This is not a movie review: You can find a good one here, or just google the title for several choices.
At the height of the cold war in Romania, mid 1980's, Western action films were voiced over into Romanian and shown to eager audiences willing to pay and take a risk. The interviews all show people who were greatly impressed and moved by Western society compared to their own: The freedom displayed as well as our opulence compared to what they had, made a big impression.
One ironic thing was that this was capitalism in practice: The people who arranged viewings, did so in their own apartments and had to acquire expensive (like the cost of a car) VHS machines. They charged guests to see films and hence recouped their investment as well as turned a profit.
The main thing that struck me was a kind of hope/despair dialectic: We are not such a beacon now. Does this mean we in the West have stagnated and are no longer in the vanguard of Human civilization? Or is it that the world is just more free now and so many more people are catching up to what we've had for so long?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment