Cold War Cinema — History, Propaganda, and Left-Wing Film Analysis with Jason Christian & Tony Ballas

How did decades of geopolitical paranoia, nuclear anxiety, and state-sponsored propaganda completely reshape the landscape of global filmmaking? In this episode of Varn Vlog, we dive deep into the intersection of history and film with Jason Christian and Tony Ballas, the hosts of the Cold War Cinema podcast.

From Hollywood blockbusters and hidden indie gems to the stark cinematic outputs of the Soviet bloc and divided Germany, our guests break down how the global standoff between capitalism and communism played out on the silver screen. We discuss the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways governments weaponized art for ideological subversion, the lingering psychological weight of the nuclear age on directors, and how the tropes established during the Cold War continue to dictate modern media narratives today.

We also explore the unique challenges of analyzing historical film through a critical, left-wing lens, sorting through the layers of censorship, blacklisting, and cultural memory that still distort how we view mid-century art. Whether you are a hardcore cinephile, a history buff, or a casual fan of classic cinema, this deep-dive conversation offers a fascinating look at the movies that defined an era.

✨ Check out the Cold War Cinema podcast on all major audio platforms to explore their full catalog of film analyses!:  https://coldwarcinema.com/

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

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Welcome And Guest Introductions

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello and welcome to the Varmblog. And today I am with the host of Cold War Cinema Podcast. Well, at least two out of three of them. Jason Christens and Tony Ballas are with us today. It appears that Paul Klein can't make it. And we're going to talk about two of my favorite things. So I love I love movies, and I love the history of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. And I think two out of three of us are old enough to technically have been alive during the Cold War, although my memory of it is the memory of, I don't know, eight to ten year old. So it is interesting to me. I've also been really interested, and this will come up later, in the way Cold War era politics gets reappropriated in our pop culture in very strange ways now. Obvious things are like the Americans, but also weird Marvel movies like the Black Widow movie, which couldn't figure out how to have that character work without the Cold War background and tried to do it anyway by inventing another Cold War that somehow there were secretly communists hanging out in Cuba that was I don't know, it didn't make any sense. So but for those of you who listened to me for a long time know that I love Russian cinema in particular, I love Soviet sim a lot. I love the stuff that everybody loves, like Tarkovsky, but I also love actual Soviet cinema because Kharkovsky's like a weird man out. So I wanted to ask you guys just the beginning, you know, who you are, what's your scholarly interest? Because your podcast hits that niche where you hit both scholarly and non-scholarly concerns, which is what I hope we hit here too. And why did you think it was important to do a show about the Cold War movie landscape?

SPEAKER_03 2:45

Well, thank you for having us on. And this is kind of a strange story, so bear with me a moment. But the the concept

Why Start A Cold War Film Podcast

SPEAKER_03 2:57

was mine, and it didn't happen immediately. I was sitting in my in-laws house in rural India in summer of 2023, kind of bored with a notebook and several books, trying to figure out a way to come up with a an interesting podcast on cinema. And I knew I wanted to talk about the 1950s because it seems like such a fascinating transitional period full of contradictions and lots of you know new developments culturally and politically and economically. So I and essentially I was talking with my wife, who is a post-colonial scholar from India, and we were talking about how 1947 was the year that India got its independence. But it was also the year that the Truman Doctrine was established, which is people consider the beginning of the Cold War. This is when Harry Truman articulates this new foreign policy that's going to be containment of communism wherever it crops up, especially in the East. And also the CIA was established that year. So 1947 seems to be a very pivotal year globally. And after some brainstorming, sort of came up with a rough scheme, a rough outline. Then I reached out to Tony and I was like, hey, I know you're into the Cold War. How do you we we didn't know the Cold War was even going to be the name yet? We were trying to figure out what you may remember more about that, Tony, than me, but I basically reached out to Tony and another friend that I was in grad school with named Tim. And I was like, hey, how do you feel about being co-host of a new podcast that's about political cinema worldwide from the basically from the late 40s through the 50s? And they said, Yeah. Paul, so Tim stayed with us through most of season one, decided he was didn't want to do it anymore. So then we invited Paul Klein, who couldn't be here today, but he ended up being the third co-host after that. But I don't know, that's that's how it began. And then we launched on we recorded an episode, I think, in December of 2023, and we launched on January 1st, 2024. That's yeah. So now we're going about two and a half years into it. But Tony, do you have anything?

SPEAKER_00 5:31

I do. I just we have different memories of this because my memory is sort of strange. I never knew that I was gonna do anything like this because I recall you reaching out to me and talking to me about a few topics. I remember you asked me, you know, because I was doing some organizing at the time with this adjunct union in New Mexico, and I was very deep into it and writing a lot about it for various outlets, and we had got into a discussion about it, and we decided, hey, maybe we should chat on Zoom or on the phone or something. And I thought we were gonna meet and talk about adjuncting and organizing and precarious labor and higher ed and some other things. And then to my surprise, we were we started a podcast, so it's just a little different. A happy accident, obviously, but mine was just mine's just a little different at the time. I think if I remember correctly, I was writing a little bit. I wrote a couple things with Dr. Horn about the SAGAFRA strikes in Hollywood, and maybe that had something to do with the context that as to why you reached out to me. I don't remember, but I'm happy that yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:47

Let me just add, yes, that was part of it. And at the time I was also working on an article about Jules Dassin's film Refifi, which ended up getting published, and I didn't really know much about the Hollywood blacklist, but he was one of the people who was blacklisted, and he self-exiled to Paris and made this film, and it was kind of his comeback film, where he's examining betrayal and solidarity and very much leaning on Cold War themes, but it's a heist movie and it's an incredible film. And I was writing an essay about that, and so that kind of clued me into kind of I guess the value of looking at the way cinema was shaped by the Cold War in Hollywood in particular. I already knew this, but you know, you can go as deep as you want into this subject, and there's a lot there, and so I think that was one of the factors. And yes, Tony was working on labor issues uh during kind of a classic Hollywood period.

C. Derick Varn 7:48

Oh, okay. I mean, one of the things about the Cold War is it's long, I mean, it's you know the better part of two generations and maybe another half, and that it is it it is super important to American politics, and you describe it as a period of pretty turbulent politics, but what were the themes that you see, like what are the shifts that you see in Cold War cinema, like in a broad view? Like like if we start in 47 and go to 91,

Periodizing Cold War Cinema Trends

C. Derick Varn 8:28

you know, what are the are there clear periodizations? Are there clump trends? Are there counter trends? I mean, what have you noticed going through all these movies and starting to sort them and looking at their context?

SPEAKER_00 8:42

Well, that's a great question. I think that's expansive one. Obviously, if you're covering six plus decades of film or any media, you're gonna have uh some tricky questions of periodization. And that was actually one of the questions we had about how we should organize the the podcast by decade, by theme, by director. So we've kind of chosen a mixed bag in that regard. And I'm sure that Jason has a lot to say about some of the film movements because he knows them a little more intimately than I do, for instance, film Gree, which was a major part of season one, and some of the unique aesthetic traits, somewhere between a sort of a sort of realism mix, you know, with some elements of film noir mixed in. There's been some work on that. This is sort of the period from 1947 to 1951 or two, maybe. Jason probably knows a little better than I do. I mean, there's clearly elements of film noir in this period. Paranoia is a big theme. Apocalypse, nuclear apocalypse is a big theme, obviously. There's there's there's so many different ways to approach this. I mean, you have to think about the advancements of technology also and the cost thereof. The labor strikes actually in Hollywood in the period, Jason, you mentioned 1947. 1947 was a big year of labor politics in Hollywood, also. Jurisdictional disputes between major studio unions, which may have affected the the actual aesthetic style of certain films of that era. There's a lot going on, really. It's it's hard to pin down sort of a Cold War aesthetic. And perhaps that's what the podcast is for, is to find all those ins and outs that you can talk about to do the difficult heavy lifting of periodizing over such a long span of time.

SPEAKER_03 10:31

Yeah. So what I would what I would add is that just thinking about Hollywood, of course, there's a whole world out there of cinema, but just thinking about Hollywood for for now, I would say the first period would be from 1947 to 1960, if you want to periodize, and that would be the blacklist era. And so because the blacklist was so powerful, you know, 10 people went to federal prison for not naming names or not testifying essentially on you know these HUAC House on American Activities Committee hearings. One of those was Dalton Trombow, one was uh John Howard Lawson, several screenwriters and directors. But because there was actual re oppression and repression, like people going to prison, people getting fired, that shaped the the culture and it shaped what could be shown, essentially. And so, like one a few things to say. So so when you think about the the era of Cold War cinema, there's two ways to at least two ways to think about it. One is the production itself, and then the other is the content, right? So like there were lots of things going on to make sure that radical themes or leftist themes were not shown in films. And some of the people who were most interested in kind of sneaking in some socially conscious pro-labor themes were those blacklisted directors like Jules Dassin and Joseph Losi and Dalton Trombo. But then there's then so there was this period where many of the films in Hollywood during that blacklisted era were very like apolitical, kind of lighthearted sort of romps, or they were very much showing American values, American sort of mythology. The Western is huge at this time and it's endorsing a lot of these things. And so it's very intentional. It's not just accidentally doing that. There are literally like interventions with the joint chiefs of staff and the FBI and all these people that were literally co-writing scripts and promoting films and and you know, backing people like John Ford and John Wayne and different people. So it was a combination of all of these things. Now, after 60, the blacklist is ended. You know, it was never officially a thing, but it comes to an end with the film. Many people credit the film Spartacus as the sort of film that ends the blacklist because Dalton Trombeau is openly writing the screenplay. Before he had been clandestinely writing screenplays under pseudonyms, he even won an Oscar for doing that. But this is where Stanley Kubrick, the director, takes a chance and just lets him openly write the screenplay and put his name on the on the credits. And this kind of the world was changing in many ways, and this kind of is officially the end of the blacklist.

Blacklist Era And State Influence

SPEAKER_03 13:38

And then the other key thing here is that the Hollywood production code, which is also known as the Hayes Code, comes to an end around this time. And so there's just a little bit more freedom in general, which of what you can depict on the screen without it being censored by the industry. It's not the state that's censoring it, it's the industry voluntarily doing this. And you know, you can go on and on and on. There's a lot to say, but I think from the 1960 through the 70s through up until the Reagan era, you have certain kinds of films, and then Reagan era is a whole different topic. We haven't even gotten that far in the podcast. We're kind of taking our time with it. And I I want to say that we are we've also looked at Soviet, we've looked so far at Hollywood and Soviet, and that's about it. But we're gonna branch out to global cinema soon.

C. Derick Varn 14:30

Um yeah. I mean Chinese cinema during the 60s and 70s was also very interesting. I I think you know, this is uh this is an interesting point that you make, though, about the Hayes Code and about how American censorship has generally worked, because it is usually operational by industry enforcing something and pretending that they're doing it completely on their own. And they are technically doing it on their own. Like they're not being they're not being forced by the government to do it. But if you actually, you know, and I know you guys have, but for my audience, if you actually study what was going on, there was a lot of pressure for them to do this, otherwise, they were going to use like the interstate comment clause or something to try to get around the First Amendment on on film, and that was threatened all the time. And I do think there are parallels now, like the way the state will cooperate with social media is actually kind of modeled on this Hays Code period stuff where where the state will ask for things, but well, until Trump very recently just being blatant about it, but will ask for things and threaten removal of certain like liability protections, etc. etc. But and in exchange for that, have get around their own laws by having capitalist actors are capitalist firms. But since we're talking about film, I should be careful using actors. But um to get around our own our own laws and our own bourgeois moral code. I mean, one of the things about Hardwood is it always struck me about like parts of the brumaire's like, yeah, the state's been it up in all that stuff directly, but never never enough for it to come up in a way, and it's still true, in so much that anytime you've ever seen the anything military in a film, the DOD has approved it in some way, and they've had to get cooperation with at least one of the branches of the military. I remember telling people, uh, this is beyond the scope of your podcast, but I was talking about the Civil War movie, and I was like, There's a reason why you can't figure out the politics of anyone in that movie. And everyone's like, Oh, it's because the director, I'm like, no, they couldn't have got it made if they actually had specific politics because they're using US military to write a to do a movie where the US loses, and that's literally the only time I've ever heard that. So they're not gonna have any political stakes at all, or that movie would not have been made. And your podcast is very important for people understanding how things may work now because a lot of the stuff is established during the Cold War. What are some of the more interesting? I mean, one of the things I got from your your Cold War movie in Hollywood is Hollywood has has this strange, like it is almost a propaganda piece for the state, but also has this internal intimate critique that quit that keeps on emerging no matter what they do. Why do you think that is? Like, what why is Hollywood often you know playing both sides of the fiddle in the messaging?

SPEAKER_03 17:58

Well, I mean, if you want me to be honest about it, because I mean, you know, if if we we have to demonstrate to the world that this is a democracy and not a dictatorship. And so if we can self-criticize in culture, in discourse, in cinema, in art, then that shows that you know there is some debate here. This is not an authoritarian dictatorship, this is a free place. Now, obviously, this is not like conscious on the on behalf of people, but I I yeah, I mean, I think there's a whole let me just take it to something specific. There's a whole genre of Israeli films that which could map perfectly onto Hollywood that they call shooting and crying movies. And these are movies that are war movies in which they show their military doing bad things, and then there's this kind of cathartic ideological function of both showing how bad it is, repenting and crying about it, but nothing changes, right? I mean, the vast majority of war films are critical of war, but at the end of the day, they they end up for the audience, not for the creator necessarily, but the reception, I think, functions in that way, a shooting and crying film where you see that bad things happen and you know that this is the cost that it takes to have this free place that we have, as flawed as it may be. And, you know, I've argued in one of our episodes, we did an episode on the searchers, and I essentially argued that the entire purpose of the, not the purpose, but the function of the Western genre in particular. So the Western genre is probably the most interesting genre, actually, if we're thinking about the ideological work that it's doing. It's essentially its main function is to justify settler colonialism by showing all the bad things that happened, by showing all the reckoning with it, but ultimately the message at the end of the day is as bad as it was, this is the cost that took. It's a creation myth. You know, this is what it took to get here today. Isn't, I mean, thank goodness we're not doing these things now. It's a little bit like primitive accumulation, but it settler colonial violence is implicit in every film because it's in the background, either implicitly or explicitly. And I think that audiences sort of find some kind of I don't know, catharsis in reckoning with that, but never throwing it out the window. Never the the conclusion is not let's give all the land back and let's dismantle the settler colonial state. And so it has this interesting, nuanced way of reckoning with that's that's sort of where I would start. Tony has probably other things.

SPEAKER_00 21:03

Well, no, I think that that's I agree with. I think most of what you just said, and Derek, you brought up you mentioned Brumaire earlier, and I think that that was very apt. I think that there's a lot of parallels between 1848 and our current sort of moment of the intervention of the state. Not a perfect one-to-one ratio, obviously, but the way I'm thinking about your question is in terms of the the way in which some of the social momentum that you find in in Hollywood during the more radical moments of labor organizing or and so forth in the period that Jason was talking about 1947 to 1960, let's say. A lot of that momentum is captured by

Hayes Code Censorship Then And Now

SPEAKER_00 21:47

by capital and repackaged. You know, I think that that's sort of co-optation. I think that a lot that that's something that I think audiences at least left critical audiences, perhaps they they know very well. In the 1848 scenario, I'm only mentioning this because it's I was really recently kind of doing some work with this. Apparently it was very popular. You had the you had this Polish question. Polish question. And the French elite were very into sort of representing the Polish in the popular arts of the day. It became a sort of there was even a phrase a la polene to to sort of represent the social causes, the social cause of the Polish peasants and the Polish serfdom in the western part of Tsarist Russia after these periods of uprising in 1831 and I think 18 early 18 late 1840. Perhaps early 1850s. In any case, there were migrant populations who were refugees essentially flooding into France and England and so forth. But they weren't often serfs, right? They were often elites who had the means to do such a thing. And so that affected the cultural sort of output. You had operas, you had theater pieces, you had novels, you had various sorts of media who were representing this cause with the patina of sort of a socially forward progressive bent, whilst that social momentum was in a sense being captured. And I think that that's there's a parallel there to the way Hollywood often functions. One of the figures that I'm thinking of, just because again, it's front and center, this is definitely outside of the bounds of Cold War cinema, but it's a nice analogy historically, I guess. There's a magician, Jean-Eugène Robert Houdin, who in the 19th century is one of the most I mean, anytime you look at a magician ever in the 20th century, 21st century, they're essentially modeling themselves after this uh individual in the 19th century who was the most famous modernizer, you could say, of of of the of the media. He's actually conscripted from the state vis-a-vis Louis Louis Napoleon, you know, Bonaparte's nephew to go on this civilizing, which is to say colonizing mission in in Algeria in 1856 to perform his feats of magic to quell an Arab holy uh rebellion that was that was apparently taking place. And so an anti-colonial struggle, to put it in modern parlance, was taking place in Algeria after 1848, and they sent a magician to go handle it. Think about that. That's a very style propaganda maneuver that it seems as though we're very much in the wake of today. I'm thinking of I mean, there's a I won't actually say too much about this, but you can go ahead and look it up. There's probably a reason why David Blaine's name appears very often, very regularly in the Epstein files. That's all I'll say about that.

SPEAKER_02 24:57

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 25:01

I mean, one of the things that we we have that I've been thinking about is the function of cinema as as an outlet and the change of its ideological function. And I've actually often wondered if the ideological function of cinema is actually a little bit more robust post-hayes code than before it, because it's so obvious what they're doing during the Haze Code, like and I mean it gets tied up in things other than the Cold War, but you know, there's this obvious, like we're supposedly a secular nation, but the Haze Code is Christian AF, Protestant Christian specifically. It's it's very it's I mean, for lack of a more nuanced term, it's it is overwhelmingly white-oriented, etc. etc. But it's obviously so, and it does create its own problems, like you know, not being able to show Gum with the wind in the south because there's black act actors in it, etc. etc. etc. Funnily enough, since Gumma Wind is basically you know Confederate apologia. But there's a lot of these sorts of contradictions that happen under the Hayes Code that kind of start working themselves out in a more sophisticated manner in the 1960s. I do think it's interesting that you have like a trifecta of things going on at once, you have you know Kubrick forcing the unofficial blacklist hands, you have you have honestly the beginnings of deindustrialization, which I don't know exactly how that affects the change of cinema, but it feels like we should like mention that Fordism basically starts to end as soon as modern Hollywood studio system starts to end. And that's that's a that's a 10-year process, but it happens. There is let's see what else can we think about. The studio system is ending during, you know. So you have like all this this interesting shifts, and it leads to this period of directors, and like what we think of like could congressive transgressive movies about Vietnam. I remember in my first film class that I took on this topic. God, this would have been like in 2001. This is right before 9-11, actually. So I guess that put a cultural context for where I was at, and I was in Georgia, and we were comparing Vietnam War movies, which you know, I don't see definitely co-war cinema. I don't see you've got a lot of them yet on your show, but we haven't gotten there yet, we will. But just just thinking about that, like I was like, what's the function of all these anti-Vietnam War movies? Because when you go back and watch, I don't know, like the John Rain one, that I think it's the Green Boy Way, the the the one that that that Wayne does in the very beginning of the war. Those movies are so hokey that you can't get modern people to watch them. I've tried, I said, I mean, I watched it in class and was very bored. And then what I was fascinated with is the those spade of uh 70s movies that are effectively after the war, going into the 80s, etc. That they you know, they come 10 10, 15 years after the fact, but they seem to be, you know, they seem to serve a subconscious ideological function for the state in some way, like you described, which is what I find interesting about that, and we can think about the difference in ideological functions, is like that didn't happen for like the the post-cold war war. So if you like look at the Iraq war, there's not nearly as much of a genre of of self-critical Iraq war movies, like they exist, Jarhead exists, etc. etc. But they don't have the cultural impact or the propaganda or ideological effect,

How Hollywood Critiques While Selling Power

C. Derick Varn 29:07

frankly, of those 70s movies. And I just wanted wanted you wanted to ask you what about the Cold War made that possible in a way that it doesn't actually seem as possible now.

SPEAKER_03 29:18

Yeah. I I don't know if I have a satisfying answer for that question, but I will say that the global war on terror cinema kind of filled the vacuum after the end of the Cold War. I mean, you had quite a few movies about you had Zero Dark 30, you had Hurt Locker, you had American Sniper, you had some pretty big blockbuster Hollywood films grappling with the Global War on Terror. And that's, I mean, that's where the state, that's that's where the the sort of scary boogeyman overseas rhetoric shifted after the Cold War. It went from communism to global war terror. I mean, that's just pervasive in the culture after September 11th. And so Hollywood follows that path. I don't know if it I I think if we can say that it doesn't have the same impact or magnitude, just in terms of numbers, just not as many films made. That probably has as much to do with the shifting landscape of media production as anything. I mean, after September 11th, it wasn't all that long before social media came on the scene and the entire media media ecosystem fractures and fragments. And and you know, like if you talk to young people now, they won't necessarily even know something as iconic as pulp fiction. You've never heard of it. Whereas when we grew up in the 90s, or when I grew up in the 90s, I knew about even if I hadn't seen it, I knew about you know these iconic movies from 15, 20 years earlier, right? Like it's not called there is no such thing as common knowledge now, like there was before the advent of uh of social media. So I think that's something to do with it, but I will say that there's still very strong production of these sort of movies. They're just grappling with the new global, you know, imperialist concerns, the global war on terror, essentially. And that's all I say for now. I may come back up, but Tony, did you have something to add?

SPEAKER_00 31:29

It's a it's a great question, and I I have to be honest, I never really thought about it in these terms, Derek. I so I appreciate the way you phrased that. It's very compelling thing to examine. But first of all, let me just say that even if there's populations, demographics in the United States who who aren't familiar with pulp fiction because of some sort of temporal generational division of some kind. I'm sure that everyone's aware now because it appears to be on the everyone's minds because of Pete Heggs. Not a fan really, but a more of a worshiper of some kind of Latino. And in any case. Now you're making me think though that one one point I I again probably won't have a satisfactory answer, but what this made you think about is let me read these films that you mentioned, like Zero Dark 30, Hurtlock, those are the Catherine Halo, right? And then the other one is the sniper movie.

C. Derick Varn 32:27

Yeah, and then like Three Kings is the only one that I felt like was particularly critical of it, and even that's not that critical.

SPEAKER_00 32:33

That's a good point. And that's the point, is like that's it's not even that critical. Some of these earlier iterations aren't even that critical. I'm looking, I'm thinking about Mash or or Deer Hunter, for instance. Now that I'm thinking about these things again, what are they really about? These are kind of the shoot and cry films of the American, you know, late 70s after the war, where the trauma, you know, there might have you might have some sympathetic scenes of of of Vietnamese villagers, for instance, who are who have been tortured, and there's a sympathetic sort of gaze at the camera, portrays them uh in a certain way. But these are really psychological films about the trauma of returning soldiers. And that seems to be the trope that's very significant in the US in history of US film. I mean, that's that's I I can't really unsee that retroactively, thinking through the period of the 70s that you mentioned, but also the post-US, excuse me, post-World War II era, the so-called as James Narmour, I think, and my my film studies knowledge is sort of spotty to be honest with you, put it you know, the sort of masculinity in crisis era after uh 18 uh sorry, 1947, 1944, 1945, and the return of all these men from from the theater of of anti-fascist war. It's it's a deep psychological realism sort of uh embedded in the way that the US media uh cinema apparatus sort of functions in all these periods, and that maybe is a formal element that you can't seem to strip that is its own stricture on the sorts of critiques that that US cinema is capable of making in these periods. That would be my sort of you know impromptu answer, I guess.

SPEAKER_03 34:22

Well, just to well, just you mentioned like the crisis of masculinity and all this stuff. This is like the operating ideological uh theme, if you want to put it that way, of film noir, the film noir tradition, which was the heyday of that, was you know, toward the end of the war, post-war era, mid to mid to late 40s through early 50s. That's the heyday of the and so films that don't have to be directly about imperialism or about war to grapple with the exact themes of that, right? So, so like the the the film noir tradition is grappling with those themes as much or more than the war folk films during that time, more honestly, in many ways, and so you know the French picked up on that, and they're the ones that coined the term Film Noir, and they they really ran with that idea and wrote a lot about it and were inspired by it, but um it always goes back to the French somehow.

SPEAKER_00 35:20

What's going on here with that?

SPEAKER_03 35:21

Yeah, yeah, that's true. And and that's all I had to say, really.

C. Derick Varn 35:27

Yeah, oh, I think of I actually think of a lot of French Cold War cinema being very different. I mean, even like somewhat reactionary filmmakers like Melville are still making celebratory movie movies about the popular front, even in the even in the height of the Cold War. You think about Army of Shadows, which is not pro-communist in any way. I mean, like I said, Melville was a reactionary, but like it it doesn't remove the communist terrorism in the popular front. I your point though about the way other genres of movies actually reflect this back is really vital. Like the fact that you know, you pointing out that the Western's high period is actually during the period of the Cold War. It's not something I've ever actually thought about, but it is a kind of like getting to the Soviet critique of American imperialism and also hiding the empire right under its own nose by admitting it. It's it's this weird, like double move that like you know, we all see today that even reactionaries will call the United States an empire. Like, but I know that I don't know how old you are, Tony, but I know how old Jason is. And I'm about the same age. And one of the things I think a lot about is like in the 2000s, and I was not a leftist that early, I was not a Marxist yet, none of that happened yet, but I was I was talking about the American Empire, and uh from actually a paleoconservative point of view at that time, and the response I got by calling you as an empire was was basically nuh-uh. And I was like, what do you think Manifest Destiny is? Like, I don't know how to also you don't know about Manifest Destiny because the other thing that we've done successfully in our school teaching is not mentioned that we tried to expand north first and then lost, that's what the war of 1812 was, and then only decided to expand West later. But because you know, we we may are sort of we we if it's it's interesting as an ideological project, what people misunderstand about the early Americas. Like, for example, I've read this French revolution this French American revolutionary writer Quebec, and he's talking about like the incorporation of Ontario and Nova Scotia into states. And and he thinks they'll do it voluntarily. And I find it funny because like when we talk about the 13 colonies, we don't we forget to mention there are other ones that still exist, they're just in what is now Canada. So there's all these kind of like consolidation national myth moves that happen in this time period. There's many, there's some that I didn't realize. For example, the Thanksgiving myth is consolidated actually mostly right after World War II. Like like I did not, I really recently like, yeah, the Thanksgiving was the holiday that was posited by Lincoln after the Civil War, basically, to unify various state holidays that were separate. But the myths around it are basically post-World War II historical constructions. So, like, if you like go to the 19th century, you're not reading a lot about pilgrims and shit. Um like as like a justification for American settlements. In fact, if you read, you know, what you actually tend to read from the 19th century about Puritans is usually another kind of like almost, you know, what you might call the the the witch trial version of shoot and cry literature. And I think that is interesting to note that a lot of our national mythology and traditions are codified in media in the cold war.

SPEAKER_03 39:27

They're not they actually don't they're not codified before that, and you know I think sorry to interrupt, in god me trust was added to the the the currency in what I think 1954, right?

C. Derick Varn 39:43

The height of the cold war, right? Same with the under god added to the otherwise well, okay. The guy who did it was kind of a nationalist socialist, he wasn't the greatest guy, but he was a socialist who wrote the the the American Pledge of Allegiance, not so much a Marxian one, though, so make of that what you will. But Under God was not in that either. So all that stuff was added by by Eisenhower, who probably was an atheist. That's the other funny thing about Eisenhower, is like you go into his religious beliefs, he doesn't really seem to have had any. But but anyway, uh I guess one of the one of the things I I'd like to ask you is when we talk about the co-war art, and I do think a lot of it is art, but it's a lot of it is also propaganda. And I guess how do we deal with that line, and how do you get people to like accept that sometimes great art is also intentional or not, and I think a lot of times it isn't intentional, great propaganda. And this time period really shows a lot of that. Uh uh what is your your responses to that, Tony?

SPEAKER_00 40:56

Well, I I try my hardest not to moralize the question of art and propaganda, because doing so, there's a certain risk in doing so, and that's when you start to slip into well, you get you actually fall into the trap of the geopolitical sort of arrangement, not talking about the 13 colonies arrangement, but the Cold War arrangement, which often comes up, you know, in the context of this podcast and and and the Eastern versus Western bloc powers squaring off on the propaganda on the propaganda front. We sort of already mentioned this in terms of the Hayes Code and and so forth. I mean yeah, there there are censorship boards and there are there are certain motivations in the in the studios here and in the Ministry of Culture, or whatever it might have been called in the Soviet context, for the cultural output. Some of it was deliberately propagandistic, some of it was not. In a sense, moralizing the question sort of reduces us down to reactionaries wherein we can

Vietnam Films And Post 9/11 War Movies

SPEAKER_00 42:07

think we think we can judge a film or a piece of artwork based on a gut feeling, a gut moral instinct, and so forth, without taking the cues of the critical toolbox to evaluate forms, to evaluate the shapes and and the reps uh of the representations and so forth. I mean, I think that that's just sort of an art criticism, film criticism 101. But but it's an important question to ask because we often forget that we ought to be tasked with this as viewers and listeners of of the media that we're imbibing in any epic. Ours probably now more than ever, I I I would hope.

SPEAKER_03 42:55

Yeah, I would also just point out that we always talk about propaganda, but when we say propaganda, we mean things we don't like. We we we never acknowledge the propaganda and the things we do like. And so I don't have a problem with propaganda. I'm a fan actually of propaganda. In fact, I'm gonna be studying, I just got into a PhD program, and I'm gonna be studying propaganda and and cinema quite a bit. But I I think it's interesting to point out that the culture has told us that propaganda is something from a point of view that we disagree with, and that that sheer fact alone weakens its art potential. And I think that there are different ways to think about that. So, so like thinking about the Soviet Union for a moment. So, after you know, the early days of cinema in the Soviet Union, you you had a lot of avant-garde experimental cinema, uh, actually incredible stuff, like man with a movie camera and things like that. Very much not realism in any way, but it has this propagandistic imperative. It's it's trying to show, well, at the very least, it's trying to show positive images of this new revolution, this new Soviet entity that has come into being and it's developing rapidly. And but it does it in a very abstract, uh, you know, avant-garde kind of way. And then along comes Stalin and Stalin's, not just Stalin, but the Soviet Union's policy of uh mandating socialist realism, a whole different approach to art. And it has this mandate to do a similar thing, to promote uh socialist values, socialist you know, organizations and institutions. Institutions and so forth. But that is a kind of parameter that artists have done incredible things within it, basically. Like it it didn't, it wasn't a situation where it's like, oh, I can't make art now. It was like, what is the challenge of making art within this point of view or within these strictures? And some of you know, some great art came out of the Soviet era that was that was mandated to be socialist realists. And so my point being that there wasn't one way to approach propaganda and art, and there were art potential in both. It came down to many factors, and there were some duds during the avant-garde period period, and there were some duds during the socialist realist period, and there were some masterpieces in both, too. Now that's in the Soviet context. You could say the same thing about Hollywood. I mean, Hollywood is an ideological machine, it teaches us how to talk, how to wear our clothes, how to dress, how to fix our hair. I mean standardizes our accents. It standardizes our accent, it standard standardizes our jokes. Think about in high school, all the people quoting the same movie over and over, affectations and speech. It standardizes a lot of things. And but there's art potential still within that framework. And so these are, I guess, complex questions, but it's a good it's a good thing to think about. It's something we think about a lot on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 46:14

Let me say one just one more thing about it because I was, you know, when I say I tend not to moralize it, I really mean it because all our all production of I mean, we're we're working within constraints at every moment.

SPEAKER_03 46:27

Right. I just I just don't see, I mean, I just don't see economic strained, political restraints.

SPEAKER_00 46:33

Yeah, it's like some are more uh explicit perhaps forward than others. But constraint is, you know, just one of those givens on any form of production anywhere. You're you know, from language up to cinema. It doesn't really matter. So it's it's not something to to absorb the you know, to think that we need to absorb the lessons of of any given propaganda just because we are not we're free refusing to admonish propagandists. I mean, that's ridiculous. And I'm not suggesting that anyone here is suggesting that, but you know it is a cultural thing though.

SPEAKER_03 47:11

People, it's a knee-jerk reaction to denouncing as propaganda. But just to take it back to the French for a second, I love the Olipo movement. So the Olipo movement was uh um uh literary movement that intentionally placed sometimes bizarre and and really limiting constraints on the production of the art, you know. And one novel famously was written without the use of the letter E, an entire novel. Why? Just to do it. What kind of what what can I do here? What can I achieve with this artificial constraint? So so there's a lot of avant-garde potential or are within self-imposed constraints too, anyway.

C. Derick Varn 47:49

Yeah, back when I taught creative writing, I used to take ellipo constraints and be and and to be an ass kind of, but to force my students to innovate, I'd be like, and you cannot use y and e in this story anywhere. Um and you don't realize how hard that is. Do you remember the E is the most common letter in the English language?

SPEAKER_00 48:12

Did you realize Dirk that you were becoming a Georges Perec propagandist by doing yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 48:20

Well, you're a poet, right? So you're already used to ruffling feathers and and and yeah, I'm used to doing all kinds of stuff.

C. Derick Varn 48:27

I also love uh my favorite thing if people this is a side note, but it's related. When people read my poetry, they ask, they always ask me, like, how does this relate to your politics? And I'm and I do the bourgeois thing, but actually it's it it it's more just like I have no idea how it relates. It does, I'm sure it does actually.

SPEAKER_03 48:47

But it came from you, that's how it relates.

C. Derick Varn 48:50

Yeah, but like if you ask me, like, how did Marx affect this? It did he didn't, not knowingly. I mean, sure he did, but like I have no idea how he did. And I do think that's interesting. I I wanted to ask you, like, I always found this observation when Marx wrote about Steinhall, and like he would always say that some of the reactionaries were actually the best propagandists for socialism because they were weirdly more honest. Whereas like the he was comparing that to the to 19th century socialist realists who were I want to like them, I do, but as a literature guy, whenever I read them, I'm always like, God, this is terrible. Oh my, it's so obvious what they're doing. And it is propaganda in the bad sense, it's like it's just like obviously weepy emotionally manipulated stuff. But I have been thinking about someone like Kubrick, who's who I think makes a lot of progressive movies, but politically, Kubrick was not. I actually have no, I don't understand Paul. Like, I've read a lot on Kubrick and tried to figure out his politics, and I'm not sure he actually even had any. I mean, he did because everyone does, but his politics were more, you know, petit bourgeois, I don't want to deal with it.

SPEAKER_02 50:00

Right.

C. Derick Varn 50:01

And yet he makes some of those politically aware movies kind of accidentally. I mean, like, are just from his like coldness perspective. Are there any other directors you see like that operating during the war who might actually have been who been doing interesting things, cutting both ways despite themselves? I can think of an artist in the other direction. I think of Louine's Lorraine Hansbury, no communist part of the the the the tail end of the Harlem Revenus movement. And yet I think unfortunately, a raisin in the sun can be used for kind of like liberal propaganda reasons pretty easily.

SPEAKER_03 50:41

So go ahead. Well, I would say one film that we covered on the podcast, and Tony actually wasn't on that episode, he couldn't make it, but this is one where it kind of shoehorned some propaganda in, probably to please the studio and and to to satisfy the needs of the source material, but it it reaches the level of art, but the the artist itself is complex, quote unquote, and uh a true liberal in the sense of like wanting to shine a light on underdogs and so forth. But anyway, the film Pickup on South Street, which is a fantastic film noir, very much with Cold War themes, directed by Samuel Fuller. So I would say Samuel Fuller is one of those directors that accidentally comes across as reactionary in some ways, certainly pro-US imperialism, but also critical of it at the same time. You know, he was a darling of the French New Wave. He was even a cameo, he came to cameo in a in, I think in a Godard film. Uh he's just playing himself. And but Samuel Fuller is one of those directors that's kind of like I would say more of a committed liberal than Stanley Kubrick, but certainly complex themes. And Pick Up on South Street is a fantastic film, despite its obvious kind of you know, you know, it's it was a very easy trope to just throw in the Soviet person or this or this commun so-called communist, and just they just kind of represent diabolical evil. You don't know what they really want or stand for, they're just this diabolical evil villain. So there's a little bit of that in the movie, but it's still a great film.

C. Derick Varn 52:31

I think about this in terms of like James Bond movies, because I mean they're British, so they're slightly different, but but they're very Cold War explicitly. But also like all the villains are communists, but when you look at what they're doing, I'm like, what shred of communism is like they just seem like gangsters. Like, you just happen to make them communists, so they can be bought in a spies pillar. Like, I don't really know. There's no communist ideology of what they're doing.

SPEAKER_03 52:58

Like covered several anti-communist Hollywood films that were just like that, they're essentially structured identically to a gangster film, except it's it was just like swap out gangster for communist, right? Tony, like I married a communist was one of them.

SPEAKER_02 53:13

Uh just right, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 53:17

Oh, yeah. I just gonna ask me some specific things about your show because I was looking at the movies you covered, and you covered some movies that like I've never even heard of that. Um, particularly from the 40s. And I Married a Communist is a movie that I'm like, I didn't know this movie existed.

SPEAKER_03 53:34

There's a lot of lore about that film. There's a lot we don't have to go into, but there's a lot of lore around the production of that film and how it was how it came to be. And it's a shame Paul's not here because he could go deep into that, um, something he knew a lot about.

C. Derick Varn 53:52

So I I was uh yeah, it's interesting to think about some of the a transition movie. Um, you guys did an episode on Monsieur Verdeau by Charlie Chapman, and I don't think of Chapel as part of Cold War cinema because most of what he's most famous for is World War II and back. So I I wanted to bring that movie up though, because it's 47, so it's the transition year. What did you notice watching that movie? And what did it say about the transition to Cold War cinema from you know pre-interwar cinema?

SPEAKER_00 54:29

Great question. Uh I'd have to have to kind of go back in time because it's been a while since I've seen it, but if I remember correctly, and maybe a listener who's seen the show can correct me if I get this wrong, but or who's listened to the episode, I if I remember correctly, there are these scenes through the tail end of that film which depict the aftermath of the anti-fascist war that the Allies waged. And you have these scenes of sort of the aftermath of like a war-torn urban environment, and they're kind of out of place in the general sort of arc of the characters of uh yeah. And he's sort of a he's sort of a I mean it's a strange part too for Chaplin. You know, it's a it's a talkie, first of all. And he didn't make too many of those, right? And it's a late film in his career. This is pre-exile, or is it postation? Do you remember?

SPEAKER_03 55:29

I think it's just a little bit before.

SPEAKER_00 55:31

A little before?

SPEAKER_03 55:32

I think so, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:34

But he's so he has this sort of it's a very it's there's a it's not like a robust in-your-face social commentary, it's very subtle, if if I remember correctly. And a lot of it takes place in the background. I mean, he's he's he goes to jail. I don't want to give the movie away, also, but you know, there's it's it's really the tail end of the film, I think, has the has the social commentary.

SPEAKER_03 55:56

Yeah, he

National Myths Built During The Cold War

SPEAKER_03 55:57

he gives a speech where he's saying, I might be a serial killer, but it this is nothing compared to the state-sponsored terror that's unleashing on the world currently.

SPEAKER_00 56:05

And that's his power of speech, right? Like that's his sort of he's about to be killed or something, right?

SPEAKER_03 56:12

Yeah, he's about to be, he's sitting in jail, he's about to be executed, I think. And it's a harrowing kind of speech, soliloquy. And he was criticized for that. But I mean, one thing that makes it a Cold War film is of course it it presages the this you know very violent period of time to come, which you know, shortly thereafter, you know, a lot of people let me just interrupt myself. A lot of people thought, and the Soviet Union hoped that after the end of the war there would be a period of peace and they could rebuild Europe and they could rebuild the Soviet Union. And and you know, the Soviet Union lost, I don't know, what, 20 million people or something like that, and their whole country was wrecked. So they needed to rebuild. All of Europe was wrecked, but the US chose to give a lot of money under the Marshall Plan to Western Europe to rebuild. And in that interim period before the Korean War started in around 1950, there was a lot of hope that we had seen the worst of humanity and there was a golden period to come. But unfortunately, the US escalated tensions with the Soviet Union and got into a lot of proxy wars with the Soviet Union, including in Korea and divided the country. And I think that film, looking back on it, kind of anticipates that kind of false hope of peace and and like the the inherent violent nature of imperialism, essentially. But also, as you mentioned a second ago, Tony, just as a thinking about the behind the camera. Charlie Chaplin was exiled. He was his he had been living, you know, he was a darling of Hollywood, he had been living in the US for decades, and they just he went on a trip to Europe and they revoked his visa and said, You can't come back, you're you're deported in a passive way. So he had to resettle in Switzerland, I believe.

SPEAKER_00 58:13

So sometimes films become retroactively Cold War films, given the way history works.

SPEAKER_03 58:20

And and he was very sympathetic to Soviet Union. He was kind of a fellow traveler, he was he won a big prize with the Stalin prize or something. He was beloved in the Soviet Union and won prizes there, and he was sympathetic to socialism, and and so he ended up becoming a victim of the Cold War, you could say. So that's that's some of the things I'd say about that film in particular. It's also just a really interesting, I recommend it, it's a good movie.

C. Derick Varn 58:47

Yeah, thinking about that transition, yeah, because I I will say when when you study when you study cinema, you tend to get a lot of like interwar cinema, and then you like basically skip to the mid-50s, like you know, and we talk about some noirs and maybe some restorns, but in general, we're not talking about most of the actually produced movies during that time period. And it is interesting because while I agree with you guys, like I like I knew I was born in 1980 and I knew all the big films from the 60s and 70s, like by the time I was probably 10, you know, like but I didn't know any of the big movies from the from of my grandparents' generation at all, and what I got served was like Shirley Temple movies, right? Like, so like I was I I didn't realize until I was an adult how like we we were not shown a lot of that uh code cinema and a lot of the more interesting parts of that. I I think that's interesting to note today when we talk about like who knows what and these movies, because uh I was thinking about the another thing that comes up in your podcast a lot, which is the material production conditions of and how they affect cinema. Like one of the things about the aughts is you have a media fragmentation in one country, but you also have the need for mass profits. Uh, so you almost following Marxist lines, verbatim, you start searching for products in other markets like China, and so making movies that have very specific historical context, even if they're universal to a nation, not they're not gonna go like if you if I'm you know, I doubt that Apocalypse Now is readily available to the entire planet, as far as like its historical references and whatever, and so that changes what you can make. This brings me to like in general, a couple of a couple of things. What were some of the notes that you guys saw that technology allowed changes for in Cold War cinema and the movies that you've watched so far? Like, what what has what has capitalist development and socialist development like led to you in terms of what filmmakers were doing?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:03

Oh, one thing that that came to my mind in I think part one or part two of Jason, you might have to correct me. Of the hyphen the terrible terrible. Oh, it's part two, okay, seized the color film stock that was produced in Germany that was very expensive to produce, and they incorporated

Drawing The Line Between Art And Propaganda

SPEAKER_00 1:01:27

it, Eisenstein incorporated it into part two of that film in a very interesting way. And so the film itself is a sort of emblem of anti-fascism, not only thematically but materially at the technological sort of raw materials stock level, and that was something that was that was very interesting. That was made available, thus, with uh the development of film production celluloid technologies in the capitalist world, and the cost of producing it was so high that it it was not very easy to get in the Soviet context, so they had to seize it.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:02

Yeah, just to say a little more about that particular question. So the actually the latest episode of our podcast is an interview with the scholar Alice Lovejoy, and she just wrote a book called Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War, and she does a fantastic job of tracing the material production of film itself, the actual technology, the film itself. So, you know, film was very flammable, and they found a way to make non-flammable film, but they still still didn't market it because it was so expensive. And it never came a point where they switched over totally because of the economics finally made sense. It was like 20 years later. But what what you're talking about, Tony, is she mentions in that episode, she solved the riddle for us, which was that after the war, whenever they divided up Germany, you know, after World War II, Germany was partitioned into four sections. And the four, you know, Soviet Union, UK, France, and United States basically were in charge, took over one of those four sectors, and essentially just pillaged everything they could. And so the Soviet Union took everything. They literally dismantled the the factory that that made the color film. They dismantled the walls, put them ever, they took every machine and everything they could get, put them on trains and sent them east, the walls itself of the factory, and reconstructed it and started using that technology. So that was a spoiler of war, a reparation or something like that at World War II. But in terms of, I mean, some of the most man, I don't even know how to. Well, one interesting thing is the helicopter at some point it gets used to do aerial shots. And of course, a helicopter is a military technology. And one of the well, the very first film, which we haven't covered on the podcast, but the very first film that uses aerial shots for for like wide shots of of you know on location in Hollywood is the Nicholas Ray film. Oh, I'm forgetting what it's called. Oh, let's see.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:25

The guitar, the guitar one?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:27

No, they live by night. They live by night is a fantastic film. It's a film noir. But anyway, so things like that. I think that they're using military technology to enhance the film production. And so I guess maybe the takeaway here being that military, the military, the state security apparatus, the military has always been entwined with with Hollywood and also in in the Soviet Union context. You know, film itself, the Kodak helped develop the atomic bomb, which was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kodak helped with the chemicals. That's one of the subjects of that book that I just mentioned. So I don't know if that answers your question, but those are some things that come to mind.

C. Derick Varn 1:05:16

That does answer my question to get to a large extent. I think about the the interplay between the military-industrial complex. I mean, one of the greatest and most interesting things about uh the United States history is that after World War II, we like to pretend that business came up with all this innovation, maybe with the help of some universities. And what you actually see is like it's mostly DARPA. Like most primary scientific research is funded by DARPA, and even when it goes through the universities, who's giving the universities money, the State Department, the CIA, or DARPA? Um, you know, and I I find that I find that interesting, and it's one of these things when I when I tell people about like the history of the Cold War, there's a lot of paranoia. But the other thing I will say is like, well, but who was who was involved, who was involved in filmmaking in the and you know, in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, people who were college educated for the most part. And you can't throw a stone at a college in the 1950s without hitting someone two degrees removed from the CIA. Like, like it shows up in obvious places, but it shows up in weird places. Like you're like, I was I was like doing research on Terrence McKenna and Dennis Leary. Both of whom had CNA ties. Lauren Channel, CNA ties, William Bluckley, CNA ties. Like it's like half of the culture industry of the 1960s and 70s on both sides of the political divide in the United States, right? Are two steps removed from the CNA. And that's not because they were all CNA plants, it's because the CNA was all up in the educational institution and the cultural apparatus of the post-Cold War era. In fact, it spent, I mean, if you read the program years and the counter-revolution of the word, these are the two books I tell people to read on this, which go into this in a large thing. You have this one point where the CNA is funding abstract expressionism, but it's also funding the people protesting it as communist at the same time. And then they're like, and then they're funneling people into both the CPUSA and also the American Nazi Party. And sometimes they're the same people. One of the issues is like, I'm not an Alex Jones, everything is secretly Project Ladio, and you actually sound like a right-wing. But it's just a historical fact. Like I said, most of these people weren't CNA, they weren't CNA agents, they didn't have handlers, they were just two steps removed, but they but they had access and they were probably partial assets. And that's you know, and people say, Well, oh, do you sound paranoid? Look at one of the things that we learned from the from the the files do Epstein is to give it a faux French title, is how many people are two steps removed from intelligence apparatuses now, particularly Massad and Shimbet, but also the CIA, also MI5 and MI6. Even the FSB, there are they are implicated, like although liberals like to make the FSB at like they're the main thing, and they're like number six or seven down, of what I've read. But I think it's interesting because I was gonna ask you that there's a deep sense of dread and paranoia in in Cold War cinema and the obvious movies like Invasion of Body Stancers, Menturian Candidate, any spy thriller. But that paranoia seems to be endemic to society, and also it I'm just gonna say it also seems to be coming out of a very real place because people are encountering government government intelligence a lot more than probably we do today. I wanted to ask you where do you see these anxieties though playing out in Cold War cinema that aren't obvious? They're obvious in Evasion of the Body Status and Macurity in Canada. And they're they're there, but a little less obvious in film noir. I mean, you guys mentioned film noir. I don't think of it as like part of the paranoia of the Cold War, but it really is actually. Like if you like look at its key themes, it's just displacement. But are there any other genres where you saw this paranoia seeping into society? And do you think that paranoia was partly like rooted in something that people were experiencing, not just propaganda without removing the or using propaganda in the colloquial sense, not in the the technical sense that we've been using it elsewhere?

SPEAKER_03 1:10:16

Yeah, well, the western, the western is just chock full of these kinds of themes. And Johnny Guitar, which was just mentioned a moment ago, Nicholas Ray, he he was kind of friends with a lot of these blacklisted directors, but never was he actually was, he did testify, and I'm pretty sure there's never released the testimony. So for all we know, he named names, but he was kind of a fellow traveler. But he made a movie called Johnny Guitar, which is fantastic, just a really artsy Western. And a lot of people see that there's heavy Cold War themes in that.

Soviet Propaganda Aesthetics And Constraints

SPEAKER_03 1:10:57

You know, one of the one of the concerns of a lot of movies, crime and western movies in particular, is that somebody is compromised and somebody is willing to talk to the authorities to undermine whatever's afoot, whatever's going on here. It may not be completely legal, but whatever, whatever scheme is is afoot in this film, somebody's gonna rat. And and that, or somebody might rat. And just that feeling is pervasive in a lot of these movies. And and just the like I mentioned before, there's two sides of this coin. There's one from the side of we need to watch out for infiltration or watch out for rats among us. The other side is endorsing what are this you know self-promoted mythology or whatever of the American project, the American democracy. And that's a huge theme. And you know, most western are on the frontier, and they're it's an avatar for the country itself. You know, you have a group of people trying to settle and live peacefully. And this is where it has a lot in common with like a lot of the Israeli media. We just want to be happy and enjoy our lives, and these people keep disrupting it. These people, Palestinians, keep disrupting it. We just want to be happy and and and that's kind of a concern a lot of Westerns. And sometimes those people disrupting it are the indigenous people, like Comanches or whoever, and sometimes they're a group of bandits, like white people who are bandits or a mixed group of bandits, and they're trying to disrupt things. And at the end of the film, things are set right. You know, the bad guys are defeated, and things settle down and they can get on with their lives. And this reaffirms kind of the idea that it may be flawed, but this this democracy that we have is probably the best that human beings can devise. And so The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence is really the quintessential, in my opinion, the quintessential Hollywood pro Cold War film. And we haven't discussed it yet. John Ford directed it. John Ford did a lot of films that concern these ideas of democracy and and freedom and so forth. And let me just just to reiterate uh earlier the the joint chiefs of staff had a meeting in 1956 with John Ford and Ward Bond and John Wayne and some others, and essentially said, Will you work with us? We want to start we want to fund a new production company, which they did. And the first film that was made was The Searchers. And we want to inject what they called militant liberty views. And and so they have this whole program, and this is something that's never talked about really. And they were like, hell yeah, we'll play ball, we'll do this in a heartbeat. So they were very much CIA. I mean, uh well, not CIA assets, I'd say military assets just for a military intelligence asset, basically. Yeah, yeah. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon met with them. So it's really interesting, and there's a lot of that. I I I could go on, but I maybe I'll hand it over to Tony and see what he wants to add.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:27

Well, this I guess in terms of the paranoia sort of features where you don't expect it. I mean, looking back on some of these films, some of which I I haven't seen before until we watched them for the podcast where I hadn't seen in a long time, are these John Garfield movies? Oh, what's it called? What's the one where he's in the apartment?

SPEAKER_03 1:14:46

He he ran, yeah. No, no, he ran all the way. He ran all the way, yeah. Very good film.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:53

Oh, it's amazing. And I mean when when these films, some of these films, you know, there's a a criminal at the at the forefront, or the protagonist is somehow uh getting involved with with uh in legal troubles and is on a run. And these films, you know, we don't romanticize the great criminal like in the old mob Caesar, I don't know, Bonnie and Clinton. Little Caesar, I should say. I don't know. But this paranoia is sort of, even though we all know that this person did something that was maybe unscrupulous, we still feel for this character, and you feel this sense of paranoia where the walls are closing in. And that's this is a very strange feature of some of these films where sympathy for the low-class criminal who's only sort of a criminal by necessity or by happenstance in a way, and so the the the question of fate and contingency is and class is sort of wrapped up in in the in the paranoid affect that some of these early films, and that's not to say the paranoid thrillers that come out later in the 60s and so forth, some of which we've covered on the podcast. In fact, a recent one we covered, which was with uh the filmmaker Adam McKay on the film uh seconds, which really drives home the paranoid thriller. To me, that's the quintessential Cold War film, right? Just because of it, has every it has all the elements that Derek you're talking about. There's a CIA sort of element behind the screen, uh the scenes pulling all the strings, and and there's the art, the discourse of art, manufactured, expression, abstract expressionism, this front-facing, and so forth. But that's a different period. This earlier period has that same affect, and I don't know, I just found it interesting that I never thought about it. I was exposed to a lot of these films when I was a kid because of my father and mother, who were born in the 50s, and and this was sort of I was sort of inherited their nostalgia in a way, and and you know, watching him for a second time as an adult, I'm like, wow, yeah, I feel this serious paranoia that this could happen to anybody, right? And now the difference is that in something like seconds, there's no cause, we don't really know what happened. We don't know, you know, he didn't do anything wrong, this character. But you get the same aspect even in these earlier 1949-50 films with John Garfield as the main example, where we know what he did wrong, but you still feel the walls closing out him anyway. That's just some thoughts I had.

C. Derick Varn 1:17:28

Oh, yeah. Seconds is a great film. Yeah, it's interesting to think about the Western. I'm I'll I'll give a little weird anecdote from my from my life. I was I came from a blue-collar white family, so when they went to find babysitters, the only people they could find was older black people grew up in Georgia. So this was, and my my babysitter was was a woman, black woman born pre-depression, didn't even have a social security number because they didn't give them to all the black people in the south. She was she must have been in her 70s and the and the 80s. I remember though she loved westerns, but would like explain them to me in these kind of strange ways. When I say strange, like she was she was in inherently picking up parts of the of the mythology and like critiquing it just from like like you know a folk southern farm worker who is spending her aging things watching white people's kids. It was interesting how much people were kind of aware that those westerns were about our justification, our justifications of early American projects, but for the time period in which they lived. And and you know, people intuited that. And I think, you know, depending on your your particular background, it would it would change things. And I always remember that. And actually, even my middle school was a was the black high school refurbished, and it had only been so for 10 years when I went to it, and that was in the night, that was in the 1980s. Which I do think is interesting because one of the things I think about from the movie pictures of America during the Cold War, and I want to get to this racial element before I go back to the Soviet context, is that the racial tensions don't really get explicitly explored until the mid to late 60s, and even then it's done so in a way that makes it seem like it's rarer than it was. Are you know are those films, which you don't think of as co-war films, but if you think about the racial narratives tied into that and who was supporting like if you were a black artist in the 50s in the 40s and 50s, particularly in the 50s, you almost join the CPUSA just to get funding. Because like no one else was supporting the community at the time, really. So I wonder what you make of the racial elements of the of this of this cinema and the way that it in some ways plays a ideological role by making the ugly parts of American racial history seem further back

Film Technology And Military Material Ties

C. Derick Varn 1:20:47

than they are. So I guess it touches on two different things. One is I I I I think people were picking up on the function of the Western subconsciously, and two, what but you know, there's the obvious racial stuff in there, it's aimed at indigenous people. But what other things did you did you notice about Cold War cinema that may have admitted American sins in the past, but like did it in a way that made it feel like they were more firmly passed than they possibly could have been?

SPEAKER_03 1:21:17

Tony. Well, it's a fantastic question. Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:20

I have to think about because you're right to say that the racial sort of tensions in Hollywood apparatus were not really explored explored in this period until the 60s that much. Sometimes in these blacklisted filmmakers, with the films of these blacklisted filmmakers, you will have these these storylines where, for instance, Canada Lee plays opposite of John Garfield in Body and Soul, and he is a black fighter boxer. The movie's all about boxing, obviously. It set the precedent for the boxing film that we know and love today. But he's fighting opposite this sympathetic character who's debilitated from fighting, and who at the time audiences likely would have known had a different history than a white fighter, uh, because the boxing is such a racially fraught sport and it's difficult to escape in the United States context. I mean, figures like Jack Johnson in the pre-you know the well, I used to first cold the early years of the Red Scare, Red Scare one was, you know, sort of yeah, Red Scare one, uh or maybe Red Scare two, even, but anyway, go ahead. You're right. You're right, Red Scare two or three, even. But but then one in the 20s, yeah. Right, exactly. And you have these, you have films that do explore these typically in the background, but they're they're they're sometimes wrenched in the plot in a way, and you gotta think maybe there's some censorship going on. We don't know what the studios are doing, we don't know the whole story now. There's a great book that I often plug, and I had the pleasure of reviewing it several years ago by uh Alyssa Goldstein Seppenwall. And the book is called Slave Revolt on Screen, and she tells us the history of it's really a history of the non-history of the product of productions about film uh films about the uh Haitian Revolution that were attempted to be made in Hollywood but never were able to be made because of questions of censorship, politics, questions of funding, lack thereof, and the anxieties that still permeate to this day, given that immense geopolitical shift that took place in the early part of the 19th century, which still hangs over um white America you know, like a curse. And so these fit these films, there were dozens and dozens, which just never were made, some of which were were starring you know major stars, like Paul Robeson, of course, one of the other unfortunate figures who was wrapped up in in the Cold War politics of the 1940s and early 50s. But he was in a film called Emperor, oh it's I can't remember what it's called. Emperor something. It's actually pretty good. It's it's it's close, but he but of course he plays a sort of a sort of despotic black emperor, but it's a it's an attempt for Hollywood making making a sort of Lydia Bailey is another one where but of course you have to go back to it's telling a history of the 19th century in the 1950s, the 1940s and 50s some of these films, so there's already a distance, but even that distance is not enough for these Hollywood studios that wouldn't touch it. Another example is more modern in the same topic, which is a film most deaf, Danny Glover, I mean big, big names, Raul Peck. They were trying to make us a film about the Haitian Revolution for years, but no one will ever fund it. And that's just that's one example, one legacy of racial the race question in the 1940s and 50s during this period, being relegated to the background or being relegated to the the dustbin in many ways.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:18

Yeah. One one thing I'd add is you know, like we've only covered, I think we've only covered 34. We've had we have like 34 episodes. We're kind of moving slowly, but but one film that we've covered is called Cry the Beloved Country. And it came out in 1951. And it was the screenwriter was John Howard Lawson. And John Howard Lawson was a diehard communist for life. He never left, even after Hungary in 1956, even after a lot of people left the party. He's he was there for life, visited the Soviet Union a lot, and he was adamant that yes, representation on screen is important, but what is equally important is getting people in the industry. And he wrote in a fascinating book about that explores many of these things, if it's out of print now. And he essentially says, look, there's one black hairdresser in Hollywood, one, and they're the one person who's working with the very few black actors. There's no camera operators, there's no, you know, grips, or there's no so he was saying, like, yes, we need to get so he had a very early critique of representational politics as the end-all be-all that many people, especially liberals, make it out to be. And it's a very interesting thing. And we're talking about 1953 when he wrote this, but but the film that I was just mentioning, Cry the Beloved Country, this is about apartheid South Africa. And so, what what they had to do, well, I don't say had to do, the only way you could talk about race in the US was to talk about race, racial apartheid in another country. And even that was hard to do, right? And I like the way one of the only ways you could confront it head on, and you know, there's a few exam exceptions, there's a few examples here and there of some films that try to take it uh head on, but essentially a lot of those critiques are muted and kind of watered down, and that has everything to do with what we've been talking about. Is you know, there's a guy named Joseph Green who was literally the Hollywood censor. His job was to take a look at every script or his assistance, make sure it was conforming to the Hayes Code and their other code codes of what they you know, the imperatives that they they abided by. So, so there were many films that were looked one way until it got to these sensor boards and then was doctored and and watered down, and the final product was very different than what the earlier drafts of the screenplay were, or even the the film itself, they would literally edit out scenes and things like that. But there were a few attempts to because, like you said earlier, the CPUSA that was the home of the anti-racist in the 30s and 40s. And if you were concerned about segregation and social justice, you didn't necessarily have to know much about Marx or Engels or socialism or anything. That was your home if you wanted to join an organization that was really doing some concrete actions and and this initiatives around these questions. So there were a lot of people who were, you could say, were. Progressive liberals who joined the CPUSA at various points because they were explicitly anti-racist and so forth. And there's a lot to say about that.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:58

But can I say one more thing? Because because you brought up John Howard Lawson. I mean, the book that you are referring to is called Film of

Paranoia Beyond Spy Thrillers

SPEAKER_00 1:29:07

the Battle of Ideas. It's from 1953, as Jason mentioned, but he it his critique of this very thing is so incredible in this book. It's no wonder it hasn't been it's been out of print for decades. He is critiquing Hollywood's aversion to representing what he calls mass man, for instance. And he links the Negro question of the day, which is how it was often termed, to Hollywood's use, ideological use of Freudian psychoanalysis to represent guilt-laden black characters on screen who would whose sufferings under the gay under the guise of sort of being liberal and sympathetic were actually outpourings of black guilt. And he's and he's calling these films in the 1940s into question about this. They're called Negro Interest films. And he's critiquing on this point. And yeah, and he he also brings up this point about the Haitian Revolution that I mentioned, and he's critiquing that one or two odd films that were vaguely often in reference to it. And he actually says this if it's just a couple sentences. He says a variation on the on the theme of this guilt I was telling you about can be found in the film Lydia Bailey, which deals with the Haitian Revolution of 1802. He gets the date a little wrong. That's okay. At the opening of the picture, the sound of ominous drums accompanies the comment uh flashed on the screen, describing Haiti as a quote, nation keyed to hysteria by the constant beat of jungle drums. Later scenes show the rebellion inaugurated by voodoo rites and a chauvinistic caricature of the beautiful dances of the Haitian people. We see houses in flames and Negro quote mobs surge across the screen. There's even the customary scene in which the white heroine is threatened by a Negro. These actions are attributed to the quote bad Negro leader who opposes Toussaint Louvre, Louverture's policy of moderation. Toussaint appears as a kindly and effectual man whose insistence that he is a quote man of peace parallels with the renunciation motif in Viva Zapata. Toussaint's avoidance struggle is counterposed to scenes in which Negro faces appear in close-up shouting, kill all the whites, kill, kill, kill. This is a sort of critique. This is 1953 when he's making this commentary, which is itself a bizarre artifact. Uh if you if you look at the Cold War sort of picture from a from an aerial view, and look at these other directors and these other you know personnel in the Hollywood movie movie machine, movie apparatus, they achieve wild success with with retrograde politics, yeah uh aggressive politics. So it's quite uh you know a uh a uh an emblem of that era.

C. Derick Varn 1:31:56

Yeah, that's that's those are great points. I also think about American, and by American here I don't mean US, I mean American, written continental history is portrayed in cinema and how little of it we actually portray. We don't have that many great Civil War movies, and and the ones we do have are like liberal apologia for Lincoln for the most part, or are even worse. They're they're the the north was right, but the confederates weren't all that bad. That's another common one. Yeah, we don't have in English hardly any not just Haitian revolutionary movies. When the who's made a fucking Mexican revolutionary movie, like one of the most the old gringos the only one I know of. Okay, yeah, yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:51

Like we're not sure actually, actually, there's a cold war angle, but Elia Kazan made one and it's heavily heavily criticized by John Harrison. He just tears him down.

C. Derick Varn 1:33:05

Well, of course, there's some bad ones. I was actually Elia Kazan is this it is one of these one of these filmmakers that uh that I hate as a good artist. I've talked about how good some of his movies are and how they're terrible. I I mean think about the there uh Chrtian released it not too long ago, but it's one he did about I can't remember his titles, but it's about the dock workers and it's on the one in front. Yeah, on the one up front, and it makes it sound like they're mobbed up, and I'm like, they're not mobbed up that early. Like, like that does happen, but it happens like it happens like 20 years later, and under under and under the US government intervention, actually.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:43

So yeah, so he was one he was one of the people who testified and named names, and so everybody was angry for forever up toward him, all of his friends as they should be, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:33:54

Right Kazan, I have to say, you know, not all Greeks of the period were were were were like him.

C. Derick Varn 1:34:04

Yeah. Um but I mean he he's one of these I think a lot of his movies are are when we were talking about art and something is both art and propaganda, and propaganda for something I don't like. Kazan is Kazan's movies are like that. I was moved by on the on the waterfront, and I also think it's a terrible propaganda movie. Yeah, well like because I was like, man, I I know that the the the the the doc unions weren't that mobbed up that early. Like, what are you talking about? Um but but yeah, it's it's an interesting, it's interesting how little it comes up because like I said, I think even now the only movie I think of is the old gringo, and that's just because you know Carlos Schuentes novel. And even that's not actually all that much about the Mexican Revolution, it's more about Ambrose Beers being a dickhead. So it's it's interesting to gather, but I I do think it's interesting to note. Let's talk about the baby boomers and you know how they've affected American infrastructure. But I do think we have to admit that American media ideological infrastructure, at least in film, comes from this period, I think more than any other period. Like this is this Cold War period sets the tone for movies as we understand them now. When you go before the Cold War, movies feel more alien even to me. Like they they they, I mean, like I get them, I can watch them, but they're pace different, they have different concerns. Pre-code movies are interesting, they're fun, but they're very different than Cold War movies, and yet Cold War movies are you know, at least the later ones, the ones that you a lot of the ones you covered in your show from like 47 to 50 are not ones that are well known, but they really do seem to shape our film. Like, can you imagine what American cinema is like without the searchers? Like, right, so much cinematic language is established in that movie, right? I guess you know, uh this gets leads me to a couple a couple of questions that might seem a little bit basic, and we can kind of extrapolate from them. But what movie, if you wanted people to understand, let's say the early Cold War aesthetic and then the post-60s Cold War aesthetic, and you had one movie for each time period, which I I know is big because we're talking between everything between 47 and 60, and then everything between 60 and 1991. But but which two movies would you tell people were like the best intros? And we'll uh we'll split it up since you guys have covered Soviet and uh US movies, we'll do it for the Soviet side and the US side.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:59

Well, I mean let me just say Doctor Strange Love has gotta be you know, if if you're like trying to dip your toe into Cold War aesthetics, you mean just yeah, I mean Doctor Strange Love. We haven't covered it on the on the podcast. We may end up covering or cut covering it, but it's so iconic that you have to see it basically. I'll say that for now. Tony, you have anything?

SPEAKER_00 1:37:26

Yeah, yeah. One film I already mentioned, but because of some of these reasons uh that Derek was was just mentioning, Body and Soul. Fantastic, it sets the pace aesthetically and we might even say narratologically for the the film the sports film, it sets the standard. And when you think, oh sports film, that must be that must mean you know that you're like and it's boxing, right? So that means I'm like a Joe Rogan knight, right? I like to get kicked in the head. No, not at all. The the cinematographer is is John John Wu. Am I saying his name correctly?

SPEAKER_03 1:38:05

No, it's it's um it's John. It's what is his name? John John John James Wong Hao. James Wong Hao.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:12

James Wang Hao.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:14

Who is, you know, he is he is one of these brilliant cinematographers. Speaking of technology, I mean, he was where he he actually innovated a sort of tracking system to film these these action shots in the ring that set the standard aesthetically, as I mentioned, but also were reduplicated in later decades in films like Raging Bull, as probably uh the most relevant example that everyone probably has seen, most people have seen. So that film, for those reasons alone, I mean, it's like it sets a standard for for so there's a legacy thus in all the sports films, sort of refer back to some American context. I mean, this is not a film, but I can't help but bring up the direct lineage. I mean, we're we're sort of in the predicament we're in today because of Hollywood. Because of I mean, and and not just the films, but Roy Cohn was uh was was uh in cahoots with with Senator McCarthy, and you know our 47th president was his right-hand man for a time, and he cut his teeth sort of in the Roy Cohn fashion, uh, and learned a lot from him. And so there's a direct link to this the the the burgeoning anti-communist red scare politics of that era in the McCarthy period, and and the Trump the and Trumpism, one could say. So we're also living in that aesthetic legacy, also.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:51

So uh so the second the part of the question was one Soviet film?

C. Derick Varn 1:39:56

Yeah, well, a Soviet film, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:59

Well, this is hard for me because many of the Soviet films that I like so much are not especially like Cold War themed. But I mean, we watched a really fascinating, it's not very well known though, unfortunately. Well,

Race On Screen And What Gets Erased

SPEAKER_03 1:40:17

I was gonna say the Russian question, which it's it's a it's a Soviet film about the United States, and actually, if you want to see a really fascinating ideological exploration of American Cold War ethos and priorities and views and so forth, watch The Russian Question, which is a film by the Soviet Union directed by Mikhail Rome about the United States. So they you know they have characters who are speaking Russian, but they have names like John Smith, and it's really interesting. It's actually brilliant, and and it's a somewhat sympathetic look at just the United States, and it's showing how good people are kind of caught up in this imperialist apparatus and and sort of victims of higher-ups. That it's not just all Americans are evil, that there is that their system has corrupted them, essentially. It's a really interesting film.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:16

It might be one of those films that you can send to your rusophobic uncle and say, maybe you watch this and you see something of your upbringing in uh you know the ideological bubble that is America being exposed to you. That's the that's a great film for those purposes, I'd say.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:33

Yeah, it's pretty obscure though. It's not well known, it's probably hard to find. I mean, it's probably streaming on YouTube, but it's not gonna be like everyone's cup of tea. You know, you can. I mean, there's I could talk all day about Soviet cinema, but I I think the this is not necessarily a cold war film, but the cranes are flying would be one masterpiece that people just need to see.

C. Derick Varn 1:41:59

But that's a great movie, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:01

Yeah, which is Mikhail Kalotozov, in my opinion, the greatest Soviet director.

C. Derick Varn 1:42:07

Take that, Tarkovsky.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:10

Oh well, let me say Jiga Virtov and Mikhail Kalotozov. Those are my top.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:16

No shade on Tarkovsky.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:17

Tarkov Tarkovsky's number three.

C. Derick Varn 1:42:21

Although I I do what people always tell me about talk to me about Tarkovsky. But the irony about Tarkovsky is his movies would never get made in America because you need a non-capitalist audience who doesn't care about having to reflect for three and a half hours to watch it. There's no way Hollywood's gonna invest in that. But but you know, he has this uh, I mean, he has his own form of Soviet critique, all mainly because he was very, very religious and pretty strange as a dude, actually. But I I often find that Soviet, like Soviet film other than Tarkovsky, is just not underwashed and under no, and it's just agreed, it's it's incredible. People think a lot of it's just like you know, like I don't know, social realist propaganda of like the most obvious kind of like ironically, that was more made by the Americans in the 30s. Um yeah, but I guess I do want to ask what this we're gonna write down this interview, but I do want to ask, maybe we haven't talked a lot about Soviet cinema, and you guys do cover it. What have you noticed were the biggest differences between Soviet and Hollywood cinema cinema of the time period that you've covered so far? Because I know you haven't gotten very far, like you're not in the 60s very deeply yet.

SPEAKER_03 1:43:45

Yeah, well, one thing that that's come up over and over is we in the West, let's say in the broad west, and especially in Hollywood, we're used to protagonicity, we're used to latching onto a protagonist and following them all the way through what their fears are, what their concerns are, what they want. This is like foundational narrative structure, right? Narrative arcs. And they're centered on one character, usually, sometimes two. But often Soviet cinema is not character-focused, it's focused on the collective. And this can be challenging for an American because you're like, where do I even place my focus? Who do I focus on? How do I follow this story? Like, who am I rooting for? And what you're rooting for is the collective. You're rooting for, I mean, you're rooting for the the larger society. And now not all not all of them are that way, but that's one of the the striking features of Soviet cinema that I've noticed, especially the first three few decades before what's called the thaw, when we can talk about later if it comes up, but it it really is focused on the system and on the people and on their collective endeavors. And it's really interesting. It's really interesting to see how we have to recalibrate our expectations, recalibrate our whole mode of engaging with this piece of art.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:20

I I you took the words right out of my mouth, the the collective versus the the individual in in these respective contexts, that it's a clear difference. And it affects the way not only the audience is identifying, perhaps with with the character forward logic versus a collective logic in the Soviet context, but it affects the way, I mean, if you think about this, it seems so rudimentary, but it affects the way these films are shot. So the style, the Soviet style and the montage style in some of these instances, or the socialist realist style, is really a product of that tension between the individual and the collective. Well, especially in the thaw period, because you get a little bit of the of the individual seeping back in after the thaw in some of the films that we've seen. But even then, narratologically, the level of plot, for instance, the the collective is ever present. And that's even true of the films like that that Ivenstein was making, where he's depicting these these great tyrants like like Ivan the Terrible. Even though that film was about Ivan, the collective is still the main character, so to speak.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:31

There's always an ensemble, there's an ensemble cast, and this is another feature. This is popular also in Bollywood. And so Bollywood, you know, there were a lot of collaborations between India and the Soviet Union, actually. And my wife is from India and she has a podcast called The Day Cays, D-E-S-I-G-A-Z-E. And she's currently looking at how the Cold War, actually, she's inspired a little bit by this, but how the Cold War worked its way into Bollywood. And there's many collaborations actually between Indian cinema and Soviet Union, but they always have these huge ensembles, you know, and and that's a kind of a rare thing in Hollywood. It stands out when it when you when you see it.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:16

And you know, when you look at these instances in that context, in all these you know, contexts where the collective is is really the the uh prime mover of these narratives or of these films, they're really the the question of organization and choreography is a real problem. And so it's become not just incredible narratives, the beautiful, that sort of thing. The technical know-how and the time that goes into these images, you can get a different sense of how the organization of space and time and and people, masses, really functions in in this different context. I mean, there's a different sort of sublime you get. You get you you get you cannot fathom what it means to organize 10,000 non-CGI people in in the Russians on the Russian steps staging a war scene. The only thing comparable in the US context is potentially Spartacus, which has these massive scenes that are much that are sort of similar. Or perhaps I'm trying to think of something earlier. There's probably some earlier examples.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:28

King Vidor is known for these huge panoramic sort of societal level films. Just to take it once again to France, Jean Renoir is another film who uh filmmaker who does these massive sociological films where there's thousands of extras, but it's rare there too. And he stood out in that way. He was also very inspired by socialist realism, and he adapted a Gorky story. So, so like you know, there's Soviet Union has a lot of influence on particular people, and those particular people in the West stood out as being uncommon, like King Vitor and Sean Renor.

C. Derick Varn 1:49:11

This this is that's very good. I actually have actually thought a lot about the American uh movie and also novelistic tendency to, although maybe less in novels, like you there are novelists who are at least good at at breaking up protagonists from chapter to chapter, at least. But this insistence on psychological realism as opposed to other forms of realism or experimentation, does seem to be a genre limit, like a real one. It's actually and today is actually somewhat of a problem for for films in particular. I think because they're also playing to a mass market of which individual psychological realism is too contextual, which is one of the reasons why I think we've gotten all these like shitty archetype young adult and Marvel movies for so long, uh, although that's ending now, but was because you were constrained by both a need for psychological realism, which even those movies attempt, even when they're about completely non-realistic scenarios and people. And I find this to be an aesthetic problem, like across the board. Like I read novels today, and I'm like, oh, you're doing mod you you're trying to give psychological realism to a 12th century peasant, and somehow they think like twenty first century American. That's great, Brandon Sanderson. But but anyway, like and Don't get that problem in. I mean, you do not to say that Russian literature doesn't Soviet and definitely pre-Soviet doesn't have psychological elements, but even some of the things that were dissident, like I don't so Bolokov, they're ensemble pieces that skip around, they have picer-esque social commentary, they go all over society. That just seems to be what Russian art kind of does, and and particularly Soviet art, which we should not say it's the same thing, by the way. People, I do know there's a difference. Which brings me to this last little bit. This will be my last question, and it's like it's a part you haven't covered in your show. But I I I found it interesting when I think about Cold War movies. American Cold War movies get dumb in the 1980s. But by the fact that, like, by the time you get to like Red Dawn and Rocky III and Rambo III, I mean, like Rambo, I mean, Sylvester Sallone is interesting for this for a variety of reasons because they start off as like almost British level Kenshin Sink, eminent critiques of Vietnam and like poor working class life in America to American boxer ends the Cold War, and one dude single-handedly has a bunch of jihadists killed the Soviets. Like, and you can see that. It is. I mean, like, and you can like watch it shift from these 70s, early 80s movies to whatever the fuck is going on in '88. And like, and you're just like, wow, I've seen this in real time through these, like these three popular films where I said I mean they they and literally with Rocky, in particular, they go from relatively smart to I feel dumber for having watched this. Conversely, the thaws going on uh in the Soviet Union, and their cinema is taking on some more and more western y tropes. What do you make of that time period? Because that that to me, that is where cold war stuff gets its most almost farcical to itself. You know, people will complain about early code movies and whatever in the end of the code, but I mean, but I don't know, 80s films are somehow even more blatant and silly, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 1:53:12

Well, we started with you started we started this conversation with a reference to Brumaire, and it seems like we're gonna end it with a okay because that may might be the case that the 1980s is the farcical repetition of the tragedy of the 1940s and 50s in terms of Hollywood cinema. The first time was the blacklist, was a serious, concerted labor and communist effort that was tragically uh dismantled, just you know, dispersed vis-a-vis these propagandistic elements, the very real oppressive apparatus of the state, the very real legal apparatuses that were implemented, which are covered in the tax. I'm always only reminded of the last couple days because of some interviews that were done. But Sharice Burden Stelli's Black Scare, Red Scare is a book that everyone should read if you really want to understand this period. Likewise, Gerald Horne's Ben David book on Ben Davis, which is called Red Black Black Liberation, Red Scare, I believe. Those two books really cover this period, and the tragedy that I'm speaking to of this period leading up to the Smith Act and the 19th, uh and these trials that we're that we cover on the podcast. But that is just to say that that tragedy, they try to rep rep replicate the formula of the post-war sort of masculine figure who's heroic, coming back after getting, you know, their behinds whooped in Vietnam and making these these revenge films that starring Sylvester Stallone, where one man is taking on the entire Russian military. Oh, sorry, Soviet military. They are different.

C. Derick Varn 1:54:57

They are different.

SPEAKER_03 1:54:59

What's even more hilarious is Red Dawn, where you have a bunch of teenagers from Colorado taking on not only the Soviet Union, but Nicaragua, Sandinistas, and North Koreans, and I don't know who else.

C. Derick Varn 1:55:11

It may be China, although China's China's suspiciously not mentioned because they may have been a U.S. ally at the time because of Sino-Soviet split, but well, that was that was a potential market.

SPEAKER_03 1:55:20

They didn't want to that's a big market.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:22

They were officially opened up at that time since 78, if I'm not mistaken.

C. Derick Varn 1:55:27

Right, yeah, they were. Yeah, and I was like, Yeah, 2012, because I was abroad, I was actually in Korea when it came out, but uh I was like, why on earth would you do that?

SPEAKER_00 1:55:58

In the remake, I'm just curious.

C. Derick Varn 1:56:01

The North Korea, so I think the North Korean, so it's even more ridiculous because somehow the North Koreans are like taking over America.

SPEAKER_03 1:56:06

So what I so what I had read is that if initially it was meant to be China, uh, but they realized, well, we could market this to China if we change it to North Korea, so they did. And it's preposterous. It's as bad as I mean, it's even worse than the original. It's an absolute like half-star movie, you know. But as a cultural artifact, it's

Best Starter Films For Cold War Aesthetics

SPEAKER_03 1:56:27

interesting, especially like you say, the timing in 2012 of all it was a I think it was just a hare-brained attempt at a cashier crab, you know. But I actually love your answer, Tony, and I think this is you're putting you're making an interesting point. By the time the 80s have rolled around, this is like this. I don't even I hate to invoke the word, but this sort of postmodern kind of insane era, and it does feel farcical and and childish.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:57

You know that I loved as a kid in the 90s, by the way, you know, just to because it's sort of been a mystery, and apparently it's a mystery to whenever people sometimes come up and ask me how old I am. I I actually was born during a world where the Soviet Union was still what year were you born? Uh I was born in 89.

SPEAKER_03 1:57:19

Okay.

C. Derick Varn 1:57:19

Technically, oh yeah, so you you you you were in the last gasp with the Soviet Union. Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 1:57:26

He was doing his duck and cover drills under the under the cradle.

C. Derick Varn 1:57:32

I well, here's the funny thing. Like, I I was born in the cut him off. Oh, sorry. I was born in '80, and I want to talk about that in a minute, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 1:57:40

I was born in 77. That's how old I am.

SPEAKER_00 1:57:43

Oh boy, yeah. I think all I was saying was that these are all the films, you know, as a child that my brother and I would watch. You know, the Rambo. Really, Rambo, I think, was a big one. First blood is specifically. And so the appeal to these films, they're absurd when you look back at them as an adult, but as a child, they they speak to children, I think. And maybe that's part also of the propaganda that this what this industry was trying to breed in minds. That might have that's the only other thing I can think of as to what would that's the only rational explanation, actually. Right.

C. Derick Varn 1:58:23

Well, right, it is interesting. I'm thinking back to a movie I was shown in class in 1989 in elementary school in suburban central Georgia. And I just want to bring this up because it does kind of bring up the two images of the world that the what liberalism was properly, but was like putting out for itself. Because the other one that I remember, and this I was showed this in class was this film about like give peace a chance or whatever, but it was also in a time period where the Reagan, you know, the Reagan Belicosa agree was all proxy wars, and those were not being covered. And like there was these liberals who were proffering that the Soviet Union thought perestroik would lead to a world without war, because we'd have detente forever, and everything would be okay. And I was shown this by a liberal teacher in a very conservative state in the in the late 80s, and it's always interesting to me because I was like, Well, we believed that for all of three years as a possibility, because as soon as the cold war is down, you start having you have Gulf War One, you have and Gulf War One was weird. I I it I have to like go back and remind myself that they were like doing for a year or two stuff like trading cars for the war. Because if you like think about the like boomer liberal, and by liberal, I mean small l, every American is a small l liberal in some way, whether we like it or not. This this time period, because like there it was people were excited that we didn't just get our ass handed to in a long, drawn-out insurgency war. This was more like, oh, it's not about the Soviets, we're not bad, we're defending people, and we're winning, and everything is great. And I know that we don't think about that now, but that very much seemed to be the shift in that time period, and so I think a lot of people had a very farcical view of war. I know I did. And the other thing is there seemed to be some hope when I was a kid, even in conservative Georgia, that maybe you know Parastrica was gonna lead to good things and everybody was gonna get along, and the Reagan bluster was over, and instead 1991 happens. And and then I also very pointedly remember just all of a sudden communists went away. Like we didn't talk about it anymore. That's what I remember from school. I mean, Jason, you're a little older. I would have been, I would have been, I spent a little bit of this abroad too, because my my father lived in Canada for a little while. But um, when I came back to the states in like '92, uh as a kid, I remember just like you like the the cold war happened, it was all over everything. It was in my Marvel comic books, it was in X-Men comic books of Omega Red was a Soviet villain, etc. etc. And then so you talk about that kid stuff, it was it was really was there, and then all of a sudden it's just gone. Like, like, like when I say it was gone, like it's like by 96, it's like you you hardly remember the Soviet Union even existed in the United States. That's only like four years later.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:11

You know, I was a kid, I was a teenager after 91. Well, from 93 or so on. But I remember the news talking about Bosnia and Serbia and sort of that conflict.

C. Derick Varn 2:02:27

Yeah, I remember that too.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:28

And but but actually, people were focusing really heavily internally, right?

C. Derick Varn 2:02:34

On the US, the different things going on, and maybe they always were Oklahoma City bombing, right-wing domestic terrorist attacks.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:42

Like I'm from Oklahoma, so the Oklahoma City barb bombing was a big deal.

C. Derick Varn 2:02:47

I remember I imagine it was the big deal for me, and I'm not from Oklahoma.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:51

So yeah, so that was in what '93? No, '95, I think.

SPEAKER_02 2:02:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:58

Yeah, 95. Yeah. So I was in high school when it happened. I graduated in '96. But yeah, like I think domestic the enemy was within. There was this rising domestic terrorist threat from the far right, and then wasn't long before September 11 came along, and then the focus was on the global war on terror and so forth. So, yeah, it's an interesting, you know, like like you could say from 1945 to 1950 was an interesting in-between period. This was another in-between

Soviet Versus Hollywood Story Logic

SPEAKER_03 2:03:27

period from 91 to really from 2001. Yeah. And cult culture was kind of reflecting. I mean, this is also when just an think thinking about pop culture, you know, grunge explodes, like punk makes it mainstream. There's a lot of different things like that that I was into because I was a kid. So I don't know, it's an interesting thing to think about.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:53

Someone needs to, this has always this has long been on my mind, and particularly because I my brother and I had a unique upbringing. Being three years separated in age, we were close enough to enjoy the same things all throughout the 90s, essentially. And someone needs to do a study. I'm too close to it, like personally, you know. Someone used to study the effect on American child children's television, the Nickelodeon phenomena, for instance, in that period after the Soviet Union, because going back to the Rolodex in my mind of a lot of the stuff that we used to abide, there are these strange references to uh the Soviet Union and to Eastern European uh conflagrations that make their way into children's media.

C. Derick Varn 2:04:41

They're all over Captain Planet, if you think about that from the mid 90s.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:45

Yeah, name them Captain Planet, Pete and Pete.

C. Derick Varn 2:04:48

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:49

Weirdly in Pete and Pete, because Pete and Pete doesn't seem about that at all. No, they find them. There are these veiled, there's these strange, sometimes veiled, sometimes explicit references, and then the other one is the Renage Stimpy show.

C. Derick Varn 2:05:01

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:05:02

Well, the people who wrote all that were you know grew up in the cold war and and just absorbed the the the ideology, it became so ingrained that it works away into their heart.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:14

Yeah, but they're but they're but they're not, I would say they're I would even argue that they're counter propagandistic, they're almost they're not they're not the typical sort of you know anti-Soviet biases, to be honest.

C. Derick Varn 2:05:31

Yeah, yeah, no, I I I I think about that, and I think it's maybe I still think Jason may be right, though it's people who are growing up with that and watch that all fall because the the way the Soviet Union like I always talk about this when I talk up when I talk about to to my to my old Trotsky friends, I'd be like, Look, you know, have the critiques of your Soviet Union. I I have mine for part of it, but it's too at this time, it's like it's it's it's it's like 2000s. Why are we talking about the nature of the Soviet Union? Because all of you, yeah, and Mike McNair makes this point too. All of you made predictions about how it was going to unfold. None of you were right, and and also for us in America, like I always said that like everyone's like, Oh, we won the Cold War. And I'm like, well, more like we just didn't self-implode. Like, what did we do to win it exactly? I guess I guess we got them tied into the IMF, but that's not the story that anyone's telling.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:31

Like I think I think we're telling a very different story now after the the Shanghai cooperative.

C. Derick Varn 2:06:38

Oh, yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:39

Maybe, maybe the maybe we maybe the idea of winning, maybe we'll have we'll tell a different story here in the next 10 years.

C. Derick Varn 2:06:46

Yeah. Um, yeah, it it it is interesting. It it it very much feels like that that post-cold war world is also itself fading away. I guess this brings me to my my very this really is my last question. Why do you think that both in political media and in media just in general, there seems to be a dire want to bring the cold war back, but then also no really, no real ability to do it because you know no matter how you feel about the PRC, they are not the USSR. Like and they they don't, you know, they might be opposed to the United States, but nowhere near the same way. And it it we do seem at a loss, and yet also they keep on wanting to re I mean, like I mentioned this with the when the beginning when I was talking about like Black Widow, like they keep on wanting to resurrect these cold war characters and not have any idea how to do it because it's not relevant the same way, but yeah, I'd let you respond to that because it does seem like they want it back.

SPEAKER_03 2:07:56

Yeah, well, if you if you're thinking about I don't know how to answer the question about like art or cinema production, but when I think about like Trump recycling cold war tropes, this is he's very much a cold war child, you know. I mean, his his whole formative years would have been steeped in anti-communism.

C. Derick Varn 2:08:15

He's literally born in the beginning of the of the Cold War, but like 47.

SPEAKER_03 2:08:20

Yeah, and and so like these are reflexive. He can just, you know, uh if his brain is kind of just running on fumes, he can still reach back to these like ingrained kind of catch-all phrases about communists. Now, there are some younger people like Heg Seth and whoever who invoke these recycled tropes, and I think they're just they're wannabes, they're one, they're wanting to be the Robert McNamara's or the or the McCarthys, or the I think they just kind of fantasize about being these true Cold Warriors. Maybe not McNamara was maybe the best choice, but like McCarthy or Kissinger, and and they kind of want that like hardened, realist Cold War ethos, Cold Warrior ethos. That's my thoughts on the art. I actually I haven't necessarily noticed that, other than like you mentioned the Americans TV show. As anyway, yeah, I other than that and a few other tiny things. I'm not sure how to answer that question. Maybe Tony has something to add.

SPEAKER_00 2:09:27

Well, yeah, I don't, I don't, I have to be honest, I don't really the the the the superhero thing never really spurred me, and I I've never really invested time into those things, although I'm very curious to know more about them, especially how they're representing these tropes decades after the fact. Uh and and and I'm very interested in this idea of failing to represent this period, because in many ways that echoes I think that there is something to the idea that Hegsteath and Trump and et al. are failing to represent this era, also they're they're chasing an old bygone era that cannot be rehabilitated. So the my quick answer will be look elsewhere outside of the United States. And and one recent film that I can think of, which is fantastic, uh, is called uh passive fiction. Oh has anyone see a P-A-S, a P-A-C-I-F-I-C-I-O? So yeah, fiction, yeah, not pacification, passive fiction, but there's a ton of time.

SPEAKER_03 2:10:30

Spanish movie.

SPEAKER_00 2:10:31

Well, no, it's it's a French Polynesian film that is so well done and so beautiful atmospherically. My wife, she actually studies atmosphere and cinema, and she's watching this film for some of her studies, and it's just incredible how the Cold War thematic sort of finds its way in the atmosphere of the film in a very innovative, very uh just brilliant, if I if I can say so, way. I highly recommend this film. It it brings back the historical some historical realities with regard to the Cold War, nuclearization, sort of this searing uh paranoia about the future and the past and and and the relationship there between in the French-Polynesian context, where you have a colonial context overlapping with these nuclear tests that were taking place during the Cold War era. And it's just really brilliantly done. So I highly recommend that one. It also centralizes the Pacific region, which is when you think about the Cold War, very very very often we're still thinking about the NATO-Atlantic sort of geo geopolitical sphere. Pacific is is is is a is a is a hotbed of of uh of Cold War activity. The recent book by Keto Swan on called Pacifica Black is an excellent title on this on the long history of this region, but in a way that decentralizes the Atlantic block from sort of our

The 1980s Turn To Farce

SPEAKER_00 2:12:07

critical imagination when we think about the Cold War. And so for that reason and this other reason, watch passive fiction because it really it really does a number, and it's probably the best film I can think of in recent memory that plots a Cold War history and narrative in such a way outside of the of the uh parameters of the United States.

SPEAKER_03 2:12:26

Yeah, can I just add one one quick thing that just occurred to me? So thinking about other films outside of the US, so a big film that that was celebrated in the last year is The Secret Agent, which was uh sort of a spy thriller from the Cold War era from Brazil. And I think I think To to go back to this secret superhero thing, you know, they have this IP, intellectual property. And much of this was created originally in the Cold War era, reflecting our anxieties about nuclear or Holocaust and so forth. And so they they they can always dip into this cachet of IP material and find a way to let it map onto the anxieties of our current era. And so, like the key op the operative word here is anxieties, like narrative sort of a productive narrative uh impulse is to tap into the anxieties of any given culture at any given moment, and they already have the IP, so they can reach into that. There is this also just right now, there is this pervasive nostalgia. There's nostalgia from the right, they want to go back to this fictional era of the 1950s, which is very much in the Cold War era. Leave it to beaver if ethos.

C. Derick Varn 2:13:43

Yeah, they want the the 50s, they want the 50s with I would say a 1890s economy. But yeah, yeah, they want to like the 50s, but they don't like the Fordism that undergirds it. So but right.

SPEAKER_03 2:13:58

No, they they like the the the mythology of the 50s, and the they basically want a conservative utopia, like the leave it to beaver kind of fabrication, but then but then there's this nostalgia from other people too. I think the you know, I hear young people say, Man, I wish I would have grown up. Somebody told me the other day, I wish I would have grown up in the the 90s when I could just have a wild night and experiment with drugs and not have to worry about dying from fentanyl. I was like, okay, that's an interesting thing to wish, but like there is a lot of pervasive nostalgia running through culture because the present is garbage, everybody kind of agrees on that, and so they're looking back, and maybe that's part of it.

C. Derick Varn 2:14:40

Uh so yeah, I think about that 80s and 90s nostalgia, but the thing is with the 80s with the 90s nostalgia, you don't have the co-war problems exactly. You you kind of do, but it's more of a a lipstick strace. But with 80s nostalgia, it's front and foremost, yet even when you think about when like I I'm I'm a weirdo, I I I love high art films, but I'm also in the trash culture as a way to gauge. I actually try to contrast the two as a way to gauge where America's like ideological world space is. So you have this like picture of the 80s that comes out that either tries to bring the cold war back without doing so, like and the mar the comic books are a particular problem because they have the whole timeline skewing thing that they're doing with their IP that makes that all problematic. But in general, there's there's a kind of want to like go back to the 80s and then not deal with the cold war. Are there nuclear war fears? Because I grew up with those too, and people seem to forget that we still had them in the early 80s, but I was like, nah, man, they told me to hide under my desk if there was a nuclear bomb. I don't know what to tell, I don't know what it would have done either, but I don't know what to tell you. We we had nuclear bomb drills like right, but they had only stopped, I think they stopped in like 80s 88. So it is and I also grew up with all this like early, like post-war two media where like everyone was imagining that the the immediate fate of the you know of the country was particularly particularly late 50s, early 60s, was the was we're just gonna nuke each other. Like, you know, because I grew up with the Twilight Zone, and how many Twilight Zone episodes are basically about that, and etc. etc. So I I do find it interesting that it it's like it's like a lingering thing that that uh people want. I also think you're right. We just have to admit that there's these baber baby boomer capitalists who have been in dominance since literally the the very beginning, since they were born, which happens to be the beginning of the cold war. And so we're kind of until they go away, I think we're stuck playing that out. But it's such a it's such a crazy reoccurrent referent. Like, I think about like like Gen X reactionaries in the Tea Party were all also like bringing up like Cold War talking points that at first were like, what are you talking about Obama being a communist? Like, this is ridiculous. Like, like like it'd be like complaining about the like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton as being communists. This is a joke, and yet, and everybody made fun of it, and yet it's still kind of the dominant go-to rhetorical device is to just imply

Why Culture Tries To Revive The Cold War

C. Derick Varn 2:17:57

that people are commies. Although one of the maybe one of the good downsides of that is from the standpoint of ideology, is it maybe has made communism somewhat safer because they threw it at people, which it obviously didn't apply to.

SPEAKER_03 2:18:11

Well, a lot of young people are just like rolling their eyes, they're like, guys, you can try this, but I communism sounds a lot better than what we have here, you know. Like, I think the social media has rendered this attempt ineffectual. And so whenever Trump reflexively invokes communist this or that, young people are just like, really? And I think you're right, like if if there was some shows that tried to attempt it and it didn't land, it's because you seem like a crazy old boomer if you start talking like this to young people.

C. Derick Varn 2:18:47

It's like we can we can have our 80s nostalgia, but like we're not really that worried about the Soviets. Um right.

SPEAKER_00 2:18:55

We're gonna remember the you know, in 50, 60 years from now, we're gonna remember the meeting that took place between Zoran Mamdani and uh Donald Trump. Like our parents remember Churchill and Roosevelt sitting down with Stalin.

SPEAKER_03 2:19:10

Yeah, the Yalta conference or whatever. Yeah, or what about what about Nixon going to China?

C. Derick Varn 2:19:16

Or Nixon in China, yeah, for sure. Yeah, this does feel like a Nixon-China moment. I hope you guys get to to the what I think is the craziest part of the Cold War, which is the Sino-Soviet split period, because that like more serious films about that, such as like the killing fields or whatever, are fascinating to try to parse because now I'm like, I got three sides I have to figure out like we'd actually love to have you on.

SPEAKER_00 2:19:47

I think that you'd be an excellent guest.

C. Derick Varn 2:19:49

Would you be interested? Sure, I'd love to come on and if you guys pick uh one of the Sinos 70 split. Why don't you why don't you pick up? You know what? I might actually tell you guys to watch to watch The Killing Fields, which and which is about I mean it's obviously about uh but it's also very interesting in what it is and is not handling about the geopolitics of that because in the the Khmer Rouge, the US is pretending to oppose them, but they're actually supporting them conquestantly with the Chinese to get the Vietnamese and also hurt the Soviet Union, and like one of the most bizarre periods of the Cold War, honestly.

SPEAKER_03 2:20:32

Yeah, probably the most bizarre periods.

C. Derick Varn 2:20:35

Yeah, that's when everyone's like like okay, who's Beth theories with whom? Like we we're on the side, like we're on the side of the genocidal quasi-Maoists who are fighting the normal Marxist Leninists, but but we're also pretending we're not on their side because we don't want to acknowledge that we're helping the Chinese. Like, what is going on? And and uh a movie like the Killing Fields is interesting because at the time they kind of people don't know that yet, it's not common knowledge, but some of the actions make more in that movie, make more sense if you do, and the movie's just like being accurate enough to memoirs to portray it, and that's that's fascinating. And then if you want to follow that up, you could follow it up to to uh what's his face? Oh god, the one man show artist who did well it's holiday in Cambodia is his one man show about that, which is just I gotta remember who that is. Oh killed himself during the beginning of the uh the war and terror. Right, yeah, I'm forgetting his name.

SPEAKER_03 2:21:45

It was a play, right?

C. Derick Varn 2:21:47

Yep, it was a play, and there's a movie of it, but it's just it's just a film version of the one-man show. And if you look up the title, unfortunately, the first thing that comes up is a dead Kennedy song, right?

SPEAKER_03 2:21:58

Right.

C. Derick Varn 2:21:58

Which is its own joy, but anyway.

SPEAKER_03 2:22:05

Yeah, why can't I find it? I'm looking it up, and it's just a dead Kennedy. Maybe it's not holiday in Cambodia, maybe it's it's something. Oh, swimming to Cambodia is what it is.

C. Derick Varn 2:22:12

Swimming to Cambodia is what it is, yes.

SPEAKER_03 2:22:14

Yeah, swimming to Cambodia. That is a Spaulding Grey, Spaulding Grey.

C. Derick Varn 2:22:18

Spaulding Grey, because Spaulding Grey has a bit part in that movie, and he like goes off because he talks about I haven't seen the movie, but I actually have the book.

SPEAKER_03 2:22:25

I have a book form of the play, but I haven't seen the movie.

C. Derick Varn 2:22:28

Yeah, so so both those things are worth considering. Uh, I'd love to talk about that. Because I'm I'm fascinated by how like what right before everything gets farcical in the 80s, you have this period of like, wait, who's on what side where now? Because like the after after Nixon goes to China, China's on our side, maybe, but maybe not, but maybe like who we who we're supporting.

SPEAKER_03 2:22:57

You also have some movies about sort of ex-militants in hiding in the US, like running on empty. So let me just let me just tell you and tell everybody. We only have five episodes left of this season, and we're then pivoting to looking at global cinema, like all across the world, but we will sprinkle in some bonus episodes about Hollywood, probably past, you know, we've we haven't gone past the 60s yet, so we'll be looking at 70s, 80s, 90s and in those bonus episodes. So, yeah, totally we'd love to have you on.

SPEAKER_00 2:23:32

Oh, yeah, please do. You know, you'd be a great guest. We'd love to have you. And thank you for having us on your show, also. I always I always joke with Jason that you know we we have this problem ahead of us, which is the to periodize, as we discussed earlier, this episode sequence for the next few years. What is it gonna look like? How do we how do we how do we uh organize it and so forth? And Jason always comes back as if it's not a problem and says, here's how we're gonna do it. And I admire him for this. He's like Dignon in the show in the movie Bottle Rocket. A five-year, then a 10-year, 20-year, and then a 50-year plan for the show. So he is our he is our fearless leader, and he is gonna get us through this periodization issue, no problem.

C. Derick Varn 2:24:13

All right, General Secretary Jason Christian. So, yeah, I'm I'm looking forward to I really enjoy your show. Thank you. I love I love informed film talk, and I love it as much as I've brought up a lot of what I what I proverbially call trash culture. I also do like it when we're actually doing serious analysis of serious films instead of me pretending that I have to care about every Marvel movie that ever comes out. And because life is too short to watch a bunch of terrible movies, is sort of like I was telling you, it really is.

SPEAKER_00 2:24:52

You know that.

C. Derick Varn 2:24:53

Oh no, just many, many art movies are bad, or are like there's so many art movies that come from like the late 90s when I was hitting college that I go back and rewatch and I'm like, oh, that's actually not that good. Or does are are it's very interesting until I like try to figure out if it's actually saying anything of substance, and then not really.

SPEAKER_00 2:25:18

I had this digitally, and I'm gonna I'm gonna call him out right now. I hope he's listening. My my good comrade Carson Welch. He he

Where To Find Their Work And Next Plans

SPEAKER_00 2:25:27

called me out because I said I I I like I love the movie from from that from you know my my college years, and he said, Oh boy, that's one of the worst. The movie was uh Synectic New York. He said, I he said I view that as the worst sort of iteration of the of the uh new sincerity movement. And I oh man, what a what a devastating critique. I felt it, and so I for it. But if I was this is the sentiment, I thought, oh my god.

C. Derick Varn 2:25:52

Did you go out and throw your Charlie Kaufman?

SPEAKER_00 2:25:54

No, no, no, but I thought, man, this guy, that was a brilliant critique, and I I didn't even see it coming. So kudos and uh and and thank you for for setting me straight, Carson.

C. Derick Varn 2:26:05

All right, well, where can people find you guys' work? Well, right?

SPEAKER_03 2:26:11

Yeah, Coldwar Cinema.com for the podcast. Tony publishes a new thing about every week, so you can find his. Do you have a website, Tony? You need one.

SPEAKER_00 2:26:24

I got the website that you guys made for this show.

SPEAKER_03 2:26:27

We're both on Twitter, unfortunately. You can search our names. Jason, mine's Jason A. Christian. And I have a website, but there's not anything too exciting on there. I do have a memoir that will come out one of these days, an excerpt of it supposed to come out within a week, actually. But we'll see.

C. Derick Varn 2:26:48

When it comes out, we might talk about it because I also we we talked about it off air a little bit, but we both spent time in squats, although mine was in Atlanta and yours was in Barcelona. And for me, that ended up with me going from squatting homeless to actual homeless to staying in a Buddhist monastery until someone found me and got me to college. True story. And for for for you, it ended up, you know, European Europeanness and a bunch of it sounds like you're hanging out with a bunch of the people I made fun of in the arts.

SPEAKER_03 2:27:19

Probably I I did stay two months in in Lower East Side New York in a squat in in a building that was next door to I think Gloria Steinem's apartment, or one of these like famous, and so we would have to like crawl out early in the morning and like hop this chain link fence right next to this really fancy apartment building.

SPEAKER_00 2:27:42

More CIA connections right there, yeah. True, true.

C. Derick Varn 2:27:47

Yeah, Steinem is on it. Steinem is a weird figure, and the fact that she still gets drug out to like go on news shows every now and then actually baffles me. I'm like, wait, she's still alive for one thing, but but the other thing I'm like, because every now and then I'll hear her like like the BBC will ask her to talk about the Trump victory or something. I'm like, where did you find Gloria Steinem? And like, how did you wow like 80? Like um, but anyway, there you go. So I I like you guys' work. I've read some of your work, Tony. For uh I actually knew your work with Gerald Horn before I knew about the podcast. So and Jason, you have the unfortunate Gen Xer name of Jason, and I say this because the number of people named Jason who were who were literally born between 75 and 78, yeah, that come on my show is is like disproportionately high. Um I believe it. Like it's apparently everybody was named Jason, like in the late 70s, but um kind of like Liam now or whatever, or Ian or Chad or something terrible.

SPEAKER_03 2:28:59

Tony also has another YouTube channel called De facto that people should check on.

SPEAKER_00 2:29:05

Okay, do you think it's Jason because of Friday the 13th? Maybe, maybe, and not my parents. My parents wouldn't have known that's maybe. I'm just trying to think of a film reference.

SPEAKER_03 2:29:17

No, they were they were country bumpkins from Oklahoma. I think they were just latching on to whatever trend like came their way.

C. Derick Varn 2:29:24

Yeah, I love my parents, but one day I want to do a thing about names because I do think it's weird, weird trims we have in names, and I've been trying to come up with a political economic reason for it, and actually I just can't. I'm just like, no, they're just need to be random trends, to be completely honest. But uh anyway, thank you guys for coming on. Check out the show, check out the facto, check out Cold War Cinema. I follow you both on Twitter, which is Hellscape that I participate in reluctantly. But uh the I when I tried to move over to to Blue Sky, it was just like terrible. It was liberalism the place, and um and like everyone was trying to pretend that we could be in like 2016 Twitter forever, and I'm like, I don't even want to be there.

SPEAKER_00 2:30:17

2016 Twitter. We are gonna have on. May I make an announcement? Go ahead. We are going to have on our next guest for Cold War Cinema, is going to be the great Ryan Ruby. Oh, and we will we will be talking with him, Jason, about which film?

SPEAKER_03 2:30:35

We're gonna be talking about New German cinema and the Red Army faction, but talking particularly about a movie called Germany in Autumn, which is directed by a lot of people, including Alexander Kluge and Fassbender, Rainer Werner Fassbender. And we're talking about another fastbender movie called the what was it called? The third generation?

C. Derick Varn 2:30:56

I think so.

SPEAKER_03 2:30:56

Something like that. Yeah, anyway.

C. Derick Varn 2:30:58

Yeah. I do love me some fast bender, but I mean but Rainer Maria Fastbender, not the other one. I mean the other I like him too, but different. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:31:07

No, the the the crazy prolific German gay film director who like directed about 40 movies in about 15 years and then died of a cocaine overdose. And that's that's the fast spender I mean.

C. Derick Varn 2:31:19

Yep. The amount of fast because I remember realizing how young he was when it died. I'm like, how did he make this little fucking movie?

SPEAKER_03 2:31:25

He was making a movie about every four months.

C. Derick Varn 2:31:29

There's so many of them. Anyway, on that note, we'll we'll end. Thank you guys. Have a great day. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 2:31:36

Bye bye.