Communism
Boyd Tonkin
Havana, 1993. Far away, the fall of the Soviet empire has suddenly stripped Fidel Castro’s Cuba of subsidy and protection, while the US blockade strangles options for an economic reboot close to home. State-imposed “austerity” ushers in the “Special Period”, when cuts, shortages and even hunger return. “A butterfly had fluttered its wings on the other side of the Atlantic,” as Karla Suárez’s narrator – a mathematician – puts it. The chaotic fallout that ensues strikes hard “on this island, in this unstable system”. You might expect a novel set in Havana during those bleak days to make for a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Veteran Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky has gone back to his beginnings for his latest film. The real-life events on which Dear Comrades! is based took place in June 1962, when social unrest over rising prices saw strikes break out in Novocherkassk, an industrial town in Russia’s south, culminating in street protest against the Soviet regime. The very idea of such an uprising was, of course, anathema in the “workers’ paradise” that was the communist system, and it was brutally suppressed by the Kremlin. The extent of the casualties was concealed, the dead secretly buried, and the events Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Seven years ago, at a literary festival in the Croatian port of Pula, I heard Goran Vojnović talk about the vicious petty nationalism that that had poisoned daily life in the republics of former Yugoslavia. At that point the splintering of communities, families, even individual selves, by what one of his characters calls the “barbaric shit” of manufactured conflict between neighbours felt to me like a troubling but still-remote problem. Well, here we are in Britain at the close of 2020, ready to drown in a toxic ocean of the same barbaric shit. Time, perhaps, to pay more heed to the many fine Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Early in The Scar (1976), the opening film in Arrow Academy’s Cinema of Conflict limited edition quartet, Stefan Bednarz (Franciszek Pieczka) requests a partial reshoot of what is to be his first interview as the newly appointed director of a large chemical factory, built in his hometown of Olechów. “This is not a feature film … no second takes”, comes the reply, unheard by Bednarz, from the journalist and filmmaker behind the camera. The Scar is, of course, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s very first feature-length film, this ultimately inconsequential scene a telling precursor of what would emerge as Read more ...
Owen Richards
While the horrors of Hitler’s rule are well documented, Joseph Stalin’s crimes are less renowned, so much so that in a recent poll in Russia he was voted their greatest ever leader. This chilling fact made acclaimed director Agnieszka Holland feel compelled to remedy such a legacy. She’s long turned her light onto Europe’s darkest hours, including Academy Award-nominated Holocaust dramas Europa, Europa and In Darkness, and now comes Mr Jones.Set in the 1930s, the film is based on real life Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, here portrayed by James Norton. He’s a lone voice questioning Stalin’s Read more ...
Owen Richards
Agnieszka Holland is one of Europe's leading filmmakers. Growing up in Poland under Soviet rule, her films have often tackled the continent's complex history, including the Academy Award-nominated Europa, Europa, In Darkness and Angry Harvest. In America, she's become a trusted hand for prestige television, with credits on The Wire, House of Cards and The Killing. Her latest film, Mr. Jones, starring James Norton, tells the true story of a Welsh journalist who exposed the terrible famines in Ukraine under Stalin. Holland spoke with theartsdesk about why she felt Gareth Jones's story was more Read more ...
Marianka Swain
We’ve had Chess the musical; now, here’s Chess the play. Tom Morton-Smith, who has experience wrestling recent history into dramatic form with the acclaimed Oppenheimer, turns his attention to the 1972 World Chess Championship in Reykjavík, in which American challenger Bobby Fischer battled the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky. The event gained outsize importance from the Cold War propaganda battle – the two men pawns in their countries’ games, and the match characterised as the lone hero versus the Soviet machine.The play follows the tournament through, as both Fischer (Robert Emms, pictured Read more ...
Tom Baily
John Simpson remains the BBC’s longest serving foreign correspondent. Here, he returns to the biggest moment of his career. This personalised retelling of the collapse of the Berlin wall encompasses fond remembrance, factual detail and the confidence of retrospective analysis. And, the big BUT question is addressed: where are we now?Simpson interviews a crew of historians and journalists who were close to the events. One news cameraman, Mark McCauley, used a hidden camera to record the first protests against the communist regime held in Leipzig. In blurred and blackened images of shouting Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In 1930, a couple of romantically involved Chinese expats in Berlin – both revolutionaries in their own way – went on a farewell date. One of them, Deng Yan-da, was due to return home to continue his clandestine political work. The pair saw Marlene Dietrich smoulder through The Blue Angel. Two decades later, Deng’s former partner, Soong Ching-ling, asked a German friend to send a disc of Marlene singing “Falling in Love Again” to her in China. She had not forgotten her Berlin affair. What complicated Ching-ling’s amorous nostalgia was her current role: as vice-chair of the newly installed Read more ...
graham.rickson
Karel Kachyňa’s The Ear (Ucho) begins innocently enough with an affluent couple’s petty squabbles after a boozy night out. He can’t find the house keys and she’s desperate for the toilet. He’s distracted, and she accuses him of having neglected her. Josef Illík’s sharp monochrome photography gleams, recalling classic noir thrillers. The mood darkens once Radoslav Brzobohatý’s Ludvik shimmies over the garden wall and discovers that the couple’s home has been broken into: spare keys are missing, there’s no power, and the phone is dead. That Ludvik and Anna (Jirina Bohdalová, pictured below with Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The excellent booklet essay by Michael Brooke that accompanies this Second Run release of Pavel Juráček’s second, and final feature (it’s presented in a fine 4K restoration) tells us much about the director’s importance for the Czech New Wave, that remarkable period of independent filmmaking that spanned the 1960s. It was brought to an end, of course, by the Soviet intervention in 1968. A Case for a Rookie Hangman intriguingly spans that crucial dividing line: written in 1966, it was filmed only in 1969 and released two years after that, albeit only on a very limited scale (for many observers Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Stalingrad is the companion piece to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, which on its (re)publication in English a decade ago was acclaimed as one of the greatest Russian (and not only Russian) novels of the 20th century. For its sense of the sheer sweep of history, of a society passing through a period of momentous conflict, comparison was often made with Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Stalingrad is the prequel to Life and Fate, and its appearance now allows readers to assess Grossman’s magnum opus – he considered the two novels to be effectively a single work – in its entirety. Tolstoy Read more ...