Cold War Fantasies: Film, Fiction, and Foreign Policy

Ronnie D. Lipschutz. Cold War Fantasies: Film, Fiction, and Foreign Policy. Rowman & Littlefield, 2O01. 256 pages; $23.95.

Historical Record

Andre Bazin argues that cinema, unlike other plastic arts, enables us to preserve evidence of a particular existence, forever mummifying a specific moment in space and time. As the Cold War continues to recede from cultural memory, Ronnie Lipschutz revisits these mummies by highlighting cinema's ability to enliven our recollection ofthat history. In Cold War Fantasies: Film, Fiction, and Foreign Policy, Lipschutz explores how cinema and literature serve as a historical record, not of specific facts and events, but as accounts of public anxieties and fatalistic fears associated with the Cold War. Lipschutz chronicles the Cold War by paralleling specific historical events with contemporaneous cinema and literature that reflect larger social concerns. By selecting both popular and obscure texts, he emphasizes that "the world is never a single narrative ... torn from the headlines, [but are often] based on fillers tucked away on the back pages of newspapers" (4). For Lipschutz, these diverse texts are individual snapshots that elucidate a larger picture of the times....