The film depicts a totalitarian future in which the all-powerful government of Panem (in what was once the United States) demands an annual “tribute” of two youths from each of its 12 districts to fight to the death in a televised event known as the Hunger Games. Sixteen-year old Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) of the dirt-poor District 12 volunteers to take her younger sister Primrose’s place in the Games. But when she reaches the Capitol of Panem, she realizes that in order to succeed, her physical abilities are not enough. She must also create a convincing (if false) public narrative that she and fellow tribute Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are “star-crossed lovers” in order to win the allegiance of the audience and outwit the “gamemakers.” This crafting of her own media narrative eventually turns Katniss into a popular heroine with the power to change the future of Panem itself.
Author Suzanne Collins has said that her inspirations for The Hunger Games came from a variety of sources, including the ancient Greek myth of Theseus, Roman gladiatorial games, contemporary TV, her father’s experiences in the Vietnam War, and news footage of the Iraq War. However, the movie adaptation of The Hunger Games contains a number of other cultural and historical references as well. Here’s a mini-guide to the cinematic, literary, and historical allusions in The Hunger Games.
The Goddess Diana
The Goddess Diana.
An early scene in The Hunger Games depicts Katniss sneaking into the forest to hunt for food. She retrieves her bow and arrows from a tree, and spotting a deer, attempts to shoot it—before her friend Gale interrupts her. The imagery of Katniss with her bow and arrow—central to The Hunger Games—evokes the imagery of Diana, the Roman Goddess of the Hunt, who was frequently associated with deer hunting. In one famous story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, when the hunter Actaeon accidentally sees Diana bathing nude in a forest pool, she turns him into a stag and sets his own hounds to chase him down and tear him apart. One can see allusions to these hounds in The Hunger Games when the gamemakers send monstrous dogs into the forest to hunt down Katniss and Peeta. In addition, Diana was a chaste goddess, and Katniss’s reluctance to engage in a romance with Peeta reflects this warrior-woman ethos of independence from men. Early in the film, Katniss even tells Gale that she will never have children. Peeta himself, in his somewhat subservient position to Katniss, resembles male acolytes of the Goddess Diana, from Hyppolytus to the Priest-Kings of Nemi—who themselves participated in a famous ritual of fighting to the death, as described in Frazer’s The Golden Bough.
[For the rest of the article and the accompanying slideshow, please visit The Atlantic.]
[Editor’s Note: The article below appears in its entirety today at The Atlantic.]
Putin’s Kiss, Khodorkovsky, and Target question tyranny, capitalism, and their country’s future.
By Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo. As Russians head toward their presidential elections on March 4th, a trio of new films sheds light on a contemporary Russia veering between hope and cynicism, democracy and authoritarianism. The documentary Putin’s Kiss depicts a young Russian woman who becomes disillusioned with her role as a leader in Vladimir Putin’s nationalistic youth group Nashi in the wake of a brutal beating of a journalist. The chilling documentary Khodorkovsky examines the fate of the jailed Russian billionaire turned democracy activist Mikhail Khodorkovsky. And the science-fiction epic Target depicts the moral collapse of a wealthy elite in an authoritarian, near-future Russia.
On the brink of what may be another six years under Putin’s rule, these three films reveal a deep anxiety about Russia’s future—and a faint glimmer of hope for more genuine democratic freedom.
Masha Drokova is the young heroine of Danish director Lise Birk Pedersen’s documentary Putin’s Kiss (2012), a selection of the 2012 Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals and currently playing in limited release. Born in 1989, Masha is part of the first generation to grow up in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the age of 16, Masha joins Putin’s nationalistic youth group Nashi; by age 19, she is already a spokesperson and leading commissar of the youth group, and Putin himself awards her a medal of honor. By age 21, the bright, ambitious Masha has everything thanks to Nashi: a prestigious spot in a top Moscow university, a new car, an apartment, her own TV talk show, and access to the highest echelons of Russia’s power elite.
As briefly mentioned in the film, Nashi itself was founded in 2005 by Putin supporters to counter the rise of pro-democracy youth groups in the wake of the Ukrainian Orange revolution. Although purportedly “democratic and anti-fascist,” Nashi bears a striking resemblance to the Soviet youth group Komsomol. Like Komsomol, the well-funded Nashi provides a route for many young people into official advancement.
In Putin’s Kiss, Nashi founder Vasily Yakemenko is shown exercising a Svengali-like control over his young charges, exhorting them to discipline and promising them a new life if they will dedicate themselves to Putin and the Russian motherland. As Yakemenko says to the Nashi faithful: “I want everybody to understand: There is no authority for the movement except for the policy of Putin and Medvedev … Being part of the movement means going out into the streets. It means to tell a villain he’s a villain.” As depicted in the film, a major part of Nashi’s efforts are directed toward vilifying Putin’s opponents as “enemies of Russia.” By way of example, the film shows some particularly crude attacks directed at opposition figures Boris Nemtsov, Ilya Yashin, and Garry Kasparov.
Masha is initially drawn to Nashi out of patriotism and ambition. She sees Nashi as a way for young people to get involved in helping advance Russia, and she considers Putin a force for strength and stability. Masha is such a fan of Putin that she becomes known as “the girl who kissed Putin” for impetuously pecking him on the cheek when he presented her with a medal.
Yet Masha’s curiosity about the larger world leads her to make friends with a group of opposition journalists. Masha’s chief friend in the group is the gregarious Oleg Kashin, a liberal journalist who writes for the Kommersant newspaper.
Things take a dark turn one night in 2010 when assailants brutally beat Oleg Kashin …
[For the remainder of this article, please visit The Atlantic.]
[Editor’s Note: The article below and its accompanying slideshow appears in its entirety today at The Atlantic.]
Decoding the many references to film history in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated movie
By Govindini Murty. Martin Scorsese’s delightful children’s film Hugo is currently nominated for eleven Oscars, the most of any film of 2011. And in a year of movies like The Artist and Midnight in Paris that pay homage to early 20th century film and cultural history, Hugo might be the most complex cinematic homage of them all.
Based on the children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, Hugo tells the story of an orphaned boy who lives in the walls of a train station in 1931 Paris. Young Hugo (Asa Butterfield) maintains the station’s clocks and tries to repair a mysterious automaton left to him by his late father, a clock maker. While doing so, Hugo encounters an old man who sells toys in the station, Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), and his precocious step-daughter Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz). Hugo and Isabelle team up to find the secret of the automaton, discovering along the way that Papa Georges is none other than Georges Méliès, the legendary turn of the century filmmaker known for such fantasy films as A Trip to the Moon (1902).
Scorsese uses the stunning 3D cinematography of Hugo much like a palimpsest, layering multiple levels of historical, cinematic, and intellectual history in each scene. Hugo references everyone from Jules Verne, Django Reinhardt, and the robot C-3PO to classic silent movies like Douglas Fairbanks’s The Thief of Bagdad, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last. Scorsese has even said that he considers the 3D in Hugo as a cinematic form of Cubism.
This cultural guide will help to decode the wealth of allusions in Hugo, making for a crash course in film, art, and literary history:
Maria from "Metropolis," C-3PO from "Star Wars."
Mysterious Automata
Hugo’s central mystery revolves around the automaton left to Hugo by his late father. The eerie metallic figure recalls such classic automata as the Machine-Man in Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi epic Metropolis and C-3PO in Star Wars. According to Hugo author Brian Selznick, the inspiration for Hugo’s automaton came from an 1805 writing automaton created by Swiss clockmaker Henri Maillerdet, currently in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, as well from the 18th century Jaquet-Droz writing automata in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Animated figures go back to the Renaissance, when mechanical humans and animals would appear out of clock faces to mark the time. Automata were also popular in Hellenistic Alexandria, where automated figures were used in mechanical puppet theaters and in temples to provide oracles.
In Hugo, the automaton possesses a dual quality—both ominous and marvelous. This reflects the ambiguous feelings that people have toward humanoid automata—seeing them either as frightening doppelgangers (as in Metropolis) or as magical helpers (as in Star Wars). The scene where Hugo dreams that he turns into the automaton reinforces this ambiguity and dramatizes a common fear of dehumanization in the machine age.
[For the rest of the article and the accompanying slideshow, please visit The Atlantic.]
By Govindini Murty. As our regular Libertas readers know, Jason and I have worked for over seven years to promote a greater diversity of voices in Hollywood. We’ve promoted hundreds of pro-freedom, pro-American, and conservative-friendly films, both through the Liberty Film Festival and the original Libertas blog, as well as the new Libertas Film Magazine. As I’ve said numerous times, we don’t do this because we want Hollywood dominated by conservative political propaganda any more than we want Hollywood dominated by liberal political propaganda. We do this because we care deeply about film and the arts and we feel that having a diversity of voices in our culture is crucial to maintaining the democratic values that make America great.
Chris Evans as Captain America.
However, Jason and I have been very concerned over the years by the conservative establishment’s refusal to seriously engage in film and the arts. By “engagement” I don’t mean reviewing a film here or there or supporting the odd conservative political documentary. I mean genuinely and passionately engaging in film and the arts: funding and supporting filmmakers, artists, and creative people, devoting a significant portion of their media platforms to supporting the arts (even when they don’t directly tie into the conservative political agenda), taking real pleasure in creating beautiful, profound, and arresting artworks that imaginatively inspire people. Conservatives have enormous resources at their disposal to have a greater voice in the culture if they want to. That they fail to seriously engage in the culture year after year is deeply troubling. It undermines both the growth of the conservative movement, as well as the vibrancy of our culture, which needs both sides engaged in order to create art and entertainment that represents all Americans.
So, I’ve written a piece in The Atlantic today (see below) that examines the issue of why conservatives are so reluctant to support conservative-friendly films. As our readers know, when Jason and I relaunched Libertas, we were determined to positively promote films and creative artists. We were tired of just complaining about Hollywood. Conservatives have complained about Hollywood for years, and it never seems to accomplish anything. We decided that rather than give the site over to partisan politics and to obsessing over every left-wing Hollywood affront, we wanted to dedicate our time to promoting films and artworks that broadly affirm freedom and individualism. We were inspired by the genuine change we had seen in the film industry in the last two to three years, in which a greater number of pro-freedom films are suddenly being made. There’s plenty of room for hope and excitement, and yet I don’t see this hope and excitement translating into the rest of the conservative world. Conservatives in the media certainly know about these films because they do cover them (often with snarky and dismissive reviews) – they just refuse to take them as a positive sign of change that should be embraced.
Dominic Cooper promoting "The Devil's Double."
I hope my Atlantic piece (see below) will inspire some honest debate amongst conservatives. I didn’t write a partisan piece – I wrote a piece that objectively deals with the issues as they appear. I truly appreciate all of our conservative, libertarian, independent, and liberal readers here at Libertas who have shown their commitment to supporting the idea of freedom in film. You’re the good ones – you get it. I hope the message spreads to the rest of the public as well, because the culture is too important to be treated as a partisan whipping post. It deserves to be treated honestly, objectively – and always with respect for the artists who create the works that give our culture meaning.
The recent news that MGM’s remake of Red Dawn may finally reach theaters should be reason for conservatives to celebrate. The Los Angeles Timesreports that MGM is in talks to sell Red Dawn to Film District (the company behind Ryan Gosling’s Drive), who will likely release the film in 2012. The original Red Dawn is one of the iconic films of the cultural right. Written and directed by John Milius, the 1984 film depicted a group of plucky teens who fight off a Soviet invasion of the U.S. This new Red Dawn, of which I’ve seen an early cut, features a similarly patriotic storyline—and stars one of Hollywood’s hottest young leading men, Chris Hemsworth (Thor). And even factoring in some controversial re-edits that change the villains from the communist Chinese to the North Koreans, the new Red Dawn seems like exactly the kind of pro-American action fare that should please cultural conservatives.
But will conservatives actually support Red Dawn when it comes out?
After years of feeling burned by Hollywood, today’s conservatives seem reluctant to go to the movies, even to see films promoting their own values. A number of right-of-center-friendly movies have been made in recent years—ranging from big-budget studio fare like the Transformers movies or art-house films like The Devil’s Double, to overtly political documentaries like The Undefeated—yet conservatives have responded with little enthusiasm to such films. Indeed, at times conservatives seem more interested in debating left-leaning works like Avatar or Fahrenheit 9/11 than in supporting movies friendly to their own cause.
From "Mao's Last Dancer."
Witness the conservative public’s tepid response to two recent films on “conservative” subjects: the movie adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, and the Sarah Palin documentary The Undefeated. Both films received extensive media coverage earlier this year. Fox News and the Fox Business Network ran numerous segments on each film (with John Stossel devoting an entire show on Fox Business to Atlas Shrugged), and both films were widely discussed on talk radio and in the print media. Yet when the films were released, they fared poorly at the box office. Atlas Shrugged made only $4.6 million on a reported budget of $20 million, and The Undefeated made only $116,000 on a reported budget of $1 million. Granted, both films received mixed reviews, at best. Nonetheless, as conservative film critic Christian Toto pointed out in a recent Daily Caller article titled “Why don’t conservatives support conservative films?,” the popularity of Rand’s original Atlas Shrugged novel and of Sarah Palin as subject matter should presumably have led to greater enthusiasm among conservatives for these projects. Yet they didn’t.
Stranger still, even when offered more popular or critically acclaimed films, many conservatives still seem reluctant to support them.
For example, a well-reviewed film recently appeared in theaters that offers an implied justification for the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The Devil’s Double tells the true story of Uday Hussein, Saddam Hussein’s gangster-like son, and his reluctant body double, Latif Yahia. Both roles in the film are played by rising star Dominic Cooper (Captain America), whose electric performance has made him one of Hollywood’s most sought-after leading men. The Devil’s Double depicts the Hussein regime pillaging and demoralizing Iraq’s people—and even includes flattering footage of George H.W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And despite its seemingly right-of-center politics, the film was screened to rave reviews at Sundance, with Roger Ebert even calling it a “terrific show” and praising Dominic Cooper’s “astonishing dual performance.”
>>>Read the rest of the article at The Atlantic here.
Posted on October 12th, 2011 at 5:32pm.
[Editor’s update: Many thanks to Kevin Roderick for mentioning Govindini’s Atlantic piece in his article “Left coast writers splash in the Atlantic” on LA Observed. Kevin runs one of the great LA sites and I urge you all to check it out.]
[Many thanks as well to Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air for linking to Govindini’s Atlantic article. Hot Air is always on top of the most interesting news and analysis, so be sure to check them out.]
[And of course, a big thank you as well to our friend Lars Larson. Lars is one of the best-informed and most articulate talk radio hosts out there (and rapidly rising, with his radio show carried in over 200 markets). Lars posted Govindini’s article on his site and he has always been supportive of Libertas Film Magazine and the cause of freedom in film.]
