Scenes from the “End of History”

The splintering of the former Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the protests in Tiananmen Square—the confluence of world historical events at the end of the 1980s was enough for political scientist Francis Fukuyama to proclaim that the great political and philosophical struggles of the age were at the point of resolution, with liberal democracy and free-market capitalism the last, best choice for humankind, and that we had subsequently arrived at, per the title of his 1992 book, “the end of history.” In this program of films produced in the final years of the tumultuous 20th century, we see a bevy of cinematic responses to a world of new freedoms and new dangers, from the blockbuster bluster of an Air Force One to films by Edward Yang, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Elia Suleiman, Želimir Žilnik, and many others that offered more circumspect perspectives on the brave new world of unfettered globalization, in which the scaffolding for how we live today was busily being erected.