A lista de Walt:
There are lots of terrific war movies, of course, but most of them tell you relatively little about why the war happened or what the conflict was actually about. And spy movies have long been a popular genre, ranging from Hitchcock’s Thirty-Nine Steps to the gadgetry and glitz of most Bond flicks to the film noir seediness of The Third Man to the paranoid high-tech travelogue that is the Jason Bourne franchise.
But let's raise the bar high, and exclude pure war movies, spy capers, documentaries, and overt propaganda films like Triumph of the Will or Frank Capra's Why We Fight, and focus on movies that tells us something about international relations more broadly. Here's my personal top ten list, with apologies for my ethnocentrism (I don’t see enough foreign-language films).
10. Meeting Venus
Ostensibly a film about opera and an unlikely romance between a diva and an obscure conductor -- set in a fictitious "all-European" orchestra -- this droll sleeper actually tells you a lot about environmentalism, European labor unions, the historical legacy of the Trotsky-Stalin split, and the tangled politics of the European Union. Plus it’s got Glenn Close.
9. Independence Day
Basically a sci-fi flick the depends on you suspending disbelief throughout (e.g., how did Bill Pullman stay cockpit ready for an F-15 while serving as President, and where did Wlll Smith learn to fly a flying saucer?) It's Hollywood, so of course the United States gets to save the world. But it makes my list because it is balance-of-power theory in action: an external threat (giant alien spaceships), gets the world to join forces against the common foe.
8. Syriana
Yes, there are a lot of spies roaming around this movie, but its much broader than that; an exciting if somewhat incoherent portrait of the interplay of oil companies, great power politics, local militias, and the tension between modernity and tradition in the Middle East. Not to be taken too seriously, but not without insights either.
7. Judgment at Nuremberg
Not just a gripping movie, but also a film about a watershed historical event. One could argue that this is where the modern human rights movement begins.
6. Wag the Dog
Instead of invading Grenada or firing cruise missiles at Sudan, here the White House hires a Hollywood producer to invent a wholly fictitious war. Sounds absurd, but those WMD in Iraq turned out to be fictitious too. There's a whole IR literature on "scapegoat wars" (i.e., wars fought to distract the public from other issues), and this film just takes that impulse a step further. It's a cautionary tale in this era of digital special effects, a compliant news media, and the citizens who are all too inclined to believe whatever they are told. Could this be Roger Ailes's favorite movie?
5. Fail Safe
Almost-but-not-quite a war movie, and one of the best Cold War-era "will we blow up the world or not?" thrillers, with a surprising, sobering ending.
4. Gandhi, and A Passage to India (tie)
Everything you ever wanted to know about colonialism and the unavoidable clash of cultures that it produces.
3. The Great Dictator
Chaplin's lethal lampooning of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, released in 1940 and addressing anti-Semitism at a moment when plenty of other institutions were still ignoring it. Reminds us that making fun of despots is often an effective weapon.
2. Dr. Strangelove
Granted, it is a war movie (though the war depicted here won’t last long), but so much more. Kubrick punctured the absurdity of the conventional military thinking in a nuclear age as well as any scholar could, and managed to satirize the whole Cold War mentality to hilarious effect.
1. Casablanca
No, it’s not really a war movie (there are no battle scenes, and the emphasis is on politics, resistance, and of course romance). But it’s on my list, because, well, it's Casablanca. And where would modern discourse be without phrases like "Round up the usual suspects," "Here's looking at you, kid," "I was misinformed," "I'm shocked, shocked!…" and "this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”?
HONORABLE MENTIONS: The Interpreter (not that good a movie, but how many films take place at the UN?); Rollover (an old B movie about a global financial meltdown triggered by crooked corporations, venal foreign investors, and corrupt financiers. Right, as if something like that could ever happen); Local Hero (hot shot rep from a multinational oil corporation is no match for the charms of a quirky Scottish fishing village); Duck Soup (the Marx Brothers show you what could happen if Glenn Beck ran foreign policy); Missing (about the CIA's involvement in Chile); Grand Illusion (a classic antiwar movie, but didn't make my list because it is set in the middle of World War I); Hotel Rwanda (humanity in midst of the world's most recent genocide); Charlie Wilson's War (partly about the Afghan War, but mostly about how things get done -- or not -- in Washington. My CIA friends tell me a lot of it is a crock, but Philip Seymour Hoffman is brilliant and Tom Hanks ain't bad); and last but not least, Reds (the Bolshevik Revolution was a major world event, and it's an excellent movie, too).
A lista de Drezner:
Someone once said that the only proper way to critique a film is by making another film. Following that logic, I think the only way to critique Steve's list is to make my own.
Using Steve's criteria, the overlap between our top ten list is pretty small: Dr. Strangelove and Casablanca. It's not that I hate the other films -- I just think there are better, more entertaining movies out there that highlight some interesting aspects of world politics. Here are eight other films I think are essential watching for international relations junkies:
8. Burnt By the Sun (1994)
The tension in Nikita Mikhailkov's film comes from the juxtaposition of the terror that comes from living in a totalitarian society and the beauty on screen that comes from a family vacation in the Russian countryside.
7. Seven Days in May (1964)
This Rod Serling-scripted, John Frankenheimer-directed movie is the film to watch when musing about civil-military relations, particularly in the United States.
6. Y Tu Mamá También (2001)
Buried within this romp about two Mexican teenagers going on a road trip with a very attractive woman is a lot of subtext about the ways in which globalization has affected Mexico. I'm not sure I agree with all of it, but director Alfonso Cuarón is quite deft in making his points without banging you on the head repeatedly to do it.
5. Conspiracy (2001)
Hannah Arendt wrote about the "banality of evil." This movie -- a real-time recreation of the 1942 Wansee Conference -- is the best evocation of Arendt's theme. Plus, any movie where Colin Firth plays a Nazi is guaranteed to shock.
4. The Americanization of Emily (1964)
An absurdist tale about bureaucratic politics and public relations during wartime. James Garner was the perfect actor to play the protagonist. Possibly the only movie ever made to extol cowardice as a virtue.
3. The Day After (1983)
An ABC television movie that sparked a great deal of controversy when it aired during one of the peaks of Cold War tensions. It's far from a perfect film -- I mean, c'mon, Steve Guttenberg is in it -- but I actually prefer it to Dr. Strangelove on one important dimension. It does a much better job than Kubrick's film at evoking the latent dread that people felt during the Cold War about the possibility of global thermonuclear war. I'm glad this dread has largely disappeared from global consciousness, but there's a part of me that wants younger generations to see this movie periodically just to remember what it feels like.
2. Children of Men (2007)
No top ten list about IR films is complete without a good dystopia flick. The premise (global infertility) is a bit of a stretch, but if you accept that, the rest of the movie seems like an effortless, logical extension of how civilization would respond to such a pandemic. Also directed by Alfonso Cuarón, incidentally. The action sequences are jaw-dropping.
1. The Lion in Winter (1967)
How do you make a movie about the strengths and limits of rational choice in international politics? It helps if you have Peter O'Toole, Katherine Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins, and Timothy Dalton, and biting dialogue.
A lista de Rachman:
That said, it leaves a gap in the market for the rest of us. So here is my list of the top ten, non-American political films. This is very much a first effort. I scribbled them down in about half-an-hour. They are listed in a very rough order of preference:
1. The Marriage of Maria Braun - Fantastic Fassbinder movie about the rise of post-war Germany, made in 1979.
2. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie - This is not strictly speaking a political film, it is too surrealist for that. But Bunuel’s 1972 masterpiece contains the funniest diplomatic reception scene I’ve ever seen - as well as an excellent scene in which the ambassador of Miranda takes pot-shots at anarchists scoping out his embassy.
3. Burnt by the Sun (1994) - Gut-wrenching movie, set against the background of Stalin’s purges.
4. The Sorrow and the Pity - Famous masterpiece; a documentary about France under the Nazis that was so sensitive that it was not released for many years.
5. Monsieur Klein (1979) - On a similar theme, a Joseph Losey film about a Parisian art-dealer who tries to avoid being caught up in the deportation of the Jews, but it all goes horribly wrong.
6. The Yacoubian Building - A recent and very successful Egyptian film that paints a very depressing and compelling picture of modern Egyptian society.
7. The Lives of Others - Recent Oscar-winner, set in East Germany.
8. Apartment Zero - Homo-erotic thriller, made in the late 1980s, and set against the background of the dirty war in Argentina.
It strikes me that all the films I’ve listed so far are a little on the depressing side, so here are two more cheeeful ones to round things off.
9. L’Auberge Espagnol - Who would have thought that you could make a genuinely funny and touching film, centred around the EU’s Erasmus programme for exchange students? This was hugely popular among Eurocrats in Brussels. It came out about five years ago.
10. Carry on Cleo (1964) - Contains the best line in British cinema, when Caesar is attacked and shouts -”Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me.” Much better than “Et Tu Brute”.
Which reminds me, that - of course - Shakespeare was quite good on politics, so Carrying on Regardless:
11. MacBeth - the Polanski version.
12. And if you are allowed television series, Michael Dobbs’s “House of Cards” - with a particularly evil and murderous chief whip. Striking isn’t it, that only the British political movies are comedies.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Postagens
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário