Virtual Friday Night Films at the Wende: Disco Dancer and Beat Street

Disco Dancer tells the rags to riches story of Jimmy (Mithun Chakraborty), a street performer who becomes India’s disco king. The Bollywood film was wildly popular in the Soviet Union and had the highest turnout of viewers for any film when it was released there in 1984. It made Mithun Chakraborty a star in the Soviet Union, and to this day he still has an enduring fan base in Russia known as “Mithunists.”

Although Bollywood films may seem at odds with Soviet ideology for their escapism and spectacle, the Soviet Union imported Indian popular cinema as a non-Western alternative to Hollywood, the other biggest film industry. Disco Dancer is a highly entertaining example of transnational cultural exchange during the Cold War. This selection connects to our Song-A-Day: Soviet Disco playlist.

Available to watch via Amazon Prime Video.

Beat Street, dir. Stan Lathan, 1984, United States, 105 min.

Beat Street introduced audiences across the world to hip hop culture, including in East Germany, where it premiered in 1985. According to Leonard Schmieding, our guest for this week’s Cold War Spaces, the film made it onto East German screens for two reasons. The cultural authorities saw it as a “problem film” that would cast America as a bad place, and educate youth about the problems of the capitalist and racist USA. The film would also be a blockbuster: it sold three million tickets and ran in theaters for several years. But to East German youth, the film’s appeal was due to its style rather than any political message. Previously, they were aware of hip hop via snippets from West German TV and radio broadcasts, but with Beat Street, they could learn from the movie’s vivid depiction of the four elements of hip hop: DJing, MCing/rapping, b-boying/break dancing, and graffiti.

Watch for free on Tubi.

For a further discussion of Beat Street and hip hop culture in East Germany, see Leonard Schmieding’s 2015 lecture and this week’s Cold War Spaces talk here.

—

Virtual Film Picks are inspired by the in-person Friday Night Films at the Wende program series. This selection is part of a curated list of weekly movie suggestions that can be watched at home, in conjunction with #WendeOnline.