Consumerism,anticommunism and romantic comedy in Ernst Lubitsch's "Ninotchka".
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文摘
The Soviet occupation authorities in East Germany sent their American counterparts in West Germany into a frenzy in 1948 with their release of Mikhail Romm's Russkii Vopros； the film was an unequivocally biting indictment of American capitalism, which featured an opening montage of newsreel footage showing American poverty, decadence, and---most provocatively---racial inequality. The American administration's lightning-fast response was Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka, a 1939 film in which Greta Garbo plays a communist official comically seduced by the pleasures of capitalism. This episode in Cold War history became the focal point of my master's thesis for the clarity with which it revealed both the power of film as a tool for relaying ideology and political rhetoric (a fact that had long been clear to both American and Soviet politicians and propagandists), as well as the potential of cinema to reveal the fears, hang-ups and values of the societies which produced, consumed, and contested it.