Films with a Social Justice theme
HISTORY OF THE LEFT
(From Democratic Socialists of America Website)
Check out Pacifica Communications' Guide to videos on History
- 1900 - Robert DeNiro learned to speak Italian for this 3-hour saga about the Italian Communist party and the rise of the Black Shirts.
- Absolute Beginners -- A one-hour show about the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, starring Patrick Stewart as Lenin!, which is one of 13 episodes of the British Series "Fall of Eagles" series.
- Daniel - Timothy Hutton turns in a powerful performance as a young man trying to clear his family name years after his parents are executed for conspiracy. Taken from the best-selling novel by E.L. Doctorow and based on the tragedy of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. (130 min.)
- Fame is the Spur - A British film starring Michael Redgrave on the life of Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour PM.
- Half a Life - Winner of the Camera D'Or at the 1982 Cannes Festival and the Cesar, Half a Life is a personal memoir of that brief moment in French history, during the late `60's, when the youthful Left seemed to be successfully storming the Bastille. (95 min.)
- Last Emperor, The - Bernardo Bertolucci's beautiful story of the last Emperor of China, demonstrating the necessity and horror of the Chinese Revolution.
- Man of Marble (1977, Andrzej Wajda) This film and Wajda's sequel, Man of Iron, not only documented the Solidarity movement, they became part of it."Review by John Sayles, in Mother Jones, 1996"
- May Fools - A 1990 Louise Malle film about a bourgeois French family screwing around at a funeral in May 1968, and suddenly realizing the country is in revolution.
- Reds - The 1981 history of John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World and a founder of the American Communist movement, and his wife Louise Bryant. Though the portrayal of Socialist Party politics has an unfortunate tilt towards the Bolshevik faction, the main point is the struggle between love and political sacrifice. Starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson.
- Rosa Luxumburg - The story of the Polish socialist leader who neared turned the tide for socialism in Western Europe after the Russian Revolution.
Seeing Red - Done by the same independent producers as Union Maids, this documentary history of the U.S. Communist Party pulls its punches, never asking its respondents the hard questions about support for Uncle Joe, or the Hitler-Stalin pact.
- The Slingshot (1994, Ake Sandgren, Sweden) The young son of an immigrant Russian-Jewish feminist and a Swedish socialist faces anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik hostility in 1920's Sweden. The title of the film refers to slingshots the boy makes out of condoms his mother illegally distributes. (Steve Press)
- Things to Come - This 1933 H.G. Wells novel was a summary of his vision of the coming of world-wide war with total weapons, leading to the rising of a scientific dictatorship which will rebuild society, and establish a utopian world government.
- The Way We Were Barbara Streisand as a Communist, and then former Communist left-liberal, involved with Robert Redford.
ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN STRUGGLES
(Likewise from Democratic Socialists of America Website)
10 Rillington Place - True drama of a British murder case that led to the abolition of the death penalty. John Hurt stars as a man sentenced to die for the murder of his family, a crime he didn't commit.(111 min.)
1984 - The 1984 production with the Eurhythmics soundtrack and Richard Burton as the party official. (115m)
Arise, My Love (Mitchell Leisen, 1940) Claudette Colbert is a journalist who, in trying to demonstrate that women can take on non-fluff assignments, rescues Ray Milland from a Franco firing squad. Together they attempt to get the U.S. out of its isolationist complacency. (Steve Press)
Blade Runner - The plight of enslaved cyborgs and our corporate-dominated future through eyes ofa sympathetic cop. (113m)
The Blue Kite (1993, Tian Zhuang- zhuang) A boy, born in Beijing in 1954, grows up amid the political upheaval and zealotry of the Cultural Revolution. One day his father's library co-workers meet to practice "self-criticism" and to identify reactionaries in their midst. When the boy's father returns from the toilet, all eyes are on him: He has been selected as the reactionary, and that is his death sentence. The mother remarries twice seeking stability, unsuccessfully. It's a remarkable portrait of a society victimized by ideology." Review by Roger Ebert, in Mother Jones, 1996"
Brazil (1985, Terry Gilliam) In a dystopian vision, Gilliam takes what Kafka started to operatic heights in a film that is fantastic but not, finally, unrealistic." Review by John Sayles, in Mother Jones, 1996"
Brute Force (Jules Dassin, 1947) Burt Lancaster and Charles Bickford are leaders of two gangs of inmates in a prison. They form a united front to effect a break-out, as the sadistic captain of the guards (Hume Cronyn) stages a coup d'etat and overthrows the more humane, but impotent warden. While the film is an obvious metaphoric depiction of fascism, it is also a statement of existential despair: no one ever escapes. (Steve Press)
Burnt by the Sun (1994, Nikita Mikhalkov) A lament for the loss of idealism. A populist Red general and eccentrics holed up in an artists' retreat are the last to get the news of Stalin's purges. The director and his own daughter play the leads. " Review by John Sayles, in Mother Jones, 1996"
Catch 22 - A brilliant dark comedy about mercantilism and the military.
Clockwork Orange - An argument against involuntary behavior modification that portrays the beauty of stylish rapes and beatings along the way.
The Fallen Sparrow (Richard Wallace, 1943). John Garfield plays a Spanish Civil War veteran who is haunted by his experiences of torture at the hands of Franco's army, and who is being pursued by Fascists in New York. (Steve Press)
Farewell My Concubine Chen Kaige's beautiful and achingly sad portrayal of a doomed love triangle between two Chinese opera stars, and a former prostitute. Following the protagonists from the '49 revolution through the Cultural Revolution, portrays the horror of Maoist totalitarianism.
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