Fusion: The problems of youth

How do you make a film on the youth of a country where the interesting thing about them is not that they are different from the youth of one’s own country but so very much the same? This was the problem that faced director Randal Beattie and myself in our first few days in Prague researching ‘Children of Revolution’, a report on youth in Czechoslovakia today. Where we had expected to make a film about the very different attitudes both to society and their own personal lives of young people born and bred under Communism, and who had known nothing else, we found ourselves confronted by a largely apolitical youth, whose chief leisure interest was ‘beat’ music and dancing (they call it ‘big beat’), who preferred idealism to ideology, private to public experience, and who were severely critical of their elders just like youth anywhere else in the western world. (Czechoslovakia shares frontiers with West Germany and Austria as well as with Communist countries of the eastern bloc, and Prague lies well to the west of Vienna.) But perhaps the most striking feature of all about these young people behind the so-called ‘Iron Curtain’ was that they were, in most cases, not only individualistic and critical but prepared to come out openly with their comments both among themselves and to us.

Before arriving in Czechoslovakia we had thought of trying to convey the special character of Czechoslovak youth by comparing them with the youth of their neighbour, Austria. The two countries share a long historical and cultural tradition, and in this way, we thought, the special influences which Communism exerts on the personality of youth would become most obviously apparent. But a few days in Prague (preceded by a short reconnaissance in Vienna) were enough to show us that the story was more interesting than that. For in spite of the utterly different political context Czechoslovak youth was, in its attitudes, strikingly similar to that of Austria. How had this come about in a state that was for long the most severe and Stalinist of Communist satellites?

Somehow we had to show the ordinary everyday lives of young people with all their natural vigour, adventurousness, impatience, anxiety, restlessness, earnestness and fun as being, in this sense, extraordinary. This sort of thing is not something you can write straightforwardly into a film script; it is a feeling that has to be absorbed invisibly, an atmosphere that must assert itself rather than appear in the form of a plain statement.