WWII ended 1945, and The Best Years of Our Lives came out in 1946.
The War in Vietnam ended in 1975. Apocolypse now came out 4 years later, in 1979.
The 9/11 attacks were in 2001, and has already been the subject of World Trade Center and United 93, both out in 2006.
The Iraq war is still ongoing, and I hear there are movies in the works about it already.
The devastating Tsunamis of 2004 received miniseries treatment within a couple years.
How strange, then, that two of the most significant events of the last hundred years–the collapse of communism as manifested in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the ensuing reunification of Germany, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. These astounding events happened almost 20 years ago and still have not received any big-screen treatment, that I know of. Isn’t that amazing? I, for one, would love to see a good movie or miniseries based on either of these two events, showing the bankruptcy of the communist system and the real reasons for its collapse. (Tibor Machan did recently recommend to me a novel, Brandenberg Gate, set in East Germany during 1989.)Update: Some comments from readers:
All those movies have one thing in common: They’re all America/American-centric.
Unless there was some way to shoe-horn Americans into the protagonist roles, there’s just no market for it.
It might be sour grapes too… with the fall of the Soviet Union they couldn’t be used as generic villains in action movies anymore (not that they didn’t try, like the Val Kilmer version of The Saint).
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Personally I’d love to see a film about the Hamilton-Burr duel and the
politics of early 19th century New York. But I may be alone in that
wish.
As for the Revolution, the biggest impediments to big screen treatment
are (1) late 18th century warfare lacks the excitement of airplane
bombings and automatic weapons; (2) American forces fared poorly for
much of the war until the French got involved; and (3) the “bad guys”
look and speak the same as the good guys.
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I think the answer is buried somewhere in the facts connected with Anne Applebaum’s observations of the differences – there are ten or so, i think – between how our historians, intellectuals, media and opinion makers, and hence our society, deal with and view the Soviet socialist system, versus say the Nazi system. For instance, to this day, it is cool to buy and collect Soviet memorabilia, but in disgustingly poor taste to be interested in corresponding Nazi memorabilia.
I think the left would like to quietly forget the failures and atrocities of Marx and Lenin, and a big part of forgetting is not creating movies to relive them.
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Your post on movies dealing with the fall of the Berlin wall cannot be complete without a mention of the Oscar winning The Lives of Others, which was made by Germans.
It chronicles the abusive Eastern German Government and the way it encroached on the privacy of everyday citizens.
Hollywood at least recognized it as the best foreign language film of the year, in fairness.
They were right to reward it as the film is the best thing that I have seen in the theater this year.
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Not exactly Hollywood, and not exactly what you’re looking for, but… “Goodbye Lenin!” has some really charming moments, such as contrasting the available groceries in pre- and post-Communist East Germany.
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Read your blog and I recall a German (comedy) film regarding the collapse of East Germany. It is called “Good-bye Lenin” and is sort of a twisted nostalgia for the old socialist state – and its products. Hillary Clinton could play the part of the mother quite well, I think. It also has English sub-titles.
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Let’s compare:
WWII, Vietnam War, 9/11, the Iraq war and tsunamis = movies about destructive forces quickly unleashed into the world with the potential for lots of crowd-pleasing, thoughtless, voyeuristic scenes. That’s a Hollywood fit if there ever was one.
Vs.
The fall of communism = A grinding, slow-motion, loss of prosperity over decades due to incredibly bad economic theory embraced by the Hollywood elite to this day. Who’s going to back it? The Pew family?
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I agree with you and I would love to see more films about the collapse of communism. The reason I suspect that there hasn’t been more films about the collapse of communism compared to other major historic events is that communism really didn’t have that dramatic of an ending but largely just fizzled out.
10:04 am on August 10, 2007
