Page 597 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| World C nema

was by commercial demands. In 1962 a group of young German filmmakers
signed the Oberhausen Manifesto, a declaration that encouraged quality art-
house films. The work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Win
Wenders, among others, found international acclaim and returned German
cinema to quality it had enjoyed during the Weimar Republic. In 1979, The
Tin Drum became the first German film to win the Academy Award for Best
Foreign Language Film. Several writers and critics have noted the similarity be-
tween Werner Herzog’s surreal tale, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fran-
cis Ford Coppola’s 1979 classic work of war and madness, Apocalypse Now.

CEnsorshiP

Global cinema has also been the subject and target of censorship. In Beijing
Bicycle, the theft of a mountain bike sets in motion a contemporary tale of class
conflict and social dislocation, yet in the new China, neither this nor the other
four feature films directed by Wang Xiaoshuai was theatrically released.
Many filmmakers courageously resist the dangers posed by ideologues who
would control the speech and art of others. Romanian filmmaker Lucian Pintilie
was forced into exile in 1972 because he refused to submit his art to what he
called the capricious demands of the system. He explained that one day the cen-
sors want one thing, the next day something else. After the fall of the Ceaucescu
government, Pintilie returned to his country and directed The Oak (1992),
a scathing social satire that portrays the process by which people acquiesce to
their leader’s injustices, who gradually and irreversible become accustomed to
the evil that becomes banal.
Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky’s feature debut Ivan’s Childhood, about the
lost spirit of a soldier boy, slipped past the censors to win the Golden Lion for
Best Film at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. What might have looked to the cen-
sors like a patriotic hymn to the Red Army was internationally acclaimed and
widely understood as work of outrage against violence. Although Ivan’s Child-
hood made it through the bureaucracy, Tarkovsky’s subsequent films were heav-
ily scrutinized and suppressed.
The bleak, wintry landscapes of a country retreat outside Moscow are featured
in Tema (Theme), a film made by Soviet director Gleb Panfilov. The film details
the passions and (mis)fortunes of a famous Russian playwright, Kim Yesenin.
Tema was shown in the United States for the first time in 1987 at the New York
Film Festival. Made in 1979, Tema stayed on the shelf for eight years because Pan-
filov had refused to alter the film’s content. It was finally released under Glasnost
and won the Golden Bear Award at the 1987 Berlin Film Festival.
Moshen Makhmalbaf experienced the economic constraints imposed on
filmmakers in Iran under the government of the Shah. Though a less direct form
of censorship, it was a stifling of expression nonetheless. After the revolution he
visited his grandmother’s grave to tell her about the changes in Iran, from a film
making industry influenced by Hollywood and motivated by the singular desire
to make money, into a humanist one. That change led to the flowering of Iran
new-wave cinema. Filmmakers now work under the eyes of government censors