MestnyiGeroi's "Top Ten Politically Craven Movies"

Add to my lists | Print this list

Sort of a companion piece to this list (http://www.listsofbests.com/list/54368) of politically bold movies, this is a selected assortment of politically craven films. Cowardice here is defined by a level of egregious pandering— pandering to nefarious rulers or regimes, and/or pandering in a cheap and facile way to the worst in society.

Clearly, such a list could number in the thousands if every forgotten piece of slavish, journeyman hackwork made under totalitarian regimes were included, but I’ve kept this to just a short, select list. The first five, however, could top any list of politically craven films, no matter what the scope, whereas the latter five are a little more arbitrary.

Brief explanations for each inclusion offered below.

  1. 1.
    Triumph of the Will (Special Edition)
    by Leni Riefenstahl
  2. 2.
    Hero
    by Yimou Zhang
  3. 3.
    Alexander Nevsky
    by Dmitri Vasilyev
  4. 4.
    The 47 Ronin: Parts 1 & 2
    by Kenji Mizoguchi
  6. 6.
    Rhapsody in August
    by Akira Kurosawa
  7. 7.
    Black Hawk Down (3-Disc Deluxe Edition)
    by Ridley Scott
  8. 8.
    Red Dawn (Collector's Edition)
    by John Milius
  9. 9.
    The Birth of a Nation
    by D.W. Griffith
  10. 10.
    Chunhyang

This is MestnyiGeroi's list. Only MestnyiGeroi can edit it. You can make your own version of this list.
Created by MestnyiGeroi on May 03, 2008.
 

Comments

mizoguchi

Untitled — 4 years ago

47 Ronin is certainly Mizoguchi’s most politically problematic film, the more so for his leftist tendency films of the 30’s and of course the humanism of his late great masterpieces. His scriptwriter Yoda thought Mizo was consistently opposed to injustice, and the film isn’t exactly militaristic propaganda of the all-action Rambo variety. It certainly lionises Japaneseness, but this involves a greater interest in spatial exploration and the psychology of inaction than the violent revenge incident itself. Like Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible it’s almost a one-off in film history. As for Alexander Nevsky, well i can’t really condemn anti-Nazi propaganda whatever the motives.

May 15, 03:38PM | 3 comments | Reply to this

MestnyiGeroi

Brief explanations: — 4 years ago

1. Triumph of the Will — The granddaddy of all pandering pics, this is a celebration of the grandeur and beauty of Hitler and all that is worst in humankind.

2. Hero — Past all the pretty colors and whirling swords, this is a bone-chilling paean to tyranny. One-time director of the astonishingly bold Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang opted to save his career with this sycophantic sermon, which equates wisdom with blind devotion to the Chinese government (Tiananmen, Taiwan, Tibet, slave labor, global pollution … huh? Pretty colors!).

3. Alexander Nevsky — A genuine masterpiece, Nevsky is nevertheless a 108-minute love song to Stalin. Like Zhang, Eisenstein knew that his career, and perhaps his life, hung in the balance, and this was his solution.

4. 47 Ronin — A Japanese war-time movie that stresses religious obedience to authority, violence as the primary means of attaining honor, and suicide as an unthinking, glorious duty to the state, this film should be classed with Triumph of the Will as an abomination against humanity. However, Mizoguchi could be said to have spent much of the rest of his career atoning for a work like this, and after the war his films were one of the very few voices of genuine reflection upon Japan’s historical role, and this remains largely true until the present day.

5. The Battle of Stalingrad — An aesthetically excruciating and factually oblivious account of a crucial WWII battle, this film might be considered a high-water mark of Stalinism at its most absurd.

6. Rhapsody in August — Possibly the world’s greatest director, Kurosawa nonetheless made this painfully embarrassing film, which purports to engage in ‘Never-Again’ hand-wringing over the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, while simultaneously engaging in ‘Sometime-Again-Soon’ cultural amnesia over the larger historical context. The German equivalent – a prolonged lament over the inhumanity of, say, the Americans’ fire-bombing of Dresden, with no recognition of the broader context of Nazi aggression and the Holocaust – would be unthinkable.

7. Black Hawk Down - While this film successfully portrays the courage of the soldier in the midst of combat, on the whole this movie – a shoot’em-up romp in a foreign land totally devoid of any political or historical context – is an apotheosis of what would become the hallmark of the George W. Bush era: unthinking acquiescence, if not cheerleading, for an ill-planned and ill-justified attack on unknown foreigners.

8. Red Dawn — The quintessential example of pandering to the worst kinds of jingoism and paranoia of the Reagan era.

9. Birth of a Nation — Not necessarily craven in every respect (the movie did get a fair amount of flak in its day), this film clearly panders, nonetheless, to the very worst in American society.

10. Chunhyang — Masquerading as sympathy for the downfallen, this movie is a reworking of a traditional folktale into an operatic celebration of reactionary misogyny, reifying and lionizing eternal suffering and blind, absurdist devotion to the man as the height of female virtue. For a contrasting portrayal of genuine sympathy for the suffering of women, see Mizoguchi’s Sansho Dayo.

May 03, 09:48AM | 2 comments | Reply to this



or
Login with Facebook