Kes tulistas J.R.-i?
Nov. 11th, 2009 09:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bironicI tried a recipe for avgolemono soup last night. Scrambled eggs only happened a little bit. The soup isn't quite as good as I'd hoped—I would definitely cut out the butter, maybe add more corn starch to thicken it up, and I already one-and-a-halved the lemon juice... maybe I should have stuck with the recipe I linked to in that post last year—but it's still eatable. And, having had to separate the eggs, I've now got some egg whites for an omelette this morning.
ETA: Ha! Look what was featured in today's Washingtonian email.
Maybe all this Greekness is a sign I should work on a particular WIP later, since I have the holiday off. (!) To vid, or to fic?
.
Last night I went to see Disco and Atomic War (Disko ya tuumasõda, Estonia, 2009, dir. Jaak Kilmi), a documentary-slash-comedy arguing that Western television that was snuck into Estonia via Finland from the 1960s to the 1980s helped bring down the Soviet Union by showing viewers how much better their lives could be.
With its capital city of Tallinn just across the Gulf of Finland from Helsinki, Estonia was a geographical gateway into the USSR. Finland aimed its towers at Estonia and broadcast programming forbidden on Soviet TV, from the Prague Spring uprising to disco dancing to Emmanuelle; Estonians built secret converters and antennas to tune in and distributed black market TV listings. The Soviet government in Leningrad and Tallinn retaliated with counter-propaganda, and devised plans to build a metal net across the gulf to "catch" the TV waves. The Finns spoofed them. The U.S. CIA got in on the game, profiling the Estonian citizenry and concocting plans to subvert the Soviets by showing ads for deli products while Estonians waited in line for meager rations; the KGB yelled at its television producers and conducted its own studies into how its citizens were reacting to the programs. And so the Cold War media battle raged for decades.
I hadn't known about any of this, so the material was fascinating. Another story about the power of media and the ultimate futility of censorship. The format was entertaining: Kilmi interwove photographs and home video; footage from the movies, shows and commercials of the time; interviews with television executives, intelligence agents, media scholars and an Estonian antenna inventor; and snippets of comedic reenactments, all shown at a swift clip with segments set apart by place and year.
Although the movie in general was informative and often funny, the pace was actually too fast for me. Photographs faded out too soon, the music cut off just when I was getting into it. However, it seemed deliberate, and the reviews I've seen of the film so far unanimously refer to Kilmi as an esteemed documentarian, so it must just not be my style. Plus, the subtitles weren't helping; the lines were too short and down in a corner, breaking at odd times compared to the visuals, so it was tough to know where to look. Usually I prefer subtitles by far, but dubbing might actually have been better here. I did laugh at the recurring use of a theme from Tchaikovsky every time the KGB changed hands.
Something else I liked was the multilinguality. I counted Estonian, Finnish, Russian, Czech and English. Since it implies a story that involves more than one culture, seeing a movie with multiple languages always makes me feel worldly.
The movie was also indirectly about fannishness. Western programs were winning over the hearts and minds of Estonian children (and adults) against the Soviet Union's best efforts to turn them into good citizens. In one of the (albeit probably exaggerated) reenactments, a whole town in the south of the country beyond Finland's reach was riveted to a little girl recounting the latest episode of Dallas via letters sent from her cousin in Tallinn. In a basement somewhere in Russia, "The Nasal Man" dubbed Greta Garbo for the entire USSR underground to enjoy. When Knight Rider aired, the KGB told Estonian citizen militias to look out for kids talking to foreign cars through their digital watches. There was footage of David Hasselhof visiting Estonia because his show was so well-loved there. Not only did the film use clips from those programs to provide a cultural background to what was going on in the Cold War—Star Wars aired while Star Wars sapped the government's budget—there was a real sense that people fell in love not just with Western culture but with the characters and worlds of the shows. Why else would the kids delight in discovering that they can make noises like KITT with their gas masks during bomb shelter drills? Why else would that little girl write her own Dallas fanfiction and pass it off as her cousin's summaries the summer after J.R. was shot?
Heh. I wonder if the prolonged ban on that kind of media and the subsequent passion for watching it is one reason there's a hub of acafan work in Estonia now.
In the end, the film tied everything together by connecting the airing of Emmanuelle one night with the USSR pulling out of Estonia (and a spike in birth rates nine months later). In an interview decades later—the only one he gave, apparently—the former president of Estonia blamed Western TV for the withdrawal and eventual collapse. A closing shot showed throngs of young Estonians at a punk rock concert, decked out in whatever hairstyles and clothes they pleased.
.
Anyway. Here is a dubbed trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8Ocuy6LsDw
ETA: Ha! Look what was featured in today's Washingtonian email.
Maybe all this Greekness is a sign I should work on a particular WIP later, since I have the holiday off. (!) To vid, or to fic?
.
Last night I went to see Disco and Atomic War (Disko ya tuumasõda, Estonia, 2009, dir. Jaak Kilmi), a documentary-slash-comedy arguing that Western television that was snuck into Estonia via Finland from the 1960s to the 1980s helped bring down the Soviet Union by showing viewers how much better their lives could be.
With its capital city of Tallinn just across the Gulf of Finland from Helsinki, Estonia was a geographical gateway into the USSR. Finland aimed its towers at Estonia and broadcast programming forbidden on Soviet TV, from the Prague Spring uprising to disco dancing to Emmanuelle; Estonians built secret converters and antennas to tune in and distributed black market TV listings. The Soviet government in Leningrad and Tallinn retaliated with counter-propaganda, and devised plans to build a metal net across the gulf to "catch" the TV waves. The Finns spoofed them. The U.S. CIA got in on the game, profiling the Estonian citizenry and concocting plans to subvert the Soviets by showing ads for deli products while Estonians waited in line for meager rations; the KGB yelled at its television producers and conducted its own studies into how its citizens were reacting to the programs. And so the Cold War media battle raged for decades.
I hadn't known about any of this, so the material was fascinating. Another story about the power of media and the ultimate futility of censorship. The format was entertaining: Kilmi interwove photographs and home video; footage from the movies, shows and commercials of the time; interviews with television executives, intelligence agents, media scholars and an Estonian antenna inventor; and snippets of comedic reenactments, all shown at a swift clip with segments set apart by place and year.
Although the movie in general was informative and often funny, the pace was actually too fast for me. Photographs faded out too soon, the music cut off just when I was getting into it. However, it seemed deliberate, and the reviews I've seen of the film so far unanimously refer to Kilmi as an esteemed documentarian, so it must just not be my style. Plus, the subtitles weren't helping; the lines were too short and down in a corner, breaking at odd times compared to the visuals, so it was tough to know where to look. Usually I prefer subtitles by far, but dubbing might actually have been better here. I did laugh at the recurring use of a theme from Tchaikovsky every time the KGB changed hands.
Something else I liked was the multilinguality. I counted Estonian, Finnish, Russian, Czech and English. Since it implies a story that involves more than one culture, seeing a movie with multiple languages always makes me feel worldly.
The movie was also indirectly about fannishness. Western programs were winning over the hearts and minds of Estonian children (and adults) against the Soviet Union's best efforts to turn them into good citizens. In one of the (albeit probably exaggerated) reenactments, a whole town in the south of the country beyond Finland's reach was riveted to a little girl recounting the latest episode of Dallas via letters sent from her cousin in Tallinn. In a basement somewhere in Russia, "The Nasal Man" dubbed Greta Garbo for the entire USSR underground to enjoy. When Knight Rider aired, the KGB told Estonian citizen militias to look out for kids talking to foreign cars through their digital watches. There was footage of David Hasselhof visiting Estonia because his show was so well-loved there. Not only did the film use clips from those programs to provide a cultural background to what was going on in the Cold War—Star Wars aired while Star Wars sapped the government's budget—there was a real sense that people fell in love not just with Western culture but with the characters and worlds of the shows. Why else would the kids delight in discovering that they can make noises like KITT with their gas masks during bomb shelter drills? Why else would that little girl write her own Dallas fanfiction and pass it off as her cousin's summaries the summer after J.R. was shot?
Heh. I wonder if the prolonged ban on that kind of media and the subsequent passion for watching it is one reason there's a hub of acafan work in Estonia now.
In the end, the film tied everything together by connecting the airing of Emmanuelle one night with the USSR pulling out of Estonia (and a spike in birth rates nine months later). In an interview decades later—the only one he gave, apparently—the former president of Estonia blamed Western TV for the withdrawal and eventual collapse. A closing shot showed throngs of young Estonians at a punk rock concert, decked out in whatever hairstyles and clothes they pleased.
.
Anyway. Here is a dubbed trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8Ocuy6LsDw
