Secret Police in Style: The Aesthetics of Remembering Socialism

This paper addresses four successful feature films that tell state security police stories from four different Central European countries and that have a number of aesthetic commonalities: Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others (set in the German Democratic Republic [GDR], Dir. von Donnersmarck 2006); A Vizsga/The Exam (set in Hungary, Dir. Bergendy 2011); Różyczka/Little Rose (set in Poland, Dir. Kidawa-Błonski 2010); and Ve Stinu/In the Shadow (set in Czechoslovakia, Dir. Ondříček 2012). An analysis of these recent films about state socialism shows that the national stories depicted in them travel transnationally by imagining the past through the generic formula of the spy thriller and the cinematic style of film noir. Further, these stylish films that draw attention to socialist surveillance in specific national contexts speak both to a regional preoccupation with questions of lustration and postsocialist justice and to a global preoccupation with international climates of surveillance.