V - Melodrama as historical understanding: The making and unmaking of communist history

Summary

History and naming: The jungle in search of a beast

Peter Burke, a Renaissance historian, has suggested the deliberate employment of cinematic techniques, such as flashbacks and crosscutting, for historical narrative. There is more to it than intellectual novelty. Look at the history of 1989:

First sequence: Beijing. The untimely death of Hu Yaobang, the onetime party chairman, was mourned by the Beijing students. The mourning ignited a chain of world-shocking events that began with pathos, erupted into an euphoric celebration of the temporal triumph of democracy, and ended in bloodbath in Tiananmen Square.

Second sequence: Budapest. On the screen was the exonerating memorial of Hungary's former premier Imre Nagy, who was illegally executed for his leading role in the 1956 uprising. Masses of Hungarians belatedly mourned his death.

Third sequence: Teheran. We see Iranians' frenzied farewell for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an enormous spectacle of emotional outpouring.

Funerals, elegiac mournings, historical memorials – these events took place almost simultaneously. Furthermore, the motif of huge crowds gathered in squares was reiterated insistently on the screen. Crowds are surging everywhere in the world: in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, the Baltic States, China. History presents itself as cinema; world events lend themselves to the now-lost grand Eisensteinian crosscutting and parallel editing; heterogeneous ideas are yoked together by violence; homogeneous scenes from heterogeneous contexts link themselves in a Kuleshovian montage with a selfassertive editing reminiscent of Dusan Makavejev's eagerness for juxtaposition.