Word: ek
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...from a tortured sleep, seized a camera and began to film what he had just been dreaming. Reality is distorted and logic becomes madness in The Ritual, Bergman's most nightmarish fantasy since The Silence. In the claustrophobic office of some anonymous bureaucrat, three actors (Ingrid Thulin, Anders Ek and Gunnar Böornstrand) perform a bizarre masque, part psychodrama, part sexual charade. They are like the mummers from The Seventh Seal or the circus performers from The Naked Night imprisoned in an allegory of doom. Inevitably the object of the masque is death. But the dramatic value...
...seemed to be recurring. Across the bridges of the Vltava River, 68 tanks rumbled noisily into Prague. The acrid smell of tear gas hung over Wenceslas Square, where troopers wielding submachine guns faced angry demonstrators. Even the cries of the crowd had a haunting familiarity. "We want Dubček!" shouted the demonstrators, paying tribute to the man whose attempt to give Communism a more human visage had brought Czechoslovakia a heady, hopeful "Springtime of Freedom." But there was a tragic difference. Last August, the tanks and troopers were Soviet. Last week, on the first anniversary of the invasion...
Party Leader Gustav Husák, who replaced Alexander Dubček in April, was also anxious to ensure calm-though his government's threats against demonstrations only tended to increase the country's nervousness...
...hierarchy. Though demonstrators scrawled the words HUSÁK-RUSÁK (Husák the Russian) on walls, the fact is that the Russians do not entirely trust Husák. He is in an unenviable position: rejected by the reformers because he replaced Dubček, disliked by the Czech majority because he is a Slovak and hated by the orthodox pro-Soviet elements (who imprisoned him for eight years) because he is a nationalist who believes in limited reforms...
...fact, Dubček, demoted last April to the figurehead post of president of the National Assembly, had occasionally fretted aloud at the speed and enthusiasm with which his reform movement took hold in Czechoslovakia. But he did not dwell on anti-socialist dangers. On the night of the invasion, two conservative members of the Presidium presented a memorandum stating that the party was losing control of Czechoslovakia to reactionaries. Dubček and his majority on the Presidium quickly rejected it. As Dubček evidently concluded, the perils of "anti-socialism" were distinctly preferable to the economic stagnation...