Commentary
This clip illustrates the specific generational experience of village residents for whom the prosperous agricultural production in cooperatives provided important social certainty and prestige. Their loss after the collapse of socialist agriculture affected the recollection of “communism”, especially in the countryside.
The clip comes from the documentary Return to the Extraordinary Years (Návrat do neobyčejných let) in which the director, Vojtěch Jasný, returns to the village of Vyhnanice 60 years later, and along with contemporary witnesses, remembers the making of a pro-regime propaganda film at the beginning of the collectivisation period. The witnesses – whether the director himself or the locals – are mostly forgiving of the past, assessing it positively and with a certain degree of nostalgia. They appreciated the social security and the rise in living standards in the collectivised village. This nostalgia is ridiculed at the end by a clip from the original documentary, which clearly demonstrates that the current memory of collectivisation is not consensual and that stories of repression are more visible in the media (Oppression).
