt at a new reconstruction of the historical event, which deeply impacted the political, historical, and social development of former Czechoslovakia, and also in terms of the filmmaker’s approach to archival images. In recent decades, a number of documentaries that employ archival footage to engage with the past have been produced in the Czech Republic. These include films focused on significant personalities of Czech history, such as Občan Havel(Citizen Havel, 2008) or Poselství Jana Palacha (Jan Palach’s Message, 2008), as well as those dealing with different historical situations, for example Můj neznámý vojín (My Unknown Soldier, 2018), Okupace 1968 (Occupation 1968, 2018), and Good Old Czechs (2022), a film based on ‘archive storytelling’ which consists of archival footage and personal testimonies of two Czech RAF pilots.
Jan Šikl’s work is unique in the context of Czech documentary filmmaking due to his extensive use of private amateur films to represent key historical moments and the specific ways he incorporates archival images into his work. I argue that a fundamental aspect distinguishing his film from those of other documentarists is the principle of openness. In the following text, I will gradually address openness in relation to Rekonstrukce okupace in terms of the accessibility of the archive, the semantic ambiguity of archival images, crowdsourcing practice, open narrative structure consisting of ‘micronarratives’, and the inconclusiveness of historical processes referenced in the film.
The archiving and reinterpretation of home movies in the Czech Republic
The archive of home movies and amateur films is a visionary-imaginary archive that is always missing, fragmental, wide and endless.[6]
Rekonstrukce okupace was directed by Jan Šikl, a Czech documentarist and screenwriter, who is also renowned as a dedicated collector of home movies. In the Czech Republic, the tradition of making domestic movies has a relatively long and rich history. And yet for a long time, similar to other countries of the region, there were no systemic, institutionalised attempts to preserve and provide access to this kind of cinematography. According to Horníček, the first initiatives to collect, preserve, and potentially reuse home movies originated from Czech Television, the public service broadcaster, which incorporated excerpts from private footage in historical documentaries.[7] Apart from television, the active searching and collecting of home movies was a matter undertaken by only a few individual collectors interested in this cinematic genre.
Šikl was one of the early enthusiasts who began building a collection of home movies already in the 1980s, and over the past four decades he has assembled a large and unique collection. According to his words, the initial inspiration to collect home movies came from his colleague and friend, Hungarian filmmaker Peter Forgács, who had already been using them in his films. In interviews, Šikl acknowledges that initially, he did not perceive home movies as interesting material for documentary filmmaking. However, over time, he gradually recognised their potential and adopted a more systematic approach to collecting them.[8] Šikl also explains that thanks to the specific situation in Czechoslovakia, where many people owned a film camera and their films were not confiscated during communism, as was the case in Hungary, he was able to access a rich visual material that documents life in Czechoslovakia from the 1920s onward. As his collection grew, in 1992 Šikl established a Private Film History Archive and began using the archival footage in his own films. Following the example of Forgács and his famous project Privát Magyarország (Private Hungary, 1988-1994), Šikl collaborated with Czech Television to create an eight-part documentary series titled Soukromé století (Private Century, 2004-2007). Each part of the series was a compilation of films from private family archives, documenting everyday life in Czechoslovakia during different periods between the 1920s and 1960s.
Today, Šikl’s archive remains one of the two largest collections of private amateur film in the Czech Republic. The other one is managed by the National Film Archive, which established a collection of home movies in 2008. Due to its primary focus on professional cinematography and legal issues, the NFA has limited capacity for providing access to and reuse of the footage. To make part of the collection available to a wider audience, the NFA annually prepares a themed compilation of home movie excerpts, selected by the archive’s curator. These images are presented without additional context, allowing them to speak for themselves. While they are not edited beyond their selection and juxtaposition, their meaning is already transformed. As Julia Nordegraaf puts it: ‘Once seen as unique shots of individual people at specific places and moments in time, they now come to be seen as typical of wider historical situations and social phenomena.’ From unique fragments, ‘they change into stock shots that refer to a more general social or historical situation’.[9]
The purpose of an archive, whether private or a state-sponsored institution, can be fulfilled only when, in addition to preservation, it also enables access to its collection. Incorporating footage into new work can be considered an effective way to breathe new life to already existing recordings, imbue them with meaning, and make them accessible to a larger audience. However, any kind of recycling, reuse, appropriation, and recontextualisation of archival footage, and particularly home movies, inevitably raises ethical issues. In her latest book Reuse, Misuse, Abuse: The Ethics of Audiovisual Appropriation in the Digital Era, Baron argues that ‘every reuse of a pre-existing recording is, on some level, a ‘misuse’ in the sense that its new use was not intended nor anticipated by its original producer’.[10]
In the case of home movies, the ethical challenge primarily lies in the fact that they will be exposed to the view of spectators outside the narrow family circle and will embody new meanings. Home movies can be considered semantically very open, more so than other types of archival footage. Without additional information about their origin, it might be challenging, or even impossible, to place them within a specific temporal and spatial framework or to identify the individuals featured in the shots. The images can be easily associated with a variety of meanings, interpretations, and narratives. In this context, Zimmerman suggests reconsidering home movies as ‘mobile constructs’, as they can be ‘activated in different ways through different historiographic and artistic strategies’.[11] The manner in which they are presented in the new context is therefore fundamental for their meaning.
The archival and documentary work of Šikl is certainly driven by the ‘preservationist impulse’,[12] an attempt to rescue rare traces of the past that would otherwise be neglected or lost. But his approach to the archive differs from that of the state-sponsored NFA. Similarly to other ‘archive artists’ such as Péter Forgács, Gustav Deutsch, Angela Ricci Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian, or Harun Farocki, to name just a few, he aims ‘to open the archives and make them visible by making new films’.[13] When appropriating home movies for his own works, he endows the images with meanings that transcend the local and personal significance they had when they were made. As Erdogan and Kayaalp put it, with their re-contextualisation, the images are ‘opening up to unforeseen complexities and richness of use’.[14]
Archival footage in Rekonstrukce okupace: Opening up the images for new readings
In Rekonstrukce okupace, the compilation of 8mm home movies capturing private moments of everyday life, seemingly banal ‘details culled from the continuous flow of time’,[15] serves as an introductory passage to the whole film. The montage of disparate shots does not generate any narrative continuity, but rather provides a specific framing for the scenes to come. Besides taking us back to the everyday reality of the 1960s and evoking a certain feeling of nostalgia, Šikl capitalises on the power of home movies to establish a particular emotional relation of the viewer to the images presented. He also employs the typically joyful and positive tone of home movies as a counterpoint to the less cheerful shots representing historical events that will soon follow. Footage from private life, at least from the analogue era, typically captures moments their authors wanted to preserve in memory, so it seldom contains unpleasant situations. As Roger Odin notes about home movies, ‘no other genres of cinema consist of so much laughter and so many smiles’.[16] The carefree nature of such scenes is often used to accentuate the drama of historical events that unfold in the background.
However, home movies capturing private family moments constitute only one type of content among the archival footage used in the film. The impetus for the creation of the documentary was a discovery of boxes with 35mm film reels, to which Šikl gained access through a friend. Nearly four hours of footage contained historically valuable visual material: previously unpublished records of the invasion of Warsaw Pact armies into Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The reels were not accompanied by any information about their authors or origin; only the 35mm format indicated that the footage was captured by professional filmmakers rather than by amateur cinematographers. The invasion was a historical event of major significance for Czechoslovak society, which was relatively well-documented by professional photographers and film crews. Nevertheless the discovery of new, previously unseen visual material was in itself remarkable.
Šikl presumed, likely correctly, that unedited footage alone would not attract significant public attention. Therefore, he decided to present it in a broader context, opening it up for new interpretations. In this case, the raw footage was not appropriated to support the filmmaker’s personal view of the occupation; instead, it became a foundational element around which Šikl constructed a new documentary film, inviting the public to participate in interpreting the found images. The filmmaking process started by an open call to the public, a kind of crowd-sourcing campaign promoted on the internet and on television. In the beginning of the documentary we see Šikl’s appearance on Czech Television where he encourages people who recognise themselves or their relatives in the footage, who were witnesses or who have private recordings of the invasion, to contact him (stills from the found footage were published on a website and on television). According to his words, over 1,000 people responded to the call. Some of them shared their testimonies and helped to contextualise scenes portrayed in the found footage, some provided film reels with their own amateur shots of the invasion.
Šikl then built his filmic reconstruction of the occupation using multiple kinds of archival materials and mixing different approaches to their incorporation. Besides home movies depicting private family moments, we see excerpts from private amateur films, collected during the campaign, which capture the historical moment that unexpectedly intruded into everyday life. Cuevas explains that ‘It is not rare that sometimes home moviemakers look at public events happening in their environments or become unexpected witnesses to events of their times.’[17] In this case, the images can still be considered home movies – due to their authorship, aesthetic, and technical qualities – although the focus of the camera was not on the family life, but rather on ongoing historical events. Another type of archival source is the found footage, the 35mm professional film material capturing moments of the invasion at diverse locations, whose origins were unknown.
When using archival materials, Šikl employs a dual approach. Images from home movies depicting private family moments, the compilation of which appears at the beginning and at the end of the film, are basically left to speak for themselves and serve a rather illustrative function. The people remain anonymous, situations are not further specified in terms of time and location, and the images are accompanied only by the sound produced by a rotating film reel, or by minimalistic music. Their selection and juxtaposition appears random; they are there rather to set up a specific mood and to emphasise the temporal distance between us and individuals featured in the footage.
The incorporation of private amateur recordings of the invasion and of the found footage differs, as they are presented within the context of narration by various protagonists, encompassing both known and predominantly unknown personalities. These narrators help to place the recordings in time and space by speaking about specific people and situations visible in the footage. Accompanying images with a personal story directly related to the depicted situation compels the viewer to engage with it more deeply. Witnesses, whether amateur filmmakers who then held a camera and now offered their recordings, or those that recognised themselves or their relatives in the professional footage provide insights on particular situations. This is conveyed through voice-over commentary for the archival footage, sometimes through phone calls, or as talking heads interviewed by Šikl. They not only explain what happens in the given scene, but also share why they were there, what they were doing and their feelings about the situation. Some even bring forth tangible evidence, such as a blood-stained shirt with a bullet hole or a bullet extracted from the body of a wounded relative. These personal testimonies, directly referencing the content of the presented footage, contribute to endowing the images with convincing factuality.
Moreover, such an approach evokes a situation commonly associated with the reception of home movies. As Forgács points out,
The maker of a home movie acts as the narrator, in a manner that recalls that of the silent film. The private filmmaker comments on the phenomena taking place on the film, identifying the people, subjects, and topics presented.[18]
In this case, the commentary accompanies images of the invasion and provides a significantly subjectivised perspective on the events captured by the camera. The difference compared to a more common situation with home movies is that the commentary is not intended for a narrow circle of family members but for a broad audience. However, it is still employed as a technique that guides viewers into the private context and creates a sense of greater proximity to the depicted reality. Such scenes succeed in maintaining the particular allure of home movies, which lies in their potential to establish close contact with the subjects’ personal lives and to generate ‘subjective responsiveness’[19] on the part of the viewer.
Open narrative structure and multiple voices of the documentary
According to Wees, ‘found footage films invite us to recognize it [the footage] as found footage, as recycled images, and due to that self-referentiality, they encourage a more analytical reading than the footage originally received’.[20] In Rekonstrukce okupace, this effect of archival materials is amplified by the film’s structure, which draws attention specifically to the archival footage. The use of previously unseen images allows for a fresh interpretation of the occupation, leading the viewer to examine the images attentively, even though they depict a historical event whose visual representations are not so rare.
The filmmaker’s attempt to reconstruct the occupation is manifested in the effort to semantically anchor the images as precisely as possible. This is achieved through testimonies from direct participants and witnesses, as mentioned above, but also, for example, by inviting lip-reading experts who determine what the characters captured in the silent shots are saying. The viewers therefore obtain very detailed information on what they are seeing and each fragment of the footage, together with the contextual information, becomes a unique micronarrative. In this sense, the structure and narrative strategy of the film as a whole can be described as open. It emerges organically as Šikl acquires new visual materials and testimonies, adding more such micronarratives. These micronarratives are connected by a common theme and temporal frame, but not by causal relations.
What holds the film together and frames individual sequences is a narrative line with an almost detective-like plot. However, it relates to a different temporality than the occupation and the archival footage. It revolves around the documentarist’s quest on which he embarks to discover the background of the found footage, identify its authors, and acquire previously unpublished private recordings of the invasion. What he then offers to the viewer is not only a documentary reconstruction of the occupation but also a self-reflective reconstruction of the filmmaking process, primarily involving the acquisition of new footage and interactions with witnesses.
At the same time, Rekonstrukce okupace is an example of what Bill Nichols refers to as the ‘participatory mode’ of documentary filmmaking.[21] This mode is characterised by the active involvement of the filmmaker in the narration as one of the protagonists. Throughout the entire film, Šikl often appears in scenes, sometimes to provide his own perspective on the occupation, but he mostly assumes the role of an investigative journalist, searching for new materials and testimonies. Many sequences capture Šikl’s enthusiasm for the newly discovered film materials and investigation into their origins, showing that collecting private footage ‘is a totally performative work’, as Berensel puts it.[22] The documentary maps his motorcycle and train journeys across the Czech Republic and Slovakia, during which he gathers unpublished film materials and meets the amateur filmmakers and witnesses who responded to his open call.
The filmmaker’s engaged participation, combined with the documentary’s self-referentiality adds an interesting layer to the overall narration. It provides insights into the process of acquiring, contextualising, and re-contextualising archival footage. Additionally, it serves as a platform for the authors of home movies to publicly comment on their recordings. They are keen to offer their private films for publishing and share their experiences, most likely because they recognise this as a means for their films, typically tucked away deep in the closet or even buried in the backyard, to gain new visibility and relevance.
Thanks to the composition of the film through individual micronarratives based on archival footage, the documentary speaks with a multifaceted voice.[23] A significant amount of meaning is embedded in the selected images, relying also on individual protagonists who interact with them, often from the perspective of participants in the depicted situations. As Berensel explains:
The experience of watching home movies is different from watching other films. The most important difference is that home movies have participants rather than audiences. The vast majority are silent, ambiguous and vague. (…) Unlike the ordinary act of watching a film, being exposed to an 8 mm family film means being involved in this ‘performance’.[24]
Of course the situations created for the documentary differ in many ways from the common reception of home movies within a family circle. Nevertheless, even in this case, the roles between authors, participants, and viewers are somewhat blurred. Most of the ‘narrators’ in the film engage with the images on a deeper level than mere viewers. Some of them are featured in the footage and can reproduce, for example, what they were just saying. Some of them held a camera themselves and might reveal the particular ‘story’ behind the creation of the image. Others impart a strong emotional charge to the images by speaking about traumatic events captured on the footage that personally touched them. The sequence in which an older woman shows the camera the bullet that wounded her brother, whom we see lying in the hospital and learn later that he passed away, definitely embodies the performativity mentioned by Berensel and goes beyond mere contextualisation of the image through words.
What contributes to the openness of the narrative structure is an inverted relationship between the image and historical interpretation. The archival footage selected for the documentary is not there to visually support a pre-determined script or historical narrative; instead, each image becomes an impulse for opening different themes, stories, and perspectives. Each of them adds another fragment to the overall picture of the occupation, which remains incomplete and contains empty spaces; however, it offers a multilayered perspective. Images from private movies and found footage are in this case used as documents that open up different moments of the past to new interpretations.
Remembering the past in Rekonstrukce okupace
Following Jose van Dijck’s concept, when home movies and found footage are digitised and placed in new contexts, they transform into ‘mediated memory objects’ that document and convey historical events.[25] Labandeira further emphasises that these films, once produced and disseminated, ‘play an important role in the visual memory of the events they depicted, for contemporary and future audiences’.[26] They embody visible traces of the past and significantly contribute to shaping and transforming shared memory, offering specific outlines to historical events and suggesting new meanings that we can associate with them.
Filmmakers like Šikl or Forgács like to refer to themselves as archaeologists, due to their role in excavating and uncovering the past through pre-existing images.[27] Experimenting with archival footage and its use as historical document of a specific kind enables them to put forward alternative, often surprising versions of the past. Catherine Russell in this context coins the term ‘archiveology’, by which she understands a ‘critical method derived from Walter Benjamin’s cultural theory that provides valuable tools for grasping the implications of the practice of remixing, recycling, and reconfiguring the image bank’. The term archiveology refers to archival film practices based on ‘exploring the potential of audiovisual fragments to construct new ways of accessing and framing histories that might otherwise have been forgotten and neglected – and to make these histories relevant to contemporary concerns’.[28]
The final segment of the quote is important as it underscores why memory, which can be defined as ‘the interplay of present and past’,[29] provides a relevant framework for our case. The subject of Rekonstrukce okupace is indeed events that took place more than half a century ago, but the film goes beyond a mere historical reconstruction. Through a specific use of pre-existing films, it reflexively engages with historical documents in order to better understand the impacts of occupation and the meanings we relate to it today.
The occupation was a key event in Czech (formerly Czechoslovak) modern history, influencing the development of the region for many decades. It marked the end of the period known as Prague Spring, during which there was a restoration of some democratic principles, such as freedom of press and freedom of speech. The invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops abruptly dashed hopes for a change of political regime and was followed by a twenty-year period of so called ‘normalisation’, which meant a return to a totalitarian regime with all its restrictions and the restoration of Soviet dominance in Czechoslovakia. More than 50 years have passed since the occupation started, but Czech society, similarly to other societies of the former Eastern Bloc, still struggles to deal with its legacy.
The interweaving of the past and the present constitutes one of the main thematic strands addressed in the documentary, eloquently expressed in its subtitle: ‘The past still lasts’. During his motorcycle journeys across the country, Šikl frequently stops at locations where events related to the invasion took place and were documented in the archival footage. He positions the camera in the same vantage points as the original shots and, through long takes, allows the viewer to observe the space, which becomes a connecting element between the past and the present. Nevertheless, the most poignant evidence that the occupation is far from being a confined historical event emerges from the testimonies of witnesses featured in the film.
When witnesses comment on archival footage, they also offer reflections on the occupation from a contemporary point of view, explaining how it affected their lives. The documentary does not provide much explanation of the political background, nor does it put forth a new historical argument. But it effectively embodies personal memories, experiences, and emotions, making them vividly present. The archival images reveal what the invasion itself looked like at different locations, while the narrations put it in wider contexts and transmit the experiences and feelings of the witnesses. It is not surprising that some experiences are largely shared: all of the protagonists agree that the invasion meant a loss of hope for them personally and for the Czechoslovak nation, evoking feelings of despair, humiliation, and a persisting sense of injustice. Many confess to losing trust in political representation. What is more striking, those who mention the death of Jan Palach, a Czech student who set himself on fire in protest against the Russian occupation on 19 January 1969, condemn his act as a futile sacrifice. The prevailing view in the documentary is that his self-immolation did not serve as an impetus for mobilising society and active resistance against the occupiers, as Palach intended; instead, it plunged Czech society into an even greater state of resignation.
Unprofessional shots from Palach’s funeral, accompanied only by somber music, appear towards the end of the film. Besides representing the tragic aftermath of the occupation, they also foreshadow the gloomy societal atmosphere of the normalisation era. The film overall moves towards an increasingly darker tone. From images and narratives articulating the unity and resistance of Czechoslovaks against the incoming occupiers, or quite amusing shots and anecdotes on the incompetence of somewhat confused Russian soldiers, the film gradually shifts its focus more and more to feelings of disappointment and on images of the wounded and the dead.
Towards the end, the filmmaker again employs footage from home movies, capturing mostly joyful private moments, and intertwines them through editing with testimonies from witnesses. This time, they are not commenting on the presented images, but rather describe their lives after 1968. Šikl lets their stories unfold, including those who, despite their convictions, eventually adapted to the political regime, often justifying it by the necessity of taking care of their families. On the other hand, there are those who refused to collaborate with the regime and faced persecution, such as being unable to pursue their original professions. This sequence demonstrates that the occupation negatively impacted the lives of all protagonists, and to some extent they all carry the trauma, which continues to burden their lives. However, each person copes with it in a different manner and whether there is more hope or despair in their individual stories remains often ambiguous and open to interpretation. The final sequence, which includes a quick montage of the graininess of empty frames from the end of film reels, eloquently represents this open-ended nature of the entire story.
Archival images and ‘citizen journalism’
As already mentioned, the occupation is firmly established in Czech cultural memory and visually quite well-documented, whether through photographs, news films, documentaries, or feature films set in this era. Nevertheless, the professional footage that Šikl obtained and incorporated into his film holds a significant value, offering previously unseen images of the invasion. Examining how it contributes to our understanding of the occupation and what is gained by combining it with excerpts from home movies deserves closer attention.
This brings us back to the topic already mentioned earlier in the text – the specific status of archival images, and particularly home movies, as historical documents. From a technical and aesthetic perspective, they are of lower quality than professional shots, typically lacking clear focus and shifting from one part of the scene to another. They represent a significantly subjective viewpoint, most often being created outside the epicentre of significant events, instead focusing on what is marginal, banal, seemingly inconsequential. At first glance, as historical documents, they might be considered unreliable, too subjective, visually flawed, and simply inappropriate. On the other hand, precisely these characteristics can simultaneously make them interesting materials that complement established and widely accepted views of the past and offer what is referred to as ‘history from below’ or ‘microhistory’.[30] Unlike professionally produced documentaries or news footage, which usually focus on major events and figures, home movies capture everyday life and the personal experiences of ordinary people. Even when their subject is not family life but ongoing significant events, they often exhibit a different style of documentation compared to professionally produced footage.
This is demonstrated in the scene from Rekonstrukce okupace where amateur shots from President Ludvík Svoboda’s speech are used. The person holding the camera does not focus solely on key moments of the event. Instead, he or she explores the surroundings: attention shifts from architecture to prominent politicians, and at times to the observing crowd. The shots often include the heads of people standing in front of the cameraman, thus conveying the personal experience of someone who, along with others, is part of the crowd. In contrast to professional shots, which often convey a sense of detached observation, private films evoke direct participation. They possess a greater degree of spontaneity, and therefore authenticity. These films lack a specific assignment behind them and they illustrate the fact that nonprofessional filmmakers record whatever catches their attention. In this sense, home movies may be seen as less biased, because their authors did not have to meet any specific requirements. As Cuevas puts it, ‘home movies add a strong sense of authenticity by being a visual document not altered by commercial or corporate interests, reinforcing the indexical character of the images and their value as “documents” from other times’.[31]
Private amateur movies, instead of showcasing representative moments, often reveal details from places where professional filmmakers would not typically reach. In this sense, when the camera focuses on ongoing events rather than private family moments, these films can be considered ‘citizen journalism’ of the analogue era. They represent footage made by ordinary people, who engage in the process of documenting important events as they happen in their communities and location. Of course, for home movies, the significant quality of contemporary citizen journalism – its immediacy – has been absent due to the lack of platforms for their publication and circulation. Nevertheless, when incorporated into films that reflect on past events, they maintain many of the qualities today associated with citizen journalism. Among other things, they offer more varied perspectives and first-hand accounts of events and also allow for a more decentralised approach to collecting visual testimonies.
The main benefits of using home movies and combining them with the found footage in Rekonstrukce okupace are associated particularly with these two aspects. The official visual coverage of the occupation in 1968 was rather ‘centralised’: well-known and frequently remediated images are mainly those made in Prague by professional filmmakers, who themselves were based mainly in the capital. In that sense, images from private footage and also from the newly discovered 35mm films, which nevertheless were not created on commission for state television or film studios, offer a much more diverse depiction of the occupation era.
For example, they display different reactions to the invasion in various locations. In villages or smaller towns, individuals passively observe the passage of military vehicles and tanks, while in cities, they occasionally attempt to actively obstruct their entry. In recordings from Košice, we can see residents throwing stones at incoming military cars. In Pilsen, people gather in front of the local radio broadcast station, using their presence to resist the occupiers and protect a key news medium. The documentary also includes recordings from other locations usually not covered in the well-known footage, for example Karlovy Vary, Hradec Králové Airport, or the Czech-Austrian border, as well as scenes from Prague hospitals, depicting evacuation of pediatric patients to the basement or young men injured during the invasion.
All these images can be considered mere fragments, depicting situations and events that, on their own, do not have a fundamentally significant meaning for our understanding of the occupation. They do not help to explain historical-political contexts in any way, nor do they reveal the succession of events or depict key political figures of the occupation era. However, the contribution of private and found footage lies in the fact that it significantly expands the available archive of images documenting this historical situation. In combination with micronarratives presented through the testimonies of witnesses, it effectively conveys the personal experience and complements our awareness of what the invasion and subsequent occupation entailed, adding further layers of meaning to established historical narratives.
Conclusion
Rekonstrukce okupace is among the films that appropriate archival materials and attempt to imbue them with a second, meaningful life. Šikl’s approach to using pre-existing images is more documentary than artistic, in the sense that he employs them more as historical documents than material for artistic experiments. In this, he differs, for example, from the aforementioned Forgács, who often transforms or ‘reorchestrates’ private footages in his works for example by emphasising certain details, using freeze frames or collages.[32] Šikl does not manipulate the footage in such a way. His method lies in letting the images speak for themselves, without transforming them, and in providing detailed insights by participants on the events depicted in the particular footage. While the creative approaches of the filmmakers differ, both nonetheless use archival footage for similar ends: ‘to bring to the surface experiences and memories not seen or felt before’, as Balasz Varga puts it in his reflection on Kádár’s Kiss.[33]
Šikl in a way eschews a closed, linear narrative and instead uses excerpts from the footage as key elements of the film structure. He does not attempt to acquaint the viewer with the socio-political background, as the entire film includes only a minimum of information related to the broader context of the occupation itself. Nor is his appropriation and reuse of home movies and found footage motivated by an attempt to testify to private, everyday life during the occupation. The point of the documentary is rather to show what the invasion looked like and what the experience of being there at that moment felt like. Even though various opinions on the occupation are voiced in the film, the images from the occupation era are not subordinated to a specific narrative or a strong historical argument. Instead, they themselves become a stimulus for reflecting on the situations, impressions, and emotions experienced by various witnesses, fostering also a retrospective evaluation of the occupation and its impact.
Throughout the documentary, considerable emphasis is placed on the role of film as a memory medium that enables one to document, preserve, and communicate important historical and personal moments. Šikl’s work effectively illustrates the current transformation in how we represent and remember the past. In his approach, images are foregrounded; his use of archival images extends beyond mere authentication or illustration, treating them as historical sources in their own right. Appropriating and remixing existing footage fosters a new appreciation for archival images and encourages a more analytical reading. In the documentary, the images themselves become the object of investigation and are scrutinised through what might today be termed ‘forensic media practices’.
The ‘mash up’ approach applied by Šikl also creates a new framework for remembering. It allows for transition between different temporalities and spatial contexts, blurs the boundaries between personal and collective memories, and bridges the gap between historical documentary and more performative memory work associated with home movies. All this underscores the idea that memory is not fixed but continuously evolving, influenced by current events, ongoing reinterpretations, and re-imaginings of the past. Such an approach does not attempt to present the past as a coherent, closed narrative but represents a shift toward a more open, collaborative memory that is fragmentary, largely subjectivised, but also more engaging, fostering an affective relationship with the past.
In my opinion, openness is a principle that aptly characterises both the documentary itself and the creative process that led to its realisation. Its key part was an open call to the public, which significantly expanded the amount of home movies and testimonies to which the filmmaker gained access. Found footage and, especially, home movies are characterised by polysemy and semantic ambiguity, which makes them suitable for subordination to a specific narrative on the one hand, while on the other hand they can as well serve as building blocks for diverse interpretations of the past. Šikl tends to use them rather in the latter way. By involving the public in the contextualisation of the footage and by letting nonprofessional filmmakers comment on their own recordings, he composes the narration from individual ‘micronarratives’ that unfold around archival images. The film as a whole does not present clear conclusions, nor does it confine its subject to unequivocal interpretations. On the contrary, the way Šikl approaches archival materials and incorporates them into a new whole enables the viewers to engage with the past in an affective way and still leaves it open for interpretation.
The concept of memory presupposes the focus not just on the past itself but on its implications for the present. The reasons to revisit the archive and reopen the theme of the occupation in a new documentary are many. It is an era that has had a deep impact on individual as well as social life of Czech and Slovak citizens and continues to burden the present. That is why it should be commemorated and subjected to retrospective reflection. As for the timing of the release of the documentary, it premiered on 21 August 2021 – on the day of the 53rd anniversary of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. Moreover, the premiere happened to take place almost exactly six months before Russia invaded Ukraine. This confluence of circumstances added further relevance to the film. It would be inappropriate to seek simple analogies between the two historical situations, however the images and testimonies contained in the documentary and the news coverage of the war in Ukraine share a striking number of intersecting points, including the general shock that something like this is even happening at this time. In this sense, the ending of the film, consisting of empty film frames, can be understood as an open space for what is yet to unfold. It might be pointing to the idea that what we refer to as historical events are rather processes that are not clearly delineated in terms of time and certainly not in terms of meaning. To some extent they ‘continue to last’ and are always open to new interpretations.
In her reflection on archiveology, Russel emphasises that ‘the past is opened to reconstruction by bringing into the foreground details that were previously obscured by dominant narratives of history’.[34] Šikl’s reconstruction, largely based on private amateur films and found footage, may be fragmented, personal, and often focused on local, perhaps less significant events. However, it still allows for a reconfiguration of memory. This does not necessarily imply a revisionist approach attempting to substantially change our perception of the occupation. It rather adds more layers to already known facts and images. The reason why we need open archives and why we should care about archival images, to revisit the question from the introduction of this article, is that through a deeper understanding of the past and its echoes in the present, we can, as Russel puts it, ‘try to reorder the future differently’.
Author
Irena Řehořová is an assistant professor at Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses on the intersections of memory, (audio)visual media, and art. She is the author of the monograph Film and Cultural Memory (2018) and has published articles on the politics of memory, mainly in relation to the legacy of communism in Central Europe and Czech-German relations.
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[1] Zimmerman 2007, p. 10.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Alphen 2008, p. 92.
[4] See for example Leyda 1964; Ishizuka & Zimmerman 2007; Rascaroli & Young 2014; Russel 2018; Baron 2020; Erdogan & Kayaalp 2023.
[5] Baron 2020, p. 6.
[6] Berensel 2023, p. 121.
[7] Horníček 2005.
[8] See for example Šikl & Horníček & Szczepanik 2004, pp. 199-200.
[9] Noordegraaf & Pouw 2009, pp. 83-103.
[10] Baron 2020, p. 8.
[11] Zimmerman 2007, p. 10.
[12] Baron 2020, p. 31.
[13] Berensel 2023, p. 122.
[14] Erdogan & Kayaalp 2023, p. 13.
[15] Forgács 2007, p. 49.
[16] Odin 2007, p. 262.
[17] Cuevas 2013, p. 25.
[18] Forgács 2007, p. 48.
[19] Baron 2020, p. 26.
[20] Wees 1993, p. 11.
[21] see Nichols 2017.
[22] Berensel 2023, p. 118.
[23] For the concept ‘voice of the documentary’, see Nichols 2017, pp. 48-60.
[24] Berensel 2023, p. 119.
[25] Van Dijck 2007, p. 5.
[26] Labandeira 2023, p. 165.
[27] See for example Forgács & Palotai, 2004.
[28] Russell 2018, p. 11.
[29] Erll 2008, p. 2.
[30] See for example Zimmerman 2007; Cuevas 2014.
[31] Cuevas 2013, p. 19.
[32] See Varga 2008, p. 91.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Russell 2018, p. 32.