Time Bomb from the West: Video, the Advertising Industry, and Consumer Culture in Late-Socialist Czechoslovakia

in a 1989 article for the Czechoslovak weekly Tvorba, the cameraman and teacher Otto Brabec likened video to “cassette television,” which in only a few years had individualized access to the consumption of audiovisual content—primarily feature movies—on the domestic market. He spoke of the individualization of consumption at a time when only 4 to 6 percent of households in late-socialist Czechoslovakia owned a video recorder,¹ noticing that people had been rapidly purchasing this type of new equipment despite all the obstacles then present (few devices available on the legal market and high prevailing prices, even more so on the black market). In fact, on the black market, video recorders were becoming available more rapidly than new content, the high demand for which state socialism was unable to satisfy. Video recorders and cassettes were perceived as representative of the desired Western lifestyle and a source of visual inspiration transmitted...