No Man’s Land drops us into the front lines of the Bosnian War in 1994 and ultimately into the no man’s land between Bosnian and Serb forces in the mountains of Bosnia Herzegovina. Ciki (who is Bosnian) and Nino (who is Serb) will confront one another in this liminal space. Can they work together to survive?

This was Danis Tanovic’ first film. He was not an outside observer. He was a university student when the war broke out (in 1992) and spent the war years following the Bosnian Army and documenting the conflict. He made this film (released in 2001) just a few years after the Dayton Accords (1995) that ended the conflict. No Man’s Land won the Oscar for best foreign film and Tanovic would go on to make several other features as writer and director.

The film works on several levels. It is a ruthless caricature of the UNPROFOR (the UN Protection Force), which didn’t succeed in doing much protecting, a send-up of the international media, and above all a plaintive cry on the futility of war. Tanovic was dealing in recent history, but he wasn’t aiming at documentary storytelling. He shared a tragic (and darkly comic) meditation on what nationalism does to ordinary people. Two soldiers – Ciki and Nino – find themselves trapped together in a trench. They share language, memories, even acquaintances (remember the conversation about Sonja from Banja Luka?). Under other circumstances, they might have been friends. But here, in the midst of war, their shared humanity is poisoned by suspicion, resentment, and the memory of violence.

The film holds out the possibility that they can recognize the humanity of the other. But that recognition never arrives. Instead, both men fall back on the same logic: whoever holds the gun holds the truth. They speak the same lines, try the same moves. The symmetry is striking, but it is not meant to suggest simple moral equivalence. Rather, as the film puts it, they are “in the same shit.”

So what should we make of this film? What does it tell us about the breakup of Yugoslavia and the nature of modern nationalism? About the international community, international journalism, and humanitarian intervention? About the self-serving logic of violence?

Goodbye Lenin! (2003) tracks closely to the history of the GDR. In August 1978, Alex’ dad abandons his family. Ten years later, on Oct 7, 1989, Alex is sitting on a park bench while Gorbachev is visiting the GDR to celebrate the 40th anniversary of East Germany. One year further on, October 6, 1990, Alex’s mother dies and Germans celebrate the reunification of their country, undoing the post-war division that had separated Germany since 1945.

But the film is more than a history lesson. It’s a dramatic retelling of these events and a meditation on the differences between East Germans and West Germans (Ossies and Wessies), the price of unification, the impact of consumerism, the generational gaps that shape experience and perceptions. The film contemplates an old fantasy – to hold back time against radical change – and the inevitable resolution that our hero (and, by extension, the rest of us) need to accept a changing world. Hence the filmmakers play with ironic juxtapositions and time effects.

The film is often described as a demonstration of Ostalgie (nostalgia for the East German past). But the filmmakers – the director Wolfgang Becker and his co-writer Bernd Lichtenberg – are Wessies. What should we make of the story they tell? As a retelling of the events of 1989-90? As a product of 2003?

There is something different about Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education – in the context of our course. I’m not talking about the film’s explicit sexuality, its remarkable color palette, or the melodramatic theme of switched identities… This is the first time we are watching a film that follows the events we are studying by a substantial period. We’ll use this film from 2004 to think about the experience of dictatorship in Spain, the transition to democracy (1975-1978), and the so-called Madrid Scene (the Movida Madrileña of the 1980s). As you will see – and as we’ll discuss – it is very much a film about memory.

The film tells the story of the film director, Enrico Goded, and the visit of a long-lost (but not forgotten) friend, Ignacio (who now goes by the name Angel). So the film begins with a creative deity (God-ed) and a supplicant angel… From this beginning, Almodovar takes us on a journey back in time to 1977 (in a fictional account of the transition), the 1960s (in boarding school), 1977 (in the real world of the film), and back to 1980 (the present of the film). Make sense?

Pedro Almodovar, is a Spanish filmmaker you’d like to know, engaging and enormously influential. He is famous for films about desire and identity, films that blend dark humor and melodrama, films about people on the margins of society. Almodovar lived through the transition to democracy and made films that defined the spirit of the Movida Madrileña. He is not considered a political filmmaker, but the politics of contemporary Spain are just beneath the surface of his films.

In one of his pamphlets on the revolutions in nineteenth-century France, Karl Marx wrote that “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” He might have been talking about the jaded anti-hero of The Joke, Ludvik Jahn, who seems to be carrying the entire history of post-war Czechoslovakia under his middle-aged comb-over.

Jaromil Jires’ film opens with shots of the remarkable astronomical clock at Oloumouc, rebuilt in a style of socialist realism in the 1950s to feature peasants, workers, and soldiers. The clock includes a calendar highlighting the birthdays of Stalin and Klement Gottwald among others. It’s a first sign that this will be a film about time, the weight of the past, the fleeting present.

We meet Ludvik as he is returning to Oloumouc with the aim to seduce Helena, the wife of his old nemesis Pavel Zemánek… And off we go, moving backward and forward in time, but especially backward, to the high-spirited days of 1948-9 (the Communist consolidation of power), to the search for enemies of the early 1950s and Ludvik’s expulsion from the party and “reeducation.”

This dark (and pessimistic) film was based on a novel by the great Czech author, Milan Kundera. We can talk a bit about him in class. It was in many ways a product of the Prague Spring, like the inquiry into the show trials of the 1950s that we are reading. But time marches forward. The film arrived in Czech and Slovak cinemas in February 1969 and was banned for the next twenty years…

With Cléo from 5 to 7 we are a long way from where we began the course, in the wreckage of 1945. Agnès Varda’s film speaks to another moment in time, the consumerist paradise of the trente glorieuses, the bustling Paris of the 1960s, the new pop culture of the era, and to the personal and political dramas that ran just under the surface of this golden age.

Cléo (Florence) is a beautiful singer on the road to stardom. But this day, this afternoon, these hours from 5 to 7 she will spend waiting for the results of a medical test. Let’s just say that the Tarot cards don’t look promising.

The film was one of Varda’s masterpieces, among her many films that stretched from the 1950s until her last film in 2019, the year of her death. She left behind body work that holds up to the best of the French New Wave (filmmakers like François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, etc.) though she didn’t receive the same acclaim as they did, at least until the end of her life.

What can Cléo’s story tell us? It is a picture of Paris before the student protests that would redefine “the Sixties.” In the background we can catch glimpses of the Algerian War and the Cold War, but the emphasis is on the personal. It can be read as an existential drama – when our lives are full of plenty, where will we find meaning? It is the story of a woman (and of women) making a way for themselves despite the gender confines of 1960s France. What do you make of Cléo and her story? I look forward to hearing.

Our film this week is another landmark in the history of cinema. A moving story, beautifully shot on the streets of Rome, it captures a pivotal moment in the history of Europe – and has captivated audiences and filmmakers ever since. The year is 1948. The Italian economy is in crisis. People are hungry and desperate for work.

Vittorio de Sica wanted to make a movie about a common man in these uncommon times. He took a popular novel from the day – about the breakdown of civil order in postwar Italy – and retold the story as an ode to the common man struggling against his circumstances. His film is one of the purest examples of what came to be known as Italian neorealism (films taking up social issues, shot on location, typically with amateur actors).

Antonio Ricci – played by Lamberto Maggiorani, a factory worker – desperately seeks work to feed his family and make a better life. All he needs is a bicycle. What better symbol of social mobility? And so we are off… The story will take us on a tour of Rome in 1948. We’ll see working class families, fortune tellers, pawnshops, beggars, markets, police stations, and sports arenas. It is a world of private dramas and public crises.

De Sicca and his collaborators finished the screenplay just a couple days after the decisive elections of 1948 that saw the Christian Democrats triumph over the Italian Communist Party. The filming took place in a tense moment. The leader of the Communists, Palmiro Tagliatti, was shot in the street by a neo-fascist student. As he lay in a coma, unions called for massive strikes across Italy and revolution was in the air. When he came back to consciousness, he called for calm; he was a proponent of a peaceful “Italian road to socialism.” Italian public opinion would turn increasingly to France and to sport, where the Italian rider Gino Bartali led the Tour de France. Yes, the bicycle race.

You were lucky to watch one of the great films in the history of cinema. It features: A powerful story and script by the English writer Graham Greene, brilliant filmmaking by the director, Carol Reed and his cinematographer Robert Krasker. Add to this the captivating score by the Austrian zither player Anton Karas and unforgettable acting by Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli. In a survey of British film critics some years back it was chosen as the most highly rated of British films ever.  For my part, I find it unforgettable as cinema. For the purposes of this class, I think the film is enormously useful. The film is a remarkable window on a pivotal moment in the history of postwar Europe.

It was shortly after the war, 1947 or 1948, that Alexander Korda had the idea of making a film about occupied Vienna. Korda, a popular film producer in Britain, had emigrated from Hungary himself. He asked Carol Reed to begin work on the film. And Reed, in turn, invited Graham Greene to visit the city and write a script. Greene spent weeks in Vienna in February of 1948, researching the occupation, the blackmarket, and the cafes. He wrote a novella that would be the basis for the screenplay. It’s a great thriller – full of unexpected twists and brilliant characters – that also presents some powerful moral dilemmas.

We can watch the film for the story – but as historians we should also see it as a product of a time and place. The emergence of the Cold War was the backdrop to the making of the film. While Greene was writing his novella, officials in Prague, Czechoslovakia were purging non-Communists from the government. While the film was being shot in Vienna, the Russians blockaded the city of Berlin, another city under four power control, ratcheting up tensions with the western powers. When the film first appeared in theaters in Britain and the U.S., officialsfrom both countries were hammering out the details of the North Atlantic TreatyOrganization.

The filmmakers set out to make an entertaining thriller, not a political speech on the Cold War. Nonetheless, we can read the film as a distinctly British perspective on the global tensions that strained Europe in these years.

I want to share just a few words on this extraordinary film, Wolfgang Staudte’s Murderers Are Among Us (1946). Warning: spoilers ahead.

The film comes out of Berlin and the immediate aftermath of the war – and it tells a story that, much like Rome Open City, reflects on the experience of the war. Susanne Wallner returns from a concentration camp looking like she just got back from a Mediterranean cruise. She discovers Dr. Hans Mertens living in her apartment. Not your classic meet-cute. He’s scarred by the war, crazy, disheveled, a drunkard. He spends his days wandering the rubble-strewn streets and visiting the cabarets, while she begins to draw again. Of course, Suzanne falls in love with Hans, but he doesn’t know if he can love again. So, #1, we have a love story.

But it’s 1945 in war-scarred Berlin. Things aren’t going to be so easy for these lovebirds. It turns that Hans’ old captain is still alive, Ferdinand Brückner. Alive and thriving in postwar Berlin, turning helmets into cooking pots and making good money. We hate to see bad guys prosper. Story #2: revenge. Will Hans kill Brückner for the crimes of war?

We can take time to discuss what the story means. I want to say a few words about the film’s style. The lighting, the cinematography, the soundscape all deserve some close attention. We’ll take a look at some striking compositions: canted shots, shadows looming over figures, evocative lighting, high angles. Staudte made his film in the shadow of the Nazi experiment (more on this when we get together), but he emphatically rejected the film styles of the Nazi period. His film harkens back to the styles (and the themes) of Weimar (that is pre-Nazi) German cinema (think the films of Fritz Lang, for example). The truth is out there, but it is obscure, hard to read. And moral corruption is everywhere. How do we start again? The answer for Suzanne and Hans – see #1 – is romantic love. The answer for Staudte seems to be a return to the filmmaking world of the 1920s and 1930s.