Czech invasion - the great films from the 60s

I was just a kid but I remember when the Czech films came to MOMA in the '60s and blew everyone away: who knew such great, simple, honest films were coming out of country behind the so-called Iron Curtain? How could brave directors make such subtle, anti-establishment (anti-Soviet?) films? They didn't do it for long - a few, like Milos Forman, moved west somehow and continued their careers, but it's great to look back at some of these early Czech films and appreciate them, still, today - not only for their place in film and world history but as really great examples of film art - like Forman's 1965 Loves of a Blonde: the story of a young woman working in a Czech shoe factory and hoping, dreaming, of finding love. As we see right off it's a world mostly of women, and in one of the many really funny scenes the factory foreman, an older guy, argues w/ a military leader asking him to station troops in the small factory town because there factory-girls need to have a social life. (In this and a few other scenes Forman shows the Soviet military as pleasant and jovial, something one would guess he was obliged to do - not that he doesn't get in some great satire elsewhere). Turns out they send a brigade of reservists, paunch, gray-haired guys who think they're still hot and, in one hilarious scene at a so-called nightclub try to pick up the eponymous blonde and two of her friends. The movie is sad and starkly beautiful, shot in austere b/w with many scenes that make haunting compositions and great historical documents: an honest look inside the factory dormitory (girls are at least 12 to a room) and a Prague apartment, with dingy doors, furnishings, etc - not even an attempt to glorify or sanctify life in the East. Despite the sorrow throughout the film - we wonder what kind of future this nice young woman and her friends can possible face - there is some terrific humor start to finish - e.g., the 3-in-a-bed scene when the parents of the Prague piano-player boyfriend (of fling?) refuse to let him sleep in the same room as the girl and bring him into their bed - and music itself, from the dopey "folk song" a guitar-strumming factory girl plays over the opening credits to the night-club songs, bad Soviet imitations of British pop, is hysterical, an icon of the era.