Dreaming of freedom, sneering at freedom

Our topic this week has been Ilinca Calugareanu’s extraordinary documentary Chuck Norris vs. Communism. The film takes us back to Communist Romania in the 1980s, when ordinary people gathered secretly to watch Hollywood movies – and thus got their first precious glimpses of life under freedom.

chuck4
Producer Mara Adina, Irina Nistor, Ilinca Calugareanu

In an interview with PBS, Calugareanu, who herself attended these group screenings as a kid, described her film as telling a story “that the world needed to hear, a story filled with joy and magic from a part of the world that most film audiences don’t know much about.” She’s right. In another interview, at a Toronto film festival, she recalls that when she was a child and walked into a group screening and saw the TV set and VCR, the thrill was palpable – you felt as if “you could almost touch freedom and the West.” People who have lived their entire lives in freedom need to be reminded how precious that gift is. To viewers who do appreciate their freedom, this documentary will be a deeply moving experience.

PARK CITY, UT - JANUARY 27: Director/writer Ilinca Calugareanu, translator/film critic Irina Margareta, and producer Mara Adina attend The Variety Studio At Sundance Presented By Dockers Day 4 on January 27, 2015 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for Variety)
Calugareanu, Nistor, and Adina being interviewed at Sundance

Unfortunately, many Western film critics don’t belong to that category of viewers. It doesn’t help that they are so contemptuous of the action vehicles starring actors like Sly Stallone and Chuck Norris that they can’t bring themselves to even try to appreciate what such fare meant to people living under totalitarianism. One such critic is Scott Foundas, who, reviewing the documentary last year in Variety, actually described it as a “breezily entertaining bonbon” – which is just this side of calling Schindler’s List a “fun romp” or Shoah a “great date film.” To be sure, Foundas was on-point when he compared Zamfir to a Graham Greene character and when he praised Calugareanu for giving her picture “the flair of a good espionage yarn.” And at least he treated the documentary and its mission with a degree of respect, acknowledging the importance of the fact that “the glimpses of the West and Western democracy afforded by American films…did much to counteract the influence of Ceausescu’s powerful propaganda machine.”

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
John DeFore

But then there’s John DeFore, who, writing in the Hollywood Reporter, sneered condescendingly about the “jingoistic action films and romantic fantasies” that worked magic on Romanian audiences. DeFore even managed to work into his review the term “cultural imperialism” – giving one the distinct impression that for him, what’s disturbing about Calugarean’s story is not the idea of people living under a real-life dictatorship that sought to brainwash and terrorize them 24/7 but the idea of them being ideologically influenced by such dreaded capitalism-promoting products as Top Gun and Pretty Woman.

Meanwhile, in the Guardian, Jordan Hoffman unhesitatingly panned Calugareanu’s documentary, complaining that it “says everything it needs to say in its first 15 minutes, and then just keeps rewinding the tape….While I’m sure the dissemination of black market tapes truly did have huge social repercussions, there’s a surprising ‘so what?’ effect after the 15th recollection of what it was like to watch Rambo.”

jordan_hoffman
Jordan Hoffman

That Hoffman should respond so dismissively, so unfeelingly, to such an extraordinarily stirring chapter of modern history tells us a great deal about him. And it’s not pretty. All he succeeds in doing, in his small-minded piece, is to remind us that while there are men and women of remarkable courage in totalitarian countries who yearn for freedom and who strive to do their part to bring down tyranny, there are also pathetic characters in free countries who not only take their freedom for granted but who think it’s cool and chic to mock the very idea of yearning for freedom. 

But what else can one expect from the Guardian?

Romania: becoming heroes

Yesterday we began discussing the documentary Chuck Norris vs. Communism, in which director Ilinca Calugareanu takes us back to 1980s Romania and the phenomenon of surreptitious private screenings at which ordinary Romanians got to see American films – and, through them, the Free World.

chuck2
In a re-creation from the documentary, Nistor is seen doing her secret dubbing

But the films didn’t just vouchsafe to Romanians their first look at the West. “The films changed what you thought,” says one of Calugareanu’s interviewees. “You developed through films.” The movies, we’re told, sowed “seeds of freedom.” One interlocutor remembers that after viewing one action film after another – starring actors like Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone, and Jean-Claude van Damme – “we started to want to be heroes.”

cae
Nicolae Ceaușescu

This is no small admission. These were people who’d been systematically beaten down by the Communist system. The word hero was flung at them constantly by their leaders – as we see in the documentary itself, in an excerpt from one televised speech by dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu – but it was invariably used to refer to so-called “socialist heroes,” people who’d submitted themselves heart and soul to the regime, who’d embraced their role as obedient mice, who’d parroted the totalitarian rhetoric (and, in many cases, ratted on their neighbors who didn’t). The bootleg Hollywood films restored to the Romanians who saw them the concept of heroism in its authentic sense – restored to them, that is, the notion that it was possible in this world to stand up for oneself, for one’s friends, and for goodness itself against the forces of evil and oppression. Nistor tells Calugareanu that since the liberation of Romania, people have told her that her very voice is linked in their minds with the idea of freedom and hope.

havel
Vaclav Havel

Like many a good Hollywood thriller, Calugareanu’s film actually contains a twist or two in its latter half. We’d rather not give away the surprises here. Suffice it to say that pretty much everybody in Romania, it turns out, up to and including people at the very highest levels of government, was eager to watch American movies. Which, in turn, underscores the fact that even top officials were, in a very real sense, prisoners of their own system. It’s not a fresh insight: Vaclav Havel, the Czech poet-turned-activist-turned-president, articulated it brilliantly in his famous essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Indeed this documentary, seen from one angle, is a confirmation of Havel’s own assertion in that essay that oppressed people in totalitarian countries are effectively collaborators in their own oppression and that they contain within themselves the power to overcome their own powerlessness. The Romanians who gathered in tiny apartments to watch those American movies were, in their own small way, defying authority – awakening in themselves the very spirit that Havel wrote about, and that would help to bring Ceaușescu down.

We’ll finish up on this tomorrow.

Chuck Norris vs. Communism: a riveting true-life story

In a stirring documentary called Chuck Norris vs. Communism, first screened last year at the Sundance Film Festival and now available on Netflix, director Ilinca Calugareanu tells the story of how bootleg Western movies, sold on the black market and shown on VHS in secret, illegal viewings in private homes across Romania in the 1980s, helped transform the mentality of a people living under the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu.

chuck7
Nicolae Ceaușescu

Calugareanu effectively combines beautifully directed historical re-creations with absorbing on-camera testimony by a couple of dozen or so Romanians who explain the impact that the movies had on them at a time when their own national TV service consisted of two hours a day of boring propaganda about the glory and triumph of socialism and when they were denied even the slightest glimpse of the world on the far side of the Iron Curtain. An older woman recalls that when she first saw Western movies, “I realized how far behind the West we were.” Another interviewee remembers, “We would all savor every image, even the credits at the beginning of the film.”

norris
Chuck Norris

Indeed, the stories told by the Western movies often took a back seat to the settings, the backgrounds. For the first time, Romanians could see the streets of New York and Paris. The actors’ “clothes, the attitudes, the gestures” communicated oodles of information that couldn’t be put into words. “You’d stop following the movies,” recalls one man, “because you were impressed by the houses.” You’d see “cars that you’d never see here.” The pictures provided “a window into the west through which I could see what the free world was like.” And every bit of it was fascinating to the viewers: “people had a strong desire to know, to learn about a society that was forbidden.”

zamfir
In one re-created scene from the documentary, Zamfir gets into a spot of trouble with the authorities

Few Romanians knew how the bootleg tapes had found their way into Romania. All they knew was that they’d had been smuggled in illegally – and that it was illegal to watch them. What we learn from Calugareanu is that the whole operation was the work of a single remarkable man named Zamfir. Starting with a couple of VCRs, he ended up with 360. Two or three times a year, he’d drive abroad and come back with a trunk full of new films. To get away with it, he bribed border guards. Eventually he developed a network that distributed tapes throughout the country.

chuck3
Irina Nistor today

Zamfir’s main helpmeet was a woman named Irina Nistor, whose story is also remarkable. She was working as a translator for the official government censors when Zamfir approached her: would she be willing to take on an evening job dubbing foreign movies for him? She leapt at the chance. She was risking prison – but she was curious to see the films herself. “It seemed,” she tells Calugareanu, “like a way to be free and spite the regime.”

Photography by Kev Williams
In one of the film’s re-creations, Nistor is seen at work in Zamfir’s home

So while continuing to work with Ceaușescu’s censors during the day, she also secretly collaborated with Zamfir, going to his home night after night to sit at a desk, watch movies on a TV screen, translate the dialogue in real time, and dub all the actors’ voices into a microphone, trying her best not only to render the words correctly into Romanian but also to convey the tone, the feeling, the mood. Even after being called on the carpet by an official of the secret police, she refused to quit. “The films were my oxygen.” Simultaneous translators at the UN generally work for only fifteen minutes or so at a time, so exhausting is the job; Nistor could dub a half dozen or more films in a single sitting. By 1989, when Communism fell, she had dubbed more than 3000 of them. As a result of her work, Nistor’s voice became, after Ceaușescu’s, the second most familiar in all of Romania.

More tomorrow.