ABSTRACT
The Cold War is much in vogue on contemporary cinema screens. Just as film-makers recycled the Second World War for political and financial profit in the 1950s and 1960s, so a new generation has recently mined the rich seam of Cold War history. Some of the resulting movies have been, like many of their Second World War counterparts, unashamedly triumphalist. In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed, for instance, an American documentary made in 2004, credits the late US actor-turned-president with having ‘freed a billion slaves from their Communist masters’. Other Hollywood products, like the complex thriller Syriana (2005), have taken a quite different political tack by connecting US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) machinations during the Cold War to America’s present-day troubles in the Middle East. Meanwhile, films depicting the degradations faced by those who lived under communism have been in the vanguard of a ‘new wave’ in Central and Eastern European cinema. These include the Romanian-made 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (2007), the harrowing story of an illegal abortion under Nicolae Ceauşescu’s dictatorship, and the German movie The Lives of Others (2006), a compelling, Oscar-winning critique of Stasi surveillance culture. 1
