The best book on the greatest film on communism, which is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, is Totalitarianism on Screen, edited by F. Flagg Taylor IV and yours truly, published in 2014. It’s probably also the best book on Donnersmarck’s cinematic work so far, and among the better books in English exploring East German communism.
It consists of eleven essays, as well as a historian’s overview of the Stasi, the secret police of East Germany. Several essays meditate on the concept of totalitarianism, most do close analysis of The Lives of Others, and there are also essays which compare it with the films Good-bye, Lenin! and Divided We Fall, and the Brecht play The Good Woman of Setzuan. My own essay in it, “Communist Moral Corruption and the Redemptive Power of Art,” lays out the different kinds of such corruption shown in the film, and culminates in a section that has vital lessons for those of today’s artists (which is most of them!) who are “in bed” with a Progressivist Establishment that quite clearly is developing in totalitarian direction. There is also an essay, by the historian Peter Grieder, that presciently warned in 2014 of the development of a new kind of Stasi-like surveillance state in our own time.
This clip from The Lives of Others could be regarded as a spoiler, so fair warning!
The book also featured an introduction in which, as noted in the last post, I mentioned the comparative dearth of films on communist totalitarianism compared to the many on Nazi totalitarianism.
Since a commenter thanked me for the references there to films since 2014 on communism,1 I thought I’d here share the list of films I provided at that time. This is the verbatim footnote 13 from that introduction:
Prominent films substantially dealing with communism include (in their English titles): The Tunnel, Good-Bye Lenin!, Katyn, I Am David, Sunshine, To Live, The Killing Fields, and Dr. Zhivago. This list does not include films primarily about spies or agents, and “prominence” here is being estimated mainly with respect to English-speaking audiences. Lesser-known films include: 12:08 East of Bucharest, Tales from the Golden Age, Bitter Sugar, East-West, The Great Water, The Chekist, Burnt by the Sun, China My Sorrow, Man of Iron, Repentance, Hibiscus Town, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Man on a Tightrope. Those who know foreign cinema, especially East European and Asian, could surely add more titles.
The recent Gulag documentary—note: documentaries are not included in this note—made me additionally aware of Ninotchka from 1939, and as I predicted, there are a number of Asian titles (incl. some Bengali films) that I missed—maybe see this Quora thread if you want to investigate further.
I wrote very brief descriptions of a few of the films in the note for the old Post-Modern Conservative blog. The ones I think the most impressive are:
To Live, Dr. Zhivago, Good-Bye Lenin!, The Great Water, Burnt by the Sun, Hibiscus Town, and the delightfully bizarre Repentance.
But the best remains The Lives of Others:
And I somehow forgot about Cold War, 2018, one of the finest of all the films here, and which I wrote about for Law and Liberty.