Carol Reed’s Comedy of Pre-Revolutionary Cuba, Plus “The Singing Revolution”

Filmmaking is all about collaboration and fortuity, as much as we genuflect faithfully to the...

The political context of the new documentary “The Singing Revolution” (2007) appears unique as well, once you get past the swoony Linda Hunt narration and PBS reflexes — it’s simply a 20th-century history of Estonia, a tiny country overrun by first the Russian empire, then the Soviets, then the Nazis, then the Soviets again, all the while fiercely holding onto its own national identity and culture. It’s a doleful tale in the buildup, thick with gulag stories and execution news footage, but then the film blooms as the resistance to Soviet oppression enjoys its first sparks and eventually, in the ’80s, becomes a fire. The various stories of how Eastern Bloc countries and ex-Soviet states like Estonia finally acquired their independence are all genuinely inspiring in their own way, beginning with Solidarność and the Czech “velvet revolution,” but Estonia’s is especially lovely: the nation has a long tradition of mass choral concerts, wherein up to 30,000 people will sing patriotic songs to an audience two or three times that size. Solidarity, indeed: in a number of distinct incidents that mark modern history for Estonians like lightning strikes, thousands and often hundreds of thousands of citizens have gathered in open defiance of Soviet threats (and tanks) and sang Estonian ballads. The collective power of the concerts spurred on more political, and always peaceful, defiance, and eventually an Estonian legislature declared itself independent. In one such pre-Soviet-collapse open-air concert, one out of every three Estonians was present, a kind of ecstatic Woodstock with a righteous purpose. I’ll admit it, I sniffled, not for an individual but for a crowd of a half-million, and it wasn’t because the clear-eyed litany of history drawn by filmmakers James and Maureen Castle Tusty obliterates any lingering notion you may have that the Soviet collapse was a heroic feat performed by Ronald Reagan. A desperate Gorbachev opened the barn door, and the un-Soviet masses came running. The Estonians, perhaps uniquely, huddled and sang.

“Our Man in Havana” (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment) and “The Singing Revolution” (New Video) are now available on DVD.

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