By Jason Apuzzo. Filmmaker, best-selling author and former rock drummer Larry Schweikart recently sent me the trailer (see above) for his forthcoming documentary, Rockin’ The Wall. Rockin’ The Wall is about the liberating force of rock music for young people living behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. The film is based in part on a segment of Larry’s book, Seven Events That Made America America. Many of you also may remember Larry as the co-author of the #1 New York Times best seller A Patriot’s History of the United States. [Both of these books are available in the LFM Store below.]
Rockin’ The Wall deals with how rock music served as a source of hope for young kids growing up in the communist world, and how the music subverted the grip that totalitarian regimes held over societies within the Eastern Bloc. Larry and his team interview rockers from the Cold War era, including the band Mother’s Finest – a black funk-rock band out of Atlanta who played East Berlin two weeks before the Wall came crashing down. Also interviewed are young eastern Europeans from that era whose lives were changed irrevocably by rock music and the cracks that music opened up – literally and figuratively – in their otherwise repressive world.
One of the great details that Rockin’ The Wall apparently goes into is how the communist regimes – seeing what a powerful force rock music was among the youth – tried to co-opt the music for their own purposes. In the Soviet Union this lead to the Russians actually creating a ‘Ministry of Rock'(!). I’m hoping Larry has some samples from that Ministry’s music – it must be hilarious.
Rockin’ The Wall reminds me of a marvelous film from the Los Angeles Film Festival that we recently reviewed here at LFM, called Disco & Atomic War. Disco & Atomic War is an extraordinary new Estonian documentary about the so-called ’soft power’ influence of American and Western culture on the minds of Soviet citizens living in Estonia during the Cold War, who were able through clever means to watch Finnish television broadcasts emanating from just over the border. As Disco informs us (in amusing detail), American popular culture – especially in the form of glamorous TV shows like “Dallas,” or movies like Star Wars and even Emmanuelle – was deeply feared by Soviet authorities due to the ideas and expectations such programming planted in the minds of Soviet citizens. This led to amusing co-optings, such as the Soviets creating their own officially sanctioned disco instruction course for TV (shades of the ‘Ministry of Rock’?).
You can read the LFM review of Disco and Atomic War from the LA Film Festival, and also read LFM Contributor Joe Bendel’s review of the film from yesterday.
Rockin’ the Wall premieres in Washington, D.C. on September 9, at the national Tea Party “March on D.C.” event. You can also pre-order the DVD here, and follow the film on Facebook here. We wish Larry and his creative team the best with this project.
Posted on July 27th, 2010 at 11:49am.
Go you guys! This is a great subject for a film. Hopefully this will avoid the usual “talking heads” approach to conservative documentaries. I still wonder why Hollywood can’t do more to make movies about the end of the Cold War. Maybe they just want to pretend it didn’t happen.
People underestimate how powerful Western culture – rock and roll, movies, TV, etc, is and how it still means freedom to a lot of people (no matter how left wing the culture may get over here). No matter how hard they try, tyrannies like the Soviet Union could not shut it out, and today remaining tyrannies such as North Korea, Iran, etc. can’t hope to keep it out either.