Day: June 19, 2010

Winning the Cold War: LFM Reviews The LA Film Fest’s Disco and Atomic War

[Editor’s Note: LFM is currently covering a series of provocative films debuting this week and next at The Los Angeles Film Festival.]

By Jason Apuzzo. Why, exactly, did the West win the Cold War?

There are many theories. Most of them identify Ronald Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system as having been the final tipping point in that epochal conflict, after which point the Soviet Union was no longer capable – militarily, economically, or perhaps even psychologically – of sustaining its Cold War arms race with the United States.

This is certainly true, so far as it goes – and Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma’s extraordinary new documentary Disco & Atomic War certainly credits Reagan’s bold proposal as having had its desired psychological effect on the Soviets.  But that isn’t really the story their film exists to tell.

What if the Cold War was instead won … by David Hasselhoff?  What if American TV shows like Knight Rider and Dallas, or movies like Star Wars and Ninotchka – or lurid, 70s soft-core erotica like Emmanuelle – played an equal (and perhaps even greater) role in bringing down the communist system?  This, essentially, is the subject matter of the  compelling and drolly amusing Estonian/Finnish documentary Disco & Atomic War currently showing at The Los Angeles Film Festival (6/20).

Don't hassle the Hoff: in Estonia he won the Cold War.

Before proceeding further, let me briefly point out that I had the chance to visit Finland and the old Soviet Union during the time period depicted in this documentary – roughly the late 80s.  Finland at that time was a kind of strange, anxious no-man’s land – a Western country that was nonetheless very much within the Soviet sphere of influence.  As a teenager I remember taking the train from Finland into the Soviet Union, and idly fretting over the fact that I was carrying a paperback copy of Tom Clancy’s thriller The Hunt for Red October in my backpack.  Would it get confiscated?  Would I be labelled a spy?  Would some Red Army jerk put a boot in my face?

If such fears seem quaint now, Disco & Atomic War brings them all back in vivid detail – because the purpose of this documentary is to examine the so-called ‘soft power’ influence of American and Western culture on the minds of Soviet citizens living in Estonia at that time, who were able through clever means to watch Finnish television broadcasts emanating from just over the border.  As the film informs us, American popular culture – especially in the form of glamorous TV shows like Dallas – was deeply feared by Soviet authorities due to the ideas and expectations such programming planted in the minds of Soviet citizens.

If what you’re expecting from this film is a dry recitation of Cold War history, though, think again – because Disco & Atomic War is quite simply one of the funniest and most inventive movies I’ve seen in some time.  The film wasn’t at all what I was expecting, or what you should expect from what might otherwise be labelled ‘an Estonian/Finnish documentary about the Cold War’ … which on the face of it sounds rather dull.  Disco is actually a riot of surprises, a mash-up of historical documentary and personal narrative that attempts to put you into the mind of a young person living in a closed, totalitarian society – who is suddenly and shockingly exposed by bootleg TV antennas to … sex and disco, Texas millionaires, robot super-cars, and Luke Skywalker.

Nikolai, crafty creator of contraband TV antennas.

As a young person living in California at the time these things were exciting enough to me … but for young people in Estonia, co-directors Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma make it clear that these pop culture phenomena were nothing short of revolutionary.  Disco & Atomic War meticulously re-creates the Estonia of the late 70s-late 80s, which was apparently used by the Soviet regime as a kind of laboratory experiment for determining the exact repercussions of having a population subjected to a steady stream of Western influence.

That’s right.  [SPOILER ALERT.]  The Soviets secretly allowed the Estonian population to be exposed to Western entertainment emanating from Finland, in order to gauge how their people would respond.  It was a dangerous experiment – one that would prove fatal to the communists’ grip on power.

As Kilmi and Aarma tell it, Estonia was a kind of quiet, Soviet backwater state at the time that just happened to find itself in close proximity not only to Finland … but to giant TV towers constructed by the Finns (with, it was understood, U.S. backing) in order to broadcast American entertainment directly into the Evil Empire.  And what exactly did these daring, constantly-under-threat Finnish TV stations broadcast into Soviet Estonia?  Frothy TV fare like Dallas (a show which, in the eyes of the Estonians, featured “men with brilliant white teeth, and beautiful but unhappy women …  in a land where everyone is a millionaire … a captivating, spiritual seance”); or shows featuring dancing girls and discos (the Americans’ “secret weapon”); or late night reruns of Ninotchka, the delightful Greta Garbo-Billy Wilder satire on Soviet bureaucrats.  There was also Star Wars, George Lucas’ electrifying spectacle that strangely seemed to prefigure both the collapse of the Soviet evil Empire, and the very means (the ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system) by which that Empire was cowed into defeat.

Western siren: Sylvia Kristel as Emmanuelle.

Nothing seems to have had such a great effect on the Estonians, however, as David Hasselhoff’s Knight Rider series … and also the lurid, 70s nudie classic, Emmanuelle.  The two most hilarious sequences in Disco & Atomic War involve recreations of how young Estonian kids would gather around foreign cars and begin speaking into their shiny new digital wrist watches, hoping that the cars would come alive like Hasselhoff’s Pontiac.  In a later sequence, we see almost the entire nation of Estonia struggle with antennas (some made of simple metal pipes, others made with mercury from thermometers) in order to catch fleeting glimpses of curvaceous Sylvia Kristel writhe in passion in Emmanuelle.

What Disco & Atomic War captures is how utterly hopeless Soviet efforts were to counteract these seductive Western entertainments … and if you’re sensing some parallels with our current struggle against the Islamo-fascists, you’re right on the money.  If you watch films like the recent No One Knows About Persian Cats (see the LFM review here), you will form the inescapable conclusion that Iran’s youth are exactly where Estonia’s were some twenty years ago … watching bootlegged Western music and movies, copping rebellious youth attitudes (including punk music), ignoring state restrictions in their daily quest for sex and excitement.  Disco & Atomic War is a kind of visual treatise on this type of ‘soft’ Western power, as opposed to military modes of power, and how utterly explosive these modes of influence can be on shaping the imaginations of a population.  As the film relates, it’s probably no coincidence that the same year Dallas reruns stopped playing illicitly on Soviet TV screens, the Soviet Union collapsed.  [In fact, in his only on-camera interview since being ousted from office, the Soviet puppet dictator of Estonia directly blames Finnish/Western TV broadcasts for the collapse of his own regime.]

I can’t recommend Disco & Atomic War enough, and if you’re in LA on Sunday, June 20th – and anywhere near the vicinity of the downtown around 10pm – I recommend you pop in and see it.  [Click here for more details.]  If there’s any justice in the world, the film will be short-listed for Oscar consideration.  It will show you a side of the Cold War we don’t hear enough about … and give you a sense of what remains our most potent weapon in the battle against tyranny: the alluring freedom of our popular culture.

I’ve embedded the trailer below – which, unfortunately, does not quite do justice to the baroque wit and sophistication of this magnificent little film.

Posted on June 19th, 2010 at 11:32pm.

Review: Jane Campion’s Bright Star

From Jane Campion's "Bright Star."

By David Ross. Has there ever been a good film about a writer?  Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) was respectable enough, as I remember it, but generally film has no idea how to approach lives that are largely interior, with driving purposes that are inconveniently invisible and inscrutable.  In consequence, film tends to emphasize the gossipy and scandalous, dwelling on the externals of sexual deviancy, alcoholism, and nervous breakdown.

Film has been particularly clumsy in its attempts to deal with the romantics, in whose case the temptation to sensationalize is enormous.  Percy and Mary Shelley receive the star treatment in Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986), while Wordsworth and Coleridge feature in Julien Temple’s Pandaemonium (2000), the latter starring the diminutive Scotsman John Hannah, last seen being chased by mummies, as Wordsworth.  Both films are creative disasters and intellectual insults even by the debased standards of Hollywood.  Pandaemonium is to literary biopic what Plan 9 from Outer Space is to science fiction: a film so unbelievably stupid that it becomes incredible in its own way. The less said about these films the better. The BBC production Byron (2003) is far more respectable, but suffers the reverse problem: its fidelity to historical and period detail is almost pedantic, and it maintains a studious emotional distance from its subject. It is a live-action encyclopedia entry, the only mildly boring film ever made on the themes of omnivorous sexuality and incest.

Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009), which tells the story of Keats’ doomed romance with Fanny Brawne, is surer of itself and sounder in its approach. Where Russell and Temple indulge in shuddering ejaculations of mayhem and mania, Campion recognizes that the challenge is to contain and compress the intrinsic melodrama of her story. She smartly attempts this work by shading her film in muted browns and grays (the true colors of England by the way); by utilizing all manner of strategic occlusion and interruption; and by interjecting into nearly every scene the acidic and not entirely endearing personality of Charles Brown, Keats’ friend and companion. When the syrup begins to bubble over, Campion knows exactly how and when to turn down the heat.

Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw in "Bright Star."

Even more importantly, the film feels psychologically and emotionally consistent with the poems. Campion’s Keats inevitably becomes a favorite playmate of the younger Brawne children – and he does perform an annoying Scottish jig at Christmas dinner – but he is neither the ethereal and evanescent sprite (the Keats of Shelley’s “Adonais”), nor the paragon of innocence and good cheer (the Keats of Yeats’ “Ego Dominus Tuus”). Played admirably by Ben Whishaw, this Keats is tough in his way, self-controlled, decent, decorous, and private. Where Russell and Temple insist on the correlation between insanity and genius, Campion underscores Keats’ self-awareness and his understated but powerful and consistent intelligence: in short, his fundamental sanity. I consider this a convincing thesis about the kind of personality that produced the poems.

Campion’s Fanny Brawne, meanwhile, seems the kind of woman who might have appealed to the man who wrote the poems. She is a woman not of passion, but of passionate character: character qualifies and directs passion, making her far more interesting and believably Georgian than the stereotypical melting or bursting damosel of romantic cliché. Abbie Cornish plays the part superbly and instantly establishes herself as an actress who can project a degree of intelligence and literacy in the tradition of Helena Bonham Carter and Keira Knightley.

I’m not enough of a Keats scholar to say whether the film is minutely correct in all its details, but the advisory help of Keats’ biographer Andrew Motion suggests that it is at least roughly correct. The film tends to downplay the alleged flirtatiousness and dress obsession that made Fanny unpopular among Keats’ friends, but this is within the bounds of reasonable interpretation, it seems to me. The film does engage in at least one petty deception. The closing credits inform us that Fanny “kept Keats forever in her heart” (or something to this effect) and that she never removed her engagement ring, implying that she spent the rest of her life faithfully mourning her lost love. In fact, as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes:

After Keats’s death, Fanny remained in Hampstead and mourned him through the 1820s, befriending his sister as she had promised him she would. After her mother’s death in 1829 Fanny became financially independent and, on a visit to France in 1833, in Boulogne met Louis Lindo (later Lindon; 1812-1872), whom she married on 15 June 1833. Of Spanish or Portuguese extraction and from a wealthy Jewish merchant and banking family, Louis Lindon seems to have held a number of positions, including working as an officer for the British Legion in Spain and as a wine merchant in London later in life. Until the 1850s, when they settled in London, the Lindons lived on the continent, especially in Germany, where Fanny gave birth to two sons and a daughter. Fanny died at 34 Coleshill Street, Pimlico, London, on 4 December 1865.

Posted on June 19th, 2010 at 11:18pm.

The Czech New Wave: Political Cinema with a Human Face

By Jennifer Baldwin. Forget the French New Wave. Yes, OK, I just got finished writing here at LFM about the greatness of Godard and VIVRE SA VIE, and I dig Truffaut and the rest of the Cahiers crowd as much as the next girl – but if I were stuck on a desert island for the rest of my life (or maybe stuck forever in a reeducation camp for Obama regime dissidents … just kidding), there is only one European “new wave” film movement I’d want to spend the rest of my days watching and it actually ain’t the French.

It’s the Czechoslovak New Wave, a film movement that received a lot of international recognition and acclaim back in the mid-to-late 1960s (e.g., winning Best Foreign Film Academy Awards in 1965 and 1967). This movement was a big deal back in the day.

But the Czech New Wave is somewhat forgotten these days, much to my disappointment.  I wouldn’t really know much about it myself if it hadn’t been for the fact that I took a class back in my college days called “Central and Eastern European Cinema” taught by the genius Herb Eagle.  (Admittedly, I needed to get the required “Race and Ethnicity” credits and it was the only class that satisfied those requirements that semester.)

Thanks to the tutelage of Professor Eagle I was soon hooked on Miloš Forman and Vera Chytilová films, like Chytilová’s Daisies featuring the two Maries.

Sadly, I don’t think the Czech New Wave gets enough love these days from film buff types.  Everybody tosses around names like Godard and Truffaut and Rohmer and Rivette, but does anybody ever mention Chytilová or Jireš or Kádar and Klos or Menzel or Němec?   (Miloš Forman doesn’t count because he’s become a well-known and award-winning director of Hollywood movies since emigrating here some 40 years ago.)

The Czech New Wave deserves better than to be some half-remembered footnote to the cinema of the 1960s. Frankly, I think the films that came out of Czechoslovakia in that era are not only fascinating examples of 1960s New Wave cinema, but they’re also still highly relevant for right now. These movies still have the power to speak to us on a political level as well as on a purely human level. If anybody wants to see what truly vibrant, brilliant, political (and personal) filmmaking is all about, they should take a look at the Czech New Wave. Continue reading The Czech New Wave: Political Cinema with a Human Face