Rethinking the Cinematic Cold War: The Struggle for Hearts and Minds Goes Global 1805398768, 9781805398769

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Rethinking the Cinematic Cold War

Visual and Media Cultures of the Cold War and Beyond Published by Berghahn Books and the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

Series Editor Skyler J. Arndt-­Briggs, Founding Editor Mariana Ivanova, Academic Director, DEFA Library Victoria Rizo Lenshyn, Associate Director, DEFA Library Editorial Board Seán Allan, University of St Andrews Barton Byg, University of Massachusetts Amherst Anne Ciecko, University of Massachusetts Amherst Thomas Lindenberger, Hannah Arendt Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism at Technische Universität Dresden This interdisciplinary series focuses on a range of visual and media cultures in and beyond the Cold War period (1945–1991) in both social and transnational contexts. It explores ways in which film and other media, their creators and audiences, and industries and states participated in, were shaped by and, in turn, shaped cultural relations during the Cold War. Beyond 1991, this series also welcomes interdisciplinary explorations of the legacies of the Cold War and its ongoing cultural impact in a global context. Volume 3 Rethinking the Cinematic Cold War: The Struggle for Hearts and Minds Goes Global Edited by Stefano Pisu, Francesco Pitassio, and Maurizio Zinni Volume 2 Science on Screen and Paper: Media Cultures of Knowledge Production in Cold War Europe Edited by Mariana Ivanova and Juliane Scholz Volume 1 Screened Encounters: The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, 1955–1990 Caroline Moine

RETHINKING THE CINEMATIC COLD WAR The Struggle for Hearts and Minds Goes Global Edited by

Stefano Pisu, Francesco Pitassio and Maurizio Zinni

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2025 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2025 Stefano Pisu, Francesco Pitassio and Maurizio Zinni All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pisu, Stefano, 1980- editor. | Pitassio, Francesco, editor. | Zinni, Maurizio, 1976- editor. Title: Rethinking the cinematic Cold War : the struggle for hearts and minds goes global / edited by Stefano Pisu, Francesco Pitassio and Maurizio Zinni. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2025. | Series: Visual and media cultures of the Cold War and beyond; vol 3 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2024046834 (print) | LCCN 2024046835 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805398769 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805398776 (epub) | ISBN 9781805398783 (adobe pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Cold War in motion pictures. | Cold War in popular culture. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.P6 R48 2025 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.P6 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/6581--dc23/eng/20241015 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024046834 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024046835 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-­1-80539-­876-­9 hardback ISBN 978-­1-80539-­877-­6 epub ISBN 978-­1-80539-­878-­3 web pdf https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805398769

Contents

List of Illustrationsviii Acknowledgementsix Introduction. Expanding the Cinematic Cold War or How We Learned to Cross Boundaries and Look at Bigger Pictures Stefano Pisu, Francesco Pitassio and Maurizio Zinni

1

Part I. At the Onset: Super-Powers, the Struggle for Europe, the Extension of the Conflict Chapter 1. The Burden of Winning: American Cinematographic Policy in Italy in the Years of the Allied Military Administration (1943–1945) Maurizio Zinni Chapter 2. The Struggle to Save Progressive Unions: Carl Marzani and Union Films Rosemary Feurer and Charles Musser Chapter 3. A ‘Trojan Horse in the Enemy Camp’: Vatican Plans for a Catholic Third Way on the Chessboard of Cold War-­Era Cinema (1939–1958) Gianluca della Maggiore

23

37

54

Chapter 4. An Impossible Cinematic Hegemony: Soviet Films in Italy between Postwar and the Cold War (1944–1953) Stefano Pisu

67

Chapter 5. Soviet Cinematic Diplomacy from New York to Beijing, 1949: Sergei Gerasimov and His Documentary Films Marsha Siefert

83

vi

Contents

Part II. Film Diplomacy: Non-Aligned Countries, Decolonisation and New Opportunities Chapter 6. The Rise and Fall of Sino-­Soviet Film Festival Diplomacy (1957–1966) Elena Razlogova

101

Chapter 7. Making Ground for Film Export: Soviet Films’ Competition with Hollywood in India in the 1950–1960s Severyan Dyakonov

116

Chapter 8. The Film Market at the Time of Independence: France’s Former African Colonies and the Cinematic Cold War in the 1960s Gabrielle Chomentowski Chapter 9. The Troubles of Non-­Alignment: International Pacifism, Transnational Style and Production Strategies in the Case of Rat (Atomic War Bride, Veliko Bulajić, 1960) Francesco Pitassio Chapter 10. From Anti-­communism to Third-­Worldism: The Transformation of Mexican Cinema in the Cold War of the 1970s Israel Rodríguez

132

147

162

Part III. From Rising Suns to a Slow Sunset: Cooperation, Disillusionment and Transfers Chapter 11. Cold War and Film Festivals in the Aftermath of 1968 Dina Iordanova Chapter 12. To Catch Up and O ­ vertake . . . ­Europe: Technology Transfer and Its Limits in the Soviet Cinema under Brezhnev Catriona Kelly Chapter 13. Missed Opportunities and Unexpected Success: Film Relationships between France and the GDR in the 1970s Perrine Val Chapter 14. The Chilean Cultural Project during Unidad Popular (1970–1973): The Interview between Roberto Rossellini and Salvador Allende Margherita Moro

181

201

216

231



Contents vii

Chapter 15. ‘Ideological Threat of Italian Movies’: The KGB, Mafia, Punk Rock and Rise of Neo-­Fascism among Soviet Youth (1982–1985) Sergei Zhuk Conclusion. Close Encounters around the World Stefano Pisu, Francesco Pitassio and Maurizio Zinni

245 258

Filmography267 Index273

Illustrations

Tables 4.1.  Amount and type of Soviet films for which distribution permission is requested in Italy (1944–1953).

69

4.2.  Information on Soviet films for which a larger number of copies is requested for distribution in Italy (1946–1953).

72

Acknowledgements

This volume was supported by funding from the University of Cagliari, Department of Humanities, Languages and Cultural Heritage (Dipartimento di Lettere, Lingue e Beni Culturali).

Introduction Expanding the Cinematic Cold War or How We Learned to Cross Boundaries and Look at Bigger Pictures Stefano Pisu, Francesco Pitassio and Maurizio Zinni

A wandering researcher meandering through her corpus on the internet might stumble upon unexpected visual sources. One such source, whose rights the Associated Press holds, is quite surprising indeed. It is a photo portraying a group of nine, under a statue (L’Homme au mouton/The Man with the Ram, 1950) which Pablo Picasso gifted to the village of Vallauris. Picasso stands centre stage, right under his artwork. The remaining eight people are standing at his left and right in equal numbers. Among them, one can recognise film directors Grigory Aleksandrov, who led the Soviet delegation at the Cannes Film Festival in 1954, and Sergei Yutkevich, who presented his Veliky voin Albanii Skanderbeg (The Great Warrior Skanderbeg, 1953), a Soviet–Albanian coproduction that won the International Prize along with other films, and a special mention for its director;1 and film stars Akaki Chorava, who embodied Skanderbeg in the eponymous film, Lyubov Orlova, the beloved protagonist of many works by her husband Aleksandrov, Klara Luchko, and Ekaterina Litvinenko. The caption reports that the delegation intended to buy from pro-­communist Picasso some of his artworks for the USSR;2 however, all the group members seem joyful and Vallauris is just a stone’s throw from Cannes, less than 10 kilometres, so the picture depicts both the negotiation with the Spanish artist and a nice group excursion for a Soviet cultural elite, beyond the rituals of the main film festival in Western Europe since 1946. To sum up, if we expand the framing of the picture, we can locate the multiple connections

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embedded in it: the early days of the Thaw, after Stalin’s death, when the Iron Curtain became less insurmountable; an artistic elite, entitled to move across it for reasons of political allegiance, reliability, popularity, and cultural distinction on both sides of the East–West boundary; a world-­renowned painter, sculptor, and graphist, whose sympathies to the political Left led him to join the Parti Communiste Français (French Communist Party, PCF) in 1944 and take part in the Soviet-­designed World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, in Wrocław (Poland) in 1948, where he drew the famous dove of peace, which one year later appeared in a different fashion in the programme of the World Congress of Partisans for Peace in Paris; and a cultural platform such as the Cannes Film Festival, where cultural diplomacy, meetings, and bargaining could take place between delegations, representatives, and individuals. What is before us is an expanded picture of the Cold War, itself a notion coined and circulated in the Western world, based on a confrontational paradigm, underpinned by a series of related notions and values (the Iron Curtain, West vs. East, freedom vs. oppression, Capitalism vs. Socialism etc.). However, in recent times many scholars have highlighted the variety of relations, connections, networks, and agencies beyond confrontation between the main international actors, that is, the USA and USSR – a multifaceted reality animating the European and world scenarios during the period between 1947 and the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989–1991. This volume follows up on previous endeavours, refreshing the reflection on the Cold War with a special angle on cinema.3 Since the 1990s an unprecedented access to primary sources, together with a different scope in surveying them, has engendered a new direction in Cold War studies. As a matter of fact, newly available sources from archives in European former socialist countries and historical materials related to nations that in the aftermath of the Second World War were emancipated from colonial power in Asia, Africa, and Central and South America enable today’s researchers to look at Cold War history with a lens beyond international relations and conflict, or ideological and economic confrontation. As Finnish scholars Simo Mikkonen and Pia Koivunen point out, scholars’ gaze has often been focused ‘on the developments within national borders; interest in the developments transcending national borders has been much more modest.’4 However, increasing mobility, cooperative research, and digitisation of sources have gone hand in hand with their collation to achieve a wider picture.5 Moreover, the availability of sources has also implied a brand new take on the past, with a change of direction from diplomatic to cultural history.6 International history scholars give broad definitions of culture, ranging from one that sees it as ‘a broader set of techniques, images, habits, mentalities, ways of producing and consuming, forms of communication, self-­ descriptions, and patterns of daily life’7 to another where culture is defined



Introduction 3

as ‘all the collective representations specific to a society, and their expression in the form of social practices, lifestyles and symbolic productions’.8 Thus, according to the French scholar Robert Frank, the notion of international cultural relations, as a relevant strand of the international history of the twentieth century, consists in ‘the circulation of representations, practices, lifestyles and symbolic objects across borders’.9 Cultural history shifted the focus from merely political dynamics to social and anthropological ones, which encompass institutional and informal networks, education, material culture, modes of reception and consumption, and so forth. As Patrick Major and Rana Mitter explain, in a path-­breaking collection: ‘Socio-­cultural’ is m ­ eant . . . ­as an umbrella term to encompass the mass experience of events – social history in its broad sense of the ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’, but often in extraordinary circumstances. Likewise, cultural does not necessarily imply the literary or artistic endeavour of high culture, but popular culture and general mentalities too.10

This collection aims at balancing the established consideration of the cultural Cold War,11 that is, cultural products and endeavours intended to achieve political goals during the Cold War, with the more recent attention to Cold War culture, that is, the production, circulation, and consumption of symbolic goods during this period.12 With regard to the cinematic Cold War, this collection does away with the well-­rooted paradigm which opposes on the one hand auteurs and artworks, and on the other hand a political power oppressing the former through censorship. This paradigm dominated a good deal of film criticism and scholarship during the Cold War, and seeks to consider in what ways politics was incarnated into policies, with effects on institutions, production and consumption cultures, networks, and individuals, animated by ideology. In fact, as we all know, ideology was a driving force during the Cold War, although less monolithic and geopolitically divided than expected. Furthermore, as recently argued, ideology generated dreams and dreamworlds, which could be shared across geopolitical barriers.13 This collection, within the limited field of film studies, aspires to survey how cinema contributed to expanding the experience of artists, practitioners, audiences, and, sometimes, policymakers too, thanks to and beyond ideology. To achieve such an ambitious goal, we need to explain some other assumptions. The same researcher, still meandering, comes across another unforeseen image. It portrays on the left Zhou Enlai, Premier of the State Council and Minister of Foreign Affairs of China, who re-­established China’s reputation in the world, and played a crucial role in tightening up international relations with the USSR and at the Asian-­African Conference in Bandung (1955). On the right, Anne Navaux, ethnologist, writer, and filmmaker, shakes hands with Zhou Enlai, while in the foreground her husband, celebrated French actor and

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star Gérard Philipe, stands smiling and enchanted. Zhou Enlai studied in the early 1920s in France, where he was also politically active. Anne Navaux, with her former husband, sinologist François Fourcade, lived in China between 1946 and 1948 and after her return to Europe became actively involved with the PCF. And Gérard Philipe, despite the association of his father with French fascism in the 1930s and early 1940s, was a very engaged leftist intellectual, working for the Théâtre National Populaire of Jean Vilar, signing the Stockholm Appeal launched by the USSR-­led World Peace Council (1950), touring socialist countries, and directing, together with Dutch Marxist filmmaker Joris Ivens, Les Aventures de Till l’Espiègle (Bold Adventure, 1956), coproduced by the French Les Films Ariane and the GDR’s state company DEFA, and then released on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The picture was taken one year after the film’s release, in March 1957, in Beijing, during a tour by the couple in China. Thus, if we enlarge the framing of the picture a few features come into play. Firstly, the presence of additional actors on stage, beyond the USA and USSR. As a matter of fact, while in France the PCF exerted a remarkable influence in the postwar years, mostly among intellectuals, China was increasingly becoming another superpower and an alternative beacon for Socialist countries, and in particular those released from the colonial yoke. Secondly, in 1957 the conflict between the USSR and USA was decreasing, as a result of both the ‘peaceful coexistence’ rhetoric launched by Khrushchev and the bipolar order stabilisation sought by Moscow and Washington, as shown in the Suez and Hungarian crises.14 However, this new course also sparked the Sino-­Soviet crisis and reshuffled policies with regard to the cinematic Cold War. Thirdly, individuals, and notably world-­renowned film stars and directors, circulated across borders and barriers, and acted as witnesses of cooperation, mutual understanding, and transnational culture. For a long time, Cold War studies privileged a framework rooted in bipolarism. Among the side effects of this stance was a neglect of historical transformation, additional players in the international arena, and trajectories exceeding the West–East transatlantic route. Recently, historians have hinted at the fact that Europe, beyond being the main arena and prize of bipolarism, developed its own ‘Cold War culture(s)’, which superpowers obviously moulded, but which were also the outcome of older connections, relationships, and habits, with national dynamics much more nuanced than superpowers experienced  – think of the role of communist parties in European countries associated with NATO, such as Italy or France, or the persistence of Catholicism and its social function in Socialist Poland.15 Furthermore, Europe, beyond being a continent torn apart, was also an arena of collaboration between the two blocs from the mid-­1950s.16 Therefore, European countries expressed an agency of their own and turned into an experimental space. Moreover, from the mid-­1950s onwards, a multifaceted scenario came into



Introduction 5

being, with the decolonisation process and the rise of both Popular China and the Non-­Aligned Movement (NAM), notwithstanding neutral countries such as Austria, Finland, and Switzerland. This volume embraces such a perspective, which intends to move beyond bipolarism and look at more complex relations, both on a geopolitical and a historical scale. This collection highlights the ‘porousness’ of the Iron Curtain,17 or Nylon Curtain, as renamed by the Hungarian scholar György Péteri:18 whereas bipolarism favours a rigid concept of this boundary, we assume – and historical evidence and the following chapters support our view – that cooperation, transfer, and movement happened throughout the Cold War. Political allegiances, educational institutions, cultural platforms, production and distribution of cultural goods, and technological needs favoured such permeability. Socialist solidarity played a relevant role in supporting movement of people across the countries: notably within the Soviet bloc, or from decolonised countries, or from countries that civil wars tore apart, as was the case with Greek actor and filmmaker Giorgos Skalenakis, born in Port Said (Egypt), a communist militant who fled Greece and resettled in Prague in 1950, where he worked in foreign broadcasting for the Czechoslovak Radio, studied at FAMU (Prague film school), and directed his debut film in 1963, titled Pražské blues (Prague Blues), telling the story of two African students in the Czech metropolis who fall in love. Film academies in Prague, Łódź, Moscow, and Potsdam-­Babelsberg trained entire generations of filmmakers coming from what were then termed ‘Third World’ or non-­aligned countries, such as Ousmane Sembène and Souleymane Cissé at VGIK (All Union State Institute of Cinematography) in Moscow, or Emir Kusturica and Goran Paskaljević at FAMU in Prague.19 Film academies in Rome (CSC-­Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia) and Paris (IDHEC-­ Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques), and in West Germany, did the same. As the burgeoning field of film festival studies has surveyed in depth, festivals acted as hubs, relatively free spaces for cultural encounter, exchange, and transaction.20 Finally, technology and know-­how transfer happened within and across the blocs, thus facilitating exchange and mutual awareness. To sum up, transitions and transactions took place during the Cold War, whose consequences still await a thorough investigation. In this respect, we embrace a multilevel and multipolar scope, as scholars such as Autio-­ Sarasmo and Miklóssy propose, or a ‘scale analysis’, as suggested by Bazin, Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotroski.21 The former argue that Besides the surface of bipolar juxtaposition, there existed diverse forms of interaction between states, organisations and individuals, irrespective of ideological– political differences. The sphere of interaction was a multilateral space by nature because it was uncontrolled by the superpowers and was not subject to the bipolar laws of the Cold War.22

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Stefano Pisu, Francesco Pitassio and Maurizio Zinni

Therefore, the multilevel perspective suggests that interaction happened at the level of administrations, state or non-­governmental organisations, and individuals  – or people-­to-­people exchange, as Mikkonen and Koivunen underline.23 Multipolarity implies that, as clarified above, such levels refer to nations and organisms outside of superpowers. Sometimes interaction involved subjects from the superpowers’ film industries, which, however, were not necessarily in a superior position and had to negotiate with counterparts from geopolitically less important nations, but not inferior in terms of film culture or know-­how. Analysing this multilevel perspective in the case of co-­production practices across the Iron Curtain, historian Marsha Siefert defines it as ‘a multilayered dynamic process in the negotiation and export of cultural influence during the Cold War’.24 Furthermore, most of the chapters included in this volume privilege a transnational perspective over a national one. In the past thirty years, many researchers have made a plea for moving beyond national film studies and paying attention to economic, social, and cultural reasons for looking at cinema through a transnational lens.25 Despite all the rhetoric, notably in the Soviet area, claiming the true popular and national spirit of state film productions, we assume that Cold War cinematic culture is a perfect fit for both an international and a transnational approach. The former encompasses two separate issues: firstly, the claim to internationalism resonating in most endeavours originating in the socialist bloc, and later in the Non-­Aligned Movement, or broadly speaking in what influential historian Akira Iriye terms ‘cultural internationalism’.26 Socialist internationalism, allegiances, and affinities, as Masha Salazkina lucidly terms such connections,27 animated a good deal of cinematic exchange during the Cold War.28 Secondly, internationalism inspired a specific period of world film history, notably after the Second World War, which American film scholar Dudley Andrew names the ‘federated phase’.29 In particular, Andrew identifies this epoch with the role that film festivals played in incarnating a neutral arena, where national delegations, artists, and artworks could gather: Played out in the sphere of cinema, the federation model fosters both equality and difference in artistic expression. Each year in a protected arena at Cannes, Venice, Locarno, and Berlin, the Hollywood empire dissolved in the face of more universal aspirations for the art. Often explicitly commanding high moral ground, festivals claimed to be utopias where the appreciation of difference and similarity would contribute to tolerance, coexistence and, of course, a richer cinema.30

Such cinematic internationalism, which supranational agencies and international humanism magnified in the aftermath of the Second World War, turning it into a brand-­new phenomenon, has some of its roots in the interwar



Introduction 7

period,31 universalism in the arts, and claims to tolerance in politics merged with (geo)political interests, ideological assumptions, and market strategies.32 That being said, consistent with the multilevel and multipolar approach we previously discussed, we also rely on a transnational perspective, as the authoritative work of Ulf Hannerz outlined, that is, referring to processes exceeding national limits and not directly referring to national entities, such as states, but focusing instead on individuals, groups, endeavours, and motifs at various scales.33 Here the taxonomy of transnational cinema, as forged by the scholars Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim, comes in handy.34 The two scholars posit that the notion of ‘transnational cinema’ can refer to three different phenomena: the production, distribution, and consumption of cinema exceeding national boundaries; regional strategies rooted in common cultural heritage and past geopolitical experience; and diasporic movements. The cinematic Cold War implied all three levels, and this volume takes into account notably the first two, with regard to issues such as transnational cooperation and exchange, transnational styles, such as neorealism, documentary, or Third Cinema, vernacularisation, appropriation, and subversive readings of film works. The pivotal role that cultural diplomacy plays in this collection testifies to our attempt at a multilevel and multipolar scope.35 Initiated at the state level as a way of tightening international bonds between states within respective blocs or across them, cultural diplomacy impacted on super- or subnational entities (e.g. film festivals, production companies, political associations), whose operational margins could vary according to historical periods, related policies, and occasions, thus inducing processes largely beyond state control. Furthermore, as recent research has surveyed, during the Cold War production cultures resisted or adjusted to political conditions,36 thus pursuing specific agendas, including media infrastructures, that shared technology, know-­how, and products much more than inherited wisdom tends to acknowledge. In fact, as media scholars Alice Lovejoy and Mari Pajala recently argued, the postwar era saw an unprecedented interest and investment in media infrastructures, whose function was deemed crucial for the world emerging from the rubble of the Second World War.37 Such concern was shared across the blocs and, later, with non-­aligned and decolonised countries, which needed to implement respective media institutions and infrastructures. Shifting the focus from international relations to media enables the chapters included in this collection to bridge the gap between international and transnational levels, as much as between Cold War studies and film and media studies. The structure of the volume replicates the periodisation of possibly the most ample work on the Cold War, The Cambridge History of the Cold War.38 Alternative ways of organising the topics and chapters of the collection would be no less valid. However, since our intention was to scrutinise and explain

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how state and bloc politics interacted with other levels, and the chapters coalesced quite easily around the most common periodisation, we stuck to it. The first section, titled ‘At the Onset: Super-­Powers, the Struggle for Europe, the Extension of the Conflict’, focuses on the role of superpowers and on the origins of the cinematic Cold War, which in our collection stretch to before the usual date a quo, 1947. In the opening chapter, ‘The Burden of Winning: American Cinematographic Policy in Italy in the Years of the Allied Military Administration (1943–1945)’, Maurizio Zinni discusses the foreign policies of the USA regarding the Italian film industry. By collating archival documents from the Department of State, the Psychological Warfare Branch, the Allied Control Commission, the American Embassy in Rome, and the Italian Prime Minister Cabinet, the author proves that from 1943 a project of economic and political imperialism was implemented regarding the Italian film industry, with a view to confrontation with the Soviet ally from the beginning. This chapter highlights that the beginning of the cinematic Cold War can be dated to two years before the end of the Second World War. At the same time, however, it points out how the political-­industrial will of the winner, and then strong ally, had to adapt in a more or less declared way to the needs and strategies of the weakest European interlocutor. Rosemary Feurer and Charles Musser, in ‘The Struggle to Save Progressive Unions: Carl Marzani and Union Films’, explore a neglected figure, company, and chapter of the US cinematic Cold War. Instead of discussing the widely scrutinised episode of the Red Scare in Hollywood, Feurer and Musser tackle the role of radical labour organisations and non-­fiction cinema as a tool of education and propaganda, which later became a legacy of American documentary filmmaking. In the following chapter, ‘A “Trojan Horse in the Enemy Camp”: Vatican Plans for a Catholic Third Way on the Chessboard of Cold War-­Era Cinema (1939– 1958)’, Gianluca della Maggiore brings into the debate about the cinematic Cold War an agency so far entirely neglected, the Holy See. The spiritual and political power it exerted, much more so in the first half of the twentieth century, considered the secular societies and ideologies that the USA and USSR represented to be almost equally dangerous. Accordingly, from the 1930s the Vatican sought a third way for film culture and production, which continued as the Cold War broke out. In the following chapter, ‘An Impossible Cinematic Hegemony: Soviet Films in Italy between Postwar and the Cold War (1944–1953)’, Stefano Pisu surveys the presence of Soviet films in Italy during the transition from the late Second World War to the height of the Cold War. Even though Italy was host to the strongest communist party in Western Europe, Soviet cinema could not carve its way into the Italian market, due to concurrent restrictions imposed on production and export by the USSR administration, the fragmentation of Italian distribution companies, the Italian conservative administration’s censorship, and, most of all, the lack of interest



Introduction 9

from the national audience. As in Maurizio Zinni’s chapter, early projects of the superpowers emerging from the Second World War aimed at occupying a leading position in the Italian film market are also shown here. The final chapter of this section, which Marsha Siefert authored, is titled ‘Soviet Cinematic Diplomacy from New York to Beijing, 1949: Sergei Gerasimov and his Documentary Films’, and ideally acts as a bridge to the second section. In fact, while discussing as prominent a figure in Soviet politics and arts from the mid-­1930s until the Gorbachev era as Sergei Gerasimov, the chapter spotlights the role of cultural diplomacy, co-­productions, and non-­fiction cinema in the early stages of the Cold War, as well as an international scenario that was already expanding beyond the European arena.39 The second section, titled ‘Film Diplomacy: Non-­ Aligned Countries, Decolonization and New Opportunities’, describes this larger international scenario, including decolonisation and fragmentation within the Socialist bloc, such as the Sino-­Soviet crisis or the Tito–Stalin split, and the role Yugoslavia gained at the helm of the Non-­Aligned Movement. This more complex situation required an increasing role of cultural diplomacy, for political and economic reasons. In ‘The Rise and Fall of Sino-­Soviet Film Festival Diplomacy (1957–1966)’, Elena Razlogova investigates how the USSR and the People’s Republic of China, on the boundary between the 1950s and 1960s, used cinema as a fully-­fledged part of cultural diplomacy; monitoring shared occasions, film criticism, and discussions on cinema enables the historian to track the evolution and shifts of international relations. The Sino-­Soviet split in the cinematic field took place at the Afro-­Asian Film Festival held in Indonesia in 1964, revealing the crucial role of decolonisation that brought China closer to the Third Worldist movement than to global communism. Severyan Dyakonov depicts the troubles and pitfalls of Soviet attempts to export film production to the newly born Indian state. ‘Making Ground for Film Export: Soviet Films’ Competition with Hollywood in India in the 1950–1960s’ describes the shift in Sovexportfilm policy, which originally planned to circulate Soviet films through theatrical releases, to tone down suspicions of propaganda and compete with American movies; however, this policy changed due to difficulties in distribution and bad performances at the box office, and Sovexportfilm turned to film festivals and retrospectives involving local elites. However, although it did much better than the USSR, even Hollywood failed to break through in the Indian market as it did elsewhere, given the audience preference for the vast domestic production. Gabrielle Chomentowski sheds light on a chapter of the cinematic Cold War thus far neglected, that is, the battle for Africa and its cinematic development and market between former colonial powers and socialist ones. In ‘The Film Market at the Time of Independence: France’s Former African Colonies and the Cinematic Cold War in the 1960s’ the author focuses particularly, but not exclusively, on the cases of Mali and

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Guinea and describes the shifts in Soviet aims, moving from the film market to training, know-­how, and technological transfer. This change was also due to the inability to compete with Hollywood, which, after an initial lack of interest in the African market, established a widespread distribution network in that continent, pushing Moscow to strengthen the above-­mentioned sides of cinema competition. Next, in ‘The Troubles of Non-­Alignment. International Pacifism, Transnational Style, Production Strategies in the Case of Rat (Atomic War Bride, Veliko Bulajić, 1960) ’, Francesco Pitassio investigates the case of a Yugoslav film production, starring a Polish actress and originating in a film script drafted by the world-­renowned Cesare Zavattini. Through Italian and Croatian archival sources, the chapter describes how this production relied on political and stylistic affinities altered by international politics, and notably the rise of the Non-­Aligned Movement, as much as by transformations in transnational film style. Rat’s release also shows how, in the early 1960s, the dissent about nuclear weapons was a transnational cinematic theme, given the interest in the subject also shown by both American and Soviet cinema.40 In the conclusive chapter of this section, ‘From Anticommunism to Third-­ Worldism. The Transformation of Mexican Cinema in the Cold War of the 1970s’, Israel Rodríguez researches the changes in Mexican film policy, which under President Luis Echeverría turned to Third Worldism to achieve prominence on the international scene. In this case, the Chilean model – and the solidarity with Chilean exiled filmmakers after 1973 – is taken as an example of a cinematic project that is ideologically characterised but intimately national, detached from both its old American partner and its direct Soviet competitor. This experience paves the way for the last part of the volume. The third section, ‘From Rising Suns to a Slow Sunset: Cooperation, Disillusionment, and Transfers’, brings together research that concentrates on the period when the post-­Second World War status quo entered crisis and the foundations were laid for a new phase, accelerating globalisation. As we now know, this would lead to the end of bipolarism and to the birth of a new, multipolar world. These are the years of Brezhnev’s new course and ensuing stagnation, the Chinese cultural revolution, and reigniting revolutionary utopias in the West, but also of the 1973 energy crisis and the questioning of the traditional international system of values and myths.41 The dollar crisis and the defeat in Vietnam for the United States, and the rise of socioeconomic difficulties and the increasing technological gap along with poor strategic choices for the Soviet Union, would lead to a de facto progressive retraction of the expansionist drive. This downsizing of global influence policies (especially for Moscow) would induce increasing dialogue with nations and entities only formally on the edges of the international scene. This shift in the international balance mirrors cinematic new waves building transnational aesthetic and generational, rather than ideological, bonds, or allegedly so; moreover, such



Introduction 11

developments are also reflected in a new cinematic and political dynamism, as testified by the short-­lived Chilean experience. In fact, in the opening chapter of this section, Dina Iordanova probes film festival archives and mostly overlooked sources. Her chapter, ‘Cold War and Film Festivals in the Aftermath of 1968’, clarifies how 1968 was a turning point for film festivals’ cultural policy and to what extent auteurist views benefitted major events (Cannes, Venice, Berlin), which could capitalise on a prestige economy of remarkable personalities, while entire, less celebrated national film productions or artists were confined to less visible arenas. The mismatch between the new cultural policies and management strategies of major West European festivals and the conservative attitudes of the Soviet bloc countries led to diminished returns for non-­ Western film traditions, especially from Socialist and Global South areas. ‘To Catch Up and O ­ vertake. . . ­Europe: Technology Transfer and Its Limits in the Soviet Cinema under Brezhnev’, by Catriona Kelly, examines the technological transfer from the Western bloc to the USSR, happening right at the time when international relations deteriorated. Awareness of technological progress beyond the Iron Curtain impacted on the practices, and even more so on the discontent, of the Soviet film industry, leading to long-­term consequences. This era paved the way for the wholesale abandonment of local technology and practices under perestroika and in post-­Soviet Russia. The scrutiny of such inequalities and unforeseen outcomes of international exchange lies at the core of Perrine Val’s chapter, ‘Missed Opportunities and Unexpected Success: Film Relationships between France and the GDR in the 1970s’. This contribution focuses on the exchange of films across the blocs and reports on the different releases and reactions, beyond any calculation that the respective administrations or distributors could make. South America, which was the birthplace of Third Cinema, becomes a point of reference (and success) for this production ‘across the blocs’, which, in the case of French–East German relations, achieved its greatest market performance in France precisely with a GDR documentary series representing Chilean events before and after the 1973 coup d’état. Chile comes into play also in the chapter by Margherita Moro, ‘The Chilean Cultural Project during Unidad Popular (1970–1973): The Interview between Roberto Rossellini and Salvador Allende’. During his administration, Salvador Allende, whom prominent European filmmakers such as Joris Ivens had already supported in previous election attempts, called for the attention and interest of both national and international intellectuals, ranging from Régis Debray to Chris Marker. The interview that Italian director Roberto Rossellini conducted with the Chilean president is a fully-­fledged part of this international support, which brought together the hopes of a free, progressive cinema with those of a socialist administration without Soviet rule. The closing chapter ‘“Ideological Threat of Italian Movies”: The KGB, Mafia, Punk-­Rock and Rise of Neo-­Fascism among Soviet Youth (1982–1985)’ by

12

Stefano Pisu, Francesco Pitassio and Maurizio Zinni

Sergei Zhuk demonstrates, through invaluable sources such as KGB reports, diaries, and interviews, the role that cultural transfers can play in determining political identities through subversive readings of films that had been specially selected to show negative sides of Western societies. This chapter also highlights the Kremlin’s progressive difficulty in holding together and controlling its own republics when the traditional bipolar perspective was beginning to clearly show all its cracks. This wide array of contributions benefits, in every single chapter, from in-­depth research on primary sources, which constitute an unquestionable opportunity to enlarge the picture and achieve a more detailed understanding of what the cinematic Cold War was. While we are fully content with this collection, we are nonetheless aware that it is one step in the direction of expanding the knowledge and could be complemented with additional frameworks. In fact, among those that this collection does not embrace, but that we believe could be very fruitful, we could mention oral history, which is much more urgent as the generations that experienced the cinematic Cold War are disappearing. An inclusion of the cinematic Cold War in broader media history could contribute to understanding the cultural, technological, and economic function of cinema, as media scenarios evolved over the decades. More detailed research on non-­institutional networks, such as cultural associations, political parties, and organisations, and on cultural exchange across the blocs, might shed light on the circulation of films and information, and on the creation of cultural value. Finally, an in-­depth survey of the dynamics of cultural reception is still to be fully produced. In 1986 the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal wrote Proluky (Vacant Lot), as a part of his trilogy In-House Wedding. At one point in the auto-­fictional narrative, the voice of Eliška (the writer’s spouse) tells us: And when he [Hrabal] was awarded I organized myself in Kersko an in-­house wedding, I invited the guests, the neighbours, we drank, I prepared tartines, we were merry, neighbours were honoured toasting to such a renowned man, Kersko’s ­pride . . . ­and the cat Et’an was in bed, sweating, and stayed there for a long time, until dawn came, and the guests were sneaking out, playing the harmonica and violin, and in the end they leaned on morning’s dew and played The Fascination, on their backs as did the gypsies in Arianna, with Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper.42

Classic Hollywood cinema and two of its major stars, like many other things, pierced the Iron Curtain and cultural distinctions between popular and high culture, individual and collective experience, and served the purpose of rendering the enchantment of everyday life across the blocs. We hope this collection will contribute to sparking interest in these mutual entanglements, transfers, and enchantments too.



Introduction 13

Stefano Pisu is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Cagliari. Previously an International Fellow at Oxford University’s Research Center in the Humanities, his work considers the history of international cultural relations through cinema. His publications include Il XX secolo sul red carpet: Politica, economia e cultura nei festival internazionali del cinema, 1932–1976 (Franco Angeli, 2016) and La cortina di celluloide: Il cinema italo-sovietico nella Guerra Fredda (Mimesis, 2019). Francesco Pitassio is Professor of Film Studies at the Università di Udine. He edited, with Dorota Ostrowska and Zsuzsanna Varga, Popular Cinemas in East Central Europe (2017). Among his books are Ombre silenziose (2002), Maschere e marionette: Il cinema ceco e dintorni (2002), Attore/ Divo (2003), and Neorealist Film Culture (2019). He was the Italian Principal Investigator of the EU HERA project VICTOR-E: Visual Culture of Trauma, Obliteration and Reconstruction in Post-WW II Europe (2019–2022). He has been Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Notre Dame (2015). His research interests focus on film acting and stardom, Italian and Central-­ Eastern European film history, and documentary cinema. Maurizio Zinni is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at Sapienza University in Rome. His research interests are focused on the relation between politics and culture in the twentieth century, particularly media industries and their impact on the political, cultural and social evolution of their time. He is the author of Fascisti di celluloide: La memoria del ventennio nel cinema italiano 1945–2000 (2010); Schermi radioattivi: L’America, Hollywood e l’incubo nucleare da Hiroshima alla crisi di Cuba (2013); Il leone, il giudice e il capestro: Storia e immagini della repressione italiana in Cirenaica (with Alessandro Volterra, 2021); and Visioni d’Africa: Cinema, politica, immaginari (2023).

Notes   1. These awards favoured its international distribution, including in India, as mentioned in Severyan Dyakonov’s chapter in this collection.  2. See https://www.alamy.com/pablo-­picasso-­with-­a-group-­of-­russians-­staying-­at-­can​ nes-­for-­the-­7th-­international-­film-­festival-­in-­front-­of-­his-­statue-­man-­and-­lamb-­in-­the​ -­riviera-­village-­of-­vallauris-­on-­march-­27-­1954-­left-­to-­right-­actress-­catherine-­litvinen​ ko-­an-­unidentified-­journalist-­and-­two-­unidentified-­men-­picasso-­actress-­lioubov-­orlo​ va-­actress-­clara-­loutchko-­actor-­akaki-­khorava-­and-­producer-­gregory-­alexandrov-­lea​ der-­of-­the-­russian-­delegation-­to-­the-­festival-­the-­group-­paid-­a-visit-­to-­pablo-­picasso​

14

Stefano Pisu, Francesco Pitassio and Maurizio Zinni

-­who-­is-­reportedly-­pro-­communist-­to-­purchase-­some-­of-­his-­paintings-­for-­the-­russi​ an-­government-­ap-­photo-­image524531681.html (retrieved 24 May 2024).   3. Obviously, the main reference here is the seminal Shaw and Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War. Russian historiography has also recently dealt with the subject, especially investigating the construction of the enemy’s images in the period 1946–1963. See Riabov, ‘Vrag nomer odin’.   4. Mikkonen and Koivunen, ‘Beyond the Divide’, 4.   5. The seminal work offering this larger picture of the Cold War is Westad, The Global Cold War.   6. See Burke, What Is Cultural History?; Green, Cultural History; Arcangeli, Rogge, and Salmi, The Routledge Companion to Cultural History. Pioneer studies on culture and international history were conducted in the early 1980s. See Milza, ‘Culture et relations internationales’. Since the 2000s this field has been increasingly enriched. For instance, see Berghahn Books’ series ‘Explorations in Culture and International History’, and especially its first volume, Gienow-­Hecht and Schumacher, Culture and International History.   7. Vowinckel, Payk, and Linderberger, ‘European Cold War Culture(s)?’, 5.  8. ‘L’ensemble des représentations collectives propres à une société, ainsi que leur expression sous forme de pratiques sociales, de modes de vie et de productions symboliques.’ Frank, Pour l’histoire des relations internationales, 373.   9. ‘La circulation des représentations, des pratiques, des modes de vie et des objets symboliques à travers les frontières.’ Ibid. 10. Major and Mitter, ‘East Is East and West Is West?’, 2. 11. Although the term ‘cultural Cold War’ had been used since the second half of the 1960s, it received significant attention from both the media and academics in the late 1990s after the release of Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? A new edition was released in 2013, and the book has been translated into many languages all around the world. See also Giles Scott-­Smith’s works, starting with his seminal The Politics of Apolitical Culture. For a reassessment of the notion of the cultural Cold War, see Pisu et al., ‘Reframing the Cultural Cold War’. 12. Major and Mitter, ‘East Is East and West Is West?’; Johnston, ‘Revisiting the Cultural Cold War’. 13. Romijn, Scott-­ Smith, and Segal, Divided Dreamworlds?; see also Buck-­ Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe. 14. Romero, Storia della guerra fredda, 111–23. 15. Vowinckel, Payk, and Linderberger, ‘European Cold War Culture(s)?’. 16. See Autio-­Sarasmo and Miklóssy, ‘The Cold War from a New Perspective’. See also Fleury and Jílek, Une Europe malgré tout. On the specific cinematic side of this European cooperation, see studies on film co-­productions, such as Palma and Pozner, Mariages à l’européenne. 17. David-­Fox, ‘The Iron Curtain as Semipermeable Membrane’. 18. Péteri, Nylon Curtain. 19. See Chomentowski, ‘Caméra au poing et valise à la main’. 20. Karl, ‘Zwischen politischen Ritual un kulturellem Dialog’; Kötzing and Moine, Cultural Transfer and Political Conflicts; Moine, Screened Encounters; Pisu, Stalin a Venezia; Pisu, Il XX secolo sul red carpet; Salazkina, World Socialist Cinema. See also the series of volumes edited by Dina Iordanova in which the phenomenon of film festivals is examined from the perspective of historical analysis, theoretical studies, and the



Introduction 15

investigation of contemporary events. The first issue is Iordanova and Rhyne, Film Festival Yearbook. 21. Bazin, Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotrowski, ‘Introduction’. 22. Autio-­Sarasmo and Miklóssy, ‘The Cold War from a New Perspective’, 7. 23. Mikkonen and Koivunen, ‘Beyond the Divide’, 6. 24. Siefert in Romijn, Scott-­Smith, and Segal, Divided Dreamworlds?, 74. 25. Higson, ‘The Concept of National Cinema’; Higson, ‘The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema’; Lagny, De l’histoire du cinéma. 26. Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order. 27. Salazkina, World Socialist Cinema. 28. See Babiracki and Jersild, Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War. See also Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism. 29. Andrew, ‘Time Zones and Jetlag’. 30. Ibid., 71. 31. Some examples are the organisation and further developments of film festivals (Venice from 1932; Moscow in 1935; Cannes in 1939), or the establishment of bodies operating in various fields and having different goals, such as the International Educational Cinematographic Institute (1928–1937) within the League of Nations or the International Film Chamber (1935–1942), even though it was under Nazi German control. One of the main issues in the international film milieu of the 1920s and 1930s was the clash between the pan-­European production movement and the American film industry. See Higson and Maltby, ‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’. 32. In addition to the sources on film festival studies mentioned above, see for example Fehrenbach, ‘The Berlin International Film Festival’. 33. Hannerz, Transnational Connections. 34. Higbee and Lim, ‘Concepts of Transnational Cinema’. 35. Over the past two decades, historiography has offered increasingly detailed contributions on the agencies and modes of cultural intervention by the two superpowers. Regarding the US, see: Osgood, Total Cold War; Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency; Scott-­Smith, Networks of Empire; Belmonte, Selling the American Way. As for the USSR, see: Gould-­Davies, ‘The Logic of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy’; Nagornaya, Sovetskaia kulturnaia diplomatiya; Golovlev, French and Soviet Musical Diplomacies. 36. See the ground-­breaking Szczepanik, Továrna Barrandov. For the conflict between requests from politics and production practice in co-­productions, see Skopal, ‘The Czechoslovak–East German Co-­Production’. 37. See Lovejoy and Pajala, Remapping Cold War Media. 38. Leffler and Westad, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 1, Origins; Leffler and Westad, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 2, Crises and Détente; Leffler and Westad, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 3, Endings. 39. Important studies have recently appeared on the origins and developments of the cinematic Cold War in East, South East, and South Asia. See Lee, Cinema and the Cultural Cold War; Fu and Yip, The Cold War and Asian Cinemas. 40. See Shaw and Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War, 127–58. 41. Rather than a full-­scale crisis in the 1970s, Niall Ferguson’s definition pinpoints ‘a widespread perception of crisis . . . – and very often a crisis that was global in scale’, i.e. a broad sensation of anxiety and insecurity spreading from the economic sector to the political, cultural, and social milieus following epoch-­making events such as the

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1973 oil crisis, the outcome of the Vietnam War, and the end of the development model that came in after the Second World War. Ferguson, ‘Crisis, What Crisis?’, 14–15. 42. Hrabal, Proluky, 492.

Bibliography Andrew, Dudley. ‘Time Zones and Jetlag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema’, in Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman (eds), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 59–89. Arcangeli, Alessandro, Jörg Rogge, and Hannu Salmi (eds). The Routledge Companion to Cultural History in the Western World. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. Autio-Sarasmo, Sari and Katalin Miklóssy. ‘The Cold War from a New Perspective’, in Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklóssy (eds), Reassessing Cold War Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 1–15. Babiracki, Patrick and Austin Jersild (eds). Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War: Exploring the Second World. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. Bazin, Jérôme, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr Piotrowski. ‘Introduction: Geography of Internationalism’, in Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr Piotrowski (eds), Art Beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945–1989) (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2016), 1–30. Belmonte, Laura A. Selling the American Way: US Propaganda and the Cold War. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000. Burke, Peter. What Is Cultural History? Cambridge: Polity, 2004. Chomentowski, Gabrielle. ‘Caméra au poing et valise à la main: les mobilités étudiantes du Sud vers les écoles de cinéma de l’Est socialiste’. Cahiers du monde russe 63(3–4) (2022), 619–46. Cull, Nicholas J. The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. David-Fox, Michael, ‘The Iron Curtain as Semipermeable Membrane: Origins and Demise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex’, in Patrick Babiracki and Kenyon Zimmer (eds), Crossings: International Travel and Exchange Across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s–1960s (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2014), 14–39. Djagalov, Rossen. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema Between the Second and Third Worlds. Montreal: McGill’s University Press, 2020. Fehrenbach, Heide. ‘The Berlin International Film Festival: Between Cold War Politics and Postwar Reorientation’. Studies in European Cinema 17(2) (2020), 81–96. Ferguson, Niall. ‘Crisis, What Crisis? The 1970s and the Shock of the Global’, in Niall Ferguson and Charles S. Maier (eds), The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press, 2011), 1–21. Fleury, Antoine and Lubor Jílek (eds). Une Europe malgré tout, 1945–1990: Contacts et



Introduction 17

réseaux culturels, intellectuels et scientifiques entre Européens dans la guerre froide. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010. Frank, Robert (ed.). Pour l’histoire des relations internationales. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2012. Fu, Poshek and Man-Fung Yip (eds). The Cold War and Asian Cinemas. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. Gienow-Hecht, Jessica and Frank Schumacher (eds). Culture and International History. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2003. Golovlev, Alexander. French and Soviet Musical Diplomacies in Post-War Austria, 1945– 1955. London: Routledge, 2023. Gould-Davies, Nigel. ‘The Logic of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy’. Diplomatic History 27 (2003), 193–214. Green, Anna. Cultural History. Theory and History. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Higbee, Will and Song Hwee Lim. ‘Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies’. Transnational Cinemas 1(1) (2010), 7–21. Higson, Andrew. ‘The Concept of National Cinema’. Screen 30(4) (1989), 36–46. ———. ‘The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema’, in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (eds), Cinema & Nation (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 63–74. Higson, Andrew and Richard Maltby (eds). ’Film Europe‘ and ’Film America‘: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999. Hrabal, Bohumil. Proluky, in Sebrané spisy Bohumila Hrabala, vol. XI, Svatby v domě (Prague: Pražská imaginace, 1995). Iordanova, Dina and Regan Rhyne (eds). Film Festival Yearbook: The Festival Circuit 1. St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009. Iriye, Akira. Cultural Internationalism and World Order. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Johnston, Gordon. ‘Revisiting the Cultural Cold War’. Social History 35(3) (2010), 290–307. Karl, Lars. ‘Zwischen politischem Ritual und kulturellem Dialog: Die Moskauer Internationalen Filmfestspiele im Kalten Krieg 1959–1971’, in Lars Karl (ed.), Leinwand zwischen Tauwetter und Frost: Der osteuropäische Spiel- und Dokumentarfilm im Kalten Krieg (Berlin: Metropol, 2007), 279–98. Kötzing, Andreas and Caroline Moine (eds). Cultural Transfer and Political Conflicts: Film Festivals in the Cold War. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017. Lagny, Michèle. De l’histoire du cinéma: Méthode historique et histoire du cinéma. Paris: Armand Colin, 1992. Lee, Sangjoon. Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. Leffler, Melvyn P. and Odd Arne Westad (eds). The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 1, Origins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ———. The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 2, Crises and Détente. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ———. The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 3, Endings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Lovejoy, Alice and Mari Pajala (eds). Remapping Cold War Media: Institutions, Infrastructures, Translations. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2022.

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Major, Patrick and Rana Mitter. ‘East Is East and West Is West? Towards a Comparative SocioCultural History of the Cold War,’ in Patrick Major and Rana Mitter (eds), Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2004), 2–18. Mikkonen, Simo and Pia Koivunen. ‘Beyond the Divide’, in Simo Mikkonen and Pia Koivunen (eds), Beyond the Divide: Entangled Histories of Cold War Europe (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2015), 1–19. Milza, Pierre. ‘Culture et relations internationales’. Relations internationales 24 (1980), 361–79. Moine, Caroline. Screened Encounters: The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, 1955– 1990. Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2018. Nagornaya, Oksana (ed.). Sovetskaia kulturnaia diplomatiya v gody Kholodnoi voiny (1945–1989). Chelyabinsk: Yuzhno-Uralsky Gosudarstvenny Universitet, 2017. Osgood, Kenneth. Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006. Palma, Paola and Valérie Pozner (eds). Mariages à l’européenne: Les coproductions cinématographiques intra-européennes depuis 1945. Paris: AFRHC, 2019. Péteri, György (ed.). Nylon Curtain: Transnational and Trans-Systemic Tendencies in the Cultural Life of State-Socialist Russia and East-Central Europe. Trondheim: Program on East European Cultures and Societies, 2006. Pisu, Stefano. Stalin a Venezia: L’URSS alla Mostra del cinema fra diplomazia culturale e scontro ideologico (1932–1953). Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2013. ———. Il XX secolo sul red carpet: Politica, economia e cultura nei festival internazionali del cinema (1932–1976). Milan: Franco Angeli, 2016. Pisu, Stefano (ed.), Giles Scott-Smith, Sergei I. Zhuk, Sangjoon Lee, Gautam Chakrabarti, Patryk Babiracki, and Caroline Moine. ‘Reframing the Cultural Cold War: 20 Years after Stonor Saunders’ Case’. Contemporanea. Rivista di storia dell’800 e del ‘900 3 (2020), 433–75. Riabov, Oleg V. (ed.). ‘Vrag nomer odin’: V simvolicheskoi politike kinematografii SSSR i SShA perioda kholodnoi voiny. Moscow: Aspekt Press, 2023. Romero, Federico. Storia della guerra fredda: L’ultimo conflitto per l’Europa. Turin: Einaudi, 2009. Romijn, Peter, Giles Scott-Smith, and Joes Segal (eds). Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012. Salazkina, Masha. World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023. Scott-Smith, Giles. The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and Postwar American Hegemony. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. ––––––. Networks of Empire: The US State Department’s Foreign Leader Program in the Netherlands, France and Britain 1950–1970. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008. Shaw, Tony and Denise Youngblood. Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2010. Skopal, Pavel. ‘The Czechoslovak–East German Co-production Tři oříšky pro Popelku/ Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel/ Three Wishes for Cinderella: A Transnational Tale’, in Dorota Ostrowska, Francesco Pitassio, and Zsuzsanna Varga (eds), Popular Cinemas in East Central Europe: Film Cultures and Histories (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 184–97. Stonor Saunders, Frances. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London: Granta, 1999.



Introduction 19

Szczepanik, Petr. Továrna Barrandov: svět filmařů a politická moc 1945–1970. Prague: Národní Filmový Archiv, 2017. Vowinckel, Annette, Marcus Payk, and Thomas Linderberger. ‘European Cold War Culture(s)? An Introduction’, in Annette Vowinckel, Marcus Payk, and Thomas Lindenberger (eds), Cold War Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2012), 1–20. Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

PART I

At the Onset: Super-Powers, the Struggle for Europe, the Extension of the Conflict

CHAPTER 1

The Burden of Winning American Cinematographic Policy in Italy in the Years of the Allied Military Administration (1943–1945) Maurizio Zinni

The years of the Allied military administration in Italy seem to be a crucial turning point in both its own postwar history and that of Europe as a whole.1 In the final years of the Second World War, we can find the precise economic, political and ideological foundations that characterised Cold War Europe2 and the confrontation between the two blocs, including from a cultural point of view.3 The historiography regarding postwar Italy highlights the complexity of the relations between the Allied administration, in particular the United States, and the first independent governments.4 This was a relationship that was anything but one-­way, capable of revealing in its particularity the complexity of the dynamics, some well out in the open, others far less so, that governed in a broad sense the interactions between the powerful overseas ally and its junior partners, not only in Europe.5 American politics, as far as the film industry was concerned, seem to be a representative and stimulating way of analysing how the military objectives of the fight against fascism, the civil objectives of anti-­fascism and, later on, the new scenario of an ideological clash on a global scale, met (and clashed with), on the one hand, the needs of Italian governments and, on the other, the pressure from one of America’s major industries, Hollywood, eager to establish itself as a protagonist in a film market from which Mussolini’s dictatorship and the subsequent years of war had effectively excluded it.

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This chapter relies on Italian and American archives, going beyond the usual key concept of American imperialism and enriched with recent research on the origins of the Cold War in an Italian context. It aims to piece together how the Italian film industry was one of the points of ‘interest’ in American foreign policy between 1943 and 1945.6 Papers from the State Department, the Allied Control Commission, the Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB), the American Embassy in Rome and the undersecretariat of the Prime Minister of the Italian government reveal traces of a design of economic imperialism with a precise political purpose. With Hollywood productions returning to Italian soil, Washington tried to establish a stable industrial stronghold that could carry out an ideological struggle to both free Italians from their fascist past and disseminate political and cultural models of a capitalist nature. In this way, a precise economic project was put in place, whose political and cultural repercussions supported the emergence of a grand design of Rooseveltian style, adapted to the new postwar challenges and the emerging dualism between global superpowers.7 All this, within the framework of a more general reorganisation of the functions of the state, in the context of the exponential growth of the influence of the new international order on local dynamics that emerged in the previous century.8

The Dawn of a Cinematic Cold War? Military Strategy, Economic Interests and the New World Order in an Italy under Allied Occupation The three Allied powers landed in Sicily in June 1943, without any clear plans for their military occupation of Italy. The military and political demands of the Anglo-­Saxon bloc would soon put an end to any Soviet hopes of influence in the region.9 A form of military management was put in place, which then ran hand in hand with political and economic initiatives. Here, the expectations, and geopolitical ambitions, of the British side gradually began to clash with the limits imposed by the international scenario and the new balance of power. This was to prop up the network of bipolar alliances for years to come.10 Looking towards future geopolitical postwar relations, in the final phase of the Second World War, the United States conceded to Italy a strategic importance that until then had not been granted to any other country in the Mediterranean region. This was not so much a question of widening the US sphere of influence, though in a way we can see aspects that would typify a budding ‘domino theory’ of the future, but rather the need to ensure Italy’s return to an open and multilateral trading system, and free and commercial markets. This was the premise for the birth of a new political-­economic



The Burden of Winning 25

order along American lines, in which a constant expansion of income would also bring with it the affirmation of democracy and the consolidation of peace.11 Elaboration of new legislation for the Italian film industry was among the first issues addressed by the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories (AMGOT) and, subsequently, by the Allied Control Commission (ACC). From the beginning there was an active commitment to the elaboration of a cinematographic policy for Italy among the American members of the various structures in command,12 both the State Department and the Embassy. This highlights the desire of a potent ‘enemy ally’ to set in motion a cinematographic project, both economic and politico-­ideological. Much has been written about the importance of politics for American cinema in postwar Europe.13 The different interpretations follow two main directions. One reading tends to highlight the perfect convergence of interests and involvement between the US government and the studio system in supporting the imperialism, first economic and then cultural, of American cinema. The other illustrates the existence of a more complex and problematic relationship between public and private objectives.14 On the other hand, less attention has been paid to an in-­depth analysis of this policy within the framework of the great postwar American liberal-­ democratic project, regarding the three main objectives highlighted above: the creation of an open economic system; the diffusion of an anti-­totalitarian ideology with an anti-­fascist (and later anti-­communist) function; and the construction of a network of stable international relations with receptive and cooperative allies. Even more specifically, in its attempt to gradually regain control in various fields, it is interesting to note how Italy approached these factors, not least in the film industry. This came as part of its transition from defeated enemy to collaborator and even potential ally in the new bipolar scenario. Analysis of the Allied and Italian documents unveils the relationship between winner and loser and the processes, both political and economic, that only gradually, and in a watered down fashion, secured the achievement of the former’s intentions, though not in the stable and lasting manner aspired to at the outset.15 Post-­October 1943, it is no coincidence that when it became evident to the political and entertainment world that there was American interest in the Italian film industry,16 in its hiring, presentation and distribution, a game of contacts and proposals began between the two countries. Behind this there were two very different objectives. American PWB officials wanted to prevent the restoration of a state film monopoly, run by elements who were in varying degrees still tied to the past regime and its economic policies. The Italian government sought, within its limited room to manoeuvre, to protect the interests of the national industry and its rights in the sector.17

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In a communication sent on 30  August 1944 to Admiral Ellery Stone, then Acting Chief of the ACC, the Director of the Public Relations Branch of the PWB, Major Lionel Fielden, openly declared that ‘the possibility of a Government monopoly is very real’ and that ‘some form of control is unavoidable at any rate until the industry has been properly epurated’.18 The first projects to reorganise Italy’s film industry, put forward under American management, can already easily be seen in a memorandum dating back to the summer of 1944. It argues that the pre-­existing structure ‘if straight-­forwardly ­conducted . . . ­can contribute to the reconstruction of a healthy national industry within the orbit of the new world economy’. The hope was that Italian cinema, once revived, ‘may bring itself into line with the International commercial ­agreements . . . ­with a view to the actual and future relations with United States’. This could only happen, however, through a ‘suitable Purge commission for the Cinema’, which would be responsible for eliminating officials who had colluded with the past regime and would allow the rise of a new category of administrators capable of transfusing ‘a new moral tone throughout the whole organization’.19 Roosevelt’s grand design to control the new international balance of power after the defeat of fascism corresponded almost perfectly with a desire to insert the Italian film industry into a broader global market. This was to be controlled and moderated by the United States, also and above all in the interest of the Hollywood majors. The particular aspirations of the major Hollywood film studios were not exactly the guiding light of the American administration, but they efficiently fitted into a broader logic of the reorganisation of the international political and economic system. Here the free market and the consolidation of a class of reformist politics and industry were to lay solid foundations for the construction of the new world order. In October 1943 there was a meeting between William Hays, representatives of Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who supported the restructuring of international relations in the name of marked economic liberalism.20 This was not just a get-­together to promote the interests of American producers in the new postwar scenario, but sanctioned the coherence of the needs of the American entertainment industry with the largest postwar reconstruction project undertaken by the victorious administration.21 Fearing a possible American film invasion, the highest representative of the Italian government, Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi himself, tried to directly intervene in an attempt to defend the interests of Italy’s film industry and workers in that sector. Bonomi’s letter to Admiral Stone of 12  September 1944 not only confirmed his government’s willingness to act immediately as a qualified liaison when it came to the projects of the occupying ally,22 but also attempted to tie the ACC’s choices to any possible scenario that could unfold



The Burden of Winning 27

at the end of the conflict. This appears evident in a passage of the letter present in Bonomi’s original draft, though removed from the final version, perhaps in order not to force his hand excessively: Finally, I must add a consideration of a political and, I would almost say, psychological nature. Failure to resume our film production would end, sooner or later, with damaging repercussions on the spirit of the popular masses, which could lead to them attributing the cause to purely commercial interests; which could upset the certainty – which has now penetrated the minds of the majority of Italians – of the understanding and concern with which the allies meet our needs.23

The Italian government was put under pressure by the PWB and the ACC to introduce the Italian film industry to the broadest exchange circuit. This was dominated by Hollywood and reflected Hullian and commercial reasoning, with Europe as an independent political and commercial partner, but adapted to the needs of the United States. The Italian government wished to affirm its sovereignty and its own personality in the world of film, without entering into open friction with what it saw as the reference point for its reconstruction phase. The first official MPPDA communications to the State Department, regarding new legislation concerning a revival of the Italian film industry, and its relations with the outside world, date back to 27 September 1944. The request for the abolition of any prior protectionist rules, which had been introduced by the fascist regime, was to protect the interests of American producers and to encourage an ‘equal treatment [of Italian products] with American products after they are imported into the United States’.24 This request followed closely the official position taken by the Italian government, but came later than the first proposal made by the PWB and followed its line. It is clear that the agreement between the American administration and the major film studios (a convenient agreement for both parties) had already been agreed upon. This was a collaboration that included the interests of American industry within a broader project aimed at defining the profile of the new Western order, under US guidance, over the decades to come.

The Negotiating Table For the PWB the creation of a temporary cinema control commission was to become a method to heal frictions and soften the Italian position.25 In the preparatory draft, dating back to the end of September 1944, the PWB reaffirmed its commitment to restarting the Italian cinematographic industry. The Allied Force Head Quarter (AFHQ) and its operational arm, the PWB, also defined the role of film in their political strategy as a ‘weapon’ for ‘instilling

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in the Italian ­people . . . g­ reater effort in the war against the common enemy and in the reconstruction of a democratic, healthy Italy’. Summing up, it was hoped that ‘the campaigns for the rehabilitation and democratic re-­education of the Italian ­people . . . s­ hould not be too abruptly discontinued and that it should not fall into the hands of a body which might misuse it’.26 Revamping Italian cinema went hand in hand with the anti-­fascist campaign, aimed at purging the top management in the Italian film industry of elements that had colluded with the past regime. This was not a simple crusade aimed at hiding the economic interests behind the operation, but the cornerstone of America’s plans to reconstruct Italy. The ideology behind trying to completely free Italy of its fascist past saw film as an instrument of ‘American-­style’ democratisation of liberated Europe.27 It provided a means to forge the Italian identity towards a modern mass consumerist democracy open to the outside. Using cinema too, the aim was to shape the political and cultural identity of post-­fascist Italy, directly focusing on a ‘moralisation’ of national film production as an appropriate means to intervene on various subjects from overseas, both political and religious. This became increasingly true with the emergence of neorealism.28 The theme of morality was to become yet another front in this political and symbolic confrontation between American reality and the situation in Italy, as well as an important step in the evolution of cinema from a political medium with an anti-­fascist function to an effective tool in the postwar anti-­communist campaign. That the two levels, the legislative-­economic one and the more strictly political-­ideological one, were taken into equal account by the PWB is confirmed by Major Fielden in a letter to Admiral Stone dated 28  September 1944. In this, the head of the Public Relations Branch openly criticised the work of Undersecretary Spataro, who was, in his eyes, guilty of trying to ‘hoodwink this Commission into permitting a state of affairs in which he, powerfully backed by Fascist elements . . ., would have full control over the enormous organisations of Luce, Enic Etc.’. It mattered little to Fielden whether Spataro’s intentions were personal or governmental. He believed there to be an impending risk of a monopoly ‘of a type which it seems to me we can scarcely encourage’.29 Of extreme interest is Oreste Biancoli’s memorandum attached to the letter. He was a journalist, scriptwriter, screenwriter and theatre and film director but, above all, Fielden’s trusted man in the Italian film industry. Biancoli’s opinions were the basis of the PWB’s political assessment, as were the comments contained in the newspapers Risorgimento Liberale of 26 September and Il Tempo of 27 September 1944. The idea was to replace the old state officials with a liberal political class and culture, which would encourage a new cinematographic management ‘in no way compromised by their past activities, and who can be considered guarantors of industrial integrity’.30 The political weight of the nominations was also reflected in their



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managerial capacity based on skills closely following the lines of an American model. In Admiral Stone’s address to the first meeting of the Allied-­Italian Temporary Film Board, on 19 September 1945, the desire to open the Italian film market to international trade was, by now, unmistakably endorsed, even to government representatives: ‘We trust the new Italian Government will not tolerate such a condition to occur again and will see to it that these unfair Fascist measures are immediately revoked and free competition is again restored.’ In the same way, it was understood that the elaboration of any guidelines that were to transfer matters such as production, distribution and censorship from the PWB to the Italian government would take place ‘in agreement with the Italian government’.31 To this end, a special subcommittee was set up within the Temporary Film Board dedicated solely to the revision of fascist cinematographic legislation. For this purpose the new undersecretary, Francesco Libonati, met with American representatives. His aim was to prevent, as far as possible, the destiny of Italy’s film industry being sacrificed to the free international market without any safeguards being put in place. His proposals, in principle, received the support of the British members of the commission.32 Parallel to the ACC’s activity, the State Department, the true direct interlocutor of the MPPDA, moved along more unofficial lines. It used the American mission in Rome and, subsequently, the embassy itself, in the person of Alexander Kirk, the mission’s head, to constantly check what point the situation had reached, and to present to the Italian government the course that the US administration was pushing for regarding the protectionist rules to be abolished. Kirk would go on to be ambassador. In a communication to the State Department, dated 29 March 1945, on the progress of the subcommittee meetings, Kirk himself expressed the need to meet the Italian requests as far as possible ‘if by so doing we could obtain the elimination of the really damaging features of the former regime’33 while reaffirming, in subsequent communications too, the prime interests of the American film industry in a market that had once again opened up.34

An Unwelcome Guest, Sat in the Front Room In this context, relations with the Soviets, not yet seen as the enemy, were still marked by formal collaboration. The USSR was already putting in place a sort of cinematographic sphere of influence in the territories it controlled. To counterbalance this, America hoped to do the same. This can be better seen in the facts rather than in the US declarations of principle. The Temporary Film Board’s preparatory draft expressed a desire that the various Allied embassies, including the Soviet one, ‘­should . . . ­be invited to send observers

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to Board Meetings’, while pointing out that the presence of their representatives on the commission itself ‘is not deemed advisable’, due to the domestic and national nature of the subject matter.35 In reality, at the time of its creation, the Temporary Film Board included representatives of the American and British embassies, but not the Soviet one, as well as lacking any outside observer at the meetings. To obtain the free circulation and projection of their products in Italy, Soviet authorities were obliged to turn to their American and British allies. Already in the draft of the future Commission, it was pointed out that, among other things, the PWB had ‘facilitated the booking, in one instance, of a Russian film’.36 This clarification appeared necessary given that, a few days earlier, the Soviet embassy had filed an official complaint about the low circulation of its films in Italy. That the problem was not insignificant is confirmed by the fact that the PWB’s Information and Censorship Section in liberated Italy expressly asked the AFHQ for recommendations on how to proceed, since the duties regarding the PWB’s film distribution, although still in force, did not appear to be well defined.37 A few weeks later, with considerable resistance, the PWB officials authorised the use of two vehicles from GDB, a distribution company headed by Giovanni De Berardinis,38 which went on to organise the circulation of Russian films in Italy over the following months. The problem of the distribution of Soviet films on Italian soil came to the fore again in the following months, calling into question whether they were receiving the same treatment as the other two Allies. In a communication of early March 1945 to the ACC, the AFHQ reported the official request of the Foreign Office to drop any previous resistance to the diffusion of Russian films in Italy. This was because at the time there was no intention of tackling the problem of distributing British and American films on Soviet soil.39 The request was forwarded to the Public Relations Office of the ACC in order to inform the Soviet representative of its willingness to provide any necessary authorisation, and means, to distribute their films, without expecting in return assurances of similar treatment of American and British films in the Balkans and other areas under Soviet control.40 However, the office superior said it was impossible to proceed without a positive view from Washington, which had been informed from the outset of the intentions of the British Foreign Office.41 The State Department’s response came via the embassy in Rome. The letter confirmed the US government’s willingness to allow and facilitate free circulation of Soviet productions, but in exchange for reassurances of reciprocal conduct regarding American films in Soviet-­occupied zones.42 Though not prohibited, the circulation of Soviet films in Italy encountered numerous obstacles. The PWB kept these in place in the hope of bringing the question of a common code of conduct to the fore, and, in a way, making it clear to the Russians who was in control in the liberated areas under American



The Burden of Winning 31

control. It was a clear message that apparently reached the Soviet embassy. On 22  March the Soviet ACC representative, Major General Kislenko, officially protested to Admiral Stone over the non-­screening of a Russian film in Bologna, putting the blame on the local component of the PWB Film Section.43 The screening of the film was actually postponed by the owner of the cinema. He did not want to miss out on being one of the screens that benefited from the PWB’s distribution plan (which tended to include more popular American works). The plan tied him to screening films offered by the PWB alone, excluding the Soviet GDB distribution.44 The supposed plurality of distribution as presented on paper was actually denied by the PWB’s actions. It served as both an in pectore agent of overseas films and as guardian of the normal circulation and distribution of films on Italian soil. In this case, though maybe following a different route, the PWB put in place a means of working – block booking – very similar to the logic of the major Hollywood distributors, and not yet sanctioned by the Supreme Court.

Conclusions Any analysis of these documents reveals a significant and constant coherence in American policy in the world of film, especially in its medium- and long-­ term objectives. US priorities, first military and then political, evolved rapidly. In spite of this, within a few months a series of interventions were put in place, capable of linking those interests already up and running with others yet to be defined. The intention was to insert the particular demands of as significant a subject as Hollywood within a global design, on a political, economic and cultural level. At the same time, the far-­from-­marginal roles played by the others involved in the process is clear: on the one hand the Italian government and Italy’s film industry; on the other, the Soviet ally/enemy. Both followed different methods within logics of alliance or opposition which were inevitably soon to be reversed, putting in doubt the overwhelming position that the United States wanted to impose. For Italy it was a question of protecting past privileges and present interests; for the Soviets, of broadening their already very slim chances of intervening and, at the least, consolidating their respective spheres of influence. Film politics became the litmus test to gauge what was going on, and how, with the war still in progress. Here the foundations were laid for how future relations would play out between the United States, her allies and the USSR, and not just in cinema. Though the weaker party in an unbalanced relationship, Italy still managed to have its needs listened to, albeit partially, thanks to its contractual capacity and the medium- and long-­term needs of the United States. The same dynamics typical of the American way of working in Italy in those months, and

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the reaction of the Italian government, resurfaced in a purely updated version before and during the years of centrist governments until the first half of the 1950s. In the first case, the binding weight of American intentions can be seen in the overlapping of subjects and agencies striving to achieve common objectives, often in an uncoordinated fashion. In the second, a rediscovered political and economic independence was reached through a shrewd policy of concessions subordinated to requests – prolonging the state of political-­ economic necessity by linking it to the new international order and the role Italy played in it as a frontier country. This juncture in the history of Italian cinema, and in the history of postwar Italy as a whole, takes on a much more complex and problematic shape than the initial research into the subject brought to light. Previous analysis had highlighted Italy as a crushed and junior partner with respect to its requests, compared to its ally, submitting to the demands of the State Department, the embassy, the ACC and the PWB, in the short-­term interests merely of American production companies. On the contrary, the available documents, only briefly touched on here, highlight a need to look at the cinematographic intervention of the Allied military administration in a much broader context, revealing a binding relationship of interests that linked public and private, international and domestic powers, at the dawn of a global confrontation that appeared to be just as demanding and prolonged as the one that had just ended. As for the Soviet Union, the network of spheres of influence appeared already to be in place even before a formal break in the war alliance. For both sides cinema became a new battlefield, both imaginative and physical, capable of combining an attempt at cultural dominance with territorial influence. In this case, the factors highlighted above laid the foundations for the undisputed domination of American film and its frameworks, in this case narrative, over the Italian market, on a par with what happened to future industrial relations. This was a solid political, economic and cultural basis for the challenges that Italy and the future bipolar system would pose to the interests of Washington and Hollywood in the second half of the twentieth century. This is a field of research in which much still needs to be done, above all from the point of view of film diplomacy and cultural relationships. This period in history precedes the traditional starting date for bipolar opposition and America’s containment policy. However, the unpublished documents taken into consideration demonstrate incontrovertibly that the cinematic Cold War had actually already begun and was up and running well before the so-­ called Iron Curtain descended on Europe, dividing East and West for over forty years.



The Burden of Winning 33

Maurizio Zinni is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at Sapienza University in Rome. His research interests are focused on the relation between politics and culture in the twentieth century, particularly media industries and their impact on the political, cultural and social evolution of their time. He is the author of Fascisti di celluloide: La memoria del ventennio nel cinema italiano 1945–2000 (2010); Schermi radioattivi: L’America, Hollywood e l’incubo nucleare da Hiroshima alla crisi di Cuba (2013); Il leone, il giudice e il capestro: Storia e immagini della repressione italiana in Cirenaica (with Alessandro Volterra, 2021); and Visioni d’Africa: Cinema, politica, immaginari (2023).

Notes   1. For the American administration, Italy was to become the place to test its political, military and economic strategy designed for Europe during and after the war, in its reconstruction phase. Miller, The United States and Italy, x.  2. Ellwood, L’Europa ricostruita, 16–36.  3. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars, 3–68.   4. Del Pero, L’Alleato scomodo, and Mistry, The United States, Italy and the Origins of Cold War.  5. Formigoni, Storia d’Italia nella Guerra fredda (1943–1978), 14–15.   6. On this subject, see the pioneering research of Di Nolfo (‘Documenti sul ritorno del cinema americano in Italia’; ‘La diplomazia del cinema americano in Europa nel secondo dopoguerra’; ‘La storia del dopoguerra italiano e il cinema neorealista: intersezioni’) and Brunetta (Storia del cinema italiano, 334–45; ‘La lunga marcia del cinema americano in Italia tra fascismo e guerra fredda’; Il cinema neorealista italiano, 150–71).  7. Harper, America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 7–8.  8. Clark, Globalizzazione e frammentazione, 181.  9. Ellwood, L’alleato nemico, 61–80. 10. Pedaliu, Britain, Italy and the Origins of the Cold War. 11. Miller, The United States and Italy, 4–13, and Ellwood, L’Europa ricostruita, 36. On the productivist doctrine underlying postwar American economic policy, see the now classic Maier, ‘The Politics of Productivity’. 12. On the complexity of the Allied employment structure and the various offices that managed the mass media industry in Italy between 1943 and 1945, see Tobia, Advertising America, 54–56. 13. For an overview of the cinematographic policies put in place in Europe by the State Department between the end of the conflict and the reconstruction phase, see Swann, ‘Il “piccolo Dipartimento di Stato”’. 14. On the different interpretations and an attempt at a balance sheet, see Cambi, ‘Washington/Hollywood dalla Seconda guerra mondiale alla Guerra fredda’. 15. Guback, The International Film Industry, 24.

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16. The economic interests of the American film industry in Europe date back to the first postwar period. The subjects chosen and the narrative criteria were clearly aimed at a need to fill spaces in foreign markets. In this sense, the First World War marked Hollywood’s overtaking of European national cinema production, including the Italian one. Vasey, The World According to Hollywood. 17. See the correspondence between the Office of Civil Affairs at the Head of Government, the Ministry of Popular Culture, that of Industry, Commerce and Labour and that of the Interior, already in progress in October 1943, following a directive sent by the head of the Film Section of the Psychological Warfare Branch, Captain Lawrence, to the Scalera I.C.I. and to the other distributors operating in the territories of the Southern Kingdom. This related to a series of constraints imposed on the programming of films, the operating hours of cinemas and the censorship of films being screened or due to be screened. Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri (Brindisi-­Salerno, 1943–1944), Ministero della Cultura Popolare, f. 7, cinematografia. 18. Federal Record Center, Suitland (FRC), ACC, PWB, RG 331, b. 11, 10.000/129/262. 19. Ibid. 20. On the mindset that influenced American political action in postwar Italy, see Del Pero, L’Alleato scomodo, 19–20. 21. Jarvie, ‘The Postwar Economic Foreign Policy of the American Film Industry’, 162–63. 22. The letter was drawn up on the basis of a confidential note from Undersecretary Giuseppe Spataro to Bonomi dated 6 September 1944. In this, the ACC’s delaying policy was denounced, but more emphasis was put on ‘the threat of speculative manoeuvres backed by the PWB’, which is defined, because of the ‘continuous contacts with the military command of Algiers, as the commission really in control in Italy’. For Spataro, the ACC was only ‘a pale simulacrum’. Author’s translation. 23. The draft for Bonomi’s letter and the note by Spataro, both unpublished, are kept in the Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri (1860– 2000), Gabinetto (1868–1987), Affari generali (1876–1987), 1944–1947, 13923 3.3.12, Ripresa produttiva dell’Industria cinematografica. Author’s translation. 24. Letter from Carl E. Milliken, secretary of the MPPDA, to Francis Colt de Wolf, head of the State Department’s Telecommunications Division, on 27  September 1944, housed in the National Archive (NA), RG 59, 865.4061, Motion Picture, 9-­2744. 25. As early as 28 August 1944, Fielden had put forward the idea of an Allied Film Board to Spataro. FRC, ACC, PWB, RG 331, b. 11, 10.000/129/262. 26. The report, contained in the Plan for Setting Up a Temporary Film Board, was written by Major John Rayner and was included in a communication from Fielden to Stone dated 30 September 1944, in FRC, ACC, PWB, RG 331, b. 11, 10000/136/527. 27. On the importance that the Office of War Information placed on the propaganda capabilities of American cinema and on the resistance of the majors to adapting their products to government guidelines, see Cambi, Diplomazia di celluloide?, 39–63. 28. Di Chiara and Noto, ‘Un codice italiano per la cinematografia’; Pitassio, Neorealist Film Culture, 141–208. 29. FRC, ACC, PWB, RG 331, b. 11, 10000/136/527. 30. Ibid. 31. FRC, ACC, RG. 331, b. 11, 10000/129/267. 32. The internal dynamics of the commission seem to reflect the various games of allegiance that took place from time to time, even at higher levels, between the Allied forces and the Italian government. In relation to the obligatory programming days for



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Italian films, for example, during the third session of the Temporary Film Board of 19 April 1945, the British government, in the person of the embassy representative Michael Stewart, declared itself in favour, unlike the representative of the American embassy and the PWB. The minutes of this and other meetings are kept at NA, RG 59, 865.4061, Motion Picture e in FRC, RG 311, Film Review Board, 10000/129/265 and others. 33. NA, RG 59, 865.4061, Motion Picture, 3-­2945. 34. This attention of the American embassy to Italian requests becomes more evident in the following months, reflected in the same position of the State Department with respect to the more insistent requests of the MPPDA. See de Wolf’s letter to Milliken of 1 October 1945, NA, RG 59, 865.4061, Motion Picture, 9-­2045. 35. PWB Plan for Setting Up a Temporary Film Board, p. 4, cit. 36. Ibid. It should be emphasised that the number of Soviet productions put on the market by the PWB was negligible compared to those of the other occupying powers. 37. Letter of George W. Edman to Russel Barnes of 26 September 1944, in FRS, ACC, RG 331, b. 11, Soviet Films. Subsequent communications are contained in the same file. 38. Brunetta, Il cinema neorealista italiano, 390. 39. Julius Myles to ACC, HQ, 3 March 1945. 40. S. Halford to G. Stewart Brown, 7 March 1945. 41. G. Stewart Brown to S. Halford, 10 March 1945. 42. American Embassy to G. Stewart Brown, 16 March 1945. 43. G. Stewart Brown to Captain Pilade Levi, head of the Film Section of the PWB, 22 May 1945. 44. Report by Francesco Battaglia, PWB Film Officer in Bologna, to Pilade Levi, included in the letter written by the latter to Stewart Brown dated 4 June 1945.

Bibliography Berghahn, Volker, R. America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. Brunetta, Gian Piero. ‘La lunga marcia del cinema americano in Italia tra fascismo e guerra fredda’, in Gian Piero Brunetta and David W. Ellwood (eds), Industria, politica, pubblico del cinema 1945–1960 (Florence: La Casa Usher, 1991), 76–87. ———. Storia del cinema italiano: Il cinema del regime 1929–1945, Vol. II. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1993. ———. Il cinema neorealista italiano: Storia economica, politica e culturale. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2009. Cambi, Stefano. ‘Washington/Hollywood dalla Seconda guerra mondiale alla Guerra fredda: un patto asimmetrico? Spunti per una rivisitazione storiografica’. Ventunesimo secolo 31(2) (2013), 63–91. ———. Diplomazia di celluloide? Hollywood dalla Seconda guerra mondiale alla Guerra fredda. Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2014. Clark, Ian. Globalizzazione e frammentazione: Le relazioni internazionali nel XX secolo. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001.

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Del Pero, Mario. L’Alleato scomodo: Gli USA e la DC negli anni del centrismo (1948–1955). Rome: Carocci, 2001. Di Chiara, Francesco and Paolo Noto. ‘Un codice italiano per la cinematografia’. L’Avventura 1 (2020), 87–103. Di Nolfo, Ennio. ‘Documenti sul ritorno del cinema americano in Italia nell’immediato dopoguerra’, in Saveria Chemotti (ed.), Gli intellettuali in trincea: Politica e cultura nell’Italia del dopoguerra (Bologna: Cleup, 1977), 133–44. ———. ‘La diplomazia del cinema americano in Europa nel secondo dopoguerra’, in Gian Piero Brunetta and David W. Ellwood (eds), Hollywood in Europa: Industria, politica, pubblico del cinema 1945–1960 (Florence: La Casa Usher, 1991), 29–39. ———. ‘La storia del dopoguerra italiano e il cinema neorealista: intersezioni’. Nuova rivista storica 1 (1993), 37–54. Ellwood, David W. L’alleato nemico: La politica dell’occupazione anglo-americana in Italia 1943–1946. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977. ———. L’Europa ricostruita: Politica ed economia tra Stati Uniti ed Europa occidentale, 1945–1955. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994. Formigoni, Guido. Storia d’Italia nella Guerra fredda (1943–1978). Bologna: Il Mulino, 2016. Guback, Thoams H. The International Film Industry: Western Europe and American since 1945. Bloomington, IN and London: Indiana University Press, 1969. Harper, John Lamberton. America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945–1948. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Jarvie, Ian. ‘The Postwar Economic Foreign Policy of the American Film Industry: Europe 1945–1950’, in David W. Ellwood and Rob Kroes (eds), Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994), 154–75. Maier, Charles. ‘The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic Policy after World War II’. International Organization 4 (1977), 607–33. Miller, James E. The United States and Italy, 1940–1950: The Politics and Diplomacy of Stabilization. Chapel Hill, NC and London: The University of Carolina Press, 1986. Mistry, Karen. The United States, Italy and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare, 1945–1950. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pedaliu, Effie G.H. Britain, Italy and the Origins of the Cold War. London: Palgrave, 2003. Pitassio, Francesco. Neorealist Film Culture, 1945–1954, Rome, Open Cinema. Amsterdam: AUP, 2019. Swann, Paul. ‘Il “piccolo Dipartimento di Stato”: Hollywood e il Dipartimento di Stato nell’Europa del dopoguerra’, in Gian Piero Brunetta and David W. Ellwood (eds), Hollywood in Europa: Industria, politica, pubblico del cinema 1945–1960 (Florence: La Casa Usher, 1991), 40–55. Tobia, Simona. Advertising America: The United States Information Service in Italy (1945– 1956). Milan: LED, 2008. Vasey, Ruth. The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

CHAPTER 2

The Struggle to Save Progressive Unions Carl Marzani and Union Films Rosemary Feurer and Charles Musser

Those making left-­wing documentaries in the United States faced many challenges over the course of the twentieth century. Scholarly investigation has tended to divide their efforts into two periods. The first occurred in the interwar period, framed by The Passaic Textile Strike (Samuel Russak, 1926) and Native Land (Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand, 1942). Left-­wing filmmaking in the US then came to a halt with the outset of the Second World War and, with the modest exceptions of Strange Victory (Leo Hurwitz, 1948) and Salt of the Earth (Herbert J. Biberman, 1954), suffered through more than two decades of the Cold War in silence; it would not re-­emerge until the late 1960s with Newsreel.1 In fact, this account overlooks a formation of radical documentary production that flourished in the immediate post-­Second World War era – even as such efforts were brutally attacked. These films, which focused on working-­class struggles and concerns, were generally sponsored by progressive unions which were organising workers on an industry-­wide basis. Although this under-­examined era of radical documentary was initially developed by the United Automobile, Aircraft & Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW) just before and during the war, it found its most sustained and important work in the motion pictures made by Union Films for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) in the post-­Second World War period. Examining these UE films, from Deadline for Action (Carl Marzani, 1946) to The Sentner Story (Carl Marzani, 1953), reveals another dimension of the toll that the postwar Cold War took on democratic culture.

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The United Auto Workers Launches Worker-Based Filmmaking The UAW and the UE were part of the labour resurgence that welcomed political left-­wingers as part of an inclusive style of organising, in contrast to the craft-­based approach of the American Federation of Labor. Both affiliated with the Committee of Industrial Organizations in 1936–1937 and became two of the largest affiliates of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1938. The UAW bought a motion picture camera in 1936 and informed readers of its United Automobile Worker newspaper not to be ‘surprised if the first film released by the International Auto Film, Inc. comes your way in the near future.’2 One of the first was a history of the UAW, which showed ‘the UAW’s rise to the position of unchallenged and worthy champion of the workers in the automobile industry,’ screened at the annual UAW Convention.3 By 1938, the UAW had developed an ambitious network of film production, distribution, and exhibition through its Department of Education, using 16mm films. Mike Martini was responsible for an array of grass-­roots films, which he sometimes showed at union meetings.4 Martini filmed local news items but also produced more sustained work such as The Cleveland Committee (Michael Martini, 1939), Fight for Sole Collective Bargaining (Michael Martini, 1939) about the Briggs Strike, and Life with Knowledge (Michael Martini, 1940) about the UAW Summer School.5 The extant, thirty-­ six-­minute United Action Means Victory (1939), produced and directed by Martini with essential post-­production assistance provided by members of Frontier Films, was easily the high point of these efforts. The films proved to be ‘instantaneous hits’: ‘Your members will see the union in action – plenty of action. It is inspiring stuff.’6 Nevertheless, UAW filmmaking seems to have ceased by the summer of 1941.7 The UAW was fraught with factionalism throughout the Second World War and the immediate postwar period. Roland Jay Thomas, president of the union from 1938 to 1946, associated with a faction affiliated with the CPUSA (Communist Party USA), while Walter Reuther collaborated with the anti-­communist right to become UAW president in 1946, aligning the union with the Democratic Party under Harry Truman. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the left-­wing faction of the UAW seemingly dominated its International Education Department, which deployed a wide range of media forms: film strips, song records, radio programmes (both local and through the CIO network) as well as union literature in book and pamphlet form.8 Martini, for instance, was a local leader in the Young Communist League.9 Nevertheless, the UAW moved away from low-­budget nonfiction filmmaking in the tradition of Mike Martini, with the animated cartoon short Hell Bent for Election (Chuck Jones, 1944), a pro-­Roosevelt campaign film made by United Productions of America.10 Despite its innovative stylistics, this colour film relied heavily



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on caricatures of fat capitalists seeking to sabotage the Roosevelt Express train on track to win the election. The same company produced the UAW’s Brotherhood of Man (Robert Cannon, 1946), an animated short designed to promote racial tolerance. Leftists John Hubley and Ring Lardner, Jr. were key contributors to the film, which was praised by both the New York Times and the Daily Worker.11 Shortly after the Second World War, the UAW once again was actively filming picket lines, union hall soup kitchens and strike-­related activities from its remarkable 113-­day strike against General Motors, from 21 November 1945 to 13 March 1946.12 Although it was supposed to be ‘part of well-­planned film program,’ there were no reports of a finished film. Perhaps the Reuther faction takeover of the Education Department, with Victor G. Reuther (Walter’s brother) replacing Jack Zeller in the second part of 1946, explains its disappearance.13 Henceforth, ‘Director Reuther said, the education program will be in the main stream of union activities.’14 Under Walter Reuther’s leadership the UAW turned its resources toward radio that featured his perspectives.15

The United Electrical Workers: A Commitment to the Printed Word Operating within a more decentralised structure than the UAW, the UE initially relied on printed work, primarily the UE News, to bring cohesion. Motion pictures were mere mentions in the UE News. J.E. Robin, Inc. was selling 16mm sound projectors that could be used to show films, suggesting that a union local could ‘Get More Members to Meetings with MOVIES.’16 Garrison Films, a distributor of leftist documentaries, sometimes inserted advertisements telling readers to ‘PEP UP meetings with LABOR M ­ OVIES . . . ­Hundreds of Locals Are Doing it – Why not Yours.’17 The emphasis at the UE through the 1930s and well into the 1940s was on its weekly newspaper and numerous pamphlets such as UE-CIO looks at FDR (1944). This perhaps reflected the background of UE Secretary-­Treasurer and UE News editor Julius Emspak, a worker-­intellectual, who had gone to work in a General Electric (GE) factory at age fourteen and then returned to school at age twenty-­three, ultimately graduating from Brown University. How then did the UE end up becoming the union most committed to radical documentary and nonfiction filmmaking? From its beginning, the UE and the UE News were deeply committed to electoral politics and focused on the kind of legislation Congress was considering and could pass for good or ill. In 1944, the UE leadership considered its role in the Congressional elections to have been strategic and innovative, using print publications to mobilise its membership.18 The UE leadership was also alarmed when radio networks dismissed popular pro-­labour

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radio ­commentators after the Second World War and eventually ploughed $250,000 to sponsor Leland Stowe and Arthur Gaeth’s radio broadcast over the Mutual network. The need for independent media was also apparent with the reaction to 1946 mass strikes resulting in a ‘Blitzkrieg Against Labor Under Way in Congress.’19 Well before the Cold War was formally launched, anti-­ communist attacks on left-­wing unions were seen as a means to promote this anti-­labour legislation and tame the CIO’s political power. After ‘the big CIO strikes,’ Congressman Andrew Jackson May (Democrat, Kentucky) ‘co-­ sponsored the drastic May-­Arends bill to outlaw strikes and labour political action.’20 The union movement had the resources to engage with this threat through film.

The UE Moves into Filmmaking The UE’s turn to filmmaking also owed something to the United States government. Its numerous information and propaganda films made during the Second World War had incidentally provided left-­leaning politicos with excellent training and experience in motion picture production. One was Carl Marzani, a one-­t ime Communist Party member who joined the office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) on a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ basis and soon became a key member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Visual Presentation Branch.21 Marzani produced War Department Report (Oliver Lundquist, 1943), a forty-­seven-­minute documentary that premiered on the second anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor and was nominated for an Oscar. Other films followed. As the war wound down, Marzani and other members of the Visual Presentation Branch formed a private company, Presentation Associates, and went looking for work.22 How did the UE, which previously had had minimal interest in film, come to fund and participate as a subject in this first radical post-­Second World War film? The networking between the UE and the Communist Party (CP) provided one obvious connection. Those networks sought to influence the CIO’s direction. CP leader Gene Dennis approached CIO attorneys John Abt and Lee Pressman to develop a political programme for the CIO with President Phil Murray’s approval, designed to organise labour support for Roosevelt in the approaching 1944 election.23 UAW President Roland Jay Thomas and UE President Albert Fitzgerald were committee members. In 1944–1945 Marzani was based in Washington, DC as was CIO headquarters – at 900 15th Street NW on the third floor of the United Mine Workers’ headquarters, where Pressman had his office. Marzani likely already knew Pressman and the UE leadership from their days in New York, in part through their involvement with the American Labor Party and the electoral campaigns for Vito



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Marcantonio. The CIO-­PAC was eager to nurture a campaign film for the 1946 election as well as a number of future labour films for various CIO unions. The UAW, in the midst of a power struggle between leftist Thomas and anti-­ communist Walter Reuther, was seemingly unavailable. After UE’s general Executive Board meeting approved the film, Marzani began to make Deadline for Action (Carl Marzani, 1946) through Presentation Associates, though its radical politics soon required a separate identity: Union Films.24 Marzani later recalled, ‘After the war, in 1946, I was asked by the UE to do a little film on the big CIO strikes of late ‘45 and ‘46. That was Deadline for Action. By the Fall of ‘46 it had grown into a much bigger film than was originally intended and that was the first big film I made outside the government.’25 The UE News proclaimed Deadline for Action to be ‘a major weapon for the congressional election campaign,’ designed to get union members and citizens in their communities to go to the polls and vote for progressive candidates.26 But it also reflected an agenda for the left within the CIO. Emspak told Marzani he had the skills to ‘show the people the score, show who the bastards are who control the economy through politics and money.’27 The film uses Bill Turner, a composite UE member and prospective voter, to carry its critique of big business’s domestic and global efforts to exploit workers. Bill begins to see unions as the key force in the labour struggle playing out in Washington, where reactionary forces were threatening to dismantle the Economic Bill of Rights that the CIO held out as a postwar vision. (As the film shows, these included the inalienable right to a good job and wages, health care and education for all.) It ends with Bill visiting the Lincoln Monument and spiritually communing with Honest Abe and his declaration ‘that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ Bill leaves planning to do some fixing: Election Day on 5 November is his deadline for action. Interviews with the three key UE leaders  – President Albert Fitzgerald, Director of Organization James J. Matles and Secretary-­ Treasurer Julius Emspak – are interspersed throughout the film. In this respect, it is very much a film about the UE even as the UE stands in for much more in a larger struggle focused on the role of strikes. It explains the role of capitalists in a new world order created by the war against fascism and suggests that the working class is the last defence against a capitalist system hell bent on ‘IMPERIALISM’ – the word projected across the screen – and is a rejection of anti-­communist and anti-­union fear-­mongering. The animations depict corporations and banking interests as an octopus with tentacles from US to Japan to Germany. Deadline for Action was supposed to be twenty-­five minutes and premiere at the UE’s annual convention in Milwaukee on 9 September 1946. Instead, it grew to thirty-­seven minutes and premiered in New York City on 14 October

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to a distinguished left-­leaning audience.28 The UE News of 11 January 1947 detailed some of its many showings. UE Local 735 in Cleveland showed it forty-­eight times in one month. ‘The International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers bought four prints and showed them in union halls across the country.’ All this left ‘no doubt whatsoever that the UE’s pioneer venture in the movie field was a phenomenal success.’ The film caused alarm in business circles. After viewing the film, GE business executives and other corporate public relations consultants called attention to ‘the skillful propaganda left-­ wing unions can turn out.’29 The National Association of Manufacturers and Chamber of Commerce soon ramped up its own propaganda arm in response, and the attack on the UE and on Marzani went full throttle.30 The Case of the Fishermen Marzani recalled that he ‘showed Deadline to Philip Murray of the CIO and [Jack] Kroll, the CIO Political Director, and they both approved of it.’31 ‘We also got a tremendous send-­off in the CIO News. This was about four months before things got really tight.’ Two likely reasons for Marzani to show Murray and Kroll the film was to gain CIO-­PAC approval to assist in its distribution but also to endorse and help finance and distribute Union Films’ next project, The Case of the Fishermen (1947). This remarkable film, which has only recently been rediscovered, defended the International Fishermen and Allied Workers of America (IFAWA), a left-­wing multi-­ethnic CIO union of roughly 22,000 members, against the US government’s charge that the union was engaging in an illegal conspiracy to set the price of fish. The government’s case, which rested mainly on defining these fishermen as small businessmen because they owned their own boats and gear, was an early attack on a small but strong left-­ wing union. The IFAWA-­CIO had organised almost 100 per cent of the fishermen in the Pacific Northwest and had launched a successful strike to gain a fair price for its catch and related activities.32 Spurred by attacks from the Federal Trade Commission, a secret Grand Jury indicted the International Fishermen and Allied Workers of America leadership on the West Coast in August 1946. The resulting documentary offers a set of compelling arguments for the defendants. It was also a philosophical commentary on what makes a worker, and the way unions can sustain workers’ actual and reproductive labour. The film notes that before unionisation, sons of fishermen had abandoned the family tradition due to its low rewards. In refuting the prosecution’s charge of price-­fixing, the documentary offers another truth instead: using a rich interplay of sound and image, Marzani’s documentary contends that unions do not behave like monopolies, that their work is not a behind-­t he-­scenes conspiracy, but rather an indispensable form of solidarity that benefits everyone and provides for an environmentally stable fishing industry.33



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Unlike Deadline for Action, The Case of the Fishermen provides production credits. Carl Marzani is listed as the producer and Max Glandbard as editor. Max Glandbard would subsequently become the director and film editor for Union Films but it has remained unclear when he joined Marzani’s group. As film editor for The Case of the Fishermen, he may have also been the editor on Deadline for Action. In any case, he was a member of the Union Films collective from very early on. A key collaborator on The Case of the Fisherman was the Los Angeles-­based H. Arthur Klein, who is listed as associate producer. Klein had been a Communist Party member and professor like Marzani; he had worked in government service during the Second World War which is how the two likely met.34 After the war he worked as a journalist in Los Angeles but also wrote for the New Masses under his party name, James Hall. He was the ideal collaborator for Marzani in San Pedro. Working with Marzani seemingly inspired Klein to subsequently produce a number of short films and film strips. Lee Pressman is extensively interviewed on camera and provides the film’s structural logic, which is based on courtroom methods. He argues that ‘the attempt to place unions under the anti-­trust act is a legalistic manoeuvre in the campaign to hamstring labour. This attempt if successful would open the unions to suits and legal warfare, from the real monopolies of America. The same reactionary companies that have been raising prices and profiteering at the expense of the American people.’ Like a good lawyer, he reads from or cites standard texts on monopolies to demonstrate that the fishermen do not meet such definitions. The film, which urges viewers to write to Attorney General Clark and their Congressmen, concludes with upbeat music and dynamic images of fishermen at sea, reminding viewers that ‘these men, who go out to face the dangers of the sea to earn their daily bread, need help not persecution. They need support from their government not attack. They need like all Americans, security and freedom.’ Pressman not only appeared in the film but hoped to actually use it in the courtroom. In the end, Marzani recalled that the judge ‘allowed it to be used without the soundtracks, which didn’t help very much.’35 The trial against the union ended with a guilty verdict. The power of the film might be evident from the refusal to allow the jury to hear it. It was an explicit effort to defend a radical union that was under attack as the Truman administration deployed the loyalty review boards and used fear to gain appropriations for the Cold War.36 Although reviews for The Case of the Fishermen seem elusive, the film was distributed through Union Films and other left-­wing film distributors. It spoke to the same narrative as Deadline for Action: capital seeks to create monopolies that suck the lifeblood of the family of workers. Notably, the film’s fishermen could stand in for today’s precarious workers who are labelled independent contractors in order to prevent unionisation. In

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that respect, Marzani was profiling a broader problem – the legal obstacles to working-­class solidarity. Marzani paid the price for these powerful, high-­profile films. On 17 January 1947, he was indicted for hiding his former Communist Party affiliation while employed by the OSS. The Washington Star made it a front-­page news item that underscored the threat of communists in government.37 If the release of the truly impressive documentary The Case of the Fishermen failed to gain critical attention, it is likely related to this development. The CIO withdrew its support for both films and for Marzani’s future filmmaking efforts. But not the UE; according to Marzani he was able to sign a $50,000 contract to produce ten reels of films under the Union Films label. Union Films next produced the twenty-­minute documentary Our Union, shown at the UE’s annual convention in September 1947. Marzani and his collaborators went on to make numerous documentaries, including The Great Swindle (1948), which continues the theme of the role of monopoly capitalism through an ‘exciting’ animated technique that improved on earlier efforts. Union Films also produced campaign films for the 1948 election in which the UE officers supported Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party, a third-­party challenge to Harry Truman on issues of race, civil rights, and the Cold War. They documented the excitement of the Progressive Party Convention with A People’s Convention (1948) and Count Us In (1948). People’s Congressman (1948) featured New York’s Vito Marcantonio with narration and a cameo appearance by African American actor, singer and politically active leftist Paul Robeson. All were shot and shown in 16mm. While often shown in union halls, these films were also used as fundraisers. The campaign films were shown in New York City streets using film trucks. While Marzani was in prison, his wife screened these and other films in the Union Films studio on West 88th Street as a way for young radicals to meet and mix.38 After appeals that went to the Supreme Court, Marzani went to prison on 22  March 1949. Union Films completed Industry’s Disinherited (Max Glandbard) in August 1949, which was shown at the UE’s annual convention in September. This film is a classic expression of social justice unionism. These films might be compared to With Our Hands (Jack Arnold, 1950), a film made around the same time by the AFL’s International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), a much more conservative labour organisation. The distinctions resonate. In With Our Hands, Alexander Brody, the fictional lead character whose story carries the message, differs from the pipe-­ smoking Bill in Deadline. Hands communicates a message of how the union dues provide benefits to its members and argues that this was made possible not only because of strikes, but because the union prevented a communist take-­over of the union. All that leads to a comfortable retirement for Brody. Despite the fact that the vast majority of the ILGWU members were



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women, Brody’s wife is jarringly depicted as a passive beneficiary through her husband. By the time Industry’s Disinherited was released, business and government had charged the UE with being a base for communist subversion. All branches of government at the local, state and federal level worked to link local and second-­tier communists to the larger story of foreign subversion. The UE withdrew from the CIO in 1949 but was officially expelled by the CIO that same year. As a result, the UE itself began to experience disintegration as its union locals were picked off by rival AFL and CIO government-­sponsored unions. The funds for film declined dramatically.39 Shortly after Marzani’s release in July 1951, the UE created a position for him in its home office, as editor of a new journal, the UE Steward. As he later reminisced, ‘My stay at the UE was one of the seminal experiences of my life. During two and a half years I enjoyed an atmosphere of affection and brotherhood working for a common purpose.’40 During the UE’s 1952 convention, delegates denounced the arrest of William Sentner, ‘one of the most respected leaders of the UE,’ under the Smith Act, the 1940 federal law that used a ruse of affiliation with any organisation that advocated violent destruction of the US government. It took beliefs, rather than criminal acts, as the basis to prosecute many of the era’s Communist Party affiliated leaders. This incident led to Marzani’s final production for UE: The Sentner Story, completed and released in March 1953.41 Marzani came to St Louis and stayed with the Sentner family for at least two weeks, along with a cameraman and a sound technician. None of them are credited in the film, and in the end, the film’s only credit is for UE District 8, serving parts of Iowa, Missouri, Indiana and Illinois. The film does not mention the word communism, but it does directly address the Smith Act’s premises of prosecuting those who advocated ‘violent overthrow’ of the government. The story presents a family in distress, targeted because of their trade union activism.42 The Sentner Story, which was shot with synch sound in the Sentner home and UE union halls, has a rough immediacy as it portrays the persecution of ‘Tonie and Bill’ as the work of anti-­labour forces in US society. These elements had always opposed unions and were anti-­immigrant, it tells viewers, but they targeted those who were willing to fight. It begins by filming Anton Radosevich, Tonie Sentner’s father, walking down a sidewalk with his lunch bucket after a long day’s work. He was one of the immigrants who came to the country and built it, mining coal that fuelled industrialisation and built great wealth. He greets an extended family – ‘four generations’ who are, the film argues, part of the union family. They then welcome Bill Sentner home from jail, a lead member of a family in struggle. He and Tonie exchange a broom, each doing their share of the housework. In the background, through

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sophisticated sound layers, we hear Grandpa Radosevich discuss events as far back as 1908, when the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) was struggling for recognition, had to fight thugs, and risked their lives below and above ground for the union. What is happening to Sentner, the film continues, is not new, and the union family must protect each other now. The warmth and unity in these scenes contrast with dramatic scenes of violence meted out by police and corporations on picket lines. The film notes that Bill and Tonie had endured years of efforts to bring them down. Sentner was charged with criminal syndicalism in Iowa in 1938 in reaction to the Maytag strike. In 1942 and 1945, Tonie’s requests for US citizenship were rejected due to association with her husband; in 1949 the government sought to deport her to get to him. Then after the McCarran Act of 1950, which targeted immigrants for deportation due to their beliefs, agents harassed and spied on her. The film highlights a singular instance of media support for the family, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial that labelled Tonie’s persecution and the McCarran act as ‘police state stuff.’ The film argues that since she came to the US as a young child, Tonie’s political and labour commitments resulted from her American experiences. The film labels the Sentners’ tormentors as un-­American. The film points out that Bill Sentner’s arrest occurred in the midst of UE bargaining sessions  – a clear effort to disrupt peaceful negotiations. It also links Bill Sentner’s persecution to African-­American Harold Ward, secretary of a UE-­affiliated union local whom the Chicago police falsely charged with murder during a 1952 strike. The Smith and McCarran laws, as well as the police, are part of power structures that protect the profits of large corporations by silencing labour leaders. ‘Here you see who really uses force and violence in the United States,’ the film exclaims. The Sentner family gathering is matched by scenes of him speaking to members at a UE local in Evansville Indiana. Implicitly, family and union are seen as two key, intertwined support structures necessary for survival. Sentner offers a homey take on his own persecution. He remarks that it was ‘inevitable’ that the UE would have more ‘casualties’ in the labour wars: ‘We’re like the ­turtle . . . ­A turtle has to have its neck way out’ to make progress. And ‘somebody’s always a whacking on’ that neck. Don Harris, President of UE District 8, is the union narrator who announces that the ‘fight to support Bill and Tonie Sentner is the fight to defend every union member.’ Sentner was one of the few Communist Party activists in the UE who did not hide his Communist Party affiliations, so despite the fact that the film does not mention the Communist Party, this is a rare and robust defence of the right to association in film history. By the time the film was made, the state at all levels had been targeting the UE for destruction, and internal fratricide



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from organised forces – including the Catholic Church and the CIO – made this kind of defence less successful.43 The case against Sentner and other St. Louis Smith Act defendants did not go to trial until 1954, and some of his bail, as well as his payment to defence attorneys, was raised by showing the films at local UE and other left-­wing union and political meetings – often attended by Sentner with his children in tow. Because of legal rulings, his affiliation with the CP was enough to ensure a guilty verdict. By the time the decision was reversed, Sentner was no longer a member of the CPUSA. Marzani and Sentner both endured demonisation and prosecution as communists. Perhaps it is not surprising they became life-­ long friends. Bill Sentner’s son remembers Marzani with affection and still recalls that Marzani hosted his family for a two-­week family gathering at his house on Fire Island.44 How should we assess the value of these films in a case study of the documentary film record? First, we should consider them in respect to Marzani’s vision. Before the Cold War led to his arrest, Marzani planned for a worker-­led media revolution based in film. Our goal was to put a couple of projectors in every town, so the UE would have a projector or if the UE local was not large, the UAW or some other local would have a projector which all unions could b ­ orrow . . . ­sources to get films for $5 or $10 . . .   My original intention, in fact, was to have a whole library of films, a book club, a magazine like Life magazine, and so on, for the CIO.   Since you’re working for other unions, you’re all over the United States, so you would do films for agricultural workers, for the food and tobacco workers, for the auto workers, and so on. You would have a tremendous set of stills as well, so you could run a very good pictorial magazine. We also had ideas of going into film strips, . . . the totality of educational work. And it would have worked, unquestionably, because the money would have been available, we had the professional skills, we had the contacts with people who were willing to work.45

The UE had taken up the charge for a progressive presentation of workers issues, one that educated workers and built a worker-­run network from the bottom up. While many Union Films productions advocated for working-­class activism at the ballot box, others – notably The Case of the Fishermen and The Sentner Story  – were made to counter government attacks on unions and their members. It was a courageous, protracted struggle during which Marzani spent several months in jail and almost three years in prison. Coming out of prison, Marzani made The Sentner Story, which was released just two weeks before filming was completed on a much better-­ known film. This was a film made by another filmmaker who had gone to prison for his communist associations: Salt of the Earth. The quite different path taken by the UAW is suggested by a 1954 news item in the United

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Automobile Worker: it informed readers that its Education Department was previewing films such as Combat America, produced by the F irst Motion Picture Unit, Army Air Forces (1945) as well as Birth of the B-29 (1945) and Battle Wreckage (1944), produced by the US War Office and Army Pictorial Services Signal Corps – all for use by local UAW leadership.46 Writing early in 1950, Milton Ost, a scriptwriter on UE’s Industry’s Disinherited, remarked, ‘The last few years have seen the widening use of the 16 millimeter independently made sound film by the labour and progressive movement at incredibly low costs and with a vast amount of s­ uccess . . . ­One union, UE, has been the largest producer of 16 millimeter documentaries in the trade-­union field.’47 The US government deployed an array of generally brutal actions in a successful effort to bring this wave of radical, union-­based filmmaking to an end. Left-­wing filmmaking did not die in the postwar era for lack of interest, talent, commitment or commercial miscalculation, as some scholars of documentary have believed. We can well imagine that Marzani would have continued to train a new generation of radical filmmakers committed to putting the story of workers’ lives on film instead of as Hollywood caricatures. The full force of the United States government and large corporations crushed this movement by destroying the unions that were its financial base, sending Marzani to prison and blacklisting others. Left documentary, however, would not have to wait until Newsreel emerged in the late 1960s. Another Marxist documentary filmmaker, whose parents were Italian immigrants and grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania (like Marzani), would appear on the documentary scene in 1964: Emile de Antonio. It is perhaps fitting that his first film, Point of Order (1964), is about the Army-­McCarthy hearings of 1954. Rosemary Feurer is Professor at Northern Illinois University, a labour historian whose scholarship examines the political economy of social conflict within the context of US capitalist development. Her books include Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900–1950 (2006). Her forthcoming work, The Illinois Mine Wars, 1860–1930, examines the violent conflicts that helped to make Illinois the most radical miners district and the strongest unionised state in the nation. With Charles Musser, she is currently co-­authoring a book on Labor Films and Left-wing Media: From William F. Kruse to Carl Marzani, 1919–1954. Charles Musser is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Yale University. His books include The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990) and Politicking and Emergent Media: US Presidential Elections of the 1890s (2016). His articles on progressive and radical documentarians such



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as Joris Ivens, Paul Robeson, William Greaves, Michael Moore, Errol Morris and the Union Films collective have appeared in Film Quarterly, The Moving Image and other journals. With Rosemary Feurer, he is currently co-­authoring a book on Labor Films and Left-wing Media: From William F. Kruse to Carl Marzani, 1919–1954.

Notes   1. Zumoff, ‘The Passaic Textile Strike Documentary’, 269–95; Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back; Alexander, Film on the Left; Kahana, Intelligence Work; Nichols, Newsreel, Film and Revolution; Nichols, Newsreel: Documentary Filmaking on the American Left.   2. Anonymous, ‘MM! Movies!’, 6.   3. Anonymous, ‘UAW History in Film’, 1.   4. Anonymous, ‘MM! Movies!’, 6.   5. Anonymous, ‘Films Ready for Locals’, 13; Anonymous, ‘UAW Educational Department Expands Activities’, 2; Anonymous, ‘Education News’, 7.   6. Anonymous, ‘UAW Films Worth Seeing’, 2.  7. Anonymous, ‘Entertainment Furnished’, 2; Anonymous, ‘Ford Strike Film’, 5; Anonymous, ‘Photo Caption’, 5.   8. Levitt, ‘Reporting on Education’, 7; Martini’s draft card referenced Secretary-­Treasurer George F. Addes as his boss, and Addes was on the left.   9. Anonymous, ‘Reds Entreat Young Allies Gird for ‘War’’, 2. This news item concerns a gathering of members of the Young Communist League in New York City, which Martini attended. 10. The UE News reported that the new studio was aided by actress Karen Morley, who had appeared in King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread (1934) and other prominent feature films and who ‘left the silver screen to do some organizing last spring [1944] for United Food, Tobacco Workers, CIO,’ and that UAW-­CIO is ‘the first big customer’ (Anonymous, ‘16 MM FILMS FOR LABOR’, 6). Morley was later blacklisted as an uncooperative witness. 11. Anonymous, ‘Films to Order Offer Broad Possibilities’, 11; Anonymous, ‘Auto Workers Offer Film on Tolerance’, 16; Platt, ‘Brotherhood of Man’, 11. 12. Allan, ‘GM Strike Filmed by Auto Workers Union’, 11. 13. Anonymous, ‘Labor Films Now Big Business as Local Demands Rises’, 3; Anonymous, ‘Education Parley Will Test Ideas’, 2. 14. Anonymous, ‘Labor Education, 1947 Model’, 2. 15. Walter Reuther’s ascendancy to the CIO presidency in 1952 led to major investments in radio broadcasting, focused on his speeches defending labour by associating it with ‘Americanism.’ Fones-­Wolf, Waves of Opposition, 220. 16. Anonymous, Advertisement (11  January 1941), 3; Anonymous, Advertisement (21 December 1940), 3; Fones-­Wolf, Waves of Opposition, 40. 17. Anonymous, Advertisement (21 December 1940), 3. Garrison Films are examined in Goldman, ‘The Distribution Front’. 18. See multiple letters between William Sentner and UE National Office in Politics Folder, 1943–1944, William Sentner Papers, Washington University Archives.

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19. Anonymous, ‘Blitzkrieg Against Labor Under Way in Congress’, 3; Fones-­Wolf, Waves of Opposition, 218. 20. Anonymous, ‘Congressman Who Helped Profiteers Milk Public Treasury Has Long Anti-­Labor Record’, 2. 21. For an overview of Marzani’s film career, see Musser, ‘Carl Marzani & Union Films’, 104–60. For an update, see Musser, ‘Discovering Union Films and Its Archives’, 125–60. 22. Sparrow, Warfare State, 48–77. 23. Abt and Myerson, Advocate and Activist, 99. It was the first political action committee (PAC) in the US. 24. Anonymous, ‘Convention to See Film Premiere’, 4. 25. Crowdus and Rubenstein, ‘UNION FILMS’, 33–35. 26. Anonymous, ‘Convention to See Film Premiere’, 4; Marzani, The Education of a Reluctant Radical: From Pentagon to Penitentiary. 27. Crowdus and Rubenstein, ‘UNION FILMS’, 34. 28. Anonymous, ‘The Critics Agree – IT’s Great!’, 7. 29. Anonymous, ‘Any Way You Look at It, UE Movie Rang the Bell’, 9. The alarm is well-­ represented in syndicated columns. See Woltman, ‘Electrical Union Hews “Party Line” in Campaign Movie’, 7. 30. Riesel, column, 14; Fones-­Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise. 31. Jack Kroll was then chair of the CIO-­PAC, succeeding Sidney Hillman who had headed the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. 32. Mann, Our Daily Bread, 119; Anonymous, ‘Fishing Union Under Inquiry’, C1; Anonymous, ‘Fishermen’s Union is Indicted On Charges of Price-­F ixing’, 1. [C1 = Page 1 of Third Section of newspaper.] 33. Mann, Our Daily Bread, suggests that the Fisherman’s Union was in fact concerned with environmental issues. 34. Klein, testimony, Communist Infiltration of Hollywood Motion-picture Industry . . ., Part 4, 1562–1574. 35. Crowdus and Rubenstein, ‘UNION FILMS’, 34. 36. The Truman Administration initiated an investigation of federal employees beginning in March 1947 for suspected subversive activities. These boards initiated the Attorney Generals’ list of subversive organisations, and emboldened the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a key instrument of raising alarms about communists. It was a key initiative of the early domestic anti-­communist campaign in the United States and produced some hallmark methods such as not allowing the government employee to face their accuser, or even know why they were being charged with subversion. Truman’s effort to sell aid to Greece and Turkey through the Truman Doctrine was enhanced by this fear campaign which amplified Congressional charges about communists in government and unions. 37. Anonymous, ‘U.S. Worker Is Indicted as Red’, 1. 38. Screenings at Marzani’s studio were occasionally mentioned in the Daily Worker. See, for instance, Anonymous, ‘Movie Notes’, 10. 39. See Filippelli and McColloch, Cold War in the Working Class, 85–167. 40. Marzani, The Education of a Reluctant Radical, vol. 5, Reconstruction, 24. 41. Anonymous, ‘17th Convention Pledges Full Support to Strikers’, 1. For background on Sentner, and the Midwestern district where he was democratically elected as pres-



42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

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ident for twelve years, despite open party membership, see Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest. Press Release, 17 December 1953, Sentner Defense Committee, 17 December 1953, Smith Act Press Releases, folder 17, box I. series 4, Williams Sentner Papers. Schrecker, ‘Political Repression and the Rule of Law’, 153–72, places the Sentner cases in legal perspective. Feurer and Musser, taped interview with William Sentner, Jr., 26 January 2023, via Zoom. Crowdus and Rubenstein, ‘UNION FILMS’, 34. Anonymous, ‘UAW Holds Film Previews’, 5. Ost, ‘What’s Holding Up Production of 16mm Independent Films,’ 11.

Bibliography Abt, John and Michael Myerson. Advocate and Activist: Memoirs of an American Communist Lawyer. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Alexander, William. Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Allan, William. ‘GM Strike Filmed by Auto Workers Union’. United Automobile Worker (9 February 1946), 11. Anonymous. ‘MM! Movies!’. United Automobile Worker (1 August 1936), 6. ———. ‘Reds Entreat Young Allies Gird for “War”’. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (4 May 1937), 2. ———. ‘UAW History in Film’. United Automobile Worker (14 August 1937), 1. ———. ‘Films Ready for Locals’. United Automobile Worker (28 May 1938), 13. ———. ‘UAW Educational Department Expands Activities’. United Automobile Worker (16 July 1938), 2. ———. ‘Education News’. United Automobile Worker (26 November 1938), 7. ———. ‘UAW Films Worth Seeing’. United Automobile Worker (6 November 1939), 2. ———. Advertisement. UE News (21 December 1940), 3. ———. Advertisement. UE News (11 January 1941), 3. ———. ‘Entertainment Furnished’. United Automobile Workers (15 April 1941), 2. ———. ‘Ford Strike Film’. United Automobile Workers (1 May 1941), 5. ———. ‘Photo Caption’. United Automobile Workers (15 August 1941), 5. –––––. ‘16 MM Films For Labor’. UE News (20 January 1945), 6. ———. ‘Blitzkrieg Against Labor Under Way in Congress’. UE News (1 December 1945), 3. ———. ‘Labor Films Now Big Business as Local Demands Rises’. United Automobile Worker (March 1946), 3. ———. ‘Films to Order Offer Broad Possibilities’. Daily Worker (1 April 1946), 11. ———. ‘Auto Workers Offer Film on Tolerance’. New York Times (23 May 1946), 16. ———. ‘Congressman Who Helped Profiteers Milk Public Treasury Has Long Anti-Labor Record’. UE News (20 July 1946), 2. ———. ‘Fishing Union Under Inquiry’. Los Angeles Times (31 July 1946), C1.

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———. ‘Fishermen’s Union is Indicted On Charges of Price-Fixing’. Los Angeles Times (24 August 1946), 1. ———. ‘Convention to See Film Premiere’. UE News (31 August 1946), 4. ———. ‘The Critics Agree – IT’s Great!’. UE News (19 October 1946), 7. ———. ‘Education Parley Will Test Ideas’. United Automobile Worker (December 1946), 2. ———. ‘Labor Education, 1947 Model’. United Automobile Worker (1 January 1947), 2. ———. ‘Any Way You Look at It, UE Movie Rang the Bell’. UE News (11 January 1947), 9. ———. ‘U.S. Worker Is Indicted as Red’. Washington Star (17 January 1947), 1. ———. ‘Movie Notes’. Daily Worker (13 January 1950), 10. ———. ‘17th Convention Pledges Full Support to Strikers’. UE News (29  September 1952), 1. ———. ‘UAW Holds Film Previews’. United Automobile Worker (15 March 1954), 5. Campbell, Russell. Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States, 1930– 1942. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982. Crowdus, Gary and Lenny Rubenstein. ‘UNION FILMS: An Interview with Carl Marzani’. Cinéaste 7(2) (1976), 33–35. Feurer, Rosemary. Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900–1950. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Filippelli, Ronald L. and Mark McColloch. Cold War in the Working Class: The Rise and Decline of the United Electrical Workers. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995. Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth. Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995. ———. Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Goldman, Tanya. ‘The Distribution Front: Tom Brandon and the Politics of the Nontheatrical Film Sector, 1931–1946’, PhD. dissertation. New York University, 2022. Kahana, Jonathan. Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Klein, Herbert Arthur. Testimony, 18  September 1951, Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities in Communist Infiltration of Hollywood Motion-picture Industry, Part 4. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1951, 1562–1574. Levitt, William. ‘Reporting on Education’. United Automobile Workers (1 February 1944), 7. Mann, Geoff. Our Daily Bread: Wages, Workers & the Political Economy of the American West. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007, 119. Marzani, Carl. The Education of a Reluctant Radical: From Pentagon to Penitentiary. New York: Topical Books, 1995. ———. The Education of a Reluctant Radical, vol. 5, Reconstruction. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002. Musser, Charles. ‘Carl Marzani & Union Films: Making Left-wing Documentaries during the Cold War, 1946–53’. The Moving Image 9(1) (2009), 104–60. ———. ‘Discovering Union Films and Its Archives’. Cinemas: revue d’études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies 24(2–3) (2014), 125–60. Nichols, Bill. Newsreel: Documentary Filmaking on the American Left. New York: Arno Press, 1980. Nichols, William James. ‘Newsreel, Film and Revolution’. MA Thesis. UCLA, 1972.



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Ost, Milton. ‘What’s Holding Up Production of 16mm Independent Films’. Daily Worker, 3 January 1950, 10–11. Platt, David. ‘Brotherhood of Man’. Daily Worker (31 March 1947), 11. Riesel, Victor. Column. The Philadelphia Inquirer (18 November 1946), 14. Schrecker, Ellen. ‘Political Repression and the Rule of Law: The Cold War Case of William Sentner’, in Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton (eds), Political Repression in U.S. History (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2009), 153–72. Sparrow, James. Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2013. Woltman, Frederick. ‘Electrical Union Hews “Party Line” in Campaign Movie’. The Knoxville News-Sentinel (29 October 1946), 7. Zumoff, Jacob. ‘The Passaic Textile Strike Documentary: The Role of Film in Building Solidarity’. American Communist History 18(3–4) (2019), 269–95.

CHAPTER 3

A ‘Trojan Horse in the Enemy Camp’ Vatican Plans for a Catholic Third Way on the Chessboard of Cold War-Era Cinema (1939–1958) Gianluca della Maggiore

The ‘Third Way’ and Its Long Roots In this chapter I would like to propose an initial interpretative overview of the role played by the Holy See in the context of Cold War-­era cinema, specifically regarding the contribution of the Italian Church under Pius XII’s papacy (1939–1958), in light of research I have conducted in various Vatican and ecclesiastical archives.1 In using the term ‘third way’ in the title – understood here in its purest meaning of an intermediate position between two opposing sides – I sought to adopt a clear position, perhaps oversimplifying, but which seems to me to help to describe the underlying aspirations of Vatican leaders toward cinema in response to the polarised conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. I speak of underlying aspirations because we are certainly not dealing with a structured plan drawn up at a table but rather with a strategy that can be inferred from an overarching, long-­term analysis and articulated in various ways in accordance with the different contexts and actors at play. It was in the 1930s that the ‘third way’ took shape. It was during this time that the Holy See became fully aware of the relevance of the film question and especially of its geopolitical implications. Coinciding with the technolog-



A ‘Trojan Horse in the Enemy Camp’ 55

ical revolution of sound that accelerated the global development of the film industry, Pope Pius XI (1922–1939), in response to the increasingly alarmed reports of an invasion of immorality in film transmitted to the Vatican from papal representatives at every latitude, began to pay more attention to the issue in his documents.2 In the pope’s magisterium, the diagnosis was very clear. It recognised that the cinema had become one of the most powerful vehicles for spreading de-­Christianising tendencies due to the reach of the two great systems and their transnational scope. Even with regard to the cinema, Pius XI’s was a Cold War avant la lettre: there was the Soviet one, inherently anti-­Christian, and the Hollywood one, which revolved around a system of secularised values.3 The foundation of the third way stemmed from this awareness and was directed toward a specific approach: in keeping with the overall plan to restore Christian society (the cornerstone of the magisterium of Pius XI) it was envisaged that it was up to the Church to correct the degeneration of cinema in order to reconfigure it into a great instrument of evangelisation and apostolate, being, as it was, a ‘gift from God.’ At the heart of Pius XI’s discourse was thus the claim that ecclesiastical authority should be recognised as the most suitable institution to define what the proper use of cinema should be, because of its moral authority and universal mission. In the early 1930s the declination of this perspective resulted in the attempt, later failed, to create a large European Catholic industrial powerhouse of film production, with the explicit aim, as we read in Vatican documentation, of achieving the ‘Christianisation of global film.’4 Later, Pius XI activated a widespread Catholic mobilisation that encompassed the entire geopolitical framework of Vatican relations and was the basis for the promulgation of the encyclical Vigilanti cura of June 1936, dedicated entirely to film.5 The advent of Pius XII (1939–1958) to the papal throne did not substantially change the framework. The strategy of his predecessor was based on a clear objective: to attempt to ‘Christianise’ Hollywood, the world’s most important film industry, through direct lobbying with producers and the mobilisation of American public opinion through the Legion of Decency, an organisation founded in 1934 dedicated to identifying objectionable content in motion pictures on behalf of Catholic audiences. A moralised Hollywood according to the principles of Catholic ethics would have allowed a common front against the expansion of Soviet film propaganda. Pius XII’s view of Hollywood was no different and reflected his broader attitude toward the United States within the framework of the world divided into Cold War blocs. The negative pole for Pius XII was and remained ‘atheistic communism,’ so he looked with interest at the US world leadership and its growing anti-­ Soviet steadfastness. But a coincidence of interests with the United States did not mean identical views. Pius XII’s opposition to the USSR was never

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in the name of ‘Western values’ or ‘democracy’ but in the name of restoring ‘Christian civilisation’. The Americans brought with them elements such as freemasonry, Protestantism and a ‘practical materialism,’ epitomised precisely by Hollywood, which, as Hebblethwaite has rightly underscored, ‘was hardly better than the theoretical materialism found in the Soviet Union.’6 The Vatican third way for cinema was therefore a reflection of the third moral and spiritual pole that the Roman Catholic Church aspired to embody in the bipolar world. It is important to distinguish, as Piotr H. Kosicki has recently put it, ‘from the outset here between ideological and legal neutrality’ of the Vatican in the Cold War: a presence of neutrality under international law did not equate with ideological neutrality.7 The Pius XII’s permanent legal neutrality toward the East and West blocs meant maintaining at the same time a very harsh anti-­Soviet polemic and a corrective action toward the values of the Western bloc in the name of the centrality of a ‘Church educator of men and peoples.’8 It is crucial to note the central position of Pacelli (Pius XII’s birth name) in his predecessor’s Vatican film geopolitics: as Pius XI’s Secretary of State (1930–1939) he promoted two international inquiries (1932 and 1936) on communism which included, in their focus, the use of cinema for propaganda. Pacelli considered Soviet cinema as a fatal alliance between ideology and media, that could amplify the effects of anti-­religious campaigns. In the 1930s Pacelli was also the leading political figure in the crusade to moralise Hollywood: he established direct contact with the main influential figures in the Hollywood film industry by building a diplomatic network and maintained constant contact with the Legion of Decency.9 When he became pope, he put this complex experience to good use: with on the one hand a constant focus on analysing the methods of Soviet film propaganda and full support for every political measure to contain it, and on the other hand the identification of Hollywood as a privileged interlocutor for building a cinema that embodied Christian values. In this regard, it is significant that a few weeks before the end of the Second World War, Pius XII met with the most important figures in Hollywood cinema at the Vatican, receiving in audience representatives of the Motion Picture Executive Committee of Hollywood. To the delegation, which included the president and vice-­president of Paramount, the president of RKO, and the vice-­president of Universal, he emphasised the grave moral and social responsibilities that rested on them not only in their own country, but throughout the world. This required Hollywood to conform its production to the ‘laws of God’ and, by implication, to the magisterium of the Church. ‘Oh, the immense amount of good the motion picture can effect!’, Pope told Hollywood delegates: That is why the evil spirit, always so active in this world, wishes to pervert this instrument for his impious purposes: and it is encouraging to know that your com-



A ‘Trojan Horse in the Enemy Camp’ 57

mittee is aware of the danger, and more and more conscious of its grave responsibility before society and God. It is for public opinion to sustain whole-­heartedly and effectively every legitimate effort made by men of integrity and honor to purify the films and keep them clean, to improve them and increase their usefulness.10

This policy of Pius XII toward the cinema, which looked to Hollywood as the ‘lesser evil’ in the name of the battle against the deadly Soviet enemy, had a way of materialising especially in Italy, the only country where the Holy See could really influence events, as part of the complex relations between the Vatican, the Azione Cattolica Italiana (Italian Catholic Action) and the Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy). But before the Vatican’s third way to cinema took on a purely political dimension, during the years of the Second World War, it had its most obvious manifestation through an articulated plan, which we might call the ‘Trojan horse’ strategy, to borrow the words of the document I quoted in the title of this chapter.11 Through film production marked by Catholic ethics but proposed under the guise of secularism, the plan aimed to encourage Catholics to assume an independent perspective, even with ambitions of dominance, in the global postwar geopolitical context of cinema: a plan that, significantly, was elaborated within the film office of Italian Catholic Action.

The ‘Trojan Horse’ Strategy A protagonist of Vatican film policy in the early 1940s was Luigi Gedda, director of the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico (Catholic Cinematographic Centre, CCC) of Italian Catholic Action. At the end of 1941, he was called upon by Pius XII to preside over the CCC with the aim of better centralising Vatican policies on cinema by transcending the largely wait-­and-­see strategy of the late 1930s. Pius XII evidently felt that during the war years, conditions for a renewed offensive strategy were once again emerging. Significantly, the Italian context was the main area of its development. It was not by chance that Gedda made his debut in cinema as a major organiser for the production of the documentary Pastor Angelicus (1942), which can be considered a sort of film manifesto of Pius XII’s pontificate. As is clear from evidence in archival papers and printed sources, Pope Pius XII thought of the film as an ‘encyclical in images’ through which to show that the only possible solution to the massive problems deriving from postwar reconstruction could be found in accepting the leadership of the ecclesiastical hierarchy over society. With this film cinema should have become for the Holy See an instrument of legitimacy for the pope, not only as the main figure of reference for an Italy in disarray but also as the global moral authority and supreme mediator of peace between

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nations, who could face dictators and also speak the same language as the great democracies.12 On the other hand, as early as April 1941, shortly before his appointment as head of the CCC, Gedda had argued, in that sort of programmatic document that was his Conclusioni to the miscellaneous volume Il volto del Cinema, that with the emergence of what he elegantly described as a new ‘visual humanity,’ it was necessary for the Church to launch a counterattack, putting an end to the inclination to address the film issue through censorship.13 On closer inspection, the plan that Gedda put in writing in early 1943 had many similarities to the Eidophon project of the 1930s. But it also had one fundamental difference: the Eidophon arose primarily from the initiative of the Office Catholique International du Cinéma (International Catholic Office for Cinema, OCIC), the governing body established in The Hague in 1928 as a coordinating outlet for the intense work Catholics had devoted to cinema since its inception in various countries of Europe (with Germany, Belgium, Holland, France and Italy leading the way). However, the OCIC, seen from Rome’s perspective, concealed flaws of origin. It was born almost entirely independent of a relationship with the Holy See, and what is more, with lay figures holding prominent roles in its top offices. Instead, Gedda’s strategy, to which Pius XII’s contribution was probably not unrelated, restored Rome to its central role, giving Azione Cattolica Italiana in particular the role of organisational model for Catholic cinema policies which it assumed, starting in 1935 with the establishment of the CCC, and which the Holy See planned to export to all corners of the globe. But what precisely did the Gedda plan consist of? And why was it drawn up at that specific time? In short, the plan followed the model of the Hollywood Majors, with the aim of providing Catholics with a complete organisation (studios, production, distribution and operation), which would start from a central facility based in Rome and develop similarly to those in international contexts, with the aim of creating an integrated system that could be an alternative to both the Soviet and Hollywood models. Gedda’s proposal reveals the underlying ambition of the Catholic third way for cinema: to identify a winning strategy that could hold together the best of the Soviet cinematic experience (high technical-­aesthetic production capable of ‘educating the masses’) and that of the US (capable of effectively satisfying the masses’ need for entertainment while being dominant in the international market). The project’s eight typewritten files were drafted between January and February 1943 – the document is not dated, but the date can be deduced from its contents and accompanying documents14 – with the explicit intent of projecting themselves into the postwar future. Gedda’s paper attacked in thorough detail the relationship between cinema and power politics and focused on the new medium’s ability to be an effective tool for attracting the masses while managing to also generate high profits. ‘Certain state, political



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and racial bodies,’ the paper read, ‘with quick wit, immediately understood the enormous possibilities that cinema offered for the achievement of certain purposes and that it enabled them to also do good business. Therefore, in an impressive crescendo, enormous capital was being invested in the industry, which corresponded, at the same rate of development, to an ever-­increasing influx of the masses.’ This outline served to highlight the Church’s heavy delays, which Gedda believed needed to be overcome without further hesitation in order to be prepared for the new postwar scenario. The Church has long been able to see the harmful consequences of certain film productions; n ­ evertheless . . . ­its activity, compared with that of others, cannot but be regarded as that of an absentee. . . . We believe that the time for experiments is largely over and that, in the face of all the serious consequences, it is incumbent upon us to act vigorously and quickly to regain lost time and to be equipped for the great struggle that is taking place today and which will even more significantly arise in the post-­war period.15

With an obvious allusion to the successes of Pastor Angelicus, it was pointed out that these sorts of initiatives were not enough, and it was necessary to go significantly further, through a plan that would spread from the centre of Catholicism to the four corners of the globe. ‘The thought of taking the field,’ Gedda continued, ‘with the creation of a small production company or launching of a film – albeit of universal importance – when there are organisations in full financial and technical operation, is like waging war with arrows against an enemy with armoured cars. Defeat would be inevitable.’ Hence the need to launch a strategy with universal ambitions. ‘The Church’s intervention even in this specific field must be universal, as universal as its mission and organisation. And for the same reason, the starting point and governing centre of this activity,’ Gedda specified, ‘must be Rome.’ And it was at this point that the president of the CCC articulated the key to his plan, the ‘Trojan horse’ strategy, which, on closer inspection, aimed to achieve, as already pointed out by Jesuit Father Joseph Ledit in the 1930s,16 that synthesis between the Soviet ‘moralised’ model and the socio-­cultural reach and economic success of the US model. Along with production – Gedda continued –, which we shall call official, done by Catholic bodies (propaganda and apostolate films, short films, etc.), which will be well received by the faithful, and opposed, hindered or greeted with scepticism by others, provisions will have to be made – and here is the centrepiece of this program – for production carried out by another strictly industrial, commercial and independent entity which – absorbed in its shareholding majority and controlled by the competent authorities of the Church  – will produce films of all subjects that although seemingly of profane character and made under a label that is not officially Catholic are in fact permeated with Christian sentiments and reach even

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those circles that are normally closed off to the beneficial appeal of the Catholic Church. (Emphasis in original)

‘This production,’ Gedda explained, ‘must be like a Trojan horse in the enemy camp, like a spoke in the wheels of an enemy runner at the right moment.’ The document went on to state that the purpose of this plan of disguised infiltration into the cinema battlefield was the absorption of an already existing body with sound and efficient technical and financial management (identified as the company Inac, Industrie Nazionali Associate Cinematografiche),17 composed of wholesome elements that were to be supervised by a steering committee appointed by competent church bodies. This would have avoided the creation ex novo of an organisation that would have been ‘immediately identified’ as being of an ecclesiastical nature, especially since the use of a company ‘already endowed with perfect industrial, bureaucratic and legal equipment’ offered, from the outset, a ‘guarantee of success’ in the enterprise. This body, it was specified, had to have not only ‘production licenses’ but also those for the distribution of films and the ‘creation of its own studios.’ ‘It must have, in short, the complete cycle: namely, from production to the launching of the film, so as to have full independence.’ It was pointed out that, like a practice already pioneered by Hollywood studios, the possibility of having a complete operation would allow not only for the independent release of films, but also for ‘limiting the release of certain films that conflict with our principles.’ From here, development of the project was then to unfold globally. Once the ‘central nucleus’ of the body had been created in Rome, the document continued, the next step involved the need to extend ‘the organisation into the principal states, through the creation of other similar societies, of a technically financial capacity adequate for the purpose.’ The possibility of ‘global’ proliferation of the Roman prototype was what could guarantee success unknown to other organisations: the Church could in fact already have an adequate infrastructural apparatus at its disposal from the start, through the ‘numerous cinemas at church oratories, which all the principal churches have or should have’ (in addition to, it was specified, those of colleges, institutes, religious bodies and other).

The Lines of Vatican Film Policy in the Italian Cold War Overall, this plan expressed a centralist approach to the Christianisation of the cinema system, not without temporalistic overtones. These actions toward the cinema were seen as a means of mobilising the masses, both as a powerful vehicle for transmitting Catholic values and strengthening devotion to the pope, and as an instrument of direct anti-­communist propaganda. But what



A ‘Trojan Horse in the Enemy Camp’ 61

were the outcomes of this grandiose project? Undoubtedly it failed in its main intent because it had no follow-­up as a strategic plan with universalist reach. In the international context of the Cold War, a Vatican prototype of a film studio, built on the strategy of the Trojan Horse, capable of acting as a model for the rest of the Catholic world, never materialised. However, it is precisely the failure of this impressive plan that tells us a lot about the role of the Holy See in the context of Cold War-­era cinema: the distance between the ambition and the actual realisation of the Gedda plan reveals how the Holy See’s strategy would have been played on less eye-­catching levels, in a continuous underground game of negotiation on the political-­cultural level. In this sense the Italian case is emblematic. First of all, it can be observed that the Gedda plan had its concrete implementation in Italy, albeit on a smaller scale and for a limited period of time, through some initiatives that played a not entirely secondary role in the local context of the Cold War. In fact, the ‘Trojan horse’ strategy toward ‘profane’ production, which was able to cunningly place itself at the service of Pius XII’s policy, materialised with the birth of the catholic film company Orbis in December 1944 (basically a depowered version of the Inac plan), which saw the collaboration of directors who were far from having an automatic Catholic sentiment (such as Vittorio De Sica, Pietro Germi, Mario Soldati), but which also produced films such as Guerra alla guerra (1948). This film was ultimately an apologetic documentary on Pius XII’s charitable action during the Second World War but also a manifesto of pure pacifist propaganda. It did not fail to impact the heated campaign for the elections of 18 April 1948 by heralding the direct involvement of the Comitati Civici (Civic Committees) led by Gedda in film propaganda in favour of the Christian Democrats, the Catholic party that won those elections and definitively established Atlanticism in Italy.18 For Gedda, it was also the sign of a retreat to a purely clerical propaganda produ ction that marked the definitive abandonment of the search for a Catholic third way offensive for cinema which could distinguish itself and which had ambitions of dominance within the context of the conflict between the two superpowers. However, the Italian context is also interesting in relation to investigating the other, more lasting form that characterised the third Catholic way in cinema: a form that equally adhered, in different ways, to the idea of the spiritual and moral third pole that the Church of Pius XII aspired to embody in the bipolar world of the Cold War. Gedda’s plan found its main obstacle in the Vatican Curia and Italian Catholic Action, whereby two fundamentally opposing lines on the matter of film faced off in those years: the centralist and muscular line proposed by Gedda, and the perspective expressed by the then president of ACI (Italian Catholic Action, 1946–1952), Vittorino Veronese, embodied also in the Vatican by the Substitute of the Secretariat of State, Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Paul VI, which was closer to the idea

62

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of a cultural and political line of action. In the postwar period, the Holy See confirmed its deep-­rooted attitude of trying to heavily influence the Italian national future from an ideological point of view, directing the Italian government towards behaviours, centred on relaunching the country’s Catholic character in new forms, and began to support a decisive role for the United States in Italy, understood as a sort of ‘lesser evil.’19 For this strategy, the link between the Vatican and the Christian Democrats was crucial. From a wider point of view, as James Chappel has pointed out, Christian Democracy was at the heart of a fundamental ideological re-­orientation among (West) European Catholics when it came to the international – read: anti-­communist – obligation of Catholics living in a secular state.20 For this reason, the Holy See, as Kosicki has rightly underscored, did insert itself into the domestic political decision-­making of sovereign countries in Western Europe  – and nowhere more so than in Italy: ‘by calling upon national-­level politicians and the social structures of Catholic Action to aid the anti-­communist camp in the April 1948 Italian parliamentary election campaign, the Holy See became one of the decisive agents in Italian national politics.’21 This line of action is very clear through the attitude shown towards Hollywood production by the Italian government, especially after the turning point of 1948, which also marked the time when the government censorship system worked more clearly to prevent the entry and circulation of Soviet films in Italy.22 The massive invasion of Hollywood films on the Italian market (more than 500 titles in 1948 alone) favoured by the ruling Catholic Party in the years of the more intense Cold War was welcomed and encouraged not only by State censorship, but also by ecclesiastical censorship as exercised by the CCC.23 The film policy of the Christian Democrats during that time was embodied mainly by Giulio Andreotti, Undersecretary of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers with responsibility for Entertainment from 1947 to 1953; scholars have amply documented how aggressively Montini lobbied Andreotti throughout the years: the Substitute of the Secretariat of State often intervened to have his say regarding censorship and the organisation of the parish cinema circuit.24 It is not a minor detail that it was Montini himself who had suggested to Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi the name of Andreotti for that role: from then on, film policy became for Andreotti a balancing act between the needs of the government, the Christian Democrat party and the Holy See.25 The idea that Hollywood cinema, through the corrective to its ‘practical materialism’ posed by the Catholic Party, was far preferable to targeted actions against Soviet film propaganda was a shared theme, although never explicitly evoked, which had an impact on the relationships between Christian Democrats and the Vatican on cinematographic politics in Italy.26 Treveri Gennari argued that ‘despite fundamental objections to the consumerist aspect of American culture, the Vatican support of the Americanization



A ‘Trojan Horse in the Enemy Camp’ 63

of post war Italy can be seen as an attempt to restore morality to the use of a certain type of Hollywood cinema.’ This was encouraged by the birth of interest groups built by ‘the Christian Democrats, which not only allowed a cross-­fertilisation between American and Italian cinema as the main vehicle for Vatican propaganda, but also promoted indigenous film in order to fulfil the aims of the Vatican.’27 One of Andreotti’s major achievements in the field of cinema was the creation of a mighty parish cinema circuit that in terms of consistency and strength of social penetration has no equivalent anywhere else in the world (it went from 1401 parish cinemas in 1949 to 5206 in 1958).28 Andreotti’s intention was that the parish cinema circuit would exercise a containment function against the communist advance while achieving the moralisation of Hollywood production.29 But if, as hoped by the Holy See, the first goal was achieved with ease, the second was destined to clash with the processes of sexualisation of the cinematic image: unlike the products of Soviet cinema, Hollywood films were not intended to persuade the audience to embrace a political thesis; rather, they made use of everyday elements to arouse in the viewer an instinctive admiration for US models of life.30 After the death of Pius XII (1958), at the height of Cold War-­era cinema, it was with growing astonishment that the Italian Catholic world gradually took note of the immorality of American cinema, which had put into circulation words, sounds and images that fed new private aspirations and desires, changing perceptions of what were judged to be acceptable sexual behaviour and gender roles.31 The Catholic third way for cinema in Italy had indeed helped to render the deadly Soviet enemy harmless, but without noticing the insidious advance of Hollywood’s ‘practical materialism,’ whose success had far more lasting effects on the transformation of viewers who adapted their lifestyles to values far removed from Catholic ethics. Gianluca della Maggiore is Associate Professor of Cinema, Photography and Television at the International Telematic University UniNettuno of Rome. He is currently director of the International Research Centre CAST-­Catholicism and Audiovisual Studies (Uninettuno). His studies focus in particular on the analysis of the relationship between Church and media. Among his latest works are Catholicism and Cinema: Modernization and Modernity, with Tomaso Subini (Milan, Mimesis International, 2018) and Le vedute delle origini su Leone XIII: Vaticano, Biograph e Lumière tra mito e storia (Turin, Utet Università, 2023).

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Notes  1. The following are the archives I used to write this chapter: Archivio Apostolico Vaticano [Vatican Apostolic Archive, AAV]; Sezione per i Rapporti con gli Stati, Congregazione degli Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari [Section for Relations with States, Sacred Congregation for International Affairs, S. RR.SS., AA. EE. SS.]; Istituto per la storia dell’Azione cattolica e del movimento cattolico in Italia Paolo VI [Archive of the Institute for the History of Catholic Action and the Catholic Movement in Italy Paul VI, Isacem]. The topic of the relationship between the Church and cinema has been at the centre of renewed historiographical fervour in recent years: see recently Subini, La via italiana alla pornografia, and for a concise overview, Viganò, ‘Il cinema: ricezione, riflessione’.   2. Film was significantly mentioned by Pius XI in three encyclicals in which the effects of society’s abandonment of God were most clearly denounced: the Divini Illius Magistri (31 December 1929) on the Christian education of youth, the Casti connubii (31 December 1930) on Christian marriage, and the Caritate Christi compulsi (3 May 1932), which denounced militant and mass atheism for the first time in such a resolute way. For the texts of the encyclicals, see https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-­xi​ /en/encyclicals.index.html.   3. On Pius XI’s Cold War avant la lettre, see Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades, 2–61; Chamedes, A Twentieth-Century Crusade, 121–66; Kent, Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII, 13–18.   4. Memorandum by B.J. Brenninkmeyer, H. Konenemann, Mursaert per la Segreteria di Stato, n.d. [ca. 1934], in AAV, Segr. Stato, 1934, rubr. 357, fasc. 3, ff. 176–183r.   5. On the writing of the encyclical, see Della Maggiore and Subini, Catholicism and Cinema, 107–20.   6. Hebblethwaite, ‘Pope Pius XII: Chaplain of the Atlantic Alliance?’, 68.   7. Kosicki, ‘No Neutrality in Ideology’, 121.   8. See Di Nolfo, Vaticano e Stati Uniti; Chenaux, Pie XII: Diplomate et pasteur.   9. Della Maggiore and Subini, Catholicism and Cinema, 21–134. 10. ‘Efficaci parole del Santo Padre per una sana cinematografia’. 11. Document without date or signature [ca. 1943], in Isacem, Aci-Pg, serie XV, b. 2, fasc. 7. 12. For an interpretation of the political significance of the film, see Ruozzi, ‘Pius XII as Actor’; Subini, ‘Pastor Angelicus’. 13. Gedda, ‘Conclusioni’. 14. Isacem, Aci-Pg, serie XV, b. 2, fasc. 7. 15. Ibid. 16. Ledit, La religione e il comunismo, 35–40. 17. Isacem, Aci-­Pg, serie XV, b. 2, fasc. 7, Report on the financial situation as of 31  December 1942 for the Company An. I.N.A.C. (Industrie Nazionali Associate Cinematografiche), signed Rag. Girolamo Scriattoli, 22 April 1943. 18. Della Maggiore, ‘Guerra alla guerra’. 19. Formigoni, Storia d’Italia nella guerra fredda, 26–27. 20. Chappel, Catholic Modern, 214. Fort the general contest, see also Fejérdi, ‘The Vatican, the United States and the Cold War’, 106–42. 21. Kosicki, ‘No Neutrality in Ideology’, 129. 22. Treveri Gennari, Post-War Italian Cinema, 38–61.



A ‘Trojan Horse in the Enemy Camp’ 65

23. Wanrooij, ‘Dollars and Decency’, 251. 24. Subini, La doppia vita di “Francesco giullare di Dio”. 25. On the Andreotti-­Montini relationship, see Andreotti, ‘Giovanni Battista Montini, aumônier des universitaires et des licenciés’, 33–40. 26. See Gundle, ‘From Neo-­Realism to Luci Rosse’, 208. 27. Treveri Gennari, Post-War Italian Cinema, XIX. 28. Wagstaff, ‘Italy in the Post-­War International Cinema Market’, 114; Della Maggiore, ‘The Church and the Circulation of Small-­Gauge Cinema in Postwar Italy’, 36–44. 29. Andreotti, ‘Censura e censure’. 30. Subini, La via italiana alla pornografia, 19–20. 31. Scoppola, La nuova cristianità perduta, 20. See also Miccoli, ‘La Chiesa di Pio XII nella società italiana del dopoguerra’, 537–613.

Bibliography Andreotti, Giulio. ‘Censura e censure: Lettera dell’On. Giulio Andreotti al Consulente Ecclesiastico del CCC’. Rivista del Cinematografo 25(12) (1952), 4. ———. ‘Giovanni Battista Montini, aumônier des universitaires et des licenciés’, in Paul VI et la modernité dans l’Église. (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1984), 33–40. Chamedes, Giuliana. A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Chappel, James. Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Chenaux, Philippe. Pie XII: Diplomate et pasteur. Paris: Cerf, 2003. Della Maggiore, Gianluca. ‘Guerra alla guerra: Cinema e geopolitica vaticana nella Chiesa di Pio XII’, in Raffaele De Berti (ed.), ‘I cattolici nella fabbrica del cinema e dei media: produzione, opere, protagonisti (1940–1970)’. Schermi: Storie e cultura del cinema e dei media 1(2) (2017), 91–107. ———. ‘Vittorino Veronese e il cinema: Un paradigma pastorale alternativo nell’età della mobilitazione geddiana’, in Elena Mosconi (ed.), ‘Davanti allo schermo: I cattolici tra cinema e media, cultura e società (1940–1970)’. Schermi: Storie e cultura del cinema e dei media 2(3) (2017), 43–63. Della Maggiore, Gianluca and Tomaso Subini. The Church and the Circulation of SmallGauge Cinema in Postwar Italy’, in Andrea Mariani and Simona Schneider (eds), Fate of a Format: il passo ridotto nell’Italia del dopoguerra: format, geopolitics, institutions (Milan and Udine: Mimesis, 2023), 36–44. ———. ‘Vigilanti cura: L’enciclica “americana” sul cinema (1936)’, in Dario Edoardo Viganò (ed.), Papi e media: Redazione e ricezione dei documenti di Pio XI e Pio XII su cinema, radio e tv. (Bologna: il Mulino, 2023), 19–62. ———. ‘Catholicism and Cinema: Modernization and Modernity. Milan: Mimesis Inter­ national, 2018. Di Nolfo, Ennio. Vaticano e Stati Uniti (1939–1952): Dalle carte di Myron C. Taylor. Milan: Franco Angeli, 1978. ‘Efficaci parole del Santo Padre per una sana cinematografia’. L’Osservatore Romano, 16–17 July 1945.

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Fejérdi, András. ‘The Vatican, the United States and the Cold War in Central and Eastern Europe (1945–1958): status questionis and Prospects for Research’, in Roberto Regoli and Matteo Sanfilippo (eds), La Santa Sede, gli Stati Uniti e le relazioni internazionali durante il pontificato di Pio XII. (Rome: Studium, 2022), 106–42. Formigoni, Guido. Storia d’Italia nella Guerra fredda (1943–1978). Bologna: il Mulino, 2016. Gedda, Luigi. ‘Conclusioni’, in Il volto del cinema. (Rome: Ave, 1941), 325–31. Gundle, Stephen. ‘From Neo-Realism to Luci Rosse: Cinema, Politics, Society, 1945–85’, in Zygmunt G. Baranski and Robert Lumley (eds), Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy: Essay on Mass and Popular Culture (London: Macmillan, 1990), 195–224. Hebblethwaite, Peter. ‘Pope Pius XII: Chaplain of the Atlantic Alliance?’, in Christopher Duggan and Christopher Wagstaff (eds), Italy in the Cold War: Politics, Culture and Society, 1948–1958 (Washington: Berg Publisher, 1995), 67–75. Kent, Peter C. The Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII: The Roman Catholic Church and the Division of Europe, 1943–1950. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. Kosicki, Piotr, H. ‘No Neutrality in Ideology: The Holy See and the Cold War’, in Marshall J. Breger and Herbert R. Reginbogin (eds), The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality (London: Lexington Books, 2002), 121–41. ———. Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and ‘Revolution’, 1891–1956. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Ledit, Joseph. La religione e il comunismo. Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1937. Miccoli, Giovanni. ‘La Chiesa di Pio XII nella società italiana del dopoguerra’, in Storia dell’Italia Repubblicana, I. La costruzione della democrazia. (Turin: Einaudi, 1994), 537–613. Ruozzi, Federico. ‘Pius XII as Actor and Subject: On the Representation of Pope in Cinema during the 1940s and 1950s’, in Daniel Biltereyst and Daniela Treveri Gennari (eds), Moralizing Cinema: Film, Catholicism and Power (New York: Routledge, 2015), 256–80. Scoppola, Pietro, La nuova cristianità perduta. Rome: Studium, 1985. Subini, Tomaso. La doppia vita di ‘Francesco giullare di Dio’: Giulio Andreotti, Félix Morlion e Roberto Rossellini. Milan: Libraccio, 2011. ———. ‘Pastor Angelicus as a Political Text’, in Roberto Cavallini (ed.), Requiem for a Nation. (Milan: Mimesis International, 2016), 17–34. ———. La via italiana alla pornografia: Cattolicesimo, sessualità e cinema (1948–1986). Florence: Le Monnier, 2021. Treveri Gennari, Daniela. Post-War Italian Cinema: American Intervention, Vatican Interests. New York and London: Routledge, 2009. Viganò, Dario Edoardo. ‘Il cinema: ricezione, riflessione, rifiuto’, in Alberto Melloni (ed.), Cristiani d’Italia: Chiese, società, Stato, 1861–2011. (Rome: Treccani, 2011), 1389–409. ———. Il cinema dei papi: Documenti inediti dalla Filmoteca vaticana. Bologna: Marietti 1820, 2018. Wagstaff, Christopher. ‘Italy in the Post-War International Cinema Market’, in Christopher Duggan and Christopher Wagstaff (eds), Italy in the Cold War – Politics, Culture and Society, 1948–1958 (Washington, DC: Berg Publisher, 1995), 89–116. Wanrooij, Bruno P.F. ‘Dollars and Decency: Italian Catholics and Hollywood, 1945–1960’, in David W. Ellwood and Rob Kroes (eds), Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony (Amsterdam, VU University Press, 1994).

CHAPTER 4

An Impossible Cinematic Hegemony Soviet Films in Italy between Postwar and the Cold War (1944–1953) Stefano Pisu

Introduction The volume Italia-Russia: Un secolo di cinema (Italy-­Russia: A Century of Cinema) – sponsored by the Italian Embassy in Moscow in 2020 – highlighted the historical and deeply rooted link between Italian and Russian (then Soviet) cinema in the twentieth century. The book also stressed how both scientific communities were interested in this link and how the diplomatic institutions were likewise willing to take cinema as an example of a long-­term dialogue and cooperation between the two countries. Nevertheless, neither the book nor other previous studies – aside from works on Soviet cinema at the Venice film festival – analysed the spread of Soviet cinema in Italy in the aftermath of the Second World War.1 However, this is a primary topic for understanding the role of Soviet films during the cinematographic Cold War,2 which also captured the hearts and minds of members of the intellectual elite and people against the backdrop of the broader cultural struggle.3 In this chapter, I aim to provide a contribution to the field, using mainly the online Italiataglia database. This database helps to retrace the history of Italian cinematographic censorship and provides relevant information related to the distribution of foreign films in the country.4 I will also analyse the papers stored in the Milan archive of the Italian Association for cultural relations with the Soviet Union (also known as ‘Italy–USSR’), which was committed to distributing Soviet

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films outside the commercial distribution chain.5 Lastly, the correspondence between the national seat of Italy–USSR and the Soviet Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS)  – stored at GARF6  – will also be examined and compared with the documents held in the Italian Central State Archive (ACS).

A Quantitative Analysis: From Few to Fewer A preamble should be given to better analyse and understand the information on the distribution of Soviet films in Italy in the aftermath of the Second World War. The USSR’s cinema industry of 1945–1953 saw a very weak production due to various factors.7 The first involves the stringent ideological control exercised by the authorities on arts and culture, following a period of lowered control due to the war.8 In addition to that, for economic and financial reasons, in June 1948 the Communist Party decided to revise the production plan of the Ministry of Cinema downwards, in opposition to the request made by the Ministry over the previous thirty years to increase it.9 Lastly, Stalin himself was convinced that imitating the Hollywood industrial and commercial model was pointless and he pushed in favour of a broader use of films and increasing the number of cinemas and mobile cinemas within the country.10 This low-­profile internal politics indirectly placed Soviet cinema in a disadvantageous position in the international panorama, mostly in terms of quantity. The following table summarises the outcomes of the research on Soviet films conducted through the Italiataglia database. Public screenings required applying for a permit. A comprehensive quantitative reference framework is provided in the table opposite. The information related to the period from September 1944 to October 1945 is taken from a report drafted by Ivan Bolshakov, the USSR Minister of Cinema, in the spring of 1946.11 According to the document, a month before official diplomatic relationships between the two countries resumed – September 1944 – the Soiuzintorgkino12 had opened an office in Italy.13 The gap between the remarkable number of films distributed over the one year indicated by Bolshakov and the lower quantity of films distributed in the following years is impressive. According to the information extracted from the database, 173 Soviet films applied for a projection permit between 1946 and 1953. The authorising committees only acted on fifteen works (8.6%). Eight films were rejected and banned from screening, while adjustments were requested for the remaining seven. Most of the Soviet films applied for a permit in 1946–1948 (126 films). By contrast, only forty-­seven films applied for one in 1949–1953. Soviet film distribution in Italy reached its peak in

11

 6

 6

 6

 –

 –

 –

 –

29

1947

1948

1949

1950

1951

1952

1953

Total

Newsreels

1946

Sep. 1944– Oct. 1945

Year

68

 2

 1

14

 5

 5

16

12

13

Documentaries

70

 4

 1

 2

 –

 4

13

27

19

Full-length feature films

6

–

–

1

2

–

2

1

–

Animated films

8

5

1

1

–

–

1

–

Films that were not granted the permit

7

–

–

4

–

1

1

1

–

Films that obtained the permit after adjustments

173

  6

  2

 17

  7

 15

 37

 46

 43

Total films that required the permit

Table 4.1. Amount and type of Soviet films for which distribution permission is requested in Italy (1944–1953). Table data © Italiataglia. Table created by Stefano Pisu.

110

110 (60 full-­length + 50 short films)

Films not included in the database

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Stefano Pisu

1947, with forty-­six films, including twenty-­seven fiction films, which had been produced over the previous decade. In the 1949–1953 period, Soviet documentaries were the most distributed films for which a projection permit was requested in Italy. The distribution recorded its lowest ebb in 1952 when only two films applied for a permit, and one was rejected. It is not a coincidence that the production of feature films in the USSR over the previous year was one of the worst ever, accounting for only nine feature films. Film censorship in Italy was strengthened through Law no. 379 of 1 May 1947, approved by the Constituent Assembly. The revision procedure followed in the censorship became stricter than that adopted in the Fascist period. Apart from reconfirming the 1923  Decree concerning the governmental supervision of films and shows, producers were given the chance to submit their scripts for an initial check by the Central Office for Cinema. This measure allowed many producers to avoid issues after the completion of the film. It enhanced the role of the revision commissions, which, after the left-­ wing representatives had left the government in May 1947 and following the elections held on 18 April 1948, were characterised by the strong presence of members from the Christian Democratic Party.14 The evolution of censorship during the decline of governments of national unity allows us to understand why – although they were few – Soviet films were mostly censored by Christian Democratic governments.15 Moreover, starting from the late 1940s, the Minister of the Interior Mario Scelba increased the controls on projections.16 In 1948, Saverio Polito, Questor of Rome and former inspector of the Fascist Police, pointed out the increasing number of Soviet films and Italy– USSR cinema collaborations.17 For a general quantitative comparison, one can mention the applications presented by the leading Western film producers between 1946 and 1953. The number of US films for which censor permits were required was 3,219; the same period saw 395 French films and 441 British ones. This data shows the low number of Soviet films distributed in Italy during the national political and ideological polarisation, in line with the hardening of the international panorama and the Cold War. While US and Western productions came back into Italian cinemas after the embargo imposed by the Fascist government and Alfieri’s law in 1938, the USSR was unable to show its geopolitical power in the cinema sector. The historiography stresses the national censorship system managed by Christian Democrats and former Fascist officers, whose ideological and political objectives included avoiding the circulation and distribution of Soviet films. This action was formally justified by the lack of reciprocity in the exchange, which would convince the Soviets to withdraw from regularly exporting films after 1953.18 However, what strikes one more than the number of – totally or partly – censored Soviet films in Italy is the scarce number of films that applied for a censorship permit.



An Impossible Cinematic Hegemony 71

Copies and Distributors GDB Edizione Noleggio Film was the first company working on distributing Soviet films in Italy in collaboration with the Soiuzintorgkino. GDB was a dubbing company with a registered office in Rome and eleven branches across Italy. The first distribution of Soviet films dates to October 1944, with the resumption of official diplomatic relationships between Italy and the USSR, and the Soviets requested to use the US channels to distribute propaganda films. The US authorities, with considerable hesitation, finally agreed to the use of two cars, thanks to the negotiations of Giovanni De Berardinis, head of GDB.19 From 1947, Sovexportfilm  – the Soviet entity that replaced the Soiuzintorgkino in the local distribution of films through popular cinemas and cultural circuits  – took the role of the main distributor, mostly through the Italy–USSR connection. In the late 1940s and, mostly, in the early 1950s, Libertas Film – a production and distribution company affiliated to the Italian Communist Party (PCI) – was the exclusive distributor.20 The evident process of politicisation also emerges in the Italy–USSR Association’s visibility in the distribution of films during the Soviet Cinema Festival in 1948. This evolution led to increased dissemination of films via cultural circuits rather than through commercial business networks. Given the difficulty of providing a homogeneous documentary collection of the actual circulation of these films in the commercial cinema circuits, the number of copies requested for distribution constitutes interesting and valuable data.21 This data offers some information on the films that circulated the most and the ones on which the distributors had placed the greatest expectations (see Table 4.2 on the following page). The number given in the right-­hand column is the total number of copies reported for each application for a censorship permit (the same film could be revised in the case of re-­releases, for example with the addition of Italian dubbing, subtitles or subsequent changes requested by the commissions in the first instance). While we await a further investigation into the destiny of the copies mentioned, the information reported in the table suggests the relevance of some genres and the circulation of particular types of cinematographic products. Apart from the case of Chiaureli’s The Vow, there was a shift from the largest number of copies for war films (fictions and documentaries) to other genres, such as children’s films, scientific documentaries, and also fantasy films. On the other hand, one can point out that the films with clear political and ideological propaganda intentions were the object of interventions by governmental revision commissions.

Film

Ona zashchishchaet rodinu (She Defends the Motherland, Fridrikh Ermler, 1943) Stalingrad (Leonid Varlamov, 1943)

Sportivnyi obzor (Sport Review, 1947) Klyatva (The Vow, Mikhail Chiaureli, 1946) Zhila-byla devochka (Once There Was a Girl, Viktor Eisymont, 1944) Kamennyi tsvetok (The Stone Flower, Aleksandr Ptushko, 1946)

Selskaya uchitelnitsa (The Village Teacher, Mark Donskoy, 1947) Zigmund Kolosovsky (The Man with Five Faces, Boris Dmochovsky/ Sigizmund Navrotsky, 1946)

Molodaya gvardiya (The Young Guard, Sergei Gerasimov, 1948) Beleet parus odinokii (The Lonely White Sail, Vladimir Legoshin, 1937)

Oni vidyat vnov (They Can See Again, Nikolai Grachev, 1950)

Istoriya odnogo koltsa (The History of a Ring, Boris Dolin, 1948) Smelye lyudi (Brave People, Konstantin Yudin, 1950)

Sadko (Aleksandr Ptushko, 1953)

Distr. Year

1946

1947

1948

1949

1950

1951

1953

Fantasy film

Scientific documentary War film

Scientific documentary

War film Children’s adventure film

Drama film Children’s adventure film

Sports documentary War fiction film Historical drama film Fantasy film

War film War documentary

Genre

FL

ML FL

ML

FL FL

FL FL

ML FL FL FL

FL FL

Length 22

35

50 42

35

60 44

55 55

67 77 44

32 36

No. of copies

Table 4.2. Information on Soviet films for which a larger number of copies is requested for distribution in Italy (1946–1953). Table data © Italiataglia. Table created by Stefano Pisu.



An Impossible Cinematic Hegemony 73

The Censorship of Soviet Films The reasons for censorship could refer to the international context or to internal aspects (or both). In the first case, the main reason for censorship was the risk of ‘disturbing good international relations’, according to a formulation taken from the Fascist decree of 1923. In 1947, the commission requested to eliminate from The Vow the sequences in which the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Georges Bonnet, was represented in a caricatural way, since they were considered offensive to the French nation, even though Bonnet had first supported appeasement in Munich and then the collaborationist Vichy regime.23 In October 1948 – during the turmoil caused by the Berlin Crisis – Russkii vopros (The Russian Question, Mikhail Romm, 1948), a critical portrait of American society and institutions, was denied approval because it presented ‘untrue aspects of American political life’ as well as ‘concepts contrary to freedom’.24 The maintenance of good international relations was invoked again in 1951 over the documentary feature film Pobeda kitaiskogo naroda (Victory of the Chinese People, Leonid Varlamov, 1950). This Chinese– Soviet coproduction, which retraced the advent of Mao’s China in enthusiastic and anti-­Western tones, was also rejected because it ‘encouraged hatred between social classes’ and could ‘subvert public order’, thus combining international reasons – at a delicate time marked by the war in Korea – with possible internal risks.25 Two years later, the new Chinese–Soviet cooperation Osvobozhdennyi Kitai/Jiefang le de Zhongguo (Liberated China/The New China, Sergei Gerasimov and Eduard Volk, 1950) was rejected because ‘under the guise of a historical documentary [it] actually carries out propaganda contrary to public order by making, defending and promoting principles contrary to our legal-­social order’.26 The propagandistic representation of the Chinese revolution was therefore dangerous for both international and national reasons. The internal reasons behind the censorship of Soviet films were mainly related to public order. While the post-­Stalin USSR returned to the Venice Film Festival in the summer of 1953 after a five-­year absence, the Italian revision commissions rejected most of the (few) films submitted for approval. The medium-­length documentary Moskovskii Stadion Dinamo (Moscow Dinamo Stadium, Dmitry Bogolepov, 1952) was rejected in September because ‘under the guise of a sports documentary it actually carries out propaganda contrary to public order by making an overall apologia and exaltation of the Soviet regime with respect to our social-­political order’.27 Velikii perelom (The Turning Point, Fridrikh Ermler, 1945) suffered the opposite fate as it was considered one of the most important Soviet war films. The film first applied for a permit in 1946, and only a year later, the revision commission approved it. In August 1953, however, the new request was rejected as the film constituted ‘a

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glorification of the military power of the Soviet State aimed at protecting good international relations and public order’.28 The commissions’ change of opinion can be interpreted through the general worsening of Italy’s political and ideological struggle after 1947 and the fear occasioned by the USSR’s achievement of nuclear independence in 1953. According to the commissions, the celebration of the Soviet state was a danger to the order and stability of Italian society and institutions, since  – in line with the logic of the reasoning put forward – it could provoke riots and encourage subversive actions. Moreover, the internal political atmosphere should not be underestimated. The campaign for the 1953 parliamentary elections was marked by the debate on the new majority electoral law proposed by the Christian Democratic Party, defined as a ‘fraudulent law’ by its detractors. The famous Padeniye Berlina (The Fall of Berlin, Mikhail Chiaureli, 1949), the lesser-­known Kavaler zolotoi zvezdy (The Knight of the Golden Star, Yuli Raizman, 1951), and the short documentary film Sovremennyi Kolkhoz (Modern Kolkhoz, Elizaveta Tylybeva, 1951) were also rejected in the summer of 1953 for reasons like those cited above for Moscow Dinamo Stadium.29 In 1951, the medium-­length documentary Antarctic Whaling (S. Kogan, 1950) and Ivan Pyrev’s feature-­length film Kubanskie kazaki (Cossacks of the Kuban, 1950) had been forced to remove or edit scenes glorifying Stalin.30 Aleksandr Nevsky (Alexander Nevsky, Sergei Eisenstein, 1938) represents a special case. Following a first application in 1946 that was unsuccessful due to lack of documentation, the film was re-­examined on 13  December 1949. At first, the commission expressed opposition to the screening in public ‘because there are particularly repugnant scenes and the historical reality is distorted for propaganda purposes’. The problems were violence and an unspecified distortion of historical events dating back to the thirteenth century. The commission then modified its opinion subject to the elimination of some scenes considered ‘particularly cruel’.31 However, when the Milan section of Italy–USSR wanted to screen the film on 18 December at the end of the Soviet Film Festival, the permit was denied, notwithstanding the assurances of the Association’s national secretary Giuseppe Berti about the possibility of obtaining it. The communist activist of the Milan section Rossana Rossanda openly complained about the lack of commitment shown to actively supporting the issuing of the permit by those who were supposedly interested (socialist and communist parliamentarians, the Soviet embassy, Sovexportfilm) and about a more general form of submissiveness to Christian Democratic Party film policy.32 Rossanda’s unconventionality allowed her to emphasise the inferiority complex of the Italian communist world – which had little support from USSR representatives in Italy  – in the context of the Cold War. Her words revealed manifest or latent critical issues in the relations between Italian communists and the Soviets that would become clearer in the following years.



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Italy–USSR and Sovexportfilm: Cooperation and Contradiction Sporadic screenings were organised by the Italy–USSR Association from 1945, while in July 1946, the first postwar festival of Soviet cinema was held at the Teatro Quirino in Rome. Occasionally, important venues were chosen, such as the Smeraldo cinema in Milan, which hosted the screening of Chapaev (Georgy and Sergei Vasilev, 1934) in February 1947, with more than 1,300 viewers, 1,111 of whom paid.33 Following the opening of the ‘month of Italian–Soviet friendship’ organised by the Association in 1948, Soviet film festivals became an annual event to counterbalance the USSR’s absence from the Venice Film Festival in those years. Moreover, in June 1950, a review of cinema for children was held at the Dal Verme cinema in Milan. Italy–USSR worked in close contact with Sovexportfilm in the organisation of screenings and festivals. In Milan, the Association and the Soviet institution physically shared their headquarters on condition of payment of rent to the PCI.34 Between 1946 and September 1948, seventeen screenings were held in Milan, including films that were not recorded in the Italiataglia database.35 It is not yet possible to determine whether this was due to the lack of governmental materials, to screenings carried out without prior authorisation, or because these were films that arrived in Italy in 1944–1945, as indicated by Bolshakov and for which there had been a direct agreement with the Allied occupation authorities. Moreover, the physical proximity to the Milan agency of Sovexportfilm facilitated the distribution throughout the different provinces of Lombardy and in some local factories.36 The collaboration with Sovexportfilm was not immune to difficulties and misunderstandings. In 1948, the Milanese secretariat negotiated with the owners of some of the city’s most important theatres, managing to obtain two premier cinemas for the Soviet Film Festival and initiating collaboration with the University of Milan for the screening of scientific documentaries. However, the negotiations were interrupted, with no reason given, by the Rome office of Sovexportfilm, which also refused to send the documentaries to Milan.37 In a letter sent to VOKS on behalf of the Milan section of the Italy–USSR Association, Rossanda openly complained about the methods employed and the materials sent by Sovexportfilm: ‘We distribute the few films that Sovexportfilm makes available to us, at a rather high price for our resources. The films are almost always neither dubbed nor have captions, which implies an additional organisational effort on our part.’38 All the critical aspects of the Soviet agency’s actions are condensed here within a few lines: the small number of films, the unavailability of a ready-­to-­use product (lack of dubbing or subtitles) and, above all, the fact that the use of the films was not free of charge, even though the intermediary was not a distribution company but an organisation whose goal was to promote the USSR in Italy. This last

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aspect was also underlined in the same year by Virgilio Tosi, who pointed out the counterintuitive difference in approach between the Anglo-­Americans and the Soviets to film distribution policies in non-­commercial circuits: Our association’s difficulty in distributing Soviet films among the private theatres of clubs, organisations or associations is caused by the fact that the two activities, commercial and cultural, are combined in the film sector. In contrast, the propaganda organisations of the British and American consulates release propaganda films free of charge purely and even lend out the projection equipment. We need to try to solve the problem of dubbing and launching the films in cinemas in the best possible way, as well as the issue of their diffusion in cultural associations and famous culture clubs in the suburbs and provinces, by somehow overcoming the economic aspect of their cost.39

The question of relating to Italy–USSR as a commercial body also emerged in 1953 concerning the distributor Libertas Film, which proposed a payment formula per screening, thus refusing to accept the joint purchase of films by a consortium of the Association’s sections.40 As reported in the annual report on the activities of 1953 with reference to the financial situation, in the early 1950s, a decidedly negative picture of the possible income that could be obtained from the screening of Soviet films was outlined: ‘Even the poor possibilities provided by Soviet films at other times have been exhausted this year. With such old and wasted films as those supplied by Libertas, one can at best break even at an event.’41

Soviet Films in Italy: Propaganda or Boomerang Effect? The correspondence between the national office of the Italy–USSR Association and VOKS suggests that the screening of Soviet films did not automatically produce a consensus on USSR cinema, nor on its country of origin. The report on 1946–1947 revealed a series of problems that contributed to significantly reducing the impact and utility of the screenings offered to Italian audiences. Concretely, it criticised: a) the fact that only a few of the films offered for cultural rental are of a high artistic level. b) the fact that they are not dubbed and therefore make it difficult for the spectator to understand them, even when translators are used. c) the fact that up to now no documentaries of the type that would be of particular interest for our work have ­arrived . . . ­d) ­besides . . . ­few [films] have been successfully dubbed and it is evident that there is a need to entrust the distribution of films to cultural bodies that can present them differently.42

The Association often lamented to VOKS the irregularity in receiving materials. As for the quality and usability of the films received, in the summer



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of 1947, Berti openly declared to the Soviets that most of the films were not well received by the viewers and were criticised by the workers and the Communist Party members themselves: There used to be an enormous expectation for Soviet films and tremendous respect for the great Soviet directors, Pudovkin and others. Now the situation in Italy has changed, even among the popular masses. Many of the new films are not liked, they are criticized from an artistic point of view even by the workers. This issue needs to be addressed seriously. It is not true that this is happening under the bad, indeed very bad, influence of the horrible American films. No, after the fall of Fascism, Italian films had already reached a high artistic level and films such as Rome, Open City, Paisan, Outcry, [and] Tragic Hunt43 were judged by the Italian public, which has a centuries-­old artistic tradition, to be artistically better than most Soviet films.44

The frankness with which Berti addressed his Soviet interlocutors is striking, both when stressing the qualitative gap between the avant-­garde filmmakers and the subsequent production of the USSR, and when comparing the latter with the Italian neorealist films. Such freedom of expression on the part of a senior communist leader can also be explained by the party’s position, as the Cominform had yet to be established (this happened at the end of September 1947). This brought about a rigid alignment of the communist parties with the Kremlin, which in Italy reflected a ‘fideistic attitude’45 that the PCI was supposed to have towards what came from the USSR, as stated in 1949 by Emilio Sereni, head of the party’s cultural commission and one of the main contributors to its ideological compactness and organisation until 1956.46 Several communist film critics also expressed their disappointment. Writing to VOKS in 1947, Ugo Casiraghi and Glauco Viazzi identified the lack of cooperation between the parties as the main reason for the films’ weak appeal: We believe that mistakes were made both by the people running our import offices and your direct agents, who were not sufficiently informed about the condition of our market. We have analysed this complex problem in our specialized publications, and we sincerely hope that our articles have been taken into consideration by your managers for their objective data.47

These sources show how the efforts to bring Soviet films to Italy after the war could be nullified by organisational complications and by the films themselves, which were not considered to meet the expectations of the public, including the communist audience. Moreover, they show an ambiguity on the part of those close to the PCI, who, while praising the artistic and social quality of that production in the press, kept stressing the difficult relationship between Italian viewers and Soviet films in their correspondence with the Soviets.48

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Institutional sources also corroborate the difficulties in the circulation and reception of Soviet films in postwar Italy. For instance, we might mention a 1948 report for the Ministry of the Interior on the screening of Vyborgskaya storona (The Vyborg Side, Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, 1939). The screening, organised by the Italy–USSR Association during the month of Italian–Soviet friendship in Rome, showed the last act of the trilogy dedicated to the young worker Maksim. After the October revolution, Maksim is appointed People’s Commissar for Banks. With considerable effort, the leading character becomes an expert in banking techniques and fights the anti-­Bolsheviks’ attempts at financial sabotage. The story seems to adapt to a specific case the notes expressed in the above-­mentioned sources: The film is so heavy, harsh and truculent; the settings and people so vulgar and repugnant, the Italian dialogue so faltering and imperfect, the scenes so hateful that it certainly must have produced a feeling of disappointment for those who imagined some glorification of the Soviet paradise. Admittedly, after the film’s screening, many people left the theatre feeling less enthusiastic communists or more anti-­communists than before. The screening left the audience very cold, even though it was mainly composed of militant communists, and they were all eager to take advantage of any opportunity to express their Marxist faith.49

Moreover, in 1951, in a letter addressed to the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, the Italian ambassador in Moscow, Manlio Brosio, explicitly stated that it would be better not to limit the circulation of Soviet films in Italy, as these films were not very attractive to the Italian public: From a political standpoint, I see no risks in allowing Soviet films in Italy. There are two reasons for this: 1) communist propaganda is already carried out in Italy by the PCI and a few more films will certainly not change the situation; 2) essentially, Soviet films are lousy, heavy and often their psychology is so inappropriate for our audience that their effect, to my mind, will be rather counterproductive.50

The various testimonies reported in this chapter question the role of Soviet films as an effective tool to gain consensus and influence in the postwar period and at the beginning of the so-­called cultural and cinematographic Cold War. Apparently, the Soviet cinema circulating in Italy at that time disappointed both the viewers and the critics, the latter remaining attached to the outdated image of avant-­garde production. However, this was an audience with a high level of film culture, as confirmed by the data on postwar cinema attendance: after the British, Italian viewers ranked as the most cinephile in Europe, with an average of twenty-­four visits per year51 and a cinema attendance twice as high as that of the French and Spanish and one and a half times higher than that of Germany.52



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Conclusions: An Impossible Film Hegemony Very few Soviet films reached Italy after the Second World War, mainly because the Kremlin seemed to repudiate Lenin’s (posthumous) slogan on cinema as ‘the most important of the arts’. Such a choice of cinematographic foreign policy resulted in the USSR playing a minor role in Western European societies through film. In the new postwar context, the USSR did not recognise the importance of being a global superpower and having an adequate film position and strategy. The impossible political hegemony exercised by Moscow in the old continent resulted in an equally impossible cinematic hegemony.53 The insufficient number of films was accompanied by a series of problems, of which government censorship was not the most important. Although censorship worked to protect the internal interests of the Christian Democratic Party-­ led government and reaffirm Italy’s belonging to the Western bloc, this work was far from systematic, except in 1953. The film distribution mechanisms suffered many difficulties, including the sudden passage from a commercial distribution system to a less ambitious cultural one linked to non-­professional bodies close to the Italian Communist Party. The latter, moreover, did not always act in harmony with the Soviet agencies, which put their Italian counterparts in no better conditions for optimal use of the products. However, while more extensive research on their reception remains to be done, the fundamental problem seemed to be the weak attraction of the films themselves, which were unable to appeal to an audience that revealed itself to be distant from them cinematically, even when it was close ideologically. Stefano Pisu is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Cagliari. Previously an International Fellow at Oxford University’s Research Center in the Humanities, his work considers the history of international cultural relations through cinema. His publications include Il XX secolo sul red carpet: Politica, economia e cultura nei festival internazionali del cinema, 1932–1976 (Franco Angeli, 2016) and La cortina di celluloide: Il cinema italo-sovietico nella Guerra Fredda (Mimesis, 2019).

Notes   1. Pisu, ‘Per una storia veneziana del cinema sovietico’.   2. Shaw and Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War.   3. For a reinterpretation of the concept of the cultural Cold War, see Pisu, ‘Reframing the Cultural Cold War’. On the relations among ‘high’, popular and mass culture in

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Italy during the Cold War from the Italian Communist Party’s perspective, see Gundle, I comunisti italiani fra Hollywood e Mosca.  4. See www.italiataglia.it (accessed 3 June 2024). For reasons of space, I will limit my citation of sources from the site to transcribing in italics the title of the Italian version of the film given in the database, thereby avoiding repeating the name of the site each time. The database was consulted in September–October 2020.   5. Associazione Italia-­Russia Lombardia (Italy-­USSR Lombardy Association), Historical Archive, Italy-­USSR Fund (AIRL, AS, FIU). I would like to thank Mrs Annalisa Seoni for her support during my research.   6. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv rossiiskoi federacii.  7. For the 1946–1953 period, the historiography mentions between 124 full-­length films (recorded by Kenez, ‘Le cinéma soviétique sous Staline (1928–1953)’, 28) and 172 films, indicated by Eisenschitz, Gels et dégels, 195–203.   8. Knight, ‘Nelli Morozova on Censors, Censorship and the Soviet Film Famine, 1948– 52’, 704–30.  9. Laurent, L’OEil du Kremlin, 232. 10. Pisu, Stalin a Venezia, 202–203. 11. RGASPI (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv socialno-­politicheskoi istorii), 17/125/639/​ 35–55. 12. Soviet film export agency. 13. On the re-­ establishment of relations between the two governments and the role played by the PCI, see Aga-­Rossi and Zaslavsky, Togliatti e Stalin, and Pons, L’impossibile egemonia. 14. Baldi, Schermi proibiti, 19–20. 15. For more details on film censorship in postwar Italy, see Brunetta, Il cinema neorealista italiano, 88. 16. On police repression of communists during Scelba’s ministerial term, see Gozzini and Martinelli, Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano, 74. 17. Polito to the Police Chief, Associazione culturale italo-sovietica, Rome, 31 July 1948, ACS, Ministry of the Interior, Public Safety, G/100/21, b.143. 18. Brunetta, Il cinema neorealista italiano, 88–89. 19. Ibid., 390. 20. See Nicoli, ‘Making Caccia Tragica’, 45. 21. The publications of the Italian General Association of the Performing Arts do not cover the postwar period and contain little information related to the early 1950s. 22. FL: Full-­length; ML: Medium-­length 23. The Vow. 24. The Russian Question. 25. Victory of the Chinese People. 26. The New China. 27. Moscow Dinamo Stadium. 28. The Turning Point. 29. The Fall of Berlin; The Knight of the Golden Star; Modern Kolkhoz. 30. Antarctic Whaling; Cossacks of the Kuban. 31. Aleksandr Nevsky. 32. AIRL, AS, FIU, 1950_128, Rossanda to Berti, 10 January 1950. 33. Ibid., 1947_32, 23 February 1947. 34. Ibid., 1948_45c, September 1948.



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35. Ibid., 1948_45f–45h. 36. Ibid., 1948_45g. 37. Ibid., 1949_121c, 5 February 1949. 38. Ibid., 1949_122e, 26 February 1949. 39. Ibid., 1948_65d. 40. Ibid., 1953_216b, December 1953. 41. Ibid. 42. GARF, 5283/16/218/131-­2. 43. Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City, Roberto Rossellini, 1945); Paisà (Paisan, Roberto Rossellini, 1946); Il sole sorge ancora (Outcry, Aldo Vergano, 1946); Caccia tragica (Tragic Hunt, Giuseppe De Santis, 1947). 44. GARF 5283/16/218/305. 45. Vittoria, Storia del PCI 1921–1991, 74–75; Gundle, I comunisti italiani fra Hollywood e Mosca, 118–19. 46. On the cultural activities of the PCI after 1948, see Gundle, I comunisti italiani fra Hollywood e Mosca, 117 ff. 47. GARF, 5283/16/232/314. 48. See for example the praising articles by Umberto Barbaro in the communist newspaper l’Unità about the screening of Soviet films at the 1946 Venice Film Festival: Barbaro, ‘Ciapaev’; Barbaro, ‘Ancora un bel film sovietico’; Barbaro, ‘Forza, fate del cinema’. 49. ACS, MI, PS, G/100/21, b. 143, Tallarigo to the Ministry of the Interior, Appunto Argomento: Attività dell’Associazione Italia-URSS, 16 November 1948. 50. Ibid. Presidency of the Council of Ministries, 1955–1958, b. 3-­2-12, f. 32845, Brosio at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 22/1/1951, Pellicole italiane nell’URSS e sovietiche in Italia. 51. Giannelli, Cinema europeo, 78. 52. Vincendeau, Enciclopedia of European Cinema, 466–67. 53. Pons, L’impossibile egemonia.

Bibliography Aga-Rossi, Elena and Viktor Zaslavsky. Togliatti e Stalin: Il PCI e la politica estera staliniana negli archivi di Mosca. Bologna: il Mulino, 2007. Baldi, Alfredo. Schermi proibiti: La censura in Italia. 1947–1988. Venice: Marsilio, 2002. Barbaro, Umberto. ‘Ciapaev: pietra miliare del cinema sovietico’. l’Unità (3  September 1946), 17. ———. ‘Ancora un bel film sovietico’. l’Unità (14 September 1946), 18. ———. ‘Forza, fate del cinema’. l’Unità (18 September 1946), 16. Brunetta, Gian Piero. Il cinema neorealista italiano: Storia economica, politica e culturale. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2009. Eisenschitz, Bernard (ed.). Gels et dégels: Une autre histoire du cinéma soviétique. 1926– 1968. Paris and Milan: Centre Pompidou-Mazzotta, 2002. Giannelli, Enrico. Cinema europeo. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1953.

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Gozzini, Giovanni and Renzo Martinelli. Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano, VII, Dall’Attentato a Togliatti all’VIII Congresso. Turin: Einaudi, 1998. Gundle, Stephen. I comunisti italiani fra Hollywood e Mosca: La sfida della cultura di massa. Florence: Giunti, 1995. Kenez, Peter. ‘Le cinéma soviétique sous Staline (1928–1953)’, in Kristian Feigelson (ed.), Caméra politique: Cinéma et Stalinisme (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2005), 19–34. Knight, Claire. ‘Nelli Morozova on Censors, Censorship and the Soviet Film Famine, 1948– 52’. The Slavonic and East European Review 96(4) (2018), 704–30. Laurent, Natacha. L’Œil du Kremlin: Cinéma et censure en Urss sous Staline (1928–1953). Toulouse: Edition Privat, 2000. Nicoli, Marina. ‘Making Caccia Tragica: Giorgio Agliani, Giuseppe De Santis and the Italian Resistance’. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 40(1) (2020), 29–54. Pisu, Stefano. Stalin a Venezia: L’Urss alla Mostra del cinema fra diplomazia culturale e scontro ideologico (1932–1953). Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2013. ———. ‘Per una storia veneziana del cinema sovietico: l’Urss e la Mostra (1932–1977)’, in Olga Strada and Claudia Olivieri (eds), Italia-Russia: Un secolo di cinema (Moscow: Italian Embassy in Moscow, 2020), 216–29. ——— (ed.). ‘Reframing the Cultural Cold War: 20 Years after Stonor Saunders’ Case’. Contemporanea 23(3) (2020), 433–75. Pons, Silvio. L’impossibile egemonia: L’Urss, il Pci e le origini della guerra fredda (1943– 1948). Rome: Carocci, 1999. Shaw, Tony and Denise Youngblood. Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010. Vincendeau, Ginette (ed.). Enciclopedia of European Cinema. London: B.F.I., 1995. Vittoria, Albertina. Storia del PCI 1921–1991. Rome: Carocci, 2006.

CHAPTER 5

Soviet Cinematic Diplomacy from New York to Beijing, 1949 Sergei Gerasimov and His Documentary Films Marsha Siefert

In March 1949 seven Soviet representatives arrived in New York City to attend a conference for world peace and in October another Soviet cultural delegation visited Beijing to celebrate the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. This chapter will look at these two visits through the lens of filmmaker Sergei Gerasimov, who was a member of both delegations and made films after both occasions. In 1948 Gerasimov had completed the film version of Molodaia gvardiia (The Young Guard, Sergei Gerasimov, 1948), a factually inspired, fictional paean to the role and effectiveness of communist youth at war. Gerasimov set off for the New York peace conference with his film, only to discover that no one was interested. Not so in Beijing six months later, where Gerasimov’s film was viewed not only as a triumph but as a model, with numerous screenings and homage by Chinese film directors seeking to portray their own achievements. The stories of Gerasimov’s documentary films, Mir pobedit voinu (Peace Will Defeat War, Sergei Gerasimov, 1949) and Osvobozhdennyi Kitai (Liberated China/The New China, Sergei Gerasimov and Eduard Volk, 1950), elucidate Soviet efforts to cinematically address two of the most populous countries – when one was the most antagonistic and the other the most receptive – as foundational moments in the early Cold War. Building from press and archival documents, this chapter will discuss how these films aimed to recalibrate and reinvigorate Soviet Cold War discourse through cinematic export, co-­production, and documentary.

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Gerasimov and The Young Guard This narrative centers on Sergei Apollinarievich Gerasimov – actor, filmmaker, teacher, ‘peace delegate.’ After playing villains in silent films of the 1920s and 1930s,1 by 1939 Gerasimov had directed three films about socialist youth: Semero smelykh (Seven Brave Men, 1936), Komsomolsk (City of Youth, 1938), and Uchitel (The New Teacher, 1939). After the German attack on the Soviet Union, Gerasimov became part of the cinematic war effort. In 1944 he joined the Communist Party and was appointed head of the renamed Central Studio for Documentary Film, filming the ‘big three’ allied conferences at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945. In the uncertain postwar years, Gerasimov returned to his earlier métier of feature film. His choice was conservative – adapting Alexander Fadeyev’s prize-­winning 1945 novel Molodaia gvardiia (The Young Guard) about a wartime Komsomol resistance group in Krasnodon. Following a stage production with his film students at VGIK,2 Gerasimov took his class/cast on location, where they lived with families of the ‘young guard’3 in preparation for a filmed version. Despite its literary pedigree, the film’s first part was criticised by the authorities for not sufficiently emphasising the Communist Party’s role.4 Inaccuracies were also alleged by the very citizens of Krasnodon with whom the young actors lodged.5 These criticisms also rebounded on Fadeyev’s novel, requiring a revision in 1951, long after its cinematic version premiered in 1948 to a huge audience: 42.4 million viewers of part one and 36.7 million of part two.6 The Young Guard, both novel and film, was emblematic of Soviet machinations surrounding the search for an exemplary postwar narrative about the Great Patriotic War. What brought the film to American attention, however, was the composer of its musical score  – Dmitri Shostakovich. During the February 1948 purge of ‘anti-­ Soviet tendencies’ among musicians, Shostakovich was singled out for ‘formalism,’ his works were proscribed for performance and he was dismissed from the Moscow and Leningrad conservatories.7 His film score for The Young Guard was written to fulfill his pledge that ‘melody would become the driving impulse behind his new compositions, melody infused by the national ethos.’8 Yet, according to an anecdote circulating among the Soviet intelligentsia and picked up by Time Magazine, Shostakovich was ‘cramped in his doghouse’, unable even to obtain a ticket to see the film.9 Thus, when Gerasimov, Fadeyev, and Shostakovich embarked for New York in March 1949, The Young Guard had already brought them together.10



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Gerasimov Goes to New York: March 1949 The Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, or ‘Waldorf Conference,’ was widely seen by American commentators as a Soviet ploy, its theme of peace a ‘communist tactic.’11 Sponsored by the National Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions,12 the Waldorf Conference represents, in the words of playwright Arthur Miller, a ‘hairpin curve’ in the Cold War struggle. Its mainstream publicity played a pivotal role in hardening anti-­communism on the American left. English-­language accounts stress how the response of New York intellectuals fuelled the formation of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, a CIA-­financed organisation that coordinated ‘a global program of festivals, seminars and magazine-­publishing, all explicitly or implicitly celebrating the cultural life of the western democracies and protesting the regimentation of the intellect under Communism.’13 At the Waldorf Conference, all eyes were on Dmitri Shostakovich.14 But all ears were prepared for Alexander Fadeyev, Secretary of the Soviet Writers Union and chief speechmaker for the nascent Soviet peace movement. His talk some months earlier at Wrocław’s Congress of Intellectuals for Peace epitomised two-­camp rhetoric, labelling American writers as typing ‘jackals’ and pen-­pushing ‘hyenas,’ among other choice epithets.15 His invective warmed up opposition from American literary figures who had already agreed to speak at the conference.16 Fadeyev’s Waldorf address, by some accounts more subdued, nonetheless provoked US critic Dwight Macdonald who, in his colourful account of the conference, calls Fadeyev ‘Stalin’s No. 1 bureaucrat’; he ‘looked more like a plain-­clothes detective than a writer.’17 The other delegates were rarely mentioned in the US press.18 A second filmmaker, Mikhail Chiaureli, director of Klyatva (The Vow, 1946), was accompanied by the author and scriptwriter Pyotr Pavlenko. In contrast to postwar Soviet films depicting complicated Soviet-­American relations, such as Mikhail Romm’s adaptation of Konstantin Simonov’s play, Russkii vopros (The Russian Question, 1948) and Vstrecha na Elbe (Encounter at the Elbe, Grigory Aleksandrov, 1949) released the week before the Waldorf conference, The Vow idealised wartime Stalin. The film’s composer was, of course, Shostakovich. Thus, it comes as little surprise that in conference press coverage, Gerasimov was either not identified, cut from the photo, or misidentified as the artist Aleksandr Gerasimov. Even the Committee on Un-­American Activities of the US House of Representatives conflated him as ‘Sergei A. Gerasimov, president of the Soviet Academy of Art, and chief purger of Soviet films.’19 The title of his conference speech, ‘The Film as a Means to Promote Mutual Understanding,’ encapsulated Gerasimov’s approach to the peace theme. He spoke admiringly of those American directors – Milestone and Wyler, as well

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as blacklisted screenwriters Trumbo and Lawson – whose films depict ‘everyday problems of modern society a­ nd . . . ­the life of ordinary people,’ recognising their striving ‘in the face of set commercial traditions of the movie companies.’ He contrasted their films to those commercial films he disliked: ‘You all know the movies in which people get killed like ­flies . . . ­t he decisive argument is the fist, firearms, shooting, murder and death. The victor triumphs, he gains the right to happiness, though this is only until he is followed by someone stronger, who no longer depends on a revolver or a gun, but on a bomb.’ Gerasimov accepted the accusation that the Soviets were propagandists. ‘We are not ashamed of this name, since, the ideas we are fighting for, with all our artistry, are: freedom, democracy, national independence, respect for human dignity and for human life itself; ideas affirming the common welfare and affirming peace throughout the world.’20 Upon his return from New York, Gerasimov wrote bitterly on his ‘12 Days in America’ for Literaturnaia gazeta.21 He had brought The Young Guard to screen for the delegates. ‘No one told us directly that this was impossible,’ he wrote. ‘Everyone smiled kindly and vaguely explained numerous reasons why the films could not be shown just then. As a result, the film lay in the Customs shed up to the moment of our departure.’22 He also complained about the political use of the camera, which seemed ‘a curious (and often malicious) desire to interpret our every gesture allegorically.’ When he arrived in New York and climbed down the steps of the aircraft, Gerasimov gave Shostakovich his hand, ‘for a second, in letting him pass’. A photograph appeared in the newspapers with the following inscription: ‘Shostakovich arrives on American soil. A Soviet guard specially attached to him, whose name is unknown, holds him firmly by the hand.’23 Gerasimov was shocked by New York. Was it possible to live in such a city, he asked? ‘Evidently not,’ he answered, ‘for the inhabitants of Manhattan themselves, as soon as they have finished their working day, rush to leave it and tear headlong to the suburbs.’ Most disturbing, he observed that ‘a woman’s naked body has become the symbol of American commerce, like a national ­trademark . . . ­And it is very strange and unpleasant to see American women, who are mostly tired, careworn, and very often badly dressed, walk calmly past this cascade of the most impudent colored pornography.’24 These images  – violence, rushing, half-­naked women, advertising – dominate the opening of his documentary completed just a few months later – Peace Will Defeat War.

Peace Will Defeat War: The Film Gerasimov returned to the USSR and his teaching duties, soon to be enlisted to produce a documentary on the Soviet peace movement. The resulting



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film, Peace Will Defeat War, was not released outside the USSR, but was screened all over the Soviet Union in October and November 1949. The film represents an attempt to improve Soviet propaganda efforts in those tense days of heavy ‘warmongering’ rhetoric by developing a peace message that was only beginning to be refined. The script was debated at the Central Documentary Film Studio: ‘The script plan correctly includes all the stages of the fight for peace. We only have a doubt about the necessity of such an expansive showing of the life of the working people in capitalist countries.’ In a second memo to the Minister of Cinematography, this point is reinforced; this ‘foreign material’ should not take up more than ten minutes.25 The chief editor also asked that women’s role in the peace struggle be strengthened with footage from the most recent conference of the Women’s International Democratic Federation.26 Given the pressure of assembling the film, experienced documentarians Elizaveta Svilova and Samuil Bubrik were brought on board as co-­directors. The novelist Nikolai Tikhonov27 was invited to write the narration, but the studio editor E.M. Maryamov had to complete the text. War reporter Konstantin Simonov was asked to write lyrics for two songs, one devoted to the Soviet Union and the other about the struggle for peace.28 Shostakovich was asked to write the musical score. As of 7 September 1949, both were late, as was the film footage from regional studios, like Minsk, Baku, Alma-­Ata and Saratov. Even worse was getting foreign footage from Sovexportfilm.29 Thus it is remarkable that the film was submitted to the Ministry of Cinematography less than three weeks later. After viewing by the officials of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Central Committee, the film was edited to four parts (about forty minutes) by cutting conference speeches and shots of the USSR.30 In its first segment, the resulting film condemns ‘the warmongers,’ opening with ten-­twelve minutes of anti-­American, anti-­Western narrative, featuring shots of hungry people (‘America is feeding the Europeans horse meat’) and decadent Hollywood films (‘of vampires, killers, and madmen’) being shown in divided Berlin. The second, third, and fourth segments use footage from peace rallies in China, Poland and France, leading up to the All-­Union Conference of Peace Supporters held in Moscow in late August 1949. The second segment shows Shostakovich playing the piano at home and Tikhonov at the lectern speaking about peace. Two close-­ups of Stalin are included, one on the Mausoleum in Red Square, being greeted by cheering demonstrators, and ending with another rally featuring a Stalin portrait and the slogan, ‘Let’s collect all of our strength to fight for a stable peace and the safety of peoples.’31 The film was approved by the Cinema Ministry on 26  September 1949 and released on 1 October. Reviews were published in cities from Irkutsk and

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Khabarovsk to Pyatigorsk, Ufa, and Taganrog, many reprinted from Moscow and Leningrad newspapers. They repeat the two-­camp theme, contrasting the ‘foreign footage’ with the visions of working people from all walks of life, emphasising conference attendees and members from the people’s democracies. Almost all reviews ended with the title of the film, ‘peace will defeat war.’32 When seen by the committee planning the next peace conference, however, Fadeyev, as its head, asked for a more suitable version for potential export. As Fadeyev’s 9 December memo asserted: The Preparatory Committee for the Convocation of the All-­Union Peace Supporters ­Conference . . . ­considers it appropriate to release a large feature film on this topic. In five-­six parts, and not in three-­four parts [as was Peace Will Defeat War] since it is more than the usual documentary chronicle and cannot be shown before the usual movie session and is too small to go on its own.33

The shooting instructions echoed the approach taken in the contemporaneous Soviet documentary, Den pobedivshei strany (A Day in the Victorious Country, Ilya Kopalin and Irina Setkina, 1947): ‘In the coming days, numerous filming reflecting today’s peaceful work of the Conference delegates  – the best workers of the production, heroes of the socialist fields, scientists, and culture – should be conducted in different parts of the Soviet Union.’ The goal was to use the new film for foreign propaganda: ‘The film should acquaint wide circles of foreign viewers with the great role of the Soviet Union in the struggle for peace, with the peaceful creative activity of the Soviet people – for this purpose the film should be dubbed into a number of foreign languages.’ In detailing the urgency for a longer version, the committee advised using both Soviet and foreign materials in the film. Members of the preparatory committee – Gerasimov, Simonov, Shostakovich, and Tikhonov – agreed to participate in the new film.34 The debate over the film script for Peace Will Defeat War, especially the number and location of anti-­American segments, reflects a larger transformation in Soviet rhetoric. As Roberts suggests, by the end of the 1940s, the struggle for peace had become ‘the handmaiden of radical change’ and the peace movement asserted that ‘war could be abolished, nor just averted’35 – that is, ‘Peace Will Defeat War.’ On 6 September 1949, Gerasimov, along with Fadeyev, Simonov, and Tikhonov (as chairman), was chosen as a member of the presidium of the Peace Committee elected at the All-­Soviet Congress of Peace Supporters he had just filmed.36



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Gerasimov Goes to China: October 1949 On the very day that Peace Will Defeat War was approved for release throughout the USSR, Fadeyev and Gerasimov, along with Konstantin Simonov, were present in Beijing as members of the Soviet delegation dispatched from Moscow to witness the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949. They were not the first to visit the ‘new China.’ Soviet engineers and skilled workers had already arrived in 1948, with experts requested by Mao in June 1949.37 Early in 1949, at the request of the Council of Ministers, the Minister of Cinematography had informed the Central Committee that two feature films and one documentary on China were planned. Gerasimov was one of the directors who agreed, but it was Ilya Kopalin who was sent in February 1949; he was recalled in March due to events on the ground.38 Thus, the Chinese authorities had anticipated the Soviet cultural delegation and their presence to celebrate the new Republic. During the month-­long visit, which included several Chinese cities, delegates made about forty-­five speeches, visited innumerable cultural institutions, and participated in the work of the All-­China Congress of Peace Supporters.39 These efforts were fundamental to the cultural communication beyond high politics that this socialist friendship was to represent.40 Members of the October 1949 delegation were already known in China. Fadeyev’s revolutionary novel, Razgrom (The Rout, 1927), had already been translated into Chinese in 1930, and a Chinese translation of The Young Guard was given to Fadeyev as a gift.41 An early laudatory anecdote stated that Simonov’s Dni i nochi (Days and Nights, 1944) on the battle of Stalingrad was given to soldiers ‘in lieu of instructions.’42 Along with literature, film was one of the most valued artistic products. By the end of 1948, Soviet films were integrated into the Chinese educational system through the Sovexportfilm offices in Manchuria and in 1949 a new agreement was made for their distribution. Gerasimov was known in China through The Young Guard.43 Additionally, travelling with his wife, the actress Tamara Makarova who starred in The Young Guard, they performed a theatrical version in Beijing. The Soviet delegation sent to China wrote back to Moscow in detail about all they saw and learned. Fadeyev wrote an impassioned piece in Pravda about Soviet-­Chinese cooperation in all the arts.44 Simonov published a series of dispatches in Pravda during the first week of January 1950, as he followed the still-­fighting army into the south. He spoke to a Beijing press conference on behalf of the Soviet cultural delegation before their departure from China just a month later, emphasising the twenty-­five years of friendship and increased Chinese interest in Soviet cultural achievements. Confirming the interest of the Soviet people in China’s cultural achievements as well, ‘the members of the delegation will consider it their duty to report on all they have seen in China to the people of the Soviet Union.’45

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But it was Gerasimov who took on the very large task of coordinating the filming efforts and diplomatic negotiations on the project, with his work spanning fourteen months. In his account of his trip,46 Gerasimov stressed that the film was ‘conceived as a joint effort of Soviet and Chinese cultural workers.’ ‘Assisting’ the Soviet filmmakers, the Central Committee of the Communist Chinese Party appointed consultants for the group, include the commanding and political staff of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The scenario was prepared with their collaboration. Gerasimov stated that the group worked without a definite plan, filming everything that seemed important, especially the festivities. He described how portraits of Lenin and Stalin were carried side by side with those of ‘Mao Tse-­tung and Chu T ­ eh . . . ­t hrough the streets and squares of their towns and villages.’ The filmed version of the inauguration ceremony on Tiananmen Square documented not only the parades and local audiences, but also ‘scripted interactions’ between the leaders.47 Throughout, a Chinese cameraman attested that the Chinese crew – translators, producers, and cinematographers – were ready to help the visitors.48

Liberated China: The Film The fact that Liberated China was conceived and executed as a co-­production is essential to understanding the efficacy of the film in establishing a basis for Sino-­Soviet cultural cooperation. Co-­production was an important technique of Soviet cinematic internationalism;49 twenty-­one of the twenty-­four films the Soviet Cultural Ministry classified as co-­productions for 1942–1954 were documentaries.50 Co-­productions did not necessarily have to be co-­directed or even co-­financed; what mattered was that the film exemplified the relationship in the script as well as production. In Liberated China, the Soviet filmmakers took the lead while listing three cameramen from Beijing State Film Studio and Chinese consultants in the film credits.51 One visible technique of co-­production is the mirroring of symbols and images, here as a demonstration of ‘friendship’ between the USSR and the PRC. Similar banners feature Cyrillic and Chinese characters, plaques in both languages represent the embassy, shots of equal length show Zhou Enlai and Andrei Vyshinsky signing the Friendship Treaty, and photos of both leaders are spliced into the treaty-­signing scene. The film ends with a tableau: crowds viewing a pagoda sheltering portraits of Mao and Stalin framing an image of Picasso’s peace dove. Although Gerasimov devoted much of his film to agrarian reform, its preparation and implementation, Chinese soldiers are described in glowing terms. Predictably a factory meeting and China’s first Heroes of Labor appear as



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signs of progress. Gerasimov commented favourably that all factory workers repeat the Party pledge with each recruit. Also, consonant with Gerasimov’s films on youth, Liberated China emphasises education and children. The footage shot by the Soviet and Chinese cinematographers was incorporated into six co-­produced films in 1950.52 The documentaries show how the studio documentary system functioned, as Liberated China used similar personnel to Peace Will Defeat War; for example, the same announcer, Leonid Khmara, and music designer, Viktor Smirnov, worked on both. Of the six films on China, the most important next to Liberated China is Pobeda kitaiskogo naroda (Victory of the Chinese People, 1950) directed by Leonid Varlamov, also a member of the Soviet delegation. The latter intentionally complements Liberated China and is notable for the participation – once again – of Simonov, who accompanied the Chinese army to the south, as scriptwriter.53 Correspondence shows that the documentary studio had clear visions of both films and asked Gerasimov to delete scenes needed by Victory.54 Gerasimov submitted four drafts of the scenario plan for Liberated China. A fuller analysis suggests that the adjustments were more than negotiations between the visions of Gerasimov and the studio, but also concerned working out how Stalin and the USSR were to be represented in the co-­production. For example, a memo from the Head of the Scenario-­Production Department of the film studio advised: ‘The theme of assistance and influence of the Soviet Union is being too persistently carried out both in the historical section and in the story of modern ­China . . . T ­ he arrival of the Soviet delegation in general should be deleted.’55 After showing the Chinese version to the PRC Minister of Culture and the Chinese Embassy in Moscow, more emphasis was requested on the Chinese Komsomol.56 Liberated China was shown on the PRC’s first anniversary, 1 October 1950, to government leaders in Beijing. Among the first viewers were the ‘heroes of the film,’ as almost everyone in attendance had participated. Gerasimov ended his account of that occasion with the belief that ‘the prospects of collaboration [between two great cultures and two peoples] are truly limitless.’57 China’s first Soviet Film Exhibition, based on the 1949 agreement with Sovexportfilm, originated the next month on the anniversary of the October Revolution,58 and presaged the immense circulation of Soviet films in China during this ‘friendship’ period.59 Liberated China won the 1950 Stalin Prize 1st class. The film’s Chinese version (Jiefangle de Zhongguo) used a translation of the Russian script with a Chinese-­language voice-­over narration. The film was exported to Eastern Europe as well as India, Pakistan, Mongolia, Indonesia, and Macao.60 However, the Soviet hope for Liberated China as a vehicle for the peace campaign in the West was unfulfilled when the Cannes Film Festival rejected it as propaganda.61 Soviet commentators were quick to demonstrate their displeasure,

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asserting that ‘orders from Washington’ were behind the ban.62 Gerasimov, no stranger to re-­editing, though this time to a different set of criticisms, remade the film as The New China, which fared better on the international market.

Conclusions These trips established Gerasimov as a trusted Soviet cultural intermediary. He was made a member of the Supreme Soviet (1950–1958) and of the Presidium of the Soviet Peace Committee (from 1950). His influence on Chinese cinema can be seen in the film, Mínzhǔ qīngnián yóuxíng (The March of Democratic Youth, Wang Yi, 1950). The film, based on the events of 27  May 1947, when Beijing students protested pro-­American rule, used ‘authentic material in order to better depict the historical events, the environment, the characters.’63 Gerasimov’s writing on cinema was translated for the Chinese film journal Film Art in Translation (Dianying yishu yicong); his claim that film scripts should be considered a literary art form was quoted approvingly.64 Gerasimov returned to the US three more times, next in 1959, the same year that Shostakovich visited both the US and the PRC. Even his films fared better than they had during his March 1949 visit: in late 1949 The Young Guard was advertised as a Christmas holiday film and in 1952 New China was on screen, both at New York City movie theatres.65 He was also instrumental in attempts to save the first, unrealised US-­USSR co-­production and in renegotiating the Soviet-­American exchange agreement in the early 1960s.66 Fadeyev’s fate was less fortunate, ending in suicide in 1956. Overall, this story of three films and the man who directed them illustrates the role of trusted socialist intermediaries in the way in which the USSR hoped to improve its cultural diplomacy during the early Cold War. Liberated China may have liberated the Soviet propaganda campaign for peace, by providing an undeniable triumph of Marxism-­Leninism in the new China. This positive message could be used for export – both to the West who had ‘lost China’ and to the rest of Asia and the developing world. While anti-­Americanism did not fully disappear from Soviet propaganda, the cinematic peace message built upon earlier Soviet international success in documentary cinema. By visually incorporating China into the modernising, Vertovian visions of the 1930s, and by drawing on Soviet documentary film practices of studio-­ coordinated labour, Liberated China affirms the achievements of socialism against a background of respect for Chinese culture and people. The continuity in these Soviet delegations during late Stalinism and the strengthening of filmmakers as ‘unofficial ambassadors’ marks a way forward



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that extends and complicates during the unfolding of the cultural Cold War and enlarges the description of its participants. By focusing on one filmmaker and one year, this chapter illuminates a pivotal moment in the evolution of Soviet cinematic diplomacy.

Acknowledgements The author thanks Yanina Karpenkina, Yana Kitaeva, Yulia Karpova, Aleksandra Maslova, and Mariia Zimina for archival assistance, Sergey Dobrynin for linguistic expertise, and Stefano Pisu for his collegiality. Marsha Siefert is Associate Professor of History, Central European University. She specialises in cultural and communications history, media industries and public diplomacy, from the nineteenth century to the Cold War. She has edited six books, most recently Labor in State-Socialist Europe, 1945–1989 (2020). Her research is published in Cold War Cultures (2012), Divided Dreamworlds (2012), Cold War Crossings (2014), Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War (2016), Music and Democracy (2021), and Frames of Reconstruction: Nonfiction Cinema, Transnational Visual Culture and Public Space in Postwar Europe (2024). She co-­edits the book series Historical Studies of Eastern Europe and Eurasia (CEU Press).

Notes   1. Noussinova, ‘Sergei Gerasimov’.   2. Sputnitskaia, ‘Youth Comedy vs. Social Drama’.  3. Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation, 137–66.   4. Gerasimov, ‘Beseda rezhissera so stsenaristom’.  5. Youngblood, Russian War Films, 90, 93–95; Hutchings, ‘Ada/opting the Son’.  6. Youngblood, Russian War Films, 93.   7. On the Central Committee Resolution of 10 February 1948, see Fay, Shostakovich, 156–65.   8. Ibid., 160–62.   9. ‘Music: Shostakovich Reads the Papers’, Time (25 October 1948). 10. Kazyuchits, ‘Sergei Gerasimov’s The Young Guard’. 11. Goedde, Politics of Peace, 20, 43. 12. For interpretations of the conference origins see Deery, ‘Shostakovich’, fn.7. The ‘driving force’ of the National Council was ‘the left-­leaning but non-­Communist Harvard University astronomer, Harlow Shapely’ (ibid., 163). 13. Wilford, ‘An Oasis’, 222–23.

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14. The VOKS Management Board Chair recounted that Harlow Shapley believed that Shostakovich concerts would popularise the conference. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii [GARF], 5283/22/136/108. 15. Feinberg, Curtain of Lies, 35. 16. On 14 December 1948, at a New York reception given for the National Council on Soviet-­American Friendship and other ‘progressive figures’, Jessica Smith, Friendship Council board member, told Soviet representatives that the National Council of Arts, Sciences, and Professions would like to invite Shostakovich and the author Mikhail Sholokhov instead of Fadeyev because of Fadeyev’s sharp speech. From the diary of First Secretary S.R. Striganov, USSR Embassy. GARF, 5283/22/136/23-­24. 17. Discussing the Young Guard, Macdonald states: ‘Fadayev may not have finished revising his novel, but he and Shostakovich did collaborate on a movie from it which conformed to the Politburo’s “suggestions”.’ Macdonald, ‘The Waldorf Conference’, 32. 18. The other two delegates were Aleksander Oparin, biologist and academician, and the interpreter and secretary, Ivan Rozhansky. In a letter to VOKS, the American conference organisers specifically requested a prominent Soviet biologist, as well as representatives of Soviet women and the Russian Orthodox Church. VOKS proposed to send soloists from the USSR folk dance group. GARF, 5283/22/136/32, 33. 19. Committee on Un-­American Activities, 14. 20. Gerasimov, ‘The Film as a Means,’ 100, 101. 21. Gerasimov adapted his account in his speech to the VOKS theatrical and film sections about his trip on 12 April 1949. While he offered similar critical remarks about the US, he repeatedly referred to the ovations given to all Soviet speeches, including his. He reaffirms American interest in Shostakovich: ‘In America they repeated that the bones of Shostakovich were rotting in Siberia. The appearance of a living Shostakovich made a double impression.’ Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva [RGALI], 3055/1/278/11. 22. Gerasimov, ‘Twelve Days in America’, 4. For Soviet press titles in English, I use the translation from Current Digest of the Soviet/Russian Press. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. RGALI, 2456/2/137/2-­ 3; 25–26. The Studio’s suggested excerpt from Comrade Molotov’s speech was rejected by the USSR Ministry of Cinematography as ‘overload.’ 26. Ibid., 2–3. 27. Tikhonov was named chair of the Soviet Writers Union in 1944, but Stalin dismissed him in 1946 for his tolerance of poets like Akhmatova. In 1949 he was proposed for the Waldorf conference. GARF 5283/22/136/33. 28. Simonov visited the US with Ilya Ehrenburg (February-­May 1946), where ‘they all put up at the Waldorf.’ Magnúsdóttir, Enemy Number One, 64–69; Anonymous, New Yorker, 13. 29. RGALI, 2487/1/407/25. 30. RGALI, 2456/2/137/29. 31. https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc44278. This copy is from the US National Archives and Records Administration series, Motion Picture Films from G-­2 Army Military Intelligence Division. Only the first two segments are available (accessed 26 August 2024). 32. RGALI, 2689/1/140.



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33. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no i politicheskoi istorii [RGASPI], 17/137/27/42-­43. See also Dobrenko, ‘Conspiracy of Peace’, 154. 34. RGASPI, 17/137/27/42-­43. 35. Roberts, ‘Averting Armageddon’, 322; Johnston, ‘Peace or Pacifism?’ 36. Anonymous, ‘In the Soviet Peace Committee’, 2. Tikhonov served as head of the Soviet Peace Committee for thirty years. 37. Kaple, ‘Soviet and Chinese Comrades’, 48. 38. Vershenko, ‘Rezhisser-­dokumentalist’. 39. GARF, 5283/18/89/1-­2, 5–6. 40. Volland, ‘Translating the Socialist State’. 41. GARF, 5283/18/88/27. 42. Gamsa, The Reading of Russian Literature in China, 77, 108–13. 43. Chen, ‘Socialist Geographies’, 77, 81. 44. Fadeev, ‘V svobodnom Kitae’. 45. Simonov, ‘A Great Friendship’, 4. 46. Gerasimov, ‘Film Story of Liberated China’, 22–24. 47. Ibid., 22; Johnson, ‘State Filmmaking’. 48. Fang, interview with Wu Benli. 49. Siefert, ‘Soviet Cinematic Internationalism’; idem, ‘Co-­Producing Cold War Culture’. 50. VGIK, Kabinet istorii otechestvennogo kino [Laboratory for the History of Domestic Cinema], inventory no. 13472, Appendix 3. Moscow: USSR Ministry of Culture, 1955. 51. The co-­production strategy mattered. Compare the Chinese response to the 1949 Bolshoi adaptation of their 1927 ballet on a Chinese revolutionary theme, The Red Poppy, to celebrate Sino-­Soviet friendship. On his February 1950 visit to Moscow, Chairman Mao declined to attend, and his associate protested the ballet or ‘degrading the Chinese’. Tyerman, ‘Resignifying “The Red Poppy”’, 446. 52. VGIK, Appendix 3. 53. Simonov, Srazhaiushchiisia Kitai; Qian, ‘Crossing the Same River Twice’. 54. E.g. RGALI, 2456/2/146/29. 55. Ibid., 72. Memo dated 28 June 1950. 56. Ibid., 93. 57. Gerasimov, ‘Film Story’, 24. 58. Ma, ‘A Genealogy of Film Festivals’. 59. Chen, ‘Socialist Geographies’; idem, ‘International Film Circuits’, 152, fn.4. 60. Johnson, ‘State Filmmaking’, 323; Chen, ‘International Film Circuits’, fn.7. 61. Pisu, Il XX secolo su red carpet, 142–43. 62. Anonymous, ‘Russia Protests Fete Film Ban’. 63. Yutkevich, V teatrakh i kino, 170. Yutkevich was in China filming his biopic, Przhevalsky (1952). 64. Dongshan, cited in Chan, Chinese Revolutionary Cinema, 39–40. 65. New York Times (19 December 1949), 22; New York Times (29 February 1952), 19. 66. Siefert, ‘Meeting at a Far Meridian’.

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Bibliography Anonymous. No title. New Yorker (17 August 1946), 13. ———. ‘In the Soviet Peace Committee’. Pravda (7 September 1949), 2. ——————. No title. New York Times (19 December 1949), 22. ———. ‘Russia Protests Fete Film Ban’. Pravda (21 April 1951). ———. No title. New York Times (29 February 1952), 19. Chan, Jessica Ka Yee. Chinese Revolutionary Cinema: Propaganda, Aesthetics and Internationalism 1949–1966. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Chen, Tina Mai. ‘International Film Circuits and Global Imaginaries in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–57’. Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3(2) (2009), 149–61. ———. ‘Socialist Geographies, Internationalist Temporalities, and Traveling Film Technologies: Sino-Soviet Film Exchange in the 1950s and 1960s’. Futures of Chinese Cinemas: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures (2009), 73–93. Committee on Un-American Activities U.S. House of Representatives, Washington DC, Review of Scientific and Cultural Conference arranged by the National Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions and held in New York City on March 25, 26, and 27, 1949 (Washington DC, 19 April 1949). Deery, Phillip. ‘Shostakovich, the Waldorf Conference and the Cold War’. American Communist History 11(2) (2012), 161–80. Dobrenko, Vladimir. ‘Conspiracy of Peace: The Cold War, the International Peace Movement, and the Soviet Peace Campaign, 1946–1956’. PhD diss., London School of Economics and Political Science, 2016. Fadeev, Aleksandr. ‘V svobodnom Kitae’. Pravda (15 December 1949). Fang, F., interview with Wu Benli, History of the Development of Chinese documentaries (Zhongguo Jilupian Fazhanshi) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 2004), 215 (trans. Y. Qian). Retrieved 11 November 2020 from https://maoeraobjects.ac.uk/sources/docu​ mentary-film-interview-wu-benli/. Fay, Laurel E. Shostakovich: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Feinberg, Melissa. Curtain of Lies: The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Fürst, Juliane. Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-war Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Gamsa, Mark. The Reading of Russian Literature in China. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2010. Gerasimov, Sergei. ‘Twelve Days in America’. Literaturnaia gazeta (7 May 1949), 4. ———. ‘Film Story of Liberated China’. New Times (from Trud) 50 (1950), 22–24. ———. ‘The Film as a Means to Promote Mutual Understanding,’ in Daniel S. Gillmor (ed.). Speaking of Peace: An Edited Report of the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, New York, March 25, 26, and 27, 1949 (New York: National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, 1949), 100–102. Gerasimov, S. ‘Beseda rezhissera so stsenaristom’. Iskusstvo kino 10 (1953), 61–73. Goedde, Petra. The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Hutchings, Stephen. ‘Ada/opting the Son: War and the Authentication of Power in Soviet Screen Versions of Children’s Literature’, in Stephen Hutchings and Anat Vernitskaia (eds), Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900–2001: Screening the Word (London: Routledge, 2004), 38–53.



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Johnson, Michael D. ‘State Filmmaking and International Documentary in Maoist China,’ in Socialism on Film: The Cold War and International Propaganda. Adam Matthew Digital, 2017, in http://www.socialismonfilm.amdigital.co.uk/Explore/Essays/Johnson (accessed 25 August 2023). Johnston, Timothy. ‘Peace or Pacifism? The Soviet “Struggle for Peace in All the World”, 1948–54’. Slavonic and East European Review 86(2) (2008), 259–82. Kaple, Deborah. ‘Soviet and Chinese Comrades Look Back at the Friendship Decade’. Modern China Studies 22(1) (2015), 45–69. Kazyuchits, Maksim. ‘Sergei Gerasimov’s The Young Guard: Artistic Method and the Conflict of Discourses of History and Power’. Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 13 (2) (2019), 162–71. Ma, Ran. ‘A Genealogy of Film Festivals in the People’s Republic of China: “Film Weeks” during the “Seventeen Years” (1949–1966)’. New Review of Film and Television Studies 14(1) (2016), 40–58. Macdonald, Dwight. ‘The Waldorf Conference’. Politics 6(1) (1949), 32A–32D. Magnúsdóttir, Rosa. Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945–1959. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Noussinova, Natalia. ‘Sergei Gerasimov, A Student of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS)’. Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 13(2) (2019), 139–50. Pisu, Stefano. Il XX secolo sul red carpet: politica, economia e cultura nei festival internazionali del cinema (1932–1976). Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2016. Qian, Ying. ‘Crossing the Same River Twice: Documentary Reenactment and the Founding of PRC Documentary Cinema’, in Carlos Rojas (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 590–609. Roberts, Geoffrey. ‘Averting Armageddon: The Communist Peace Movement, 1948–1956’, in Stephen A. Smith (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 322–38. Siefert, Marsha. ‘Co-Producing Cold War Culture: East-West Film-Making and Cultural Diplomacy’, in Peter Romijn, Giles Scott-Smith and Joes Segal (eds), Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War East and West (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 73–94. ———. ‘Meeting at a Far Meridian: American-Soviet Cultural Diplomacy on Film in the Early Cold War’, in Patryk Babiracki and Kenyon Zimmer (eds), Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange in the Soviet Bloc, 1940s–1960s (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 2014), 166–209. ———. ‘Soviet Cinematic Internationalism and Socialist Filmmaking, 1955–1972’, in Patryk Babiracki and Austin Jersild (eds), Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War: Exploring the Second World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 161–93. Simonov, Konstantin. ‘A Great Friendship: Speech delivered at a Peking Press conference given by the Soviet Cultural Delegation before its departure from China’. Literaturnaia gazeta (2 November 1949), 4. ———. Srazhaiushchiisia Kitai. Moscow: Soviet Writers Publishing House, 1950. Sputnitskaia, Nina. ‘Youth Comedy vs. Social Drama: The Origins of Sergei Gerasimov’s System for Training Filmmakers’. Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 13(2) (2019), 151–61. Tyerman, Edward. ‘Resignifying “The Red Poppy”: Internationalism and Symbolic Power in the Sino-Soviet Encounter’. Slavic and East European Journal 61(3) (2017), 445–66. Verchenko, Alla. ‘Rezhisser-dokumentalist I.P. Kopalin i pervaya popytka snyat’ fil’m o

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pobede kitayskogo Naroda’. Problemy Dal’nego Vostoka 4 (2020), 180–88. Reprinted at https://csdfmuseum.ru/articles/871 (accessed 1 February 2023). Volland, Nicolai. ‘Translating the Socialist State: Cultural Exchange, National Identity, and the Socialist World in the Early PRC’. Twentieth-Century China 33(2) (2008), 51–72. Wilford, Hugh. ‘An Oasis: The New York Intellectuals in the Late 1940s’. Journal of American Studies 28(2) (1994), 209–23. Youngblood, Denise. Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Yutkevich, Sergei. V teatrakh i kino svobodnogo Kitaia. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1953.

PART II

Film Diplomacy: Non-Aligned Countries, Decolonisation and New Opportunities

CHAPTER 6

The Rise and Fall of Sino-Soviet Film Festival Diplomacy (1957–1966) Elena Razlogova

In 1963, a major literary journal of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Wen yi bao, published a lengthy critique of Soviet cinema of the Thaw, focusing on the films of Grigory Chukhrai. The critique provided a survey of the transnational reception of the ‘Soviet New Wave’ across Europe and the United States, citing articles in Russian, English, French, German, Bulgarian, and Czech. The article travelled around the globe, broadcasted via Peking New China News Agency International Service in English, partially transcribed by the United States Foreign Broadcast Information Service, and translated in its entirety into Russian for the State Committee for Cinematography of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. ‘The smell of bourgeois humanitarianism and pacifism spread by the films,’ the author argued, ‘shows, in the field of art and ideology, precisely the political line of modern revisionism and the political demand for “peaceful evolution” from socialism to capitalism.’1 The Chinese retreat from Soviet cinema expressed in this piece paralleled the deterioration of political relations between Mao’s China and Khrushchev’s Soviet Union.2 The diplomatic Sino-­Soviet split followed a period of close cooperation after the birth of the PRC in 1949. The schism began around 1957 and culminated in 1962, with the conflict focused on the Soviet doctrine of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the West and Soviet unwillingness to recognise and arm anti-­colonial liberation movements. Historians disagree about the complex causes and timing for the political rift between the PRC and the USSR. Some emphasise the relative ­importance

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of practical domestic and diplomatic considerations, as well as leaders’ personalities.3 Others point to a long-­standing fear of the Eastern other in Russian culture, going back to Russian literature and the Sino-­Japanese and Russian conflicts at the turn of the nineteenth century.4 Yet others focus on the ideological disagreements about global anti-­colonial and anti-­imperialist struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America – what was then called the ‘Third World’ and now, the ‘Global South.’5 ‘Though the split has generally been presented as a clash of interests or egos’, Jeremy Friedman argues, ‘it should be seen also as the geopolitical mechanism by which the demands, ideas, and interests of the newly decolonised states challenged and ultimately came to shape the revolutionary agenda of the global Left centered around the international communist movement.’6 Although all these approaches complement each other, my research aligns most with Friedman’s argument. The immediate motives of state leaders or longue-duree tensions each played a role, but the dispute over Thirdworldism as a political and cultural issue was the most important factor in the Sino-­Soviet cinematic split. The Sino-­Soviet cinematic relationship played out on the international film festival circuit. As far back as the 1930s, Soviet film directors and theorists Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Vsevolod Pudovkin influenced leftist cinematic circles in Shanghai.7 The first film festival contacts between China and the Soviet Union go back to the one-­off 1935 Moscow International Film Festival. Eight Chinese films participated, star actress Hu Die came as part of the national delegation, and silent social drama Yu guang qu (Song of the Fishermen, Cai Chusheng, 1935) won a diploma at the festival.8 In the 1950s, the PRC and the USSR regularly exchanged film weeks – bilateral festivals of each other’s national cinemas – and bought each other’s films at socialist festivals such as the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czechoslovakia, founded in 1946.9 The PRC participated and won prizes at the relaunched Moscow International Film Festival in 1959 and 1961.10 And both the PRC and the USSR competed at flagship European festivals, including Cannes, Venice, and Berlin.11 From the Berlin-­Karlovy Vary standoff across the Iron Curtain, to the rivalry between the US-­sponsored Asian Film Festival (AFF) and the Sino-­Soviet-­initiated Afro-­Asian Film Festival (AAFF), cinematic summits restaged the East-­West Cold War conflict and enmeshed it in North-­ South decolonisation struggles.12 The Sino-­Soviet film festival diplomacy shows that decolonisation and anti-­imperialism played a crucial role in the cinematic Cold War. This chapter thus extends the global scope of this concept, introduced by Tony Shaw and Denise Youngblood to analyse the role of films in the US-­USSR struggle for ‘hearts and minds.’13 It also reframes its focus from the Cold War propaganda goals of the USSR and the PRC to new kinds of cinematic internationalism and Thirdworldism made possible by their state-­sponsored projects.14



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In this chapter, I first analyse the Sino-­Soviet cinematic cooperation at the Asian Film Week (AFW) in Beijing (1957) and the First AAFF in Tashkent (1958).15 Second, I examine the breakdown of Sino-­Soviet cinematic ties at the Third AAFF in Jakarta, Indonesia (1964), and finally in a trenchant critique of Grigory Chukhrai’s films acclaimed at European festivals. This critique foreshadowed the militant ‘Third Cinema’ movement in the 1960s and 1970s.16 Immediate diplomatic needs directed ideological clashes at festivals and brutal film criticism. But cinematic encounters exceeded state directives. These state-­sponsored debates redefined revolutionary film aesthetics and the role of cinema in liberation struggles in ways that inspired transnational cinematic movements for decades to come.

Sino-Soviet Cooperation in Film Festival Diplomacy The Sino-­Soviet international film festival cooperation began in a Thirdworldist international context. In 1955, the Bandung Conference in Indonesia brought together twenty-­nine independent and decolonising countries of the region and established a programme of self-­determination, peaceful coexistence, and non-­alignment, later developed at the 1961 Non-­Aligned Conference in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.17 In the aftermath, Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev each announced policies of peaceful coexistence and cooperation with African and Asian nations.18 The PRC softened its cinematic diplomacy, adding more operas and melodramas to its war and spy genre repertoire and expanding its exports to Hong Kong and Southeast Asia in addition to the socialist bloc.19 The USSR opened up to international visitors, including dozens of cineastes who came to a film festival that was part of the Sixth International Youth Festival in Moscow in July-­August 1957.20 A Silver Prize-­winner at the festival, colour sports drama Nülan wuhao (Woman Basketball Player No. 5, Xie Jin, 1957) represented the new internationalist spirit. This story of a young basketball player who learns to sacrifice her personal needs for the team and the nation recalled both Soviet sports films of the 1930s and pre-­revolutionary melodramas of the famous Shanghai Studio.21 ‘Allow me to convey our warmest congratulations to the makers of the film’, wrote Sergei Yutkevich to the Chinese Film Workers’ Association in March 1958, after the picture opened in Moscow. ‘We are sure it will give much joy to our spectators’.22 Twelve million Soviets saw Woman Basketball Player No. 5 in the first seven months of its release; it became popular throughout the socialist bloc.23 Its youthful appeal reflected a global cultural moment. Bandung organisers invited the PRC but excluded the USSR from the conference, making revolutionary China a crucial intermediary in contacts between the socialist and decolonising worlds.

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The Bandung Conference gave rise to a slew of meetings and associations, most importantly the Afro-­Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), and also film festivals. The PRC spearheaded the film festival movement with the Asian Film Week launched in Beijing on 31 August 1957.24 In a speech for the AFW delegates, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, who had participated in the Bandung conference, declared that the festival answered the Bandung call for cultural cooperation. Although labelled a ‘film week’, the AFW was a fully-­fledged international festival: it featured fourteen countries, from Syria to Japan, including Tajikistan, a Soviet republic.25 The festival thus accepted a Soviet Asian republic as part of Asia, just as AAPSO included the USSR when it met for the first time in Cairo in December 1957. ‘It is the first time’, the AFW preparation committee reported, ‘that our country has organised such large-­scale and focused diplomatic activities through film.’26 The AFW fulfilled this purpose. In 1957, the PRC was particularly isolated on the Cold War film festival circuit. It withdrew from Cannes because the festival welcomed Taiwan. It was uninvited from Venice by the Italian Foreign Ministry. And it could not attend the anti-­communist Asian Film Festival (AFF) in Tokyo because the PRC had been excluded since the AFF’s founding in 1954.27 The AFW broke down Cold War divisions, bringing together, among participating melodramas, musicals, and action movies, a Cannes entry from Lebanon, Ila Ayn? (Where To?, George Nasser, 1957), an AFF entry from Thailand, SantiVina (Thavi Na Bangchang, 1954), and the PRC’s own Soviet prize-­winner, Woman Basketball Player No. 5.28 The AFW final communiqué proposed a recurring Afro-­Asian film festival, to ‘bring prosperity to the film industries of the Asian and African countries, . . . and play its part in safeguarding world peace.’29 In late August 1958, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, the Chinese delegates launched the First AAFF by raising its flag, as the country that in 1957 initiated the Eastern countries’ film festival movement.30 Like the AFW, the Tashkent festival interpreted the ‘Bandung spirit’ as the peaceful cooperation of sovereign nations. Fourteen Asian and African delegations and eight Soviet Asian republics participated.31 Two militant films attracted attention: an Indonesian revolutionary drama Turang (Bachtiar Siagian, 1957) and Freedom for Ghana (Sean Graham, 1957), a triumphant chronicle, in colour, of Ghana’s first independence day ceremony. But entertainment cinema dominated. The Soviets submitted mostly musicals, comedies, and historical biopics, such as Avitsenna (Ibn Sina, Kamil Yarmatov, 1957). Song-­and-­dance melodramas from India, Pakistan, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) drew enthusiastic Uzbek crowds. Chinese children’s movie Lan Lan he Dong Dong (Lan Lan and Dong Dong, Yang Xiaozhong, 1958) conformed to this trend.32 The final Tashkent festival communiqué, signed by all participants, called for film exchanges, co-­productions, and technological cooperation. It expressed solidarity with the ‘growing struggle of Asian and African



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nations against colonial oppression’, reaffirmed the ‘positive experience of the Asian Film Week in Beijing’, and, ‘following the principles of the Bandung conference’, resolved to use cinema to ‘develop and strengthen friendly ties among peoples.’33 The entertainment films shown at Tashkent were anti-­ colonial in a particular sense: they helped new nations to build independent film industries in cooperation with other African and Asian states. Chinese delegates signed the public communiqué but ultimately rejected its irenic message. Wang Yan, Chinese delegation head and Beijing Film Studio chief, reported upon his return, alluding to Mao’s economic Great Leap Forward Campaign launched in January 1958: ‘Some filmmakers’ ideas lag behind our leap forward to a new era.’34 At the festival, a twelve-­minute PRC documentary, Six Hundred Million with You (Joris Ivens, 1958), depicted a two-­ day-­ long non-­ stop mass procession before the British embassy in Beijing against British military intervention in Lebanon and Jordan. ‘Raised fist clenched in iron determination, we go forward to crush the wolfish skull of imperialism’, began the voiceover.35 In the same vein, the Chinese panned the Tashkent line-­up in a private note to AAFF organisers: ‘We cannot agree with the ideology of some films’, they wrote. Anti-­colonial films have to demonstrate that ‘we are not asking for peace but aim to achieve it through armed struggle.’36 This private cinematic critique paralleled a Chinese confidential political note sent during the International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties in Moscow in November 1957. The PRC delegation to the Meeting signed a joint communiqué endorsing a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism, but then objected privately to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). ‘The proletariat’, they argued, ‘must be prepared at all t­imes . . . t­o overthrow the bourgeoisie by armed force.’37 The note to the CPSU rejected Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence for the first time since the Bandung conference.38 The note to the AAFF a year later was its cinematic aftershock, one that accepted only militant films as anti-­colonial cinema. The Third AAFF in Jakarta, Indonesia further articulated a Maoist approach to revolutionary cinema at the same time as it enacted the Sino-­ Soviet split.

The Cinematic Sino-Soviet Split The Third, and final, AAFF took place in April 1964. It was the most representative, and the least successful for the USSR. Only ten nations participated in the Second AAFF in Cairo in 1960, none of them from Sub-­Saharan Africa.39 Twenty-­two delegations came to Jakarta, including a dozen delegates from seven Sub-­Saharan African nations.40 The USSR had a friendly relationship with the leftist President Sukarno’s regime in Indonesia in the early 1960s, including

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contacts with the Institute for the People’s Culture (LEKRA) that organised the Jakarta AAFF.41 These exchanges continued after the festival: a group of Indonesian film officials visited the USSR in August 1964.42 At the AAFF, however, Indonesian organisers aligned with China against the USSR. Sino-­Soviet relations deteriorated in October 1962 when the Soviets withdrew nuclear arms from Cuba. In February 1963, the PRC won overwhelming support for its anti-­imperialist programme against a Soviet focus on disarmament at the AAPSO Conference in Moshi, Tanganyika (now Tanzania). The Conference endorsed the Jakarta AAFF and also planned the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba.43 Echoing the militant and tricontinental focus at Moshi, the final Jakarta AAFF communiqué vowed ‘to support the liberation movement of the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and to make use of films, the weapon in our hand, to this end.’44 According to a Soviet report, in an opening speech, Sukarno proclaimed ‘the skin color principle for uniting Asian and African countries, fully supporting the racial basis promoted by the PRC government’ to exclude the USSR from all Afro-­Asian meetings.45 Chinese participants got the best seats at receptions and the most applause. They lured other delegates to their side by buying them meals every evening. Chinese influence, Soviet delegates complained, ‘constantly made itself felt in the hostile attitude toward the Soviet delegation and the Soviet Union during the entire festival.’46 Following a Maoist programme, the Jakarta festival attacked Hollywood and promoted anti-­imperialist cinema. Head of Chinese delegation Ssutu Hui-­ min described the primary ‘revolutionary criterion’ for AAFF films: ‘politics first, content first.’47 On the eve of the opening, the organisers announced a boycott of American films. ‘By early June, the boycott had spread throughout the country and only a very few American films continued to be shown in very small communities’, United State Information Service observer Burtt McKee reported.48 McKee saw several festival films, including the Chinese three-­ hour colour epic Hóngsè Niángzǐjūn (The Red Detachment of Women, Xie Jin, 1961), a Bandung Prize-­winner. The spectators, most of them Sukarno’s supporters, gave ‘great cheering at every appearance of the Communist flag, the red guerrillas, or any act of violence perpetrated against the old established order [i.e. imperialist West].’49 A documentary prize-­winner, 35-­mm colour Zanzibar People March Forward (1964), ‘showed the American Consul and the British Consul being expelled from the country’, drawing much applause.50 Conversely, Soviet documentary Zakon podlosti (Law of Baseness, Aleksander Medvedkin, 1962), about Patrice Lumumba’s assassination, offended a Congolese delegate. ‘Why did the USSR send this film?’ he asked. ‘Only Africans should make films about Africa.’51 After Jakarta, Soviet officials finally understood the Chinese critique of the 1958 Tashkent festival. ‘I.e. no peaceful co-­existence!’ an anonymous official wrote in the margins of the Chinese note in 1964.52



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In addition to sidelining the USSR at the AAFF, the PRC also used film criticism as a weapon in the global Cold War. The globally circulated critique that opened this chapter responded to Grigory Chukhrai’s article ‘Keeping the Old on Their Toes’, published in the British journal Films and Filming in October 1962. The article was not commissioned or sanctioned by the Soviet government, nor even written by Chukhrai himself: the journal formatted an informal interview with the director as an article written by him, omitting the interviewer’s name and questions.53 In explaining the aesthetic principles of the ‘Soviet New Wave’, including his own work, Chukhrai denounced Chinese cinema as ‘the example of the dogmatic and anti-­artistic way of thinking’ that does not express ‘emotions’, and concluded that ‘with dogmatism and logic alone the Chinese artist cannot make good films.’54 In response, Wenyi bao editor-­in-­chief, poet Zhang Guangnian, dissected the visual and narrative aspects of Chukhrai’s films as ‘examples of modern revisionism in art.’55 He cited Chukhrai’s success at major European and American film festivals as an example of Soviet capitulation to capitalist and imperialist Western powers. Sorok pervyi (The Forty-First, Grigory Chukhrai, 1956) won an award at Cannes in 1957 and Balada o soldate (Ballad of a Soldier, Grigory Chukhrai, 1959) won prizes at Cannes and at the San Francisco Film Festival in the United States in 1960. Chinese criticism resembled the Soviet officials’ misgivings about The Forty-First as too focused on love and not enough on revolution, but applied their analysis of the love-­story plot, emotional dialogues, and sensual visuals by legendary Soviet cameraman Sergei Urusevsky, to international relations.56 ‘Leaders of contemporary revisionism hug and kiss the bosses of American imperialism, embodying Mariutka’s morals’, argued Zhang, connecting Khrushchev’s agreement with John F. Kennedy to pull nuclear weapons from Cuba in October 1962 to the love affair of a Red Army woman sniper with a White Army officer in The Forty-First.57 Jay Leyda, an American film historian in Beijing at the time, remembered that Chinese critics turned Chukhrai’s offhand statements into ‘a weapon, not only against Chukhrai and his films (all dissected in scathing detail) but as well against all Soviet films and beyond  – against Soviet policy, culture, government.’58 As Chinese critique travelled around the globe, film aesthetics became a matter of state security. While Chinese cinematic diplomacy closely matched its foreign policy, the Soviets followed a more aspirational and ecumenical approach. The PRC rejected forty-­five Soviet films in 1958 and twelve in 1959, along with other foreign films that did not conform to the Maoist ideal of revolutionary cinema. Despite these rejections, Sovexportfilm still planned to increase purchases of Chinese films in 1959.59 In 1966 China went into isolation at the start of the Cultural Revolution era. In December 1964–January 1965, director Yuri Ozerov and actress Tatyana Konyukhova toured China in one of the last exchange trips before the Cultural Revolution period. Ozerov’s report registered echoes from

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the Jakarta festival. Chinese audiences flocked to see The Red Detachment of Women, a prize-­winner at Jakarta. Ozerov also described ‘Chinese cinema’s ideological attack on the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.’60 With pride, the Chinese showed diplomas won at Asian and African festivals. But they were not interested in exchanges with the USSR. Senior officials refused to meet with the Soviets, nor were the visitors allowed to speak before large Chinese audiences. ‘Currently it is impossible to establish genuinely friendly cultural ties with the PRC’, Ozerov concluded.61 Despite this advice, Soviet festival organisers continued to invite China to the Moscow International Film Festival in 1963, 1965, and 1967 (Chinese filmmakers declined every time). Only after three rejections did the Soviets give up; they did not invite the PRC to the First Tashkent Festival of Asian and African Cinema in 1968.62 The re-­launched Tashkent festival hosted militant films and directors but also Bollywood films, Egyptian melodramas, and other entertainment cinema from the Global South. Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, Soviet aspirational film festival diplomacy made for a uniquely diverse Global South cinematic experience.63 The PRC’s militant film festival diplomacy left its own legacy. Independent film production and distribution infrastructures, crucial for AAFF participants, remained central in the resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers Committee, a seminal meeting of forty-­five African, Latin American, and Asian anti-­imperialist cineastes in Algiers in 1973. The Committee, however, saw the filmmaker’s role in the anti-­imperialist struggle as ‘no longer limited to the making of films’, but extended to ‘associating cinema in a more concrete way in this struggle.’64 As Jie Li has shown, this idea, of film producers and film projectionists as guerrilla fighters, was central to the Maoist idea of cinema.65 In the 1960s and 1970s, Maoism inspired revolutionary movements and remained influential among militant filmmakers around the world, from Jean-­ Luc Godard in France to Mrinal Sen in India.66 ‘While denouncing the Soviet heritage in the East because a half-­century of dictatorship had fossilized it’, French film critic Guy Hennebelle later remembered his Thirdworldist milieux in Paris thus: ‘this movement did not, at first, find any other vocabulary than that of Marxism-­Leninism: a Chinese version, a Trotskyist version, a Czech version, a Cuban version, or a patchwork version.’67 In their foundational text on anti-­imperialist Third Cinema, published in Havana in 1969, Argentinian filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino cited Mao Zedong’s 1937 lecture ‘On Practice’ three times, as a guide to embedded, ‘guerrilla’ filmmaking and film exhibition.68 Sino-­Soviet cinematic tensions in the late 1950s and early 1960s presaged the militant cinematic Thirdworldism of the post-­1968 moment. The Sino-­Soviet split at the Afro-­Asian Film Festival suggests that the cinematic Cold War can be approached not just from the point of view of the



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state and its needs to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of foreign peoples, but also from the point of view of cineastes and spectators. The AAFF makes visible the earlier East Asian – Chinese and Indonesian – roots of the Third Cinema movement that is usually traced only to the Latin American cinema of the last 1960s and 1970s.69 The state-­sponsored nature of the AAFF raises the question of governments’ role in militant cinemas of the Cold War era, for example, how Solanas and Getino’s participation in Argentina’s Peronist government influenced their concept of Third Cinema.70 It also makes visible the value of entertainment cinema for national sovereignty in the Global South. Maoist film critics and Third Cinema filmmakers did not allow for the decolonising potential of entertainment cinema, but recent studies of popular video industries in Nigeria and Ghana demonstrate that such potential exists.71 To understand how diplomatic Cold War infrastructures gave rise to translocal cinematic movements, historians may want to ask not only what cinema did for the Cold War, but also what the Cold War did for film theory and practice. Elena Razlogova is an Associate Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). She has published articles on US radio history, music recommendation and recognition algorithms, film translation, Global South cinema networks, and Soviet international film festivals.

Notes  1. In Wen yi bao (Literature and Art Review), November 1963. I cite this passage in transcription from a US report (‘Wen Yi Pao Article Raps Revisionist Art’). This article was published in English, abridged (Chang, ‘An Example of Modern Revisionism in Art,’ 13  December 1963), and as a pamphlet (Chang, An Example of Modern Revisionism in Art, 1965). For an unpublished Russian translation of the full article, see Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI), 2944/13/63. I abbreviate Russian archival references according to their location: fond/opis/ed.khr./ page number. I use only translated Chinese sources in this chapter. All but one were translated at the time for Soviet or US government purposes; one source was translated by Roman Shapiro (Yan, ‘Yafei dianying yishu de jieri [The festival of Afro-­Asian film art]’).   2. Because the Soviet Union only collaborated with the PRC, here I will occasionally use ‘Chinese cinema’ as a synonym for PRC national cinema. In fact, the term ‘Chinese cinema’ also includes Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinemas.   3. See, for example, Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split; Marangé, ‘Une réinterprétation des origines de la dispute sino-­soviétique d’après des témoignages de diplomates russes’;

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Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens; Wang, ‘The Quarrelling Brothers: New Chinese Archives and a Reappraisal of the Sino-­Soviet Split, 1959–1962’.   4. See Bianco, Stalin and Mao.   5. Jeremy Friedman provides the strongest case for this argument in Friedman, Shadow Cold War. For a good summary of these debates, see Radchenko, ‘The Sino-­Soviet split’.  6. Friedman, Shadow Cold War, 1–2.   7. Jeh-­Chih, ‘L’émergence du film de “gauche” (Shanghai 1930)’; Toroptsev, ‘Kitai-­SSSR/ Rossia’, 202–205.   8. Toroptsev, ‘Kitai-­SSSR’, 202.   9. Ma, ‘A Genealogy of Film Festivals’, 40–58; Chen, ‘International Film Circuits and Global Imaginaries’; Bláhová, ‘National, Socialist, Global’. 10. For Chinese participation in European film festivals, see Clark, ‘Projecting Influence’. 11. For histories of film festivals, see de Valck, Film Festivals; Pisu, Il XX secolo sul red carpet; Kötzing and Moine, Cultural Transfer and Political Conflicts. 12. On the Asian Film Festival, see Lee, Cinema and the Cultural Cold War. On the Afro-­Asian Film Festival, see Kirasirova, The Eastern International, 196–98, 360–75; Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism, 137–39; Baskett, ‘Parting the Bamboo Curtain’; Du, ‘Projecting Maoist China’. 13. For the notion of the ‘cinematic Cold War,’ see Shaw and Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War; Kozovoi, ‘The Cold War and Film’. On the importance of the North-­South conflict during the Cold War, see Connelly, ‘Taking Off the Cold War Lens’; Westad, The Global Cold War; Mavhunga, ‘A Plundering Tiger with Its Deadly Cubs?’. 14. On ‘cinematic Thirdworldism,’ see Mestman, ‘From Algiers to Buenos Aires’. 15. I examine the AAFF in more detail in Razlogova, ‘Cinema in the Spirit of Bandung’. 16. Argentinian filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino introduced the concept of ‘Third Cinema’ in Solanas and Getino, ‘Toward a Third Cinema’. 17. Lee, Making a World after Empire; Prashad, The Darker Nations. 18. Chen, ‘China and the Bandung Conference’; Friedman, Shadow Cold War, 25. 19. Xu, ‘The Southern Film Corporation’. 20. ‘53 Features in Moscow Salute to Young Folk’, 3. 21. Jian, ‘Gender Politics and the Crisis of Socialist Aesthetics’. 22. RGALI, 2936/1/1245/1. 23. RGALI, 2329/8/1174/19; Lu, Moulding the Socialist Subject, 53; Du, “Projecting Maoist China,” 74. 24. Iakovleva, ‘Festival kinoiskusstva Azii’; RGALI, 2912/1/468. 25. ‘A Feast of Art’, 36–37. Other participants were Burma (now Myanmar), Cambodia, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), China, Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), India, Indonesia, Lebanon, Mongolia, North Korea, Pakistan, Singapore, and Thailand. Syria sent a delegation but no films. On film weeks vs festivals, see Ma, ‘A Genealogy of Film Festivals in the People’s Republic of China’. 26. Quoted in Xu, ‘The Southern Film Corporation’, 245. 27. ‘Red China Quits Film Fete’; ‘Pictures’; Searls, ‘Red China Switches To Love, Softpedals Marx to Sell Movies’; Lee, Making a World after Empire, 70. 28. ‘A Feast of Art’, 36. 29. ‘Asian Film Week (Hsinhua News)’, 36. 30. Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI) 5/36/81/68.



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31. ‘Kommunike uchastnikov kinofestivalia stran Azii i Afriki’, 82; Other participants included Burma, Ceylon, DRV, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Mongolia, North Korea, Pakistan, and Thailand. Sudan sent an observer. Japan did not officially participate but two Japanese studios sent films. The Soviet Asian republics included Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. 32. Faiziev, ‘Kinoiskusstvo stran Azii i Afriki na podieme’; RGALI, 2912/1/584. 33. ‘Kommunike uchastnikov kinofestivalia stran Azii i Afriki’. 34. Yan, ‘Yafei dianying yishu de jieri’ [The Festival of Afro-­Asian Film Art]. 35. Schoots, Living Dangerously, 255–56. 36. RGALI, 2944/13/206/122. 37. ‘Outline of Views on the Question of Peaceful Transition’, 22. 38. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split, 77; Friedman, Shadow Cold War, 27–28. 39. Participants included China, Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), India, Indonesia, Lebanon, North Korea, UAR, and USSR. Kuwait, Yugoslavia, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization participated as observers. Japan did not officially participate but individual studios sent films. 40. Participants included Afghanistan, China, Congo (Léopoldville; now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), DRV, India, Indonesia, Japan, Lebanon, Liberation Front of North Vietnam, Mali, Mongolia, North Kalimantan (now part of Indonesia), North Korea, North Rhodesia (now Zambia), Pakistan, Somalia, Tunisia, UAR, Uganda, USSR, and Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania). Four countries, including Iraq and the Philippines, sent films but no delegates. 41. RGALI, 631/26/5336/6. 42. RGALI, 2944/13/210. 43. Friedman, Shadow Cold War, 93–98; RGALI, 2944/13/206/3. 44. FBIS, ‘Festival Communiqué’. 45. RGALI, 2918/4/106/16; Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism, 138. 46. RGALI, 2918/4/106/16-­17. 47. Hui-­min, ‘Revolution in the Afro-­Asian Film World’, 6. 48. McKee, |‘Report of Third Afro-­Asian Film Festival,’ 6 July 1964. RG 306; Film Festival Report Files, 1953–1972. National Archives, College Park, 6. 49. McKee, ‘Report of Third Afro-­Asian Film Festival,’ 4. 50. Ibid., 5. 51. RGALI, 2944/13/206/76. 52. RGALI, 2944/13/206/122. 53. On this point, see Leyda, Dianying, 282. 54. Chukhrai, ‘Keeping the Old on Their Toes’, 26. 55. For Zhang Guangnian’s career, see Huangfu, ‘Roads to Salvation’, 69, 73. 56. Woll, Real Images, 39. 57. RGALI, 2944/13/63/41. 58. Leyda, Dianying, 282–83. 59. RGALI, 2329/8/1174/17, 18, 20. 60. RGALI, 2936/1/2180/5. 61. RGALI, 2936/1/2180/10. 62. RGALI, 2944/24/126/1. 63. Djagalov and Salazkina, ‘Tashkent ’68’.

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64. Various Authors, ‘Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting (Algeria, 1973)’, 280. 65. Li, ‘Cinematic Guerrillas in Mao’s China’. 66. Feigelson, ‘Chinese Fictions in France and Shadows in China’; Sen, ‘The Spring Thunder’; Dalla Gassa, Neri, and Zecca, ‘Maoisms, National Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives’. 67. Hennebelle, ‘Les années de l’utopie’. 68. Solanas and Getino, ‘Toward a Third Cinema’; Tse-­Tung, On Practice. 69. On Chinese cinema, see Li, ‘Cinematic Guerrillas in Mao’s China’. On Indonesia cinema, see Sen, ‘What’s “Oppositional” in Indonesian Cinema?’. 70. Mariano Mestman examines this question in Mestman, ‘Tracing the Winding Road of the Hour of the Furnaces in the First World’. 71. On this point, see Larkin, ‘The Grounds of Circulation’.

Bibliography Anonymous. ‘Red China Quits Film Fete’. New York Times (22 April 1957), 15. ———. ‘53 Features in Moscow Salute to Young Folk’. Variety (21 August 1957), 3. ———. ‘Italy in Abrupt Snub of China’. Variety (21 August 1957), 22. ———. ‘Asian Film Week (Hsinhua News)’. Asian Recorder (5–11 October 1957), 1670. ———. ‘A Feast of Art’. People’s China (1 October 1957), 36–39. ———. ‘Kommunike uchastnikov kinofestivalia stran Azii i Afriki’. Iskusstvo kino (October 1958), 82. ———. ‘Wen Yi Pao Article Raps Revisionist Art’. Daily Report--Foreign Radio Broadcasts 234 (4 December 1963): BBB1. Baskett, Michael. ‘Parting the Bamboo Curtain: Japanese Cold War Film Exchange with China’, in Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov (eds), The Dismantling of Japan’s Empire in East Asia: Deimperialization, Postwar Legitimation and Imperial Afterlife (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), 278–95. Bianco, Lucien. Stalin and Mao: A Comparison of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2018. Bláhová, Jindřiška. ‘National, Socialist, Global: The Changing Roles of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, 1946–1956’, in Lars Karl and Pavel Skopal (eds), Cinema in Service of the State: Perspectives on Film Culture in the GDR and Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960 (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 245–72. Chang, Kuang-nien. ‘An Example of Modern Revisionism in Art: A Critique of the Films and Statements of Grigori Chukrai’. Peking Review = Beijing Zhou Bao 50 (13 December 1963), 6–13. https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/peking-review/1963/PR1963​ -50.pdf. ———. An Example of Modern Revisionism in Art: A Critique of the Films and Statements of Grigori Chukrai. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965. Chen, Jian. ‘China and the Bandung Conference: Changing Perceptions and Representation’, in See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (eds), Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), 132–59.



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Chen, Tina Mai. ‘International Film Circuits and Global Imaginaries in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–57’. Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3(2) (2009), 149–61. https://doi.org​ /10.1386/jcc.3.2.149_1. Chukhrai, Grigory. ‘Keeping the Old on Their Toes’. Films and Filming (October 1962), 26. Clark, Paul. ‘Projecting Influence: Film and the Limits of Beijing’s Soft Power’, in Paola Voci (ed.), Screening China’s Soft Power (London: Routledge, 2018), 21–37. Connelly, Matthew. ‘Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict During the Algerian War for Independence’. American Historical Review 105(3) (2000), 739–69. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/105.3.739. Dalla Gassa, Marco, Corrado Neri and Federico Zecca. ‘Maoisms, National Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives: An Introduction’. Cinéma & Cie 18(30) (2018), 13–19. de Valck, Marijke. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. Djagalov, Rossen. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020. Djagalov, Rossen and Masha Salazkina. ‘Tashkent ’68: A Cinematic Contact Zone’. Slavic Review 75(2) (2016), 279–98. https://doi.org/10.5612/slavicreview.75.2.279. Du, Ying, ‘Projecting Maoist China: The PRC’s Transnational Film Distribution, 1949 to 1966’, Screen 64(1): (2023): 58–81, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjad004. Faiziev, Latif. ‘Kinoiskusstvo stran Azii i Afriki na podieme’. Zvezda Vostoka (December 1958), 141–51. FBIS. ‘Festival Communiqué’. Daily Report--Foreign Radio Broadcasts (30  April 1964). RRR 5–6. Feigelson, Kristian. ‘Chinese Fictions in France and Shadows in China’. Cinéma & Cie 18(30) (2018), 83–94. Friedman, Jeremy. Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Hennebelle, Guy. ‘Les années de l’utopie’, in Guy Hennebelle (ed.), Les années de l’utopie: bilan critique des idées sages et folles des décennies 60 et 70 (Condé-sur-Noireau: Éd. Corlet, 1993), 5–7. Huangfu, Jenny. ‘Roads to Salvation: Shen Congwen, Xiao Qian, and the Problem of NonCommunist Celebrity Writers, 1948–1957’. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 22(2) (2010), 39–87. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41491028. Hui-min, Ssutu. ‘Revolution in the Afro-Asian Film World’. China’s Screen (1964), 6–7. Iakovleva, V. ‘Festival kinoiskusstva Azii’. Iskusstvo kino (December 1957), 142–44. Jeh-Chih, Yu. ‘L’émergence du film de “gauche” (Shanghai 1930)’, in Kristian Feigelson (ed.), Caméra politique: cinéma et stalinisme. Théorème 8 (Paris: Presses Sorbonne nouvelle, 2005), 155–64. Jian, Mao. ‘Gender Politics and the Crisis of Socialist Aesthetics: The “Room” in Woman Basketball Player No. 5’, in Xueping Zhong and Ban Wang (eds), Debating the Socialist Legacy and Capitalist Globalization in China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 73–84. Kirasirova, Masha, The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union’s Anticolonial Empire, Oxford Studies in International History. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2024. Kötzing, Andreas and Caroline Moine (eds). Cultural Transfer and Political Conflicts: Film Festivals in the Cold War. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017.

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Kozovoi, Andrei. ‘The Cold War and Film’, in Artemy Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle (eds), The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2016), 340–50. Larkin, Brian. ‘The Grounds of Circulation: Rethinking African Film and Media’. Politique africaine 153(1) (2019), 105–26. http://www.cairn.info/revue-politique-africaine-2019​ -1-page-105.html. Lee, Christopher (ed.). Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010. Lee, Sangjoon. Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. Leyda, Jay. Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972. Li, Jie. ‘Cinematic Guerrillas in Mao’s China’. Screen 61(2) (2020), 207–29. https://doi.org​ /10.1093/screen/hjaa017. Lu, Xiaoning. Moulding the Socialist Subject: Cinema and Chinese Modernity (1949– 1966). Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020. Lüthi, Lorenz M. The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Ma, Ran. ‘A Genealogy of Film Festivals in the People’s Republic of China: “Film Weeks” During the “Seventeen Years” (1949–1966)’. New Review of Film and Television Studies 14(1) (2016), 40–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2015.1107266. Marangé, Céline. ‘Une réinterprétation des origines de la dispute sino-soviétique d’après des témoignages de diplomates russes’. Relations internationales 148(4) (2011), 17–32. Mavhunga, Clapperton Chakanetsa. ‘A Plundering Tiger with Its Deadly Cubs?: The USSR and China as Weapons in the Engineering of a “Zimbabwean Nation,” 1945–2009’, in Gabrielle Hecht (ed.), Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 231–66. Mestman, Mariano. ‘From Algiers to Buenos Aires: The Third World Cinema Committee (1973–74)’. New Cinemas 1(1) (2002), 40–53. ———. ‘Tracing the Winding Road of the Hour of the Furnaces in the First World’, in Javier Campo and Humberto Pérez-Blanco (eds), A Trail of Fire for Political Cinema: The Hour of the Furnaces Fifty Years Later (Bristol: Intellect, 2019), 135–58. Peking Review. ‘Outline of Views on the Question of Peaceful Transition: A Written Outline Presented by the Delegation of the CPC to the Central Committee of the CPSU on November 10, 1957’ (3 April 1964). Pisu, Stefano. Il XX secolo sul red carpet: Politica, economia e cultura nei festival internazionali del cinema, 1932–1976. Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2016. Prashad, Vijay. The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. New York: New Press, 2007. Radchenko, Sergey. Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009. ———. ‘The Sino-Soviet Split’, in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds), The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Volume 2, Crises and Détente (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 349–72. Razlogova, Elena. ‘Cinema in the Spirit of Bandung: The Afro-Asian Film Festival Circuit, 1957–1964’, in Kerry Bystrom, Monica Popescu and Katherine Zien (eds), The Cultural Cold War and the Global South: Sites of Contest and Communitas (London: Routledge, 2021), 111–29.



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Schoots, Hans. Living Dangerously: A Biography of Joris Ivens. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001. Searls, Guy. ‘Red China Switches to Love, Softpedals Marx to Sell Movies’. Wall Street Journal (26 September 1957), 1–2. Sen, Krishna. ‘What’s “Oppositional” in Indonesian Cinema?’, in Anthony R. Guneratne, Wimal Dissanayake and Sumita S. Chakravarty (eds), Rethinking Third Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 147–65. Sen, Sanghita. ‘The Spring Thunder: Revisiting the Naxal Movement in Indian Cinema’. Cinéma & Cie 18(30) (2018), 53–69. https://www.academia.edu/38133777/_The_Spr​ ing_Thunder_Revisiting_the_Naxal_Movement_in_Indian_Cinema_. Shaw, Tony and Denise J. Youngblood. Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010. Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino. ‘Toward a Third Cinema’. Tricontinental 14 (1969), 107–32. http://www.documentaryisneverneutral.com/words/camasgun.html. Toroptsev, Sergei. ‘Kitai-SSSR/Rossia: kinematograficheskie kontakty’. Kinograf 20 (2009), 201–209. Tse-Tung, Mao. On Practice. New York: International Publishers, 1966. Various Authors. ‘Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting (Algeria, 1973)’, in Scott MacKenzie (ed.), Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 275–84. Wang, Dong. ‘The Quarrelling Brothers: New Chinese Archives and a Reappraisal of the Sino-Soviet Split, 1959–1962’. CWIHP Working Paper. Washington, DC: Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center, 2006. https://www​ .wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/WP49DW_rev.pdf. Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Woll, Josephine. Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000. Xu, Lanjun. ‘The Southern Film Corporation, Opera Films, and the PRC’s Cultural Diplomacy in Cold War Asia, 1950s and 1960s’. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29(1) (2017), 239–82. Yan, Wang. ‘Yafei dianying yishu de jieri’ [The Festival of Afro-Asian Film Art]. Translated by Roman Shapiro. Guoji dianying (1958), 30–31.

CHAPTER 7

Making Ground for Film Export Soviet Films’ Competition with Hollywood in India in the 1950–1960s Severyan Dyakonov

In April 1959, a festival took place in Andal, a small town in West Bengal, India. The Soviet Consulate in Calcutta sent a minibus equipped to screen documentary films about the merits of Soviet modernisation. Soviets occupied one of the central plazas for screening their films. The next day they moved to the outskirts of the festival for more space and to avoid the noise of the crowds. Americans sent their minibus too, but it arrived two days later, so they had to take the spot previously occupied by the Soviets. Initially, the Soviets and the Americans were relaxed and friendly with each other, discussing their work. The Americans were not happy with the noisy spot. They asked if they could come to where the Soviets were and use the back of the Soviet screen for American films as a symbol of the ‘peaceful coexistence’ that the Soviet government was promoting at the time. But the Soviets refused the proposition for ‘obvious reasons.’ Later that day, Americans tried to convince the Indian driver of the Soviet minibus to work for them for a better salary. That same evening ‘someone flattened the tires of the American bus.’1 The Soviet cultural programme of film exchange, book publishing, and ties with Indian academia aimed to back up USSR’s larger strategy to curb American influence in non-­aligned countries.2 The American programme of influence in its turn targeted the Indian educated English-­speaking ruling elite with the long-­term goal of counteracting the Leftist ideological influence on the Indian political system. How and why did the Soviets want to organise a specific programme of Soviet film screenings in India to compete with Hollywood productions?



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The Soviets sought to establish stable commercial film export to India to prove that the USSR, like the United States, was legitimate to claim its global superpower status.3 The commercial aspect was decisively important for the Soviets as they believed it would help to prevent accusations of disseminating communist propaganda. Soviet films had to be available in the ideologically neutral spaces of commercial Indian cinemas and have the same status as popular Hollywood productions. In the Soviet mind, those Indians who wanted to watch Soviet features were most likely politically left-­leaning Indians. By going to cinemas, they could meet other sympathisers with socialist ideas. Therefore, screening Soviet films could create new social networks for leftists. By the 1960s Hollywood film companies had a well-­established position in India, with most of new American films being shown there. In the 1920s Hollywood even enjoyed a dominant position in Indian films market but lost it to Indian-­made films as the silent cinema era ended. In the 1950s the Indian market provided the same financial output as that of New Zealand to Hollywood. This situation has not changed for decades, with the Indian market being as profitable as the Israel market but less so than the Polish market in the 1990s. However, Hollywood succeeded in attracting a stable audience for its films in India despite the fact that the Indian public largely prefers home productions to any foreign films, with casual exceptions for American blockbusters in recent decades.4 Unlike Hollywood, the Soviets did not set up a stable commercial market for its features in India. Soviet film festivals ultimately became the only reliable and efficient way for Soviet features to reach Indian cinemas. At the beginning of the 1960s, public screenings of Soviet films attracted more viewers than the commercial ones, at two million per year against a few hundred thousand.5 However, public screenings through the Indo-­Soviet Cultural Society (ISCUS) and other leftist organisations had the image of free-­of-­charge communist propaganda that the Soviets wanted to avoid by showing their films in commercial cinemas, especially to people that were not necessarily left-­leaning. The beginning of Soviet film exports to India is discussed in Paul McGarr’s article ‘“A Rather Tedious and Unfortunate Affair”: The Rahi Saga and the Troubled Origins of Indo-­Soviet Cinematic Exchange.’ McGarr argues that in 1954 neither the Soviets nor Indians had a clear plan on film exchange and points out that the Indian government was distrustful of Soviet cultural diplomacy in the context of communist insurgencies in Southern India in 1946– 1951.6 Sudha Rajagopalan’s book Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas: The Culture of Movie-Going after Stalin talks about the success of Indian films in the USSR.7 Following McGarr’s article, my research will shed light on the Soviet and American film screening competition in India. The period I cover begins in the late 1950s, when the Soviets and Americans already had years of experience in the Indian foreign films market, and ends at the beginning of the

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1960s when Soviet film festivals and Soviet film weeks became the primary tactic for commercial film screenings. The last section tackles the Sino-­Indian border conflict of 1962 when many Indians protested against Soviet film festivals, perceiving the USSR as an ally of Communist China. This research mostly uses the unexplored documents of Sovexportfilm (Soviet Film Export agency, SEF) stored at the RGALI (Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts) and the GARF (Russian National Archive) archives in Moscow, Russia.8 This chapter focuses on Soviet endeavours and deliberations regarding entry into the Indian film market, primarily drawing from materials sourced from Russian archives. Due to the lack of Indian archival data, it was challenging to present the Indian perspective on why the Indian government sought to allow Soviet films into the country. This underscores the significance of such insights for future researchers to explore.

Unsuccessful Soviet Attempts to Get to Indian Screens in the 1950s Soviet film export organisation was initially established in 1924 as Intorgkino, then reorganised in 1945 into Sovexportfilm (SEF). The first official Soviet film screenings in India began with the help of the Second World War-­era organisation, Friends of the Soviet Union. SEF opened its office in India in 1946 in Bombay and worked in close cooperation with the Soviet embassy, the Soviet Ministry of Culture, the State Committee for Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries (GKKS), and Societies of Friendship with Foreign Countries (SSOD). In 1959, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) heavily criticised SEF for the poor performance of Soviet films abroad and shifted SEF from the control of the Ministry of Culture to the Soviet Chamber of Commerce, making it a Soviet commercial company.9 SEF yearly reports provide information on how the Indian film market looked in 1959. In the 1950s, India had a population of 450 million with one cinema theatre per 100,000 inhabitants and 2.5 million daily viewers that went to a cinema three times a month. The poorest young people could not afford any other entertainment but cinema.10 More than 55 per cent of theatres showed only Indian films, 37 per cent of theatres showed foreign and Indian films, and 8 per cent showed only foreign, mostly American, films. By 1960 the Indian film industry was producing 300 feature films a year, third after the US and Japan, while the USSR made over a hundred. Indian viewers overwhelmingly preferred their national film productions to foreign features.11 There were 3,829 cinema theatres, with American and British companies directly controlling 1,000 of the largest and most comfortable; fifty theatres showed only American and British films. Hollywood dominated the Indian



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foreign film market from the 1920s when 80 per cent of imported films in India came from the US.12 The knowledge of English by the Indian population played a significant role in the popularity of American and British films.13 In 1959 India imported 350 movies a year: 300 from the US, forty from the UK, and two to ten from other countries, including the USSR. SEF thus thought that foreign film distribution was almost entirely subservient to the interests of American and British companies. The US had reorganised Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) into Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) in 1945 to endorse film distribution at home and Motion Pictures Export Association (MPEA) to promote films abroad.14 Eric Johnston (1896–1963) became the head of the two associations after holding office in the US Chamber of Commerce. MPEA became the main agency that worked for Hollywood abroad in cooperation with the State department.15 Already in the 1930s Hollywood was searching for foreign markets in Latin America, especially after film export to Europe was cut off by the Second World War.16 By the 1950s foreign markets proved to be important sources of income for Hollywood companies, especially with the rising popularity of television in the US.17 Hollywood film industry’s main magazine Variety published materials, in collaboration with the MPEA, on potential markets; India came up in 1949 and was characterised as a country situated ‘only three days away by plane.’ In 1953 Variety mentioned India, calling it an expandable market.18 The MPEA’s idea was to ‘to construct a series of showcases for American product and to keep playing it until the Indian public cultivates a taste for Hollywood films.’ The MPEA was aware, however, that the programme ‘would be costly without fast profits.’ Johnston claimed to have worked out several phases of a programme which would widen the circulation of American pictures in the Far Eastern areas. Johnston was specifically concerned about the Indian market where, according to him, the MPEA was ‘getting only 2% of [its] potential.’ He believed that his organisation had to significantly enhance the promotion of Hollywood films in India.19 However, challenged by the Bollywood film industry, the MPEA by the early 1960s secured the same profits in India with its 400 million population as in New Zealand which had a population of one million at the time.20 As for Soviet efforts, throughout the 1950s Moscow hesitated over whether to dub films into local languages, into English, or use subtitles that a large illiterate Indian population would not be able to read. SEF reported numerous difficulties in negotiations with the Indian government around dubbing or voice narrating Soviet films into Indian languages, suspecting that the Indian government was prioritising Indian languages for their own film industry.21 By 1959 all attempts to dub Soviet films failed because of the resistance of the Indian government, because of the larger time gaps between production and

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screening that it was likely to entail, and because of Indian viewers’ habit of watching foreign films in English.22 Most often, Soviet films in India had only English subtitles.23 One could conclude then that Soviet films were primarily seen by educated Indians. Indian government controlled the distribution of foreign films through a license sold to foreign film export agencies. The Indian government calculated prices in rupees according to the amount of feet of film. In 1956–1959 the price was 300,000 rupees for the limit of about 400,000 feet of film. With a single license, the Soviet Union could sell up to ten feature films and twenty to twenty-­five short films a year, and had to buy the same amount of Indian films in terms of film footage.24 The issue of reciprocity in film exchange posed problems for the Soviets because they could not use all the 400,000 feet limit in buying Indian films, claiming that Indian movies were not up to the required standard for Soviet cinemas. The reciprocity of film exchange always caused controversy because most Indian features were musicals longer in length than Soviet films. However, Indians wanted to have an equal number of films for exchange. When buying movies, SEF prioritised leftist directors, such as Raj Kapoor and K.A. Abbas.25 From the beginning of the 1950s, SEF showed films through large distributing companies: Select Films, Norona Ltd., Goodwin Pictures, International Distributors, Naren Pictures, Singh Films Distributors, and The National Education. SEF showed films mainly in large cities, such as Delhi, Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. Before 1959 films were either sold to distributors or leased for 50 per cent profit. In 1957 the SEF central office in Moscow decided to sell movies for a set price without percentage income from screening to stimulate distribution. In this way, SEF earned only a nominal profit but did control films’ screening. Indian distributors often showed Soviet films at in the early morning, without prior publicity, or would buy them without showing them at all. SEF then wanted to fund thirty Indian theatres for Soviet films. This idea was finally rejected because, according to Soviet laws, the Soviet government could not finance private companies. The plan could also have risked SEF being considered a communist propaganda agency.26 The Soviets explained the failure to access the larger Indian public by the fact that Soviet films were too ‘complicated for Indians.’ Soviets imagined a struggle of high culture with American entertainment, universal humanitarian values against American oversimplification. As SEF’s head in Bombay, Didenko wrote to Moscow headquarters: ‘Indian public grew up on their pictures and American films which falsify real life with fairy tale adventures and sex ­scenes . . . ­t herefore Indian public is not ready for Soviet films with their focus on social problems and sophisticated content.’27 Historian David Caute explained such an attitude by the fact that Soviets made generalisations about American art as being dressed in mannerisms and abstractions, selling illusory



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nonsense to the world.28 It also seems the Soviets had overestimated their films’ attractiveness, thinking that Soviet high culture features with a socialist ideological message would somehow become popular because this ideology had been suppressed during colonial times. At the same time, the 1950s was the optimistic Thaw period for the Soviet film industry that grew from producing nine films a year in 1951 to 137 in 1959.29 Soviet films won various international film festival prizes that encouraged Moscow to seek larger foreign audiences. Some of the Soviet films did not pass the Indian censorship committee: Mat (The Mother, Mark Donskoy, 1955), Vassa Zheleznova (The Mistress, Leonid Lukov, 1953), Prolog (Prologue, Efim Dzigan, 1956), Sorok pervyi (The FortyFirst, Grigory Chukhrai, 1956), and Velikii voin Albanii Skanderbeg (The Great Warrior Skanderbeg, Sergei Yutkevich, 1953). India’s censorship boards were established in 1920.30 The Mother, Prolog, and Vassa Zheleznova were films based on the literary works of Maksim Gorky (1868–1936), a Russian then Soviet writer whose texts became the icon of socialist realism, the official art form of the USSR. The Soviets thought that the Indian government was not interested in promoting films on revolutionary themes. Officially, however, Indians denied having any political slant in film distribution.31 International context influenced the fate of censored films. The Great Warrior Skanderbeg, a historical feature film on the fight of the Albanian people against the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century, was a co-­production of the USSR and Albania (the country that became the sole ally of Communist China during the Sino-­ Soviet split in the late 1950s). After a year, Skanderbeg did finally appear on Indian screens, possibly because it earned the International Prize at the Cannes Film Festival of 1954. In 1957 The Forty-First was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes and got the Special Jury prize. The Forty-First is an essential Thaw period film about the Russian Civil War that featured an intelligent, caring, and reflective White army officer – enemy of the Bolsheviks. The main male character was played by Oleg Strizhenov, who later played the leading role in the Soviet-­Indian joint feature Pardesi/Khozhdenie za tri morya (Journey Beyond Three Seas, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and Vasily Pronin, 1958) which might have helped The Forty-First to get to the screens. Journey Beyond Three Seas was the first Soviet-­Indian joint feature film, based on the fifteenth-­century travelogue of the supposed journey of Afanasy Nikitin (died in 1475) to India.32 The figure of Afanasy Nikitin became a symbol of Indo-­ Soviet friendship in the mid-­1950s. In 1955 a monument to Nikitin had been opened in his hometown of Tver (Kalinin in Soviet times) in the presence of Indian Foreign Minister Menon. The diary of Nikitin was translated into Indian languages and published in India. Apparently, in the Soviet mind, Nikitin represented a white European non-­coloniser in contrast to Western Europeans who came to India as colonisers.

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Soviet Film Festivals as a Solution to Get to Indian Audiences By 1959 Moscow declared the seventeen years of experience of Soviet film distribution in India as unsatisfactory. The head of SEF complained that this situation created a bad reputation for Soviet films in India. The abundance of American films proved the failure of the Soviets in the ideological struggle. SEF decided to reach the screens by devising a publicity campaign for Soviet films through festivals that would show films directly, bypassing Indian distributors. The solution was to offer the best of Soviet cinema in week-­long, well-­publicised festivals preceded by opening ceremonies with the participation of Indian public figures. Tickets for screenings cost the same as regular cinema screenings, making festivals commercially self-­sufficient. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the USSR signed several treaties of cultural cooperation with many countries of the world. For example, Moscow signed a cultural cooperation treaty with the US in 1958, and with Italy in 1960. The first new type of Soviet film festival took place on 15–22 January 1960 in Delhi, and was associated with the signing of the Treaty of Cultural and Scientific Cooperation between the USSR and India. SEF rented one of the best cinema theatres, the 445-­seat Rivoli, to screen recent Soviet films: Letyat zhuravli (The Cranes are Flying, Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957), Ilya Muromets (The Sword and the Dragon, Aleksandr Ptushko, 1956), Lebedinoe ozero (Swan Lake, Zoya Tulubyeva, 1957), Sudba Cheloveka (Destiny of a Man, Sergei Bondarchuk, 1959), and Malchik is Neapolya (A Boy from Naples, Ivan Aksenchuk, 1958).33 This time SEF paid great attention to publicity. On 14 January 1960, the agency held a press conference, published articles in the Indian press, and organised the installation of boards in the streets, billboards on mobile carts, posters and signs on the theatre building. Soviet ambassador I.A. Benediktov opened the festival. SEF and Soviet diplomats succeeded in inviting Indian elite figures to the new types of festivals. During the opening day, the festival welcomed Indian federal ministers and other essential statesmen, such as foreign diplomats. Over 9,000 people attended the festival. This success encouraged SEF to suggest holding festivals regularly during the next four to five years to ‘cultivate a taste for Soviet films,’ thus adopting the same strategy as Americans had used in India since the beginning of the 1950s.34 The second festival took place in Bangalore. SEF set up a special committee for the festival headed by Mr Partasarti, a prominent Bangalore doctor, member of the Andhra Pradesh State’s legislative assembly. The committee also included Garadacha, a member of the State Cinematographic Chamber; Krishna Rao, the State Journalist Association secretary; and several businesspeople and lawyers. SEF ordered 150 placards, 1000 wall posters, 200 posters for the prominent films Swan Lake and Destiny of a Man, 5,000 personally addressed postcards, and 30,000 leaflets (15,000 in English and



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15,000 in Tamil and Kannada). The main city squares had large thirty-­by-­ten-­ metre boards with information about the festival two weeks in advance. As in Delhi, SEF held a press conference three days before the festival and sent 650 special invitations to the city elite’s representatives. The first speech was given by the festival committee chairman, followed by that of the Mysore legislative assembly speaker S.R. Khanti.35 The most successful picture was the feature film Destiny of a Man. The Indian press wrote positive reviews about Destiny of a Man: ‘an outstanding feature, it is different from films like The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957), it is not only about the horrors of war, but how it affects an ­individual . . . ­t he film is not only a great film but a life experience which nobody would like to have, but one can’t forget after getting it.’36 An article in the Stateman, ever unfriendly to the Soviet Union, asserted that: The main feature of Soviet films is that they are very far from cheap light comedies with the cheap show. What is good in them is their realism, the faith in the strength of a human being. The best of their features are sacramental and ­depressing . . . ­F ilms at the festival are an example of silent propaganda, a connection of reality with human ­relations . . . ­Although the films are made mainly for their Soviet public, they do have success internationally.37

The success of the festival in Bangalore gave the green light to the Soviets to continue festival screenings. Besides, it was easier to sell films that received public acclaim at festivals, such as Devochka ishchet otsa (A Girl Searches for Her Father, Lev Golub, 1959) and Doroga k zvezdam (The Way to Stars, Pavel Klushantsev, 1957), which were later sold to Indian distributors. The festival cost 8,485 rupees and earned 8,922 from tickets, which was a financial achievement for SEF. In 1960 SEF, for the first time, came close to balance its budget.38 It seems that from the beginning of its work in India, SEF never made earning money a priority but did need balanced budgets to avoid being accused of subsidising film screenings. During the autumn of 1961 and January 1962, SEF continued its festival programme in Hyderabad, Vizagapatam, Guntur, Nilore, Calcutta, and Bombay, having 10,000 to 30,000 viewers per festival.39 As the 1961 festivals took place after the first human-­crewed space flight, two of the most popular films were Pervyi reis k zvezdam (First Flight to Stars, Dmitry Bogolepov, Ilya Kopalin, Grigory Kosenko, 1961), and Chelovek vernulsya iz kosmosa (A Man Came Back from Space, Ekaterina Vermisheva, 1961), documentaries about Yuri Gagarin. For these films, tickets were resold on the black market at several times over the original price. All festivals in 1961 followed the same pattern of organising festival committees and opening ceremonies with speeches that included representatives of local elites, such as mayors, state ministers, members of state parliaments, writers, doctors, and lawyers. SEF closely

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cooperated with Soviet cultural agencies, such as the International Book, the Indo-­Soviet Friendship Society, and the News Agency Novosti. The festivals allowed SEF to organise other cultural activities around the film festivals, such as book exhibitions. In some instances, SEF faced difficulties in the organisation of festivals. In Hyderabad, a local president of the Cinema Chamber and a regional president of the Indo-­Soviet Friendship society refused to participate, denouncing the festival because it was not free of charge.40 SEF and Soviet diplomats succeeded in inviting local elite figures to the festivals. The mid-­level Indian bureaucracy however showed resistance to the campaign. For example, Indian police officers would come to the theatre owners’ homes and ask why they had agreed to lease their theatres to show Soviet films and what was all that ‘non-­commercial activity’ about.41 As Bombay had the most developed film market, all theatres were already booked for American and British films.42 Some theatre owners refused to screen Soviet films. SEF had long and difficult negotiations for the lease of the Excelsior, owned by certain K.K. Modi, who had for a long time worked closely with American companies. The report on the Bombay festival mentions that twenty days before the opening of the festival K.K. Modi demanded a very high lease price, ‘hoping to get [SEF’s] refusal.’ In the end, SEF agreed to pay the money. This situation was even commented on in the Indian film industry magazine Cinema Express: ‘Regardless of the high rental price, Soviet films gained financial success. If one compares the theatre owners’ attitude to foreign films, we can see that they are more reserved toward Soviet films. Without taking any responsibilities, theatre owners demanded high prices from Russians.’43 Later officials in Moscow would criticise the festival’s programme for being too propagandistic and for the instrumentalisation of diplomats, local elites, and public figures. Moscow did not like the elitist character of festivals and the neglect of the masses of the Indian poor. However, SEF did think about targeting the poor in Bombay. The idea was first mentioned after the Bombay festival. SEF suggested renting the Aurora theatre in a working-­class neighbourhood of Bombay for Soviet films week.44 However, there was no follow-­up in SEFs documents for special programmes in impoverished areas of Bombay. SEF later suggested having festivals in 1962 in several smaller Indian cities and towns  –Ahmedabad, Syrat, Baroda, Baunagar, Jamnagar, Nasik, Puna, Kolhapur, Hubli, Sholapur, Belgaum, Saugore, Nagpur, Gwalior, Jodhpur, Ajmer, and Jaipur. SEF’s headquarters in Moscow suggested having festivals in fifty-­four Indian cities and towns in 1962. In many small towns, festivals were the only way for Indians to see Soviet films. This was the case with Rajmundri, a southern town of 80,000 people. This is how a report from India characterised the situation:



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The revenues in small towns are low, but we get something more significant – it is for the first time that thousands of people watch Soviet films. Publicity is modest there, but one has to understand that in small Indian towns, publicity with an orchestra, a car and a speakerphone is a sign of solemnity.45

By the beginning of 1962 the organisation of well-­advertised Soviet film festivals became one of the main activities for SEF. Later on, during the Sino-­ Indian border conflict of 1962, the publicity of festivals would backfire.

1962: ‘The Worst Year for Soviet Propaganda in India’ In the middle of 1962, tensions between India and China resulted in a border conflict in the Himalayas. The direct clash of Indian and Chinese armed forces coincided with the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. On 26  October 1962, India proclaimed an emergency regime because of the border conflict. In November 1962, distributors stopped showing Soviet films. However, SEF managed to organise fifteen festivals in 1962 attended by 182,000 viewers. In Hyderabad, the Indian public boycotted the Soviet film festival, and films were screened in half-­empty theatres. The festival in Madras was held between 26  October and 8  November 1962, with the participation of the sheriff of Madras and the Ministers of Tamil Nadu. The Indian authorities allowed publicity banners only on the third day of the festival, and these were quickly vandalised. The Indo-­Soviet Friendship Society refused to participate in the festival. In Madras on 28 October, a group of young Indians rallied against the USSR in front of the Maryland theatre that showed Soviet films. At that time, the USSR already had a consulate in Madras. Still, the festival’s publicity turned a theatre where screenings of Soviet films were held into the ‘imaginary Soviet Union’ the protesters were rallying against. More than half of those invited for the festival opening refused to participate. On 30 October, the local nationalist political party Jana Sangh organised an anti-­Soviet demonstration to give out leaflets accusing the Soviet Union of being ‘an abettor of Chinese aggressors’, although by 1962 many observers were aware of the ongoing Sino-­Soviet split and Moscow-­Beijing tensions within the World Communist Movement. However, Moscow’s main political newspaper Pravda took a somewhat pro-­Chinese stance in the conflict, especially at the beginning in October 1962, referring to the Chinese as ‘brothers’ and India as only a ‘friendly’ nation in an article intitled ‘In the Interests of Peoples, for the Sake of Peace’. This division infuriated many Indians, making them that believe Moscow had supported China against India.46 Representatives of Indian distributors suggested that SEF pause screenings of films due to the emergency. SEF’s report of 1964 for the previous year calls

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the period the ‘most difficult period in the history of Sovexportfilm in India.’47 Soviet diplomats characterised the situation as one of ‘anti-­ Communist hysteria.’48

The Challenge of Indian Regulations for Soviet Export in the 1960s The 1962 Sino-­Indian conflict had an immediate effect and all Indian distributing companies stopped showing Soviet films in the first part of 1963.49 Significant changes were brought about by the establishment in 1963 of the Indian agency for foreign films distribution in India – the Indian Motion Picture Export Corporation (IMPEC) – which initially was not a state agency but an independent association, the Motion Pictures Export Association of America. The Soviets resumed its film programme in the second half of 1963 and continued the same festivals programme in 1964. However, in 1965 SEF faced a total ban from IMPEC on selling new films. This halt in Soviet film export continued for two years until 1967. The Soviet Film festivals continued with the use of same older films, with less number of viewers. SEF asserted that the Indian Ministry of Commerce did not sell licences on purpose in order to force SEF into working with IMPEC directly.50 The new Indian rule to introduce IMPEC as the main agency for foreign companies had to be applied equally to everyone. However, in Soviet documents it was stated that American MPEA and the British Rank Films Distributors had licenses until 1967 and enjoyed free access to Indian distributors.51 The Soviets sent a note of protest to the Indian Embassy in Moscow and to the Indian External Affairs Ministry as a first step to handle the situation. The main Indo-­Soviet agreement on trade promised the access of Soviet films to the Indian market; from a Soviet perspective, these new measures violated this agreement. One can speculate that the Sino-­Indian war and the death of Nehru in 1964 made an impact on Indian policymakers to reduce Soviet films in India which actually did not have a big presence anyway. Indian censors began to claim that Soviet films were ‘direct red propaganda of communist ideas,’ an instrument to agitate revolutionary sentiments in viewers. Thus, Indian censors revived their early 1950s prejudices about Soviet films. The crisis allowed Western companies to enlarge their presence. For example, in 1966 American companies gained access to show their films in twenty out of eighty theatres in Bombay.52 The situation was relayed to the Central Committee of the CPSU, which sent an envoy to India to negotiate films export in 1967. Possibly due to the new government of Indira Gandhi, things improved for Sovexportfilm from 1967, when SEF managed to increase to three times of the length of licence limit to bring more films, over twenty a year from the end of the 1960s, and opened Sovexportfilm offices in Madras and Calcutta by 1972.



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Conclusion Soviet film screenings in India suffered significant failures.53 In the mid-­1950s, the Soviets could not reach Indian cinemas on the same scale as Hollywood. Showing Soviet films through Indian distribution companies was neither particularly rewarding nor gave control over screenings. In 1959 Soviet film export agency SEF decided to launch a special campaign of well-­advertised Soviet film festivals and Soviet film weeks in order to reach the Indian public. The festival programmes succeeded in engaging Indian local elites which in turn helped to attract a larger viewer audience. Nevertheless, showing Soviet films to 200,000 Indian viewers per year in commercial screenings was a tiny drop in the Indian film market of 2.5 daily viewers. There were many reasons for this  – Indians’ preference to watch their own film industry’s features and the habit of watching foreign films in English that favoured Hollywood in India. As Paul McGarr showed in his article, Indian bureaucrats also distrusted the idea of showing Soviet films for fear of disseminating communist propaganda, especially given the complex political context and social tensions that characterised Indian society itself. The Sino-­Indian border conflict also became a significant challenge for the Soviets, seen as allies of Communist China. However, after the crisis, India remained non-­aligned and continued to work with the USSR. The Soviet festivals campaign resumed in 1963 but not without new problems. In 1965 the controversy of film exchange between the USSR and India stalled SEF’s attempts to bring in new films. SEF negotiated throughout 1965 to sell new features, the target being finally achieved a year later. Thus, Soviet film festivals of 1965 had to show the same films as in 1964, resulting in a lower number of viewers.54 The story of Soviet abortive attempts to reach the Indian foreign film market shows how the Soviets lacked experience in working in new decolonised countries. Moreover, this shows how inadequate were Soviet means to project its superpower status to the Third World on the same scale as the United States. In educational exchange, for example, the USSR never managed to find and train enough professors and teachers with knowledge of English to be sent abroad.55 At the same time, Soviet ideology saw decolonisation as a progressive movement that would eventually push decolonised countries toward socialism, independently of the USSR’s support. Historical developments seemed to confirm this vision. China became communist on its own by 1949, as did North Vietnam and later Cuba. Therefore, independent political processes in the Global South encouraged the USSR to promote what it believed to be the superior development path of socialism, even if the Soviets could not adequately support them by cultural diplomacy programmes.56 A more successful Soviet attempt to influence the Third World came with the ­establishment

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of the Tashkent International Films Festival in 1968 for the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where India was much welcomed to show its films.57A truly rewarding enterprise for Soviet public diplomacy was book publishing and export to India. Its high period started in the 1960s when Soviets engaged in the translation of a diverse range of literature into English and a variety of Indian languages, making this production more affordable than US and British books. Severyan Dyakonov is a history researcher specialising in Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War in the decolonised world. He earned his PhD from the Geneva Graduate Institute in 2022. Following his PhD, he was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research at Harvard University (2022–2023) and New York University (2023– 2024). His postdoctoral research focuses on the history of the Soviet Red Cross influence within the International League of the Red Cross in Geneva during the Cold War.

Notes  1. RGALI (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva), 2918/4/49/15 . The report was prepared by then Soviet Consulate intern in Calcutta, Vyacheslav Gurgenov (1935–1994), who later became a KGB operative in India and Pakistan and one of the directors of the KGB Foreign Intelligence Service in the 1980s. A State Department Document at RG 59/CDF1960-­63/1366 has a file on a conversation between American Consul in Calcutta with Gurgenov on 7 September 1961.   2. Hilger, ‘Building a Socialist Elite’.  3. Westad, The Global Cold War; Kalinovsky and Radchenko, The End of the Cold War, 16.  4. Govil, Orienting Hollywood, 28.   5. For numbers of viewers of Soviet film public screenings for the year 1964, see GARF (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii), 9576/15/286/610.   6. McGarr, ‘A Rather Tedious and Unfortunate Affair’, 5–20.  7. Rajagopalan, Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas.   8. Most of the documents used consists of correspondence between the SEF head office in Moscow and the Bombay SEF office in India.   9. Kosinova, ‘Export-­Import Relations of Soviet Cinema during the Years of “Stagnation”’, 213–18. 10. RGALI, 2918/4/49. 11. RGALI, 2918/4/145. 12. Metha, ‘Screening/Meaning: Hollywood’s Long Career in India’, 95. 13. Ibid.



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14 Segrave, American Films Abroad, 141. 15. Ibid., 144. 16. Sadlier, Americans All. 17. Segrave, American Films Abroad, 187. 18. Anonymous, ‘Is India an Expandable Market?’, 5, 17. 19. Ibid. 20. Anonymous, ‘India Rising as U.S. Film Market’, 3. 21. RGALI, 2918/4/49/49-­53. 22. RGALI, 2918/4/145/59. In the 1950s Hollywood companies moved away from the idea of dubbing their films because Indians preferred watching American films in English. 23. RGALI, 2918/4/49/49-­53. 24. RGALI, 2918/4/49/54-­56. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. RGALI, 2918/4/51/9-­22. 28. Caute, Dancer Defects, 8–11. For more on the pedagogical and didactic character of Soviet mass culture, see Roth-­Ey, Moscow Prime Time. 29. Caute, Dancer Defects, 48. 30. Mehta, ‘Screening/Meaning: Hollywood’s Long Career in India’, 95. 31. RGALI, 2918/4/49/54-­56. 32. Salazkina, ‘Soviet-­Indian Coproductions’, 71–89. 33. Films’ titles in SEF documents do not name directors. 34. Anonymous, ‘Picker On India and Europe as Sales Potentials’, 5, 21. 35. RGALI, 2918/4/50, Bangalore festival. 36. Ibid. 37. RGALI, 2918/5/254, spravka ot 1963. 38. RGALI, 2918/4/145/17-­59. 39. During the 1961 programme SEF showed Leili i Medzhnun (Leili and Majnun, Tatjana Berezantseva and Gafur Valamat-­Zade, 1959), First Flight to Stars, The Destiny of a Man, The Cranes are Flying, Arena smelykh (The Arena of the Brave, Sergei Gurov and Yuri Ozerov, 1953); a short film: Ali-baba I sorok razboinikov (Ali Baba and Forty Bandits, Grigory Lomidze, 1959). 40. RGALI, 2918/4/145/17-­59. 41. RGALI, 2918/5/254, spravka ot 1963. 42. RGALI, 2918/4/145/1-­9. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. RGALI, 2918/4/145/1-­9, spravka 21 January 1961. 46. Anonymous, ‘V Interesakh Narodov, vo Imya Mira’, 1. 47. RGALI, 2918/5/253/44-­50. 48. Ibid. 49. RGALI, 2918/146/33. 50. RGALI, 2918/5/365/21. 51. RGALI, 2918/5/365/49. 52. RGALI, 2918/5/365/94. 53. Brouillette, ‘US-­Soviet Antagonism and the “Indirect Propaganda”’, 170–88. 54. RGALI, 2918/5/365.

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55. Katsakioris. ‘Creating a Socialist Intelligentsia Soviet Educational Aid and its Impact on Africa (1960–1991)’, 262. 56. The USSR itself had to rely on foreign, especially trophy, films to fill the demand of its domestic film market in the 1950s. See Shaw and Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War, 50. 57. Djagalov, From Internationalism to Post Colonialism.

Bibliography Anonymous. ‘Is India an Expandable Market?’ Variety (25 November 1953), 5, 17. ———. ‘Picker On India and Europe as Sales Potentials’. Variety (9 December 1953), 5, 21. ———. ‘India Rising as U.S. Film Market’. Variety (17 January 1962), 3. ———. ‘V Interesakh Narodov, vo Imya Mira’. Pravda (25 October 1962), 1. Brouillette, Sarah. ‘US-Soviet Antagonism and the “Indirect Propaganda” of Book Schemes in India in the 1950s’. University of Toronto Quarterly 84(4) (2015), 170–88. Caute, David. Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Djagalov, Rossen. From Internationalism to Post Colonialism. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2020. Govil, Noton. Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Hilger, Andreas. ‘Building a Socialist Elite’, in Jost Dulffer and Marc Frey (eds), Elites and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Kalinovsky, Artemy and Sergey Radchenko (eds), The End of the Cold War and the Third World New Perspectives on Regional Conflict. London: Routledge, 2011. Katsakioris, Constantin. ‘Creating a Socialist Intelligentsia Soviet Educational Aid and its Impact on Africa (1960–1991)’. Cahiers d’études africaines 226 (2017), 259–88. Kosinova, Marina. ‘Export-Import Relations of Soviet Cinema during the Years of “Stagnation”’. Vestnik Universiteta 12 (2016), 213–18. McGarr, Paul. ‘“A Rather Tedious and Unfortunate Affair”: The Rahi Saga and the Troubled Origins of Indo-Soviet Cinematic Exchange’. Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 36(1) (2016), 5–20. Metha, Rini. ‘Screening/Meaning: Hollywood’s Long Career in India’. Comparative American Studies An International Journal 12(1–2) (2014), 93–98. Rajagopalan, Sudha. Indian, Films in Soviet Cinemas: The Culture of Movie-Going after Stalin. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009. Roth-Ey, Kristin. Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Sadlier, Darleen J. Americans All: Good Neighbour Cultural Diplomacy in the World War II. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2012. Salazkina, Masha. ‘Soviet-Indian Coproductions: Alibaba as Political Allegory’. Cinema Journal 49(4) (2010), 71–89. Segrave, Kerry. American Films Abroad: Hollywood’s Domination of the World’s Movie Screen. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., Publishers, 1997.



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Shaw, Tony and Denise J. Youngblood. Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010. Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: The Third World Interventions and The Making of Our Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

CHAPTER 8

The Film Market at the Time of Independence France’s Former African Colonies and the Cinematic Cold War in the 1960s Gabrielle Chomentowski

As a former officer of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Andrei Tarelin recalled in his memoirs, in the early 1960s: Most of the African population had no idea what the Soviet Union looked like. This had to be rectified both culturally and ideologically. Initially, three countries were chosen where Nikita Khrushchev wanted to build socialism and where anti-­colonial actions were most spectacular: Ghana, Guinea, and Mali. In these countries, the first Soviet embassies in West Africa were opened and entrusted with this mission. And the easiest way to apply this Soviet wish was to start with cinema.1

For a long time, Africa was strikingly absent from the cultural history of the Cold War, as scholars focused especially on the military and political dimensions of the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States.2 As Robert J. McMahon wrote, many historians and political scientists ‘hewed to a narrow interpretive paradigm that privileged the actions and motivations of policymakers in Washington and Moscow, treating Third Word actors – at least by implications – more as objects of manipulation than as active agents shaping that own fate.’3 Yet Africans were also at the centre of the Soviets’ and the United States’ efforts to win hearts and minds. In the fight for independence and against neo-­imperialism, many African intellectuals, artists, and activists also participated in ideological battle.4 Fortunately, over the past few



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years, many historians have begun reinterpreting the history of cultural life in Africa thanks to new sources from the archives and oral history, combining Cold War, postcolonial and independence struggle perspectives. In this context, highly extensive research in social history devoted to African students’ mobility during the Cold War,5 and to socialism in Africa,6 has helped to reinterpret the role of African actors in the Cold War. This chapter proposes to explore the situation of the film market in France’s former African colonies at the turning point of the 1960s, especially in socialist Guinea-­Conakry and Mali but also in the monarchy of Morocco. After describing the political and cinematographic context in which relations between the Soviet Union and African governments were possible, using mainly Soviet archives but also French, US, and African sources, I will focus on the way in which the Soviet government first entered the film market in these countries and how the United States responded to this ‘communist penetration’. So as not to consider the former West African French colonies as an exceptional case, I will illustrate the broader film market context with other non-­French West African cases in this chapter. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that while Soviet assistance had a clear political goal for the Soviet Union – to spread socialism – it also participated in the development of film infrastructures and know-­how in Africa.7

Could Soviet Films Be Seen on African Screens before the Wave of Independence? The chronology of film activities in Africa is very different from one country to another. If the first screenings were organised in nearly the same period in North Africa (Morocco and Egypt), South Africa and Mali,8 i.e. in the ten years from the end of the nineteenth century to 1910, film production and distribution appeared in very different times in the twentieth century. It is in Johannesburg that the film industry appears to have been first developed,9 then in Egypt, when the end of the British protectorate in February 1922 gave new opportunities to local entrepreneurship.10 In other parts of Africa, however, mainly dominated by European empires, no film production structure was created before the end of the 1940s. In an effort to develop leisure activities for European and African citizens, cinemas managed by Europeans or Syrian-­Lebanese expanded in African towns in the 1930s, showing French, US, Egyptian, or, especially in East Africa, Indian films. Control over film screenings was not homogeneous in all African countries. In the French and British cases,11 colonial authorities kept a careful eye on all kind of anti-­colonial expression and especially the manifestation of communist ideas. In France, for instance, each film needed to receive an

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official certificate to be released, but in the colonies, after the adoption of the French Minister of Colonies Pierre Laval’s 1934 decree to control film release and filmmaking,12 local authorities could apply an additional level of control and censorship. Despite this process, the reality was much more complex. One example is the Soviet film Potomok Chingis-Khana (Storm over Asia, Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1928), which tells the story of a young man from Mongolia who organises a rebellion against the British Imperial Army, and of a North American trader exploiting local peoples. The film was forbidden by the French Commission of Cinematographic Control but released anyway in 1931 in Equatorial French Africa (AEF), before being censored in 1938; the colonial authorities considered that the film could have a strong subversive effect on colonised people in the French colonies.13 On a comparative basis, in the British colonies, the showing of Soviet films was also very rare because of a double system of film control: the first level was applied in London by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), excluding all films containing ‘Bolshevik propaganda’ or ‘incitement to class hatred’,14 and the second via local control in Africa. Some Soviet films appeared on screens in British colonial Africa after the Second World War: the colonial mobile cinema van for Western Africa released two educational films, one dealing with farming organisation ‘received from the USSR [and] re-­edited for African audiences’ and one about Cossack horsemen.15 Despite their very limited quantity, the presence of Soviet films in French Africa after the Second World War may seem surprising as, given the strong anti-­colonial contestation in imperial societies, control over film screenings was intensified considerably. This did not inhibit the new dynamic observed by Odile Goerg, who notes that before, during and after film screenings, cinemas provided a space for ‘exuberance, joy, and critique’ for young African generations.16 And, as the Department of State Committee of the United States noted in a report in April 1950, ‘among nationalist leaders [in Africa] and groups there are undoubtedly some [penetrations] with communist ties or sympathies’.17 For the Soviet government, while Africa was not at the heart of its concerns during the Stalin era,18 the mid-­1950s marked a turning point: the emergence of the so-­called ‘non-­aligned’ countries during the Bandung Conference in 1955, the Suez crisis in 1956, and many countries’ accession to independence led the first secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, to integrate the African continent into the Soviet international policy agenda.19



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Africa: A New Film Market – and a Market of Minds – for the Soviet Union to Conquer African countries’ independence in the 1950s and 1960s opened new perspectives for the Soviet Union in terms of film distribution as the European empires’ economic and cultural monopoly officially collapsed (even if the reality was much more complex). In May 1959, the USSR Council of Ministers – one of the country’s highest political authorities – initiated a plan to improve and intensify film exports to Africa. They provided an overview of the situation of the film market in each country in terms of infrastructure, audience, and state control, and identified potential local partners to deal with. In Morocco, for example, a report on the situation of the film market written in 1960 pointed out first that ‘European’ cinema included French films and foreign films dubbed in French, while ‘Arab’ cinema included films dubbed in Arabic, and secondly, that the majority of local film distribution companies were branches of French and US companies.20 According to the Soviet report, US films made up 50 to 55 per cent of screenings in Moroccan cinemas. Such information was also gathered in 1960 for countries such as Guinea, Togo, and Tunisia, but also Somalia, Ghana and the Union of South Africa, giving a rich overview of film activity in these countries at that moment. For the Soviet observers, this data served to better elaborate a strategy for the distribution of Soviet films. Once this information had been gathered for each country, and according to the local governments’ requests in terms of film assistance, the Soviet Ministry of Trade opened local offices of Sovexportfilm  – the state organisation charged with the import and export of films. A Soviet officer and an interpreter oversaw several countries’ film activity. The first Sovexportfilm office opened in Guinea-­Conakry in January 1960 after both partners – Nikita Khrushchev and Sékou Touré – signed cultural agreements in Crimea a few months earlier. Furthermore, as Sékou Touré chose socialism as a political and economic model, and ‘[restricted] private film distribution companies on the territory’, as a Soviet officer noted, the presence of a state company such as Sovexportfilm would be welcome, ‘[allowing the Soviets] not only to enter the film market in Guinea but also to widen the distribution of Soviet films in neighbouring territories and the closest countries, such as Liberia, Ghana, Cameroon and the territories that in 1960 were preparing to become independent, such as Togo and Nigeria.’21 The Sovexportfilm office in Conakry thus undertook prospective action in the region. Sovexportfilm’s second base opened in Addis Ababa, as the Ethiopian authorities welcomed Soviet films. It was responsible for the distribution of Soviet films in Sudan, Somalia (both the English and Italian parts), Kenya, and Uganda. In October 1960, a third Sovexportfilm office opened in Morocco.

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Once present in an African country, the Sovexportfilm officer had to deal with the local cinema owners to distribute Soviet films. The film release situation could differ from one country to another. Either the local government decided to nationalise cinema infrastructures  – as in Guinea or Mali in the 1960s – and Sovexportfilm had to negotiate with the Ministry of Information, or the cinema market remained open to private firms and, in this case, Sovexportfilm had to deal directly with cinema operators and owners. In the first case, inter-­state agreements in the cultural field governed the release of Soviet films. Thus, in February 1960, at the request of the Guinean authorities, the aforementioned Andrei Tarelin and two technicians from the Moscow Studio of Documentary Films came to Conakry for a few weeks with a mobile projector and Soviet films dubbed in French. They trained a dozen Guineans to become projectionists in rural places.22 Two years later, following a new agreement signed in Conakry, Sovexportfilm agreed to deliver 120 films, including feature-­length fiction films, documentaries, animated cartoons, and popular science films dubbed in French. The Guinean Ministry of Information insisted on including in this list films such as Dikaya sobaka Dingo (The Wild Dog Dingo, Yuly Karasik, 1962) and Ivanovo Detstvo (Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962), which won awards at the Venice Film Festival the previous year.23 In the case of Soviet–Malian agreements signed in 1961, the Malian ambassador in Moscow, Mamadou Keita Fediala, asked Sovexportfilm for assistance in building a new cinema, for a supply of Soviet films, and for the sending of mobile cinema projectors. In his view, this assistance would help Modibo Keita’s government develop its own cinema and compete with ‘the gangster films’ released in French film distribution networks ‘that have a bad influence on Malian youth’.24 Part of Fediala’s request was honoured: as a former Malian projectionist testified, Soviet mobile cinema vans travelled in Mali throughout the 1960s screening Soviet films.25 The Guinean and Malian cases testify that African socialist governments had a proactive policy regarding Soviet film assistance in the 1960s. In other African countries, where states were not involved in film infrastructures, the Soviet authorities paid great attention to film operators and exhibitors. From the Sovexportfilm office in Morocco, the Soviets established trade agreements with the private firm Maghreb Uni-­F ilm based in Casablanca to distribute Soviet films in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria.26 In Togo, in March 1961, Sovexportfilm invited Crawford Anthony ‘to discuss ways of increasing the distribution of Soviet films in Togo’.27 The manager made a commitment to screen sixty-­five Soviet feature films, at a rate of four per month, in his cinema in Lomé. In return, Sovexportfilm agreed to supply a mobile cinema van, Ukraïna-­16 mm projection equipment, and seven mobile generators. Although it seems unlikely that this very ambitious plan was realised, the Soviets did provide the Cine Opera with a new 35 mm projector.28



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By comparison, the same year, Sovexportfilm respectively invited managers of an Ethiopian film distribution company, Artin Avakian, and Omar Captan of the Ghanaian film company Captan Cinema29 to Moscow to sign agreements for the sale of mobile projectors. In return, both managers agreed to screen Soviet films regularly in rural Ethiopia and Ghana. Finally, the Soviet embassies and cultural centres that gradually opened in Africa in the 1960s served as privileged places for showing Soviet films. The film clubs regularly offered free screenings, as the Guinean newspaper Horoya testified, for example on 10 May 1966 when it announced the screening in Conakry of two documentary films: Velikaya Otechestvennaya (The 20th Anniversary of the Victory over Fascism, Roman Karmen, Irina Venzher, and Irina Setkina, 1965) and Chelovek vyshel v kosmos (The Man Went Out in Space, Grigory Kosenko, 1965). These film clubs sought to attract the widest possible audience, whether socialist activists or not, screening both didactic documentary films on life in the USSR and fiction films that won awards at international film festivals. Furthermore, in the framework of bilateral cooperation, Sovexportfilm regularly organised ‘Soviet film weeks’ to present the latest film productions. Starting with a ‘Soviet film week’ in a given country, the latter then organised a cultural week in the Soviet Union the following year. The first ‘Soviet film weeks’ appear to have been organised in Bamako and Casablanca in 1961, then in Conakry in 1963. Soviet artists participated in these events, such as Tatyana Samoilova in the mid-­1960s, promoting Letyat Zhuravli (The Cranes Are Flying, Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957), or in 1971 for the fifth Soviet film week in Conakry, when the Kirghiz actress Natalia Arinbasarova came to promote the film Djamilia (Jamilya, Irina Poplavskaya and Sergei Yutkevich, 1969).30 Regarding the selection of films, the Soviets chose to screen newsreels, educational and documentary films in Africa, and, to a lesser extent, feature films. This choice corresponded to the Soviets’ priority: describing the Soviet Union with the aim of fighting anti-­communist and anti-­Soviet propaganda, and spreading the ideology of socialism. In the context of the free international newsreels market, the Soviets offered newsreels such as Po Sovetskomu Soyuzu (Around the Soviet Union)31 and Khochu vse znat (I Want to Know Everything)32 for child audiences in English, Arabic or French to several countries, such as Sudan in 1961,33 Morocco,34 Tunisia, Guinea, and Mali, and even in Amharic for Ethiopian audience from 1963. These newsreels were carefully selected by a committee from the Ministries of Culture and Foreign Trade to show the athletic performance of the Soviets, the multicultural identity of the Soviet population, or how the revolutionary process extended beyond the Eastern bloc, or to popularise the image of the first secretary of the CPSU and so on. After the success of Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space in 1961, the Soviet catalogue was expanded to include films about Soviet cosmonauts,

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thus demonstrating the technological exploits of which the USSR was capable. These newsreels also aimed to testify to the way in which the Soviets gave a place to African voices through cultural events organised by African artists in the Soviet Union, such as newsreels about Soviet–African relations (the above-­mentioned Khrushchev and Touré meeting in Crimea in 1959, for example). Regarding feature films, to achieve an immediate effect the Ministry of Foreign Trade selected Soviet films that were already in the distribution network for French- or English-­speaking countries that could be screened in former French or British colonies in Africa. This selection included historical films, such as Aleksandr Nevsky (Alexander Nevsky, Sergei Eisenstein, 1938), Ivan Groznyi (Ivan the Terrible, Sergei Eisenstein, 1944), and films about the Revolutions such as My iz Kronshtadta (The Sailors of Kronstadt, Efim Dzigan, 1936). But most Soviet films selected concerned the Second World War, firstly because it was the main theme of Soviet films made after the war, and secondly because the Soviet government wanted to recall the Soviet Union’s strategic role in the defeat of the Nazi regime. Films awarded at international film festivals, such as The Cranes Are Flying, Sudba cheloveka (The Destiny of a Man, Sergei Bondarchuk, 1959), and Balada o soldate (Ballad of a Soldier, Grigory Chukhrai, 1959) made a strong impression on African audiences, as they did on other audiences.35 Other films were especially selected for African audiences, such as films made in Central Asian and Transcaucasian film studios, the idea being that films made in a country with a Muslim cultural heritage would better reach Muslim audiences in Africa. In this regard, the Soviets for instance distributed the Georgian films Fatima (Vladimir Valiev, 1958), about a nineteenth-­century Ossetian fairy tale, and Zvigenis kbili (The Shark Tooth, Shalva Gedevanishvili, 1959), about two poor boys in an unspecified eastern country, and the Tadjik film Qismati Sho’ir (The Lot of the Poet, Bension Kimiagarov, 1959), devoted to the life of the Persian poet Rudaki.

The Film Market in Africa in the 1960s: A Minefield for the Communists? The Soviets’ arrival in the film market in Africa did not go unnoticed. The United States, but also former European imperial powers such as the French and British, kept a close eye on all kinds of communist propaganda thus distributed, for obvious political and economic reasons. As mentioned above, the US Department of State carefully observed all communist activities worldwide and this surveillance increased with the disintegration of the European empires in the 1950s and 1960s. Concerning cinema, a report published in 1962 stated:



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During 1961, as in previous years, films  – feature, documentaries, shorts, cartoons, and newsreels – constituted a major propaganda vehicle for the Sino-­Soviet Communist Bloc’s continuing cultural offensive. . . . The Bloc substantially increased its material and technical assistance to the newly emerging countries, where the film ranked second to radio as a medium of communication.36

As shown earlier, one of the Soviet strategies in Africa was indeed to offer technical assistance (mobile cinema vans, projectors, etc.) in exchange for Soviet film releases. International film festivals too, from the US point of view, constituted a place for the ‘Communist cultural offensive’. Indeed, in contrast to the Western European international film festivals held in Cannes and Venice, the Soviet government offered a privileged place to newly emerging countries at the International Film Festival in Moscow, which was created in 1959. As several scholars have analysed, regardless of the prevalence of ideological aspects in the film selection, the Moscow festival gave African films the opportunity to compete and African filmmakers to participate in the jury.37 That was not the case at this time at European film festivals. This strategy reached its climax with the creation of the Tashkent Festival of Asian and African Films in 1968, renamed the Festival of Asian, African, and Latin American Films in 1972.38 Furthermore, the US Department of State monitored ‘how the Communist bloc countries also showed their interest in the developing nations by participating heavily in various African and Arab-­ sponsored festivals’,39 and how local audiences received films. The report points out that half of the main films shown at the first International Film Festival in Ibadan in 1961 came from communist countries, and that the Polish film Popiół i diament (Ashes and Diamonds, Andrzej Wajda, 1958) and the Japanese film Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa, 1954) ‘made the greatest impression, in the opinion of the festival organizers’.40 The same year in East Africa, the US reports that during the fourth International African Film Festival in Mogadishu, Chinese, Czechoslovak, and Soviet documentary films focusing on African countries received great acclaim from local audiences.41 To fight the ‘Communist offensive’, the US government started to support European allies by giving them informational surveys about Soviet activities in their former colonies, which they still considered their backyard. In this way, in 1963, the director of the Motion Picture Export Association of America (MPEA) office in Paris informed the director of the French National Centre for Cinematography  – the state institution supervising all issues regarding the French film industry and film creation42 – about the Soviet films sold by Sovexportfilm to the private company Secma. Since the end of the 1930s, this firm, along with another called Comacico, had constituted a duopoly in French-­ speaking African countries:43 in 1960, these two firms owned

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r­ espectively sixty-­five and eighty-­five cinemas equipped with 35 mm projectors out of the 180 cinemas present in French Africa, while a Syro-­Lebanese and Indian family were in charge of the remaining thirty. As Comacico and Secma were essential actors in film distribution, Sovexportfilm had to deal with them to distribute Soviet films. While Secma released Soviet films, the relationship with Comacico was much more difficult. In 1962, the trade officer at the Soviet embassy in Bamako complained to the head of Sovexportfilm in Moscow that, through their firms, Western countries were undermining the former ‘Soviet film week’ organised in March: Comacico workers spread rumours about the low artistic quality of the Soviet films and high cost of the cinema tickets sold at the festival; Soviet posters announcing the event were reportedly torn down; and cinema owners refused to screen Soviet films on Saturdays and Sundays, the busiest days for cinemas in town.44 In 1965, in Togo, Comacico refused to renew its film distribution agreement with the owner of a cinema that had received a 35 mm projector from the Soviets.45 In the end, several Western countries’ embassies reportedly put pressure on cinema managers, requesting that certain Soviet films be removed from the programme. This was the case in Mali in 1962 when the West German and US embassies asked to remove two films: Aleksandr Medvedkin’s Razum protiv bezumiya (Reason Against Madness, 1960), describing Nazi atrocities and US implication in the Hiroshima horror, and Pylayushchy ostrov (The Blazing Island, Roman Karmen, 1961), about the United States landing in the Bay of Pigs.46 This kind of diplomatic pressure also occurred in other countries, such as in Somalia in 1961, where the Federal Republic of Germany’s embassy asked a cinema manager not to screen the already mentioned Ballad of a Soldier, arguing that the film was an insult to Germans, as soldiers were called ‘hogs’ in the film.47 Recorded in the Soviet archives, this surprising German reaction reminds us that at the beginning of the 1960s, the process of bringing Nazi criminals to justice had only just begun in West Germany, and that the elites who occupied important positions under the Third Reich still held political and diplomatic functions in this period. The US embassy’s support for the German embassy above all revealed a commitment to preventing the dissemination of any kind of cultural and artistic creation from communist countries.

Was It Possible to Have the Upper Hand over US Films? US films were present on African screens from the beginning of the twentieth century: first in South Africa, and progressively in the whole continent, especially after the First World War when French domination of film production collapsed. Despite the will of European countries such as France and the



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United Kingdom to limit US films’ screenings in cinemas in the 1930s, their presence increased irreversibly on the mainland and in the African colonies.48 In French West Africa (AOF) in the interwar period, French-­speaking films dominated the market (61 per cent) while 31 per cent were American, except in Ivory Coast where more than 90 per cent of films were American.49 But at the end of the 1950s in the French-­speaking countries of Africa, US films represented more than half of Comacico and Secma’s overall revenues.50 In comparison, in the Belgian colonies, westerns were so popular that young people in Kinshasa took cowboys as fashion models.51 In Zanzibar, Indian and British films dominated local screens in the interwar period, but from 1941, 55 per cent of films were imported from the United States and 35 per cent from India.52 Of the 173 films presented to the censors in Tanganyika in 1949, ninety-­two were American, twenty-­seven were British, forty-­seven Indian, and seven Arab.53 Indeed, while before decolonisation, the United States distributed films in Africa through European firms to preserve diplomatic relations with European allies, the situation changed in April 1961 when Eric Johnston – the head of the MPEA – founded the American Motion Picture Export Company Africa to conquer the film market in Africa. This company gradually drove out all its competitors, including the French Comacico and Secma in the 1970s.54 How could the Soviets fight against US film hegemony? Just to quote an example, at the beginning of the 1960s, 41.7 per cent of films released in Tunisia were American, 25.6 per cent French, 8.3 per cent Egyptian, 6.7 per cent Italian, and only 0.3 per cent Soviet.55 In one of the main cinemas of Lomé in Togo, almost only US films were screened in this period,56 and in Morocco, US films occupied 50 to 55 per cent of the screens.57 Was it the market demand or the market offer that explained this African preference for US films? Or was it the quality of the films? Sovexportfilm was aware of the flop of Soviet films in African cinemas. In 1961, its director reported to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow that films selected for African screens must be ‘full of actions’, not ‘psychological ones that will be unsuccessful with local spectators’, and suggested avoiding historical films.58 However, it was historical films that Moscow sent to Africa, such as Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. In 1962, an officer from Guinea’s Sovexportfilm office observed that Guinean audiences did not understand films such as Lenin v 1918 godu (Lenin in 1918, Mikhail Romm, 1939) or the aforementioned Ballad of a Soldier, while films such as the American The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960), the British film Horrors of the Black Museum (Arthur Crabtree, 1959) or the French Le Gorille vous salue bien (The Mask of the Gorilla, Bernard Borderie, 1958), with their dynamic action, were immediately understood by African audiences. Confronted with this failure, a representative of the Soviet embassy in Addis Ababa proposed countering US

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detective films with Soviet detective films that would be conceived ‘in a communist and not a commercial perspective’. But the head of Sovexportfilm replied that detective films made in the Soviet Union could never compete with US films of the same genre.59

Conclusions Did the cinematic Cold War in Africa resemble that which took place elsewhere? First, as I have shown, African countries were at the centre of the United States’ and Soviet Union’s attention, as well as that of other countries. Both closely monitored each new step that its opponent made in film distribution and exhibition. The Soviets and their allies were the first to invest in cinema development in Africa: they sent technical material to screen films and experts to train people on-­site when, in the beginning, the United States did not have a specific policy regarding film distribution in Africa. Two factors could explain why the United States did not initially fight back: during the colonial era they did not want to tread on French and British toes; secondly, they did not need to, as US films were already very popular among African audiences. The United States’ attitude changed with decolonisation in Africa, when the US decided to adopt a dual strategy. On the one hand, they supported their European allies in fighting all forms of communist cultural offensive; on the other hand, they developed a new network of film distribution, defeating all competitors, whether communist, European, or African. Unable to compete with the United States in terms of film screenings, the Soviets banked on the other aspect of cinema, namely aid in developing technical assistance and national film production. To this end, they gave scholarships to African states to train filmmakers. In this sense, we may consider their strategy a success, as filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène from Senegal, Souleymane Cissé from Mali, and Michel Papatakis from Ethiopia, who trained in Moscow, are now considered the pioneers of African cinema. Gabrielle Chomentowski is Research Fellow at the Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains (CNRS – Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne). Her main research field is the social and cultural history of cinema in a transnational perspective, focusing on the Soviet, French, and African cases. She is currently working on film school history in a transnational perspective, on film cooperation competition and on African Students Mobilities during the Cold War. Her earlier research was devoted to nationalities policy in Soviet cinema during the 1920s and the 1930s and especially on the Film Studio Vostokkino.



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Notes  1. Tarelin, Zapiski diplomata-zateinika, opus’ 2, 75.  2. Onslow, Cold War in Southern Africa; Shubin, The Hot ‘Cold War’.  3. McMahon, The Cold War in the Third World, 4.   4. See Katsakioris, ‘L’Union soviétique et les intellectuels africains’, and, as an example, see Blum, Chomentowski, and Katsakioris, ‘Au cœur des réseaux africano-­soviétiques’.  5. See Katsakioris, ‘Leçons soviétiques’; Saint-­ Martin, Scarfo Ghellab and Mellakh, Étudier à l’Est; Leclerc-­Olive and Hily, ‘Former des élites’; Pugach, African Students in East Germany.   6. See notably Blum et al., Socialismes en Afrique.   7. See Chomentowski, ‘Filmmakers from Africa and the Middle East trained at VGIK during the Cold War’. I would like to thank Melissa Thackway for her careful proofreading.   8. Hampâté Bâ, ‘Le dit du cinéma africain’.  9. Maingard, South African National Cinema. 10. Farid, ‘Naissance et développement du cinéma égyptien’. 11. In this chapter, I will consider in particular the former colonies of the French and British empires, and will give some facts concerning the South African Union and Ethiopia. I will not consider the African colonies of the Portuguese Empire as they only gained independence in the 1970s. This does not mean that Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-­Bissau were not involved in the cinematic Cold War, as Soviet filmmakers were sent during the wars of independence in these countries. For more information, see Gray, Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution. 12. Decrees on the organisation of the control of films, phonographic records and cinematographic recordings in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa date respectively to 8 March and 5 August 1934. Journal officiel de la République française, 8445–46. 13. Goerg, Fantômas sous les tropiques, 103. 14. Smith, ‘Soviet Films and British Intelligence in the 1930s’. 15. Anonymous, ‘Revised List of Films’. 16. Goerg, Tropical Dream Palaces, 141. 17. Paper prepared by the Colonial Policy Review Sub-­Committee of the Committee on Problems of Dependent Areas, Department of State Committee files, lot 54 D 5, ‘Working Group on Colonial Problems’, 26 April 1950, https://history.state.gov/histo​ ricaldocuments/frus1952-­54v03/d775 (accessed 29 May 2024). 18. Regarding Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union’s historical ties with the countries of Africa, see Matusevich, Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa. 19. Bartenev, ‘L’URSS et l’Afrique noire sous Khrouchtchev’. 20. RGALI, 2918/5/77/108, Reports from diplomatic services in Ghana, Guinea, Somalia, Togo, Tunisia, Ethiopia, and South Africa regarding film cooperation in 1960. 21. RGALI, 2918/5/25/16, Order from the Minister of Foreign Trade regarding the plan to increase Soviet films released in Africa. 22. Tarelin, Zapiski diplomata-zateinika, opus’ 2, 75. 23. Anonymous, ‘Les accords culturels guinéo-­soviétiques portant sur l’exploitation des films soviétiques en Guinée’, 4. Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Tarkovsky’s first feature film, won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival in 1962. Filmmaker Yuly Karasik received a prize for his film The Wild Dog Dingo at the same festival.

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24. RGALI, 2918/5/77/76. The idea that some films could be detrimental for young audiences was already being expressed by French officers and African intellectuals in the colonial period. See Goerg, ‘Entre infantilisation et répression coloniale’. 25. Jolin, ‘Histoire du cinéma ambulant au Mali’. 26. RGALI, 2918/5/133/11. 27. RGALI, 2918/5/77/69. 28. Zimmerman, ‘Le développement du cinéma’, 102. 29. Mcfeely, ‘“Gone Are the Days”’. 30. Interview with Nadine Barry, living in Conakry at that time, by Odile Goerg in 2005; Anonymous, ‘La Vème semaine du film soviétique a été solennellement ouverte mardi 15 décembre 1971’, 1. 31. Newsreels produced from 1961 to 1988. 32. A children’s educational film magazine produced since 1957. RGALI, 2918/5/133/5, Reports from diplomatic services in Ghana, Guinea, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Ethiopia, and South Africa regarding Soviet film exports in 1961. 33. RGALI, 2487/1/1067/5-­7, Agreement with Sudan regarding newsreels. 34. RGALI, 2487/1/1065/24, Agreements with Iraq and Morocco regarding newsreels. 35. Interview in Paris (2016) with Amadou Traoré, in charge of film cooperation in Mali in the 1960s. 36. United States Information Agency, Communist Propaganda Around the World. 37. Razlogova, ‘World Cinema at Soviet Festivals’, 143. 38. Razlogova, ‘World Cinema at Soviet Festivals’; Djagalov and Salazkina, ‘Tashkent ‘68’. 39. United States Information Agency, Communist Propaganda Around the World, 84. 40. Ibid., 85. 41. Ibid., 85–86. 42. French National Archives, 20050584/40/2. 43. Secma (Société d’Exploitation Cinématographique Africaine) was founded in 1936 by the French Maurice Archambeau and acquired by Albert Mocaër in 1956. Comacico (Compagnie Marocaine Cinématographique et Commerciale) was founded in 1932 by the French Maurice Jacquin. See Forest, ‘Les films à l’affiche dans les salles africaines Secma-­Comacico (1960–1961)’. 44. RGALI, 2918/5/133/56. 45. Zimmerman, ‘Le développement du cinéma’, 102. 46. RGALI, 2918/5/133/56. 47. RGALI, 2918/5/77/93. 48. Smyth, ‘The Development of British Colonial Film Policy’, 437–38. 49. Goerg, Fantômas sous les tropiques, 127–28. 50. Carrière, Le marché du film dans les nouveaux États de l’Afrique tropicale atlantique, 227. 51. Gondola, ‘Le culte du cowboy et les figures du masculin à Kinshasa dans les années 1950’. 52. Reinwald, ‘“Tonight at the Empire”’. 53. Smyth, ‘The Feature Film in Tanzania’, 391. 54. Armando, ‘Vers l’hégémonie hollywoodienne’. 55. Cheria, Cinema and Culture in Tunisia, 19. 56. RGALI, 2918/5/77/47. 57. RGALI, 2918/5/77/108.



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58. RGALI 2918/5/77/47. 59. RGALI, 2918/5/133/98 and 2918/5/133/71.

Bibliography Anonymous. ‘Revised list of films’, Colonial Cinema 3(2) (1945). ––––––. ‘Revised list of films’, Colonial Cinema 6(4) (1948). ––––––. ‘Les accords culturels guinéo-soviétiques portant sur l’exploitation des films soviétiques en Guinée’. Horoya (9 March 1963), 4. ––––––. ‘La Vème semaine du film soviétique a été solennellement ouverte mardi 15 décembre 1971’, Horoya (17 December 1971), 1. Armando, Soba Joseph. ‘Vers l’hégémonie hollywoodienne: mécanismes de la pénétration culturelle américaine en Afrique’. L’Homme et la société 127–28 (1998), 91–102. Bartenev, Vladimir. ‘L’URSS et l’Afrique noire sous Khrouchtchev: la mise à jour des mythes de la coopération’. Outre-mers 94 (354–55) (2007), 63–82. Blum, Françoise et al. (eds). Socialismes en Afrique. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2021. Blum, Françoise, Gabrielle Chomentowski and Constantin Katsakioris. ‘Au cœur des réseaux africano-soviétiques: archives et trajectoire de l’écrivain-cinéaste sénégalais Ousmane Sembène’. Sources. Materials & Fieldwork in African Studies 3 (2021), 99–135. Carrière, Michel. Le marché du film dans les nouveaux États de l’Afrique tropicale atlantique. Paris: UniFrance, 1961. Cheria, Tahar. Cinema and Culture in Tunisia. Paris: UNESCO, 1963. Chomentowski, Gabrielle. ‘Filmmakers from Africa and the Middle East trained at VGIK during the Cold War’. Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 13(3) (2019), 189–98. ———. ‘Implanter le socialisme par le cinéma? La diffusion des films soviétiques en Afrique au début des années 1960’, in Françoise Blum et al. (eds), Socialismes en Afrique (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2021), 457–81. Decrees on the organisation of the control of films, phonographic records and cinematographic recordings in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, Journal officiel de la République française (11 August 1934), 8445–46. De Saint-Martin, Monique, Grazia Scarfo Ghellab and Kamal Mellakh (eds). Etudier à l’Est: Expériences de diplômés africains. Paris: Karthala, 2015. Djagalov, Rossen and Masha Salazkina. ‘Tashkent ‘68: A Cinematic Contact Zone’. Slavic Review 75(2) (2016), 279–98. Farid, Samir. ‘Naissance et développement du cinéma égyptien (1922–1970)’. Écran (May 1973). Forest, Claude. ‘Les films à l’affiche dans les salles africaines Secma-Comacico (1960– 1961)’. Revue d’histoire Contemporaine De l’Afrique 1 (2020), 39–61. Goerg, Odile. ‘Entre infantilisation et répression coloniale: Censure cinématographique en AOF, “grands enfants” et protection de la jeunesse’. Cahiers d’études africaines 205 (2012), 165–98. ———. Fantômas sous les tropiques: Aller au cinéma en Afrique coloniale. Paris: Vendémiaire, 2015. ———. Tropical Dream Palaces: Cinema in Colonial West Africa. London: Hurst, 2020.

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Gondola, Charles-Didier. ‘Le culte du cowboy et les figures du masculin à Kinshasa dans les années 1950’. Cahiers d’études africaines 209–10 (2013), 173–99. Gray, Ros. Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution: Anti-Colonialism, Independence and Internationalism in Filmmaking, 1968–1991. Martlesham: Boydell & Brewer, 2020. Hampâté Bâ, Amadou. ‘Le dit du cinéma africain’, in Catalogue du Comité international du film ethnographique (Paris: UNESCO, 1967), 9–19. Jolin, Alice. ‘Histoire du cinéma ambulant au Mali, Interview avec Falaba Issa Traoré, Africultures, 2005 (interview carried out in 2001), http://africultures.com/histoire-du​ -cinema-ambulant-au-mali-4236/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm​ _campaign=539. Katsakioris, Constantin. ‘L’Union soviétique et les intellectuels africains, Internationalisme, Panafricanisme et négritude pendant les années de la décolonisation, 1954–1964’. Cahiers du monde russe: Russie, Empire russe, URSS, États indépendants 47 (1–2) (2006), 15–32. ———. ‘Leçons soviétiques: La formation des étudiants africains et arabes en URSS pendant la Guerre froide’, PhD dissertation. Paris: EHESS, 2015. Leclerc-Olive, Michèle and Marie-Antoinette Hily (eds). ‘Former des élites: mobilité des étudiants d’Afrique au nord du Sahara dans les pays de l’ex-bloc socialiste’. Revue européenne des migrations internationales 2(32) (2016). Maingard, Jacqueline. South African National Cinema. London: Routledge, 2007. Matusevich Maxim (ed.). Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa, Three Centuries of Encounters. Trenton, NJ and Amsara: Africa World Press, 2007. Mcfeely, Gareth. ‘“Gone are the Days”: A Social and Business History of Cinema-going in Gold Coast/Ghana, 1910–1982’, PhD dissertation, Boston University, 2015. McMahon, Robert J. (ed.). The Cold War in the Third World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Onslow, Sue (ed.). Cold War in Southern Africa: White Power, Black Liberation. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Pugach, Sara. African Students in East Germany, 1949–1975. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2022. Razlogova, Elena. ‘World Cinema at Soviet Festivals: Cultural Diplomacy and Personal Ties’. Studies in European Cinema 2(17) (2020), 140–54. Reinwald, Brigitte. ‘“Tonight at the Empire”: Cinema and Urbanity in Zanzibar, 1920s to 1960s’. Afrique & histoire 1(5) (2006), 81–109. Shubin, Vladimir. The Hot ‘Cold War’: The USSR in Southern Africa. London: Pluto, 2008. Smith, James. ‘Soviet Films and British Intelligence in the 1930s: The Case of Kino Films and MI5’, in Rebecca Beasley and Philip R. Bullock (eds), Russia in Britain, 1880 to 1940: From Melodrama to Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 241–57. Smyth, Rosaleen. ‘The Development of British Colonial Film Policy, 1927–1939, with Special Reference to East and Central Africa’. The Journal of African History 20(3) (1979), 437–50. ––––––. ‘The Feature Film in Tanzania’. African Affairs 352(88) (1989), 389–96. Tarelin, Andrei. Zapiski diplomata-zateinika, Kniga III, kaif rasshiriaet granicy, opis’ II. Strasbourg: France, 2014. United States Information Agency (The). Communist Propaganda around the World, 1962. Zimmerman, Sophie. ‘Le développement du cinéma comme lieu de loisir et de sociabilité au Togo (années 1910–2007)’, Master Degree Thesis. Paris: Université Paris Diderot, 2008.

CHAPTER 9

The Troubles of Non-Alignment International Pacifism, Transnational Style and Production Strategies in the Case of Rat (Atomic War Bride, Veliko Bulajić, 1960) Francesco Pitassio

Contexts and Conjunctures The film Rat (Atomic War Bride, 1960) in particular expands our view on the cinematic Cold War, beyond the USA/USSR dichotomy, and showcases an exclusive focus on respective film productions and related topics. The director was Veliko Bulajić, a Montenegro-­born filmmaker, and it is based on a screenplay by the Italian writer Cesare Zavattini, who is mostly known for his contribution to neorealism, along with Aldo Paladini and Virgilio Tosi. Bulajić’s second feature epitomises several questions that shed light on how the production arose. In this contribution I concur with the assumptions of Lawrence Grossberg, when he discusses the notion of ‘conjunctural history.’ I want to try to clarify the specific way in which cultural studies understands contexts – as relational. . . . Its sense of context is always a complex, overdetermined and contingent unity. Contextualism in cultural studies is often defined by and as a theory of articulation, which understands history as the ongoing effort (or process) to make, unmake and remake relations, structures and unity. . . .   But the particular practice of contextualism in cultural studies often involves a location within and an effort at the diagnosis of a conjuncture, that is a focus on the social formation as a complexly articulated unity or totality (that is nevertheless not an organic totality).1

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There are many contexts which determined the conjuncture which generated Atomic War Bride. A tentative list should encompass pacifism and the protest against the use of nuclear weapons; neorealism as a film style operating as a mediator between film production on both sides of the Iron Curtain; the emergence of the Movement of Non-­Aligned Countries; cultural policy and mediascape in the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia after the Tito-­Stalin split (1948); and the influence of Italian culture in Yugoslavia, notably from the mid-­1950s onwards. I reconstruct these contexts mostly through secondary sources, while illustrating the genesis of the film and making hypotheses based on the primary sources located at the Cesare Zavattini archive, at the Biblioteca Panizzi in Reggio nell’Emilia and at the Hrvatsky Državni Arhiv in Zagreb.2 In the aftermath of the Second World War, pacifism was a widespread ideology, particularly relevant at a transnational level. The conflict resulted in hardships and grievances across the globe. This led to a new notion of international relations, with bodies such as the United Nations and its cultural counterpart, UNESCO, whose international humanitarianism came to the fore. Against this backdrop, two main features characterised pacifism. On the one hand, pacifism was a generic notion, inspiring support on both sides of the Iron Curtain. As Goedde argues, postwar pacifism implied an inherently transnational dimension.3 On the other hand, the USSR and its coordination of European Marxist-­Leninist parties, such as Cominform, seized pacifism as a chance to create political hegemony. The role of the USSR in postwar pacifism was the consequence of the different engagements of the US and USSR in the Second World War, especially of the American atomic bombing of Japan in 1945 and their use of re-­arming as a geopolitical deterrent. Organisations such as the World Federation of Democratic Youth (1945), the Partisans of Peace (1949)4 and, most of all, the World Peace Council (1950)5 were political arenas shared across the Iron Curtain, but under the aegis of Cominform. This meant they could condemn American warmonger imperialism, while associating themselves with the USSR and a democratic, internationalist and pacifist ideal – or, more specifically (and revealingly), of ‘defence of the peace.’6 Initiatives such as the Stockholm Appeal (1950) for nuclear disarmament were a worldwide success and promoted the Soviet-­led endeavour. The World Peace Council was extraordinarily effective in attracting renowned intellectuals, such as French philosopher and writer Jean-­Paul Sartre, Afro-­American actor Paul Robeson, Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado, or painters such as Italian Renato Guttuso, Mexican Diego Rivera, and Spaniard Pablo Picasso, whose dove was the crest for the World Congress of the Peace Partisans in Paris (1950), which brought about the World Peace Council. This organisation soon turned into a meeting point, partly because of the prizes it bestowed, which gave prestige and visibility to leftist intellectuals across the world. Writers, painters, philos-



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ophers and filmmakers received the International Peace Prize, among them Wanda Jakubowska (1950), Charlie Chaplin (1954) and Joris Ivens and Cesare Zavattini (1955).7 As a consequence of this acknowledgement and the major functions which organised cultural diplomacy between the two blocs, such as the association Italy-­USSR, the Italian intellectual acted as a mediator.8 The tense situation between the two blocs in Europe during the Cold War resulted in widespread anxiety, particularly over the irreversible consequences of a nuclear conflict. These fears moulded the imaginary in the 1950s and 1960s. Furthermore, the possible nuclear conflict was at the core of Cold War imagery and generated narratives, as argued by Grant and Ziemann: ‘Nuclear weapons were crucial for these multiple meanings of the Cold War: and the “bomb” itself became the central metaphor of the Cold War. . . . Living in “the shadow” of the bomb signified anxiety and dread, and the image of the mushroom cloud became the central icon of the entire Cold War.’9 The number of films on both sides of the Iron Curtain about nuclear warfare testifies to its relevance: from Five (Arch Oboler, 1951) to On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959), from Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon (Late August at the Hotel Ozone, Pavel Juráček, 1967) to Il nuovo mondo (The New World, Jean-­Luc Godard), included in the omnibus film RoGoPaG (1962), the nuclear threat created a fertile film trend. However, most recent research mostly focuses on Hollywood productions, instead of observing the transnational relevance of this fear.10 Atomic War Bride is not a Hollywood production, but acts as a suitable case for how the atomic fear led to a prolific genre of film; moreover, Bulajić’s film originates from a political context beyond the transatlantic and Soviet blocs with their respective ideologies. An Italian intellectual wrote the script, which was based on an idea he drafted in the first half of the 1950s, and a Croatian company, Jadran Film, produced it. It was made when Yugoslavia was about to head the rising Non-­Aligned Movement whose opposition to nuclear weapons was at the forefront of its agenda.11 In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian neorealism was an important genre. On the one hand, it was based on the ethics and aesthetics of humanitarianism, which new supranational agencies fostered.12 On the other hand, it was part and parcel of the clash between conservatives and progressives and, from the late 1940s, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) appropriated it as a part of its cultural legacy.13 Furthermore, neorealism expressed a newly found national identity within an international culture, which relied on mutual understanding between nations through cultural means and particularly visual culture. Thus, cinema acted as an Italian cultural diplomat, since it gave the opportunity to show the national reality through images that supposedly represented it. According to this perspective, neorealism countered Hollywood production’s cosmopolitism, which ­dominated the Italian and Western European market. This same point of view was an ideological

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c­ ontrast with American cultural production, which relied on market performance, while the European one was based on national cultures combined with social and artistic value. Notably, in the postwar era, the USSR supported this view of national cultures, with the state acting as patron, as well as controller, of the arts.14 Therefore, neorealism came to embody a production which resisted Hollywood products and resonated more with Soviet cultural diplomacy. This is seen by film events beyond the Iron Curtain, such as the festival in Mariánské Lázně (1948–1949) and Karlovy Vary, from 1950 onwards, which selected neorealist films.15 During the Thaw, neorealism acted as a reference point for the shift in the style and theme of film production in European Socialist countries.16 Incidentally, following Stalin’s death, the Thaw coincided with the partial resolution of the dispute over the Free Territory of Trieste thanks to the London Memorandum (October 1954). This achievement eased the tensions between Italy and Yugoslavia, which led to bilateral co-­production agreements (December 1957).17 In this period, Socialist filmmakers and ideologues sought an international style which could adequately portray Socialist ideals: Institutionally, the goal of these collective projects included creating occasions for artistic discussions across the Bloc, establishing a Socialist film elite through education and formal association, cultivating sympathetic filmmakers in non-­Socialist countries, and setting up a transnational network of financial and technological support for like-­minded filmmakers. In short, what could be termed a Soviet cinematic internationalism.18

Siefert points to warfare, particularly the Second World War, as a privileged theme of such cinematic internationalism; she even includes co-­productions such as Bitka na Neretvi (Battle of Neretva, Veliko Bulajić, 1969) in her argument. Moreover, many Italo-­Yugoslav co-­productions were set during the Second World War, as Italian film scholar Francesco Di Chiara describes in detail with Kapò (Kapo, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1960), Le soldatesse (The Camp Followers, Valerio Zurlini, 1965) and Andremo in città (We’ll Go to the City, Nelo Risi, 1966).19 Tito’s Yugoslavia held an important place within the international scenario, which the USSR hegemonised. The Tito-­Stalin split had direct consequences for international relations, including the Yugoslav search for an autonomous social and political model, halfway between the USA and the USSR. This attempt intensified the relations and exchanges with Socialist political organisations and parties in Western Europe in promoting pacifism and in building connections and allegiances with Asian and African countries from the 1950s onwards. The chief outcome of this new network was the creation of the Non-­Aligned Movement, which was established in Yugoslavia in 1956 with the first conference taking place in Belgrade in 1961.20



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Yugoslavia’s cultural policies distanced themselves from the USSR, which led to the rejection of the Socialist realist canon, which was enforced in most of the other Soviet bloc countries. Sabina Mihelj claims that: The developments that followed Yugoslavia’s expulsion from Cominform in 1948 sit uneasily with the implicit East-­West divide that underpins much of the Cold War historiography. The country’s ‘market socialism’ is often seen as a compromise between socialist planning and free enterprise, and its involvement in the Non-­ Aligned Movement can be interpreted as an articulation of this compromise in the field of foreign policy. The same is true of Yugoslav culture: while they initially adopted Soviet cultural policies, Yugoslavia’s writers, artists, and other cultural producers soon began to carve out a ‘third way’ between what they saw as the excessively state-­controlled model of cultural production followed in the East, and the overly market-­led approach favored in the West.21

Soon the League of Communists of Yugoslavia rejected a top-­down, ideologically biased management of culture. It preferred, instead, a market-­based organisation of the cultural sphere, which provided the citizens with a space of freedom to create support for the socialist project among the younger generations.22 Two additional features contributed to this: modernity as an indicator of progress in social condition and material culture within the federation; and the promotion of Yugoslavia as a point of convergence and mediation between the cultural production of the two blocs.23 A distinctive feature of Tito’s Yugoslavia was to show objects which epitomised modernity in daily life while creating a cultural market where Western goods were more readily available than goods created in the Soviet bloc. Hollywood films played a role in fashioning this modernity. From the 1950s the American films were the most common in Yugoslavia, which was the result of international agreements and of a US strategy of cultural diplomacy.24 According to recent scholarship, the Hollywood relevance on the domestic market stylistically influenced some national productions within Yugoslavia. This happened for two main reasons, according to Croatian film critic Jurica Pavičić: The modelling of the Yugoslav cinema according to the Hollywood classic style model had a double function. Firstly, that strategy was simply just another one among many ways in which Yugoslav society eagerly accepted Western models of leisure, entertainment and popular culture. Secondly, such a modelling was just another field of industry in which Yugoslavia imported Western technology and know-­how.25

According to this assumption, Croatian films, which peaked between the late 1950s and early 1960s, benefitted from narrative patterns, staging style and actors’ direction based on the Hollywood template. Nevertheless, Hollywood was not the only reference: Italian culture and notably neorealism were

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important too. Italy was the Western country with the largest Marxist political party, which played a significant role within prominent cultural institutions. Moreover, the Italian Communist Party relied on an ample international network which, from the late 1940s, appropriated neorealism when it was internationally acclaimed. Yugoslav film journals paid attention to neorealism by translating essays and articles written by Italian critics or intellectuals such as Guido Aristarco or Cesare Zavattini and published volumes which focused on it.26

Transnational Encounters In 1955, the Rome film academy (Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia) hosted Veliko Bulajić as external auditor and he moved to the capital, together with Frane Barbijeri, a young journalist from Dalmatia, who would emigrate to Italy in the 1970s.27 During this period, as previously mentioned, co-­productions between Italy and Yugoslavia, particularly Croatia, came into being. Occasionally, these were European co-­production schemes fashioned upon the model of so-­called ‘pink neorealism’, which was a realist, contemporary setting merging with romance, as was the case with Dekle iz solin (Sand, Love, and Salt, 1957), which Czech-­born František Čáp directed and Václav Vích cinematographed, thanks to an Italo-­Yugoslav-­West German co-­ production.28 More often, co-­productions involved directors with a neorealist background, as with Giuseppe De Santis who directed Cesta duga godinu dana (The Road a Year Long, 1958), which came to be the first Yugoslav submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The production was enormously expensive by Yugoslav standards. They hired an Italo-­ Yugoslav cast and crew, together with some prominent Italian stars (Silvana Pampanini, Massimo Girotti and Eleonora Rossi Drago) and shot in Istria and Dalmatia. Moreover, young Bulajić worked as an assistant director on the production, together with Branko Lustig, who in the early 1960s also worked on Bulajić’s films, allowing his career to develop, and later was among the most prominent transnational producers.29 Therefore, beyond acting as a bridge between Socialist and Western film production, neorealism (or what was left of it) also worked as an opportunity to import into Yugoslavia technical and artistic skills to train a new cohort of filmmakers. Atomic War Bride was at the junction of the different contexts described above: progressive pacifism, Hollywood hegemony and neorealism template, Yugoslavia’s political independence and specific cultural output. How did the film substantiate this conjuncture?



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Tracking Shifts The first sketch of Zavattini’s subject consists of two typed pages, with a few handwritten notes,30 which the Italian journal L’Eco del Cinema published in 1954.31 The film depicts a war scene: a peasant in the countryside not far from Rome grazes his cow; black clouds rise over the close city (Frosinone); three aircrafts head towards the city, but one breaks out of formation and with no apparent reason shoots at the peasant, who finds shelter behind an oak. This situation can be brought back to Second World War imagery with its air strikes on Italy and shows its setting explicitly, which is also associated with the personal experience of Zavattini.32 This is an example of its neorealist culture and its repudiation of warfare. The image of a rural, idyllic location savaged by an air raid persists as an ideal representation of warfare, throughout the different phases the script undergoes by Zavattini. As previously explained, a year after this was published, Bulajić entered the Rome film academy as an external auditor. In the 1950s and 1960s, the academy attracted talent from the Mediterranean area, central and eastern Europe and South America. Among its students were Fernando Birri, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Julio García Espinosa, István Gaál and Predrag Delibašić who would go on to become successful filmmakers.33 Bulajić, during his stay in Rome, got in touch with neorealist artists, together with Barbijeri, to start building his future career. Since the mid-­1950s, articles and interviews both produced have attested to this endeavour. Bulajić highlighted the international relevance of neorealism and tried to set up co-­productions with Vittorio De Sica,34 for whom he also acted as assistant director.35 In the same period, Bulajić interviewed Cesare Zavattini, who discussed the resilience of neorealism and how to understand its basic assumptions and entertainment values.36 Whereas Zavattini’s role in nurturing Cuban cinema has recently been surveyed in depth,37 his work for Yugoslav cinema has not been similarly studied. My claim is that when Italian neorealism and Zavattini’s work drew attention in Yugoslavia,38 Veliko Bulajić used this political, cultural and market value to import it into his home country and build his career upon it. The early meetings between him and Zavattini happened during this period, together with the work on the 1954 film. But what kind of work? The expansion and revision of the subject, which Paladini and Tosi also worked on, follows three directions: the modernisation of the narrative, which updates the story of an air raid to a quickly escalating nuclear conflict; the shift from realism to allegorical sci-­fi; and the replacement of the ancient peasant with a young groom, who on the day of his wedding faces the outbreak of nuclear warfare. We can trace this expansion to 1957, when the new version was registered at SIAE (Italian Authors’ and Publishers’ Association).39 This showed some

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f­eatures to be found in the film too, such as the protagonist being young (named Ton in the film), and his bride Maria. The plot takes place over one day which shifts from the happiness of a marriage to the apocalypse of a nuclear conflict, while the hero goes from being unaware to bewildered before finally acknowledging the situation. Most of all, two pivotal components appear. Firstly, the story turns into a fable, which leaves out specific historical or geopolitical references as well as social roles, which become more general (the Chief, the Army, the Parents, etc.). Moreover, social welfare and modernisation take over with Antonio now a salesman for household appliances. A second version likely dates to the following year, and is explicitly set in 1958 in a location named ‘a big city in the Z. state’.40 This new, much longer version reintroduces neorealist features (the cow scene, unemployed workers, the alternation between realist, dramatic and comic sequences), and increases the number of characters while enhancing two key elements: the madness of military hierarchy and the role the media play in power dynamics. The army forcibly enlists Antonio and makes him do ridiculous training, with grotesque instructions, while radio and TV screen broadcast propaganda. In another version, presumably from 1959 following a meeting between the screenplay writer and Croat director and producer,41 Zavattini’s handwritten notes make atomic fear even more explicit: visual motifs of Hiroshima are included (shapes of burnt people on the walls), along with a description of the survivors as ghosts, and the devastated city after the bombing is shown in more detail. For these amendments, little differences can be discovered in the two versions of the screenplay preserved at the National Film Archive in Zagreb, respectively in Italian and Croatian. The Croatian version is very informative for how the film was shot and Bulajić annotated it a lot.42 The name of the hero changed from Antonio to Ton but in the last draft preserved in Reggio nell’Emilia and in the two scripts in Zagreb, the army’s most haunting features are mitigated, along with the class differences. What happened in the meantime? The Zavattini Archive also has his handwritten notes, recording his negotiations with Bulajić and the Jadran Film producer, Ivo Vrhovec. They probably report two different meetings that took place in 1959 to redraft the screenplay to make it ready for shooting.43 After they met in Venice in July 1959,44 the project entered pre-­production in late autumn. Zavattini’s notes express his doubts about Yugoslav partners as well as his occasional objections. The earliest handwritten notes mention his intention to refer to Marx as a turning point in the history of humankind and his aim of merging the legacy of neorealist humanism with a socialist take on pacifism: In this ­film . . . ­we didn’t try to give a lecture on Communism, but to take a stance in this anti-­war awareness, because this s­ ensibility . . . ­aims at sliding these issues which are more of a humanistic (Italian style) kind into the consciousness of the



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big shots anywhere in the world, so that they understand that we really don’t want this war. . . . The second part lacks a brutal social statement, that we really support a socialist order.45

Beyond this noble aim, the notes share Vrhovec’s more substantial concerns about the screenplay’s lack of vision and the gratuitousness of some jokes. Moreover, the producer wanted to bring back the scene with the cow, which had been deleted in the previous version. Bulajić suggested fashioning the protagonist, Ton, as a modern Švejk. This character created by Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek in the 1910s and 1920s was an icon of European anti-­ militarism, but was not ideologically driven. His later requests are even more explicit: he wanted the screenplay to be more rhythmic and to have its anti-­militarist polemics mitigated by humanising the army, and felt that the main conflict should move from Ton and the Chief to Ton and warfare itself. Vrhovec outspokenly clarified Yugoslavia’s specific condition, in between the two blocs, and mentioned how the story could take place anywhere, naming America and Russia, but also India, Egypt, and Ghana – which were countries belonging to the Non-­Aligned Movement. Furthermore, he associated Khrushchev with Eisenhower and finally declared: ‘The question is that the big countries argue with each other, while neglecting the small ones, although they would also be involved [in a nuclear conflict]’.46 Bulajić recommended not identifying the two countries involved which would enhance the horrors of nuclear warfare. Zavattini did not understand why Yugoslavs would shy away from the ‘two reasons for the socialist character’ of the screenplay, which are social justice and pacifism, but considered their concerns. The result is a hybrid, unusual film which displays neorealist features – ruins, normal people, solidarity and magic realism as in Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, Vittorio De Sica, 1951), while showing modern-­day Yugoslavia with sci-­fi motifs, such as Ton’s dream of modernity which nuclear war tears to pieces. Likely, the events depicted in Atomic War Bride changed after conversations between Zavattini and Bulajić. The Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia wanted to be the spearhead of the Non-­ Aligned Movement. Pacifism itself was entering a new, post-­Soviet phase. Neorealism was less influential at the end of the 1950s, and the director and producer’s requests to produce a paced narrative testifies to this. Jadran Film and its director wanted to circulate the film internationally, as seen with the casting of the Polish actress Ewa Krzyzewska, who was in Popiół i diemant (Ashes and Diamonds, Andrzej Wajda, 1958). Softening the ideological themes was part of this strategy and resonated with their attempts to pursue a third way in the Cold War scenario. Pacifism and sci-­fi were safer options than the social polemics which Zavattini wanted.47 Atomic War Bride was selected to ­compete for the

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Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1960. Among the other nominees was the final farewell to neorealism from one of its acclaimed masters, Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, Luchino Visconti) along with a manifesto for a new pacifism, Holubice (The White Dove, František Vláčil). War, pacifism and cinema had entered a new era. Francesco Pitassio is professor of Film Studies at the Università di Udine. He edited, with Dorota Ostrowska and Zsuzsanna Varga, Popular Cinemas in East Central Europe (2017). Among his books are Ombre silenziose (2002), Maschere e marionette: Il cinema ceco e dintorni (2002), Attore/ Divo (2003), and Neorealist Film Culture (2019). He was the Italian Principal Investigator of the EU HERA project VICTOR-E: Visual Culture of Trauma, Obliteration and Reconstruction in Post-WW II Europe (2019–2022). He has been Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Notre Dame (2015). His research interests focus on film acting and stardom, Italian and Central-­ Eastern European film history, and documentary cinema.

Notes   1. Grossberg, ‘Does Cultural Studies Have Futures?’, 4.  2. http://panizzi.comune.re.it/Sezione.jsp?idSezione=41 (accessed 9 March 2023).  3. Goedde, The Politics of Peace.  4. Buton, Partigiani della pace. For Italy, see Cerrai, I partigiani della pace in Italia.   5. Popov, ‘The World Council of Peace’.   6. Wernicke, ‘The Communist-­led World Peace Council’; Wernicke, ‘The Unity of Peace and Socialism?’.   7. For the Italian reactions to the prize see Anonymous, ‘A Cesare Zavattini il Premio della Pace’; Anonymous, ‘Il Premio della Pace a Zavattini’; Anonymous, ‘A Cesare Zavattini il Premio della Pace’; Anonymous, ‘A Cesare Zavattini il Premio internazionale per la Pace’; Anonymous, ‘Un premio comunista attribuito a Zavattini’; Anonymous, ‘Il “Premio Stalin” a Cesare Zavattini’; Anonymous, ‘Un premio sovietico al regista Zavattini’; Anonymous, ‘Un premio sovietico al regista Zavattini’; Anonymous, ‘Consegnato ieri a Zavattini il premio mondiale della pace’; Anonymous, ‘Anche per Zavattini il premio comunista’; Anonymous, ‘La Settimana’.   8. See Pitassio, Un partigiano pacifista.   9. Grant and Ziemann, ‘Introduction: The Cold War as an Imaginary War’, 2. 10. See, for instance, Shapiro, Atomic Bomb Cinema. For a discussion of atomic fear in a socialist film production, see Pospíšil, ‘The Bomb, the Cold War, and Czech Film’. 11. Wittner, Confronting the Bomb. 12. Schoonover, Brutal Vision. 13. Forgacs, ‘The Making and Unmaking of Neorealism’; Forgacs, ‘The Italian Communist Party and Culture’.



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14. Gienow-­Hecht, ‘Culture and the Cold War in Europe’. 15. Bláhová, ‘National, Socialist, Global’. 16. See Bulgakowa, ‘Cinema sovietico’; Garbolevsky, ‘Mirrors of Death’; Haltof, Polish National Cinema; Hames, The Czechoslovak New Wave; A. and M. Liehm, The Most Important Art; Näripea, ‘National Space, (Trans)National Cinema’; Pitassio, ‘Italian Neorealism Goes East’; Salazkina, ‘Soviet-­ Italian Cinematic Exchanges’; Siefert, ‘Soviet Cinematic Internationalism’. 17. See Rolandi, ‘Tra diplomazia culturale e spontaneismo’. 18. Siefert, ‘Soviet Cinematic Internationalism’, 162. 19. Di Chiara, ‘Cinecittà sulla Neretva’. 20. Niebuhr, ‘Nonalignment as Yugoslavia’s Answer to Bloc Politics’; Jakovina, ‘The Active Coexistence of Non-­Aligned Yugoslavia’. 21. Mihelj, ‘Negotiating Cold War Culture’, 510–11. 22. Lily, Power and Persuasion. 23. See Rolandi, Con ventiquattromila; Rolandi, ‘A Filter for Western Cultural Products’. 24. See Vučetić, Coca-Cola Socialism, notably 25–84. 25. Pavičić, ‘“Lemons in Siberia”’, 28. 26. Turconi, Neorealizam u italijanskom filmu. 27. Kuljiš, ‘Bulajić: Kako sam prešao Neretvu’. 28. Di Chiara, ‘Looking for New Aesthetic Models’. 29. Lustig is the only Croatian-­born producer who has won two Academy Awards, for Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) and Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000). See Grimmer and Luketić, ‘Lustig, Branko’. 30. Zavattini, La guerra (1954?), Archivio Cesare Zavattini, 2 pages. 31. Zavattini, ‘Un soggetto di Cesare Zavattini’. 32. During the most dramatic phase of the Second World War, Zavattini found shelter in the area of Frosinone. Si veda Tosi, ‘Parliamo tanto di ZA’. 33. Baldi, La scuola italiana; Laviosa, ‘Six Continents’. 34. Bulajić, ‘Vittorio De Sica’. 35. Kuljiš, ‘Bulajić: Kako sam prešao Neretvu’. 36. Barbijeri and Bulajić, ‘Prijatelj malo čoveka’. 37. Ricciarelli and Malquori, ‘Il neorealismo cubano’; Brancaleone, Zavattini, il neorealismo. 38. See, for instance, Anonymous, ‘Neorealizam nije’; Nauman, ‘Zavattini o filmskoj umetnosti’; De Sika, ‘Najlepše godina moga života’; Jt. ‘Zavattini i jego Luzzara’. 39. Cesare Zavattini, with Aldo Paladini, and Virgilio Tosi. La guerra (n.d., 1957?), Archivio Cesare Zavattini, 8 typed pages. On page 2 a SIAE stamp, dated 28 April 1957. 40. Cesare Zavattini, with Aldo Paladini, and Virgilio Tosi. La guerra (n.d., 1958?), Archivio Cesare Zavattini, 44 typed pages, 22. 41. Cesare Zavattini, with Aldo Paladini, and Virgilio Tosi. La guerra (n.d., 1959?), Archivio Cesare Zavattini, 49 typed pages, with handwritten notes. 42. Cesare Zavattini, with Aldo Paladini, and Virgilio Tosi. La guerra (n.d., 1959?), Hrvatski Državni Arhiv, 211 typed pages. The Croatian script indicates that the shooting took place between February and June 1960, describes the shooting plan and records the amendments to the dialogue list. 43. Cesare Zavattini, Note di lavorazione (1959?), Archivio Cesare Zavattini, 38 handwritten pages; Note di lavorazione (16 November 1959?), Archivio Cesare Zavattini, 14 handwritten pages.

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44. Anonymous, ‘Zavattini radi za “Jadran”’. 45. Zavattini, Note di lavorazione (1959?), 33–35. 46. Cesare Zavattini, Note di lavorazione (16 November 1959?), 8. 47. The version on YouTube is dubbed in English and its opening titles indicate United Artists as its distributor, which demonstrates the film’s international appeal: https://​ www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiMnjdMZ_Qo&t=26s (accessed 14  March 2023). However, I couldn’t find the title in the list of the UA releases Balio produces in United Artists.

Bibliography Anonymous. ‘Neorealizam nije’. Vjesnik u srjedu (17 January 1954), n.p. ———. ‘A Cesare Zavattini il Premio della Pace. Avanti! (12 May 1955), n.p. ———. ‘A Cesare Zavattini il Premio della Pace’. L’Unità-Genova (12 May 1955), n.p. ———. ‘A Cesare Zavattini il Premio internazionale per la Pace’. Paese Sera (12 May 1955), n.p. ———. ‘Un premio comunista attribuito a Zavattini’. Il Corriere della Sera (12 May 1955), n.p. ———. ‘Il Premio della Pace a Zavattini’. L’Unità-Torino (12 May 1955), n.p. ———. ‘Il “Premio Stalin” a Cesare Zavattini’. Gazzetta Padana (12 May 1955), n.p. ———. ‘Un premio sovietico al regista Zavattini’. La Tribuna del Mezzogiorno (13  May 1955), n.p. ———. ‘Consegnato ieri a Zavattini il premio mondiale della pace’. Avanti!-Roma (14 May 1955), n.p. ———. ‘Anche per Zavattini il premio comunista’. La Cittadella (22 May 1955), n.p. ———. ‘La Settimana’. Noi Donne (22 May 1955), 2. ———. ‘Zavattini radi za “Jadran”’. Globus (18 July 1959), 17–18. ———. ‘Lustig, Branko’. Leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleža (2021). https://www.encikl​ opedija.hr/natuknica.aspx?ID=37615 (accessed 12 March 2023). Baldi, Alfredo. La scuola italiana del cinema: Il Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia dalla storia alla cronaca (1930–2017). Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2018. Balio, Tino. United Artists: The Company That Changed the Film Industry, vol. 2, 1951– 1978. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. Barbijeri, Frane and Veliko Bulajić. ‘Prijatelj malo čoveka’. Vjesnik u srjedu (20 April 1956), 4. Bláhová, Jindřiška. ‘National, Socialist, Global: The Changing Roles of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, 1946–1956’, in Lars Karl and Pavel Skopal (eds), Cinema in the Service of the State: Perspectives on Film Culture in the GDR and Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2015), 245–72. Brancaleone, David. Zavattini, il Neorealismo e il nuovo cinema latino-americano. Parma: Diabasis, 2019. Bulajić, Veliko. ‘Vittorio De Sica govori o sebi i svojim planovima’. Vjesnik u srjedu (6 April 1955), n.p. Bulgakowa, Oksana. ‘Cinema sovietico: dal realismo al disgelo: 1941–1960’, in Gian Piero



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Brunetta (ed.), Storia del cinema mondiale, vol. 3/*, L’Europa. Le cinematografie nazionali (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 681–735. Buton, Philippe. ‘Partigiani della pace’, in Silvio Pons and Robert Service (eds), Dizionario del comunismo nel XX secolo, vol. II M-Z (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), 110–11, ad vocem. Cerrai, Sondra. I partigiani della pace in Italia: Tra utopia e sogno egemonico. Limena: Libreriauniversitaria, 2011. De Sika [sic], Vittorio. ‘Najlepše godina moga života’. Filmski svet (3  November 1955), n.p. Di Chiara, Francesco. ‘Looking for New Aesthetic Models through Italian-Yugoslavian Film Co-Productions: Low-Brow Neorealism in Salt, Love and Sand’. Iluminace 25(3) (2013), 37–49. ———. ‘Cinecittà sulla Neretva: La seconda guerra mondiale nelle coproduzioni tra Italia e Jugoslavia’, in Stefano Pisu (ed.), War Films: Interpretazioni storiche del cinema di guerra (Milan: Acies, 2015), 561–83. Forgacs, David. ‘The Making and Unmaking of Neorealism in Postwar Italy’, in Nicholas Hewitt (ed.), The Culture of Reconstruction: European Literature, Thought, and Film 1945–1950 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 51–66. ———. ‘The Italian Communist Party and Culture’, in Zygmunt G. Barański and Robert Lumley (eds), Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy (Houndmills and London: MacMillan, 1990), 97–114. Garbolevsky, Evgenija. ‘Mirrors of Death: Subversive Subtexts in Bulgarian Cinema, 1964– 1979’, in Sanja Bahun and John Haynes (eds), Cinema, State Socialism and Society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917–1989: Re-Visions (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014), 77–93. Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C.E. ‘Culture and the Cold War in Europe’, in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds), The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. I, Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 398–419. Goedde, Petra. The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Grant, Matthew and Benjamin Ziemann. ‘Introduction: The Cold War as an Imaginary War’, in Matthew Grant and Benjamin Ziemann (eds), Understanding the Imaginary War: Culture, Thought, and Nuclear Conflict, 1945–1990 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 1–29. Grimmer, Vera and Željko Luketić. ‘A Life Story as a Motive and a Cause’. Oris 84 (2013), 205–19. http://www.oris.hr/files/pdf/zastita/34/Oris.84_Lustig_Interview.pdf (accessed 12 March 2023). Grossberg, Lawrence. ‘Does Cultural Studies Have Futures? (Or, What’s the Matter with New York?): Cultural Studies, Contexts, and Conjunctures’. Cultural Studies 2(3) (2006), 1–32. Haltof, Marek. Polish National Cinema. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2002. Hames, Peter. The Czechoslovak New Wave. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985. Jakovina, Tvrtko. ‘The Active Coexistence of Non-Aligned Yugoslavia’, in Yugoslavia from a Historical Perspective (Belgrade: Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, 2017), 461–514. Jt. ‘Zavattini i jego Luzzara’. Gazeta pomorska (29–30 December 1956), n.p. Kuljiš, Denis. ‘Bulajić: Kako sam prešao Neretvu’. Panorama (9 January 2011), 46–50. Laviosa, Flavia. ‘Six Continents at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome:

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Flavia Laviosa in Conversation with Alfredo Baldi’. Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 9(2) (2021), 261–70. Liehm, Antonín and Mira Liehm. The Most Important Art. Eastern European Cinema after 1945. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977. Lily, Carol S. Power and Persuasion: Ideology and Rhetoric in Communist Yugoslavia, 1944–1953. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001. Mihelj, Sabina. ‘Negotiating Cold War Culture at the Crossroads of East and West: Uplifting the Working People, Entertaining the Masses, Cultivating the Nation’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 53(3) (2011), 509–39. Näripea, Eva. ‘National Space, (Trans)National Cinema: Estonian Film in the 1960s’, in Anikó Imre (ed.), A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas (Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2012), 244–64. Nauman, J. ‘Zavattini o filmskoj umetnosti’. Film (26 July 1954), 1. Niebuhr, Robert. ‘Nonalignment as Yugoslavia’s Answer to Bloc Politics’. Journal of Cold War Studies 13(1) (2011), 146–79. Pavičić, Jurica. ‘“Lemons in Siberia”: A New Approach to the Study of the Yugoslav Cinema of the 1950s’. New Review of Film and Television Studies 6(1) (2008), 19–39. Pitassio, Francesco. ‘Italian Neorealism Goes East: Authorship, Realism, Socialism’. Iluminace 26(3) (2014), 7–18. ———. ‘Un partigiano pacifista: Cesare Zavattini oltre la Cortina di ferro (1947–1983)’, in Alberto Ferraboschi (ed.), Zavattini oltre i confini (Reggio nell’Emilia: Corsiero, 2020), 115–28. Popov, M. ‘The World Council of Peace’, in W.S. Sworakowski (ed.), World Communism: A Handbook, 1918–1965 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1973), 498–503. Pospíšil, Tomáš. ‘The Bomb, the War, and the Czech Film’. Journal of Transatlantic Studies 6(2) (2008), 142–47. Ricciarelli, Cecilia and Diego Malquori. ‘Il neorealismo cubano di Zavattini’. Quaderni del CSCI 2 (2006), 142–48. Rolandi, Francesca. Con ventiquattromila baci: L’influenza della cultura di massa italiana in Jugoslavia (1955–1965). Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2015. ———. ‘A Filter for Western Cultural Products: The Influence of Italian Popular Culture on Yugoslavia, 1955–1965’, in Simo Mikkonen and Pia Koivunen (eds), Beyond the Curtain: Entangled Histories of the Cold War Era in Europe (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2015), 277–94. ———. ‘Tra diplomazia culturale e spontaneismo: La rinascita dei rapporti culturali tra Italia e Jugoslavia (1955–1965)’. Annali dell’Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici 29 (2016), 513–54. Rondi, Brunello. ‘L’esigenza di Zavattini’. L’Eco del Cinema 5(65) (31  January 1954), 8–10. Salazkina, Masha. ‘Soviet-Italian Cinematic Exchanges, 1920s–1950s: From Early Soviet Film Theory to Neorealism’, in Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar (eds), Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 37–51. Schoonover, Karl. Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Shapiro, Jerome F. Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Siefert, Marsha. ‘Soviet Cinematic Internationalism and Socialist Film Making, 1955–



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1972’, in Patryk Babiracki and Austin Jersild (eds), Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 161–93. Tosi, Virgilio. ‘Parliamo tanto di ZA: ll film jugoslavo “RAT” (La guerra – 1960) di Veliko Bulajic, soggetto e sceneggiatura di Cesare Zavattini (1–3)’. il documentario (14, 15 and 16) (August, December, and January 2011). http://www.ildocumentario.it/archivio/in​ dex.htm#Critica%20Doc (accessed 12 March 2023). Turconi, Sergio. Neorealizam u italijanskom filmu. Belgrade: Kultura, 1961. Vučetić, Radina. Coca-Cola Socialism: Americanization of Yugoslav Culture in the Sixties. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2018. Wernicke, Günter. ‘The Communist-led World Peace Council and the Western Peace Movements: The Fetters of Bipolarity and Some Attempts to Break Them in the Fifties and Early Sixties’. Peace & Change 23(3) (1998), 265–311. ———. ‘The Unity of Peace and Socialism? The World Peace Council on a Cold War Tightrope Between the Peace Struggle and Intrasystemic Communist Conflicts’. Peace & Change 26(3) (2001), 332–51. Wittner, Lawrence S. Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement. Stanford, CA: Stanford Universty Press, 2009. Zavattini, Cesare. ‘Un soggetto di Cesare Zavattini: “La guerra”’. L’Eco del Cinema 5(65) (31 January 1954), 11.

CHAPTER 10

From Anti-communism to Third-Worldism The Transformation of Mexican Cinema in the Cold War of the 1970s Israel Rodríguez

Introduction The year 1972 marked the hundredth anniversary of the death of Benito Juárez, the Mexican president who defeated the invading French army in 1867. For that reason, 1972 was declared to be the ‘Year of Juárez’. As was to be expected, one of the many actions to commemorate the national hero was the making of a blockbuster film. This unexceptional film, Aquellos años (Those Years, Felipe Cazals, 1973), presented the official version of Mexican history, with its Manichean rhetoric, great heroes, and dialogue for posterity. However, one element made it infamous in the history of Mexican cinema. At the end of the film, Benito Juárez (Jorge Martínez de Hoyos) looks to the horizon and gives a speech that caught the attention of critics. In his monologue, the nineteenth-­century hero alerts the audience about the danger of the imperial powers, always thirsty for the resources of their territories. For this reason, in 1972, the Third World rhetoric of Those Years was perceived as a clear example of the use of cinema to support the state’s diplomatic rapprochement with Third World countries.1 The problem was that in this film the allegories were so obvious that, in the eyes of the critics, they were rudimentary: by mixing into Juárez’s stiff speeches the traditional phrases of Mexican liberalism with confusing references to imperialism, the film tried to place the Mexican government as the only one capable of stopping the imperialist plundering of the peoples of Latin America.



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In this chapter I will attempt to explain how cinema participated in the Third World adventure initiated by the Mexican state in the context of the Cold War diplomatic transformations of the 1970s. First, I provide a brief synthesis of Mexican cinema’s involvement as an ally of Hollywood and the US government during the 1950s and 1960s. At the end of this part, I explain how and why the Mexican government changed its diplomatic proximity to the United States to join so openly the 1970s Third Worldism. Furthermore, I analyse the way in which the film bureaucracy undertook specific approaches to two of the most politically significant Latin American film industries in the 1970s: Chilean and Cuban. Finally, the text offers a brief review of the images produced in the light of this impulse and points out how the promotion of these works became a political success for Mexican cinema and for the regime that sponsored it.

The Cinema of the Good Neighbour (1945–1970) In political terms, two elements determined the shape of the Mexican film industry from its golden age (beginning in the mid-­1940s) to its moment of greatest crisis (late 1960s): on the one hand, its closeness to the topics, forms and interests of the US administration at the most critical moments of the Cold War; on the other hand, its subordination to a political regime that during those decades combined social and nationalist rhetoric with the impulse of a capitalist economy. These two elements coexisted harmoniously in a film industry that, from the late 1940s, became the second most powerful in Spanish-­speaking countries, only behind Hollywood.2 The emergence of the Mexican cinema golden age was the result of the exceptional conditions of the Second World War. The economic and political support of the United States, the size of the Spanish-­speaking audience in Latin America, and the geographical and ideological position of Mexico all fostered the rapid growth of the industry during the first half of the 1940s. However, Mexican cinema soon discovered that with the end of the war the privileged situation was coming to an end. When the conflict was over, Mexico faced a harsh reality: Hollywood industry re-­emerged as a powerful competitor in Latin America, but now accompanied and reinforced by the political projects of the State Department and the Office of Inter-­American Affairs.3 Together, Hollywood’s commercial interests and the political interests of the US government exerted significant pressure on the Mexican film industry. However, although from the 1950s onwards the international scene (especially in Latin America) was increasingly adverse for Mexican cinema, the industry maintained the pace of its production thanks to large audiences in countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia and Peru, which continued

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to watch Mexican films.4 Mexican films spoken in Spanish were preferred by Latin American audiences who were illiterate or simply did not want to watch Hollywood films reading subtitles. On the other hand, the Spanish and Argentine industries, geographically and politically distant from US support, would take many years to resume their pre-­war production of films and could not compete with the Mexican industry.5 The political and commercial development of Mexican cinema in the following decades was far from uniform, but it had important elements that remained over the years and shaped a powerful industry. It was usually an industrial cinema filmed with few resources and aimed at the working classes in Latin American cities. In its films, this Mexican cinema was extremely popular among the public in genres such as melodrama, comedy, and suspense. In fact, a large part of the success and geopolitical importance of this production was that it reproduced the forms and topics of Hollywood cinema, but adapted them to the Mexican and Latin American contexts. For more than twenty years, Mexican cinema adapted film noir to the modern Latin American cities as in Distinto amanecer (Another Dawn, Julio Bracho, 1943), La otra (The Other, Roberto Gavaldón, 1946), En la palma de tu mano (In the Palm of Your Hand, Roberto Gavaldón, 1951) and La noche avanza (Night Falls, Roberto Gavaldón, 1952); it set the western in rural Mexico as in El charro negro (The Black Charro, Raúl de Anda, 1940), El jinete sin cabeza (The Headless Horseman, Chano Urueta, 1956), Los hermanos del Hierro (My Son, the Hero, Ismael Rodríguez, 1961); and it transformed Hollywood romantic cinema into the successful melodramas that showed again and again the problems faced by Latin American lovers, as is the case of María Candelaria (Portrait of Maria, Emilio Fernández, 1944), Enamorada (In Love, Emilio Fernández, 1946), Pueblerina (Small Town Girl, Emilio Fernández, 1948). As a result, the United States soon realised that the Mexican industry, rather than being a dangerous competitor, was a necessary ally in the process of spreading the American way of life among Latin American audiences. Although clearly aligned with its northern neighbour, Mexican cinema (and the Mexican regime) was far from mechanically repeating the anti-­communist statements that flooded Hollywood films during the 1950s and early 1960s. Rather than absolute dependence, the Mexican and American film industries established a relationship in which commercial competition, political affinities and strict boundaries coexisted.6 Certainly, since the 1950s, Mexican productions filled Latin American film theatres with films that promoted consumption, capitalist modernity and the free market.7 However, these films rarely made a direct criticism of the communist world or the Soviet Union, with which Mexico always kept diplomatic relations. However, episodes such as the Korean War or the Cuban Revolution frequently triggered pressure from the US State Department for Mexico and its



From Anti-communism to Third-Worldism 165

industry to abandon its diplomatic neutrality and produce films that were not only pro-­capitalist, but openly anti-­Soviet. Thus, although the position of political neutrality always forced Mexican cinema to act with restraint and indirect allusions, during these decades anti-­communist references became commonplace in Mexican cinema. One of the most obvious cases is the film Dicen que soy comunista (They Say I Am a Communist, Alejandro Galindo, 1951), made with resources from Washington in Mexico’s Estudios Churubusco.8 Overtly alluding to the defence of national identity against foreign threats, Galindo’s film offers an almost cartoonish picture of Hollywood-­style anti-­communism.9 Although during these two decades the negative references to the Soviet bloc were not direct, the position of Mexican cinema as an anti-­communist propagandist became increasingly clear. In terms of domestic politics, the regime’s shift to the right undoubtedly favoured this type of film, aimed more at evading social problems than at portraying them. In terms of foreign policy, Mexico played the complex role of Washington’s ‘good neighbour’ during the height of the Cold War.10 However, towards the end of the 1960s, several phenomena converged so that, starting in 1970, Mexican cinema, hand in hand with the regime that sponsored and supported it, took a U-­turn in its content and in the international industrial connections. On the one hand, between the second postwar period and the 1970s, Mexican diplomacy gradually modified its role on the world stage to reduce US influence.11 In fact, in Mexican diplomatic history, changes of course were more common than is usually assumed. In the first half of the 1960s, President Adolfo López Mateos’ administration (1958–1964) strove to diversify diplomatic relations that, since the end of the Second World War, had been increasingly concentrated on bilateral relations with the US. Moreover, beyond the purely economic aspects, during López Mateos’ administration Mexico attempted for the first time in its history to elaborate a wide-­ranging foreign policy in which the Non-­Aligned Movement played an important role.12 From the 1960s on, the reconfiguration of the Cold War and the strengthening of the Third World movement led the Mexican government to try to diversify its diplomatic relations. On the other hand, in the late 1960s, the economic crisis of the Mexican film industry and the political legitimacy crisis of the regime led the National Film Bank (Banco Nacional Cinematográfico, BNC), the official institution in charge of financing most Mexican film productions, to change course. From 1972 onwards Mexican cinema decided to abandon its traditional role as an ally of Hollywood to seek a place in an increasingly influential Third World cinema movement.

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Chile and Cuba: Mexican Cinema in Search of the Third Worldism By the early 1970s, while the governments of Allende and Castro were in a central position in the Third World movement, the film industries of both countries played a leading role in the main forums and festivals of the so-­ called Third World Cinema. Although the incipient development of the Chilean film industry was still far from the international presence that Cuban cinema had already achieved in those years, the transformation carried out by Chile Films since 1970 and the close collaboration with the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Arts and Industry (ICAIC) also placed the so-­ called New Chilean Cinema at the centre of the scene.13 It is therefore not surprising that, just as Mexican’s Third World project sought political relations with these two countries, its film programme also prioritised rapprochement with these two film industries. The Mexican government’s foray into the Third World movement and its rapprochement with the Allende government happened almost in parallel. The cooperation with the South American country was almost immediately replicated in the field of cinema. In addition to the Mexican cinema week in Chile and Chilean cinema week in Mexico that accompanied the visits of the presidents, during the two years of rapprochement, the Mexican government undertook an intense film campaign to show the closeness between the Mexican state and the Allende government. As part of this project, Mexico’s pro-­government Short Film Production Centre (Centro de Producción de Cortometrajes, CPC) made several documentaries to convey to national and international public opinion the image of Mexico and Chile as two peoples with a common purpose.14 In these works, the Mexican government repeatedly combined the discourse of friendship that united the two peoples with an increasingly frequent Latin Americanist and anti-­imperialist rhetoric. Universidad comprometida (Committed University, Carlos Ortiz Tejeda 1972), the best-­known film in this series, is a clear example of the way in which the Mexican authorities used its rapprochement with Allende’s socialist regime to reconfigure its hegemony among Mexican left-­ wing groups. The film reproduces a famous speech that the Chilean president gave to youth at the University of Guadalajara. However, from this speech, the film selects some fragments in which the president forcefully clarifies that the revolution does not pass through the university, that the revolution is made by the workers and peasants, and that the duty of young people is to study and serve the people. The Mexican edition juxtaposes images of impoverished masses or organised workers next to young doctors helping peasants or disciplined university students preparing for the future and swelling the popular contingents of progressive governments. The discursive potentiality of President Allende seems to permeate everything and intentionally fuses the



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Chilean revolutionary process with the official institutions and the Mexican youth. At an important moment of political redefinitions and attempts by the government of Mexican President Luis Echeverría (1970–1976) to show itself as progressive, the usefulness of the film was clear: inside the country, this discourse formed part of Echeverría’s attempt to counteract student activism and to assimilate the Mexican regime discursively and visually to Allende’s socialist government, whose image of progressivism was converted in the film into a call for discipline and national unity against the imperialist external enemy.15 In 1973, the coup d’état that ended Allende’s life and administration and the consequent arrival of Chilean asylum seekers in Mexico were decisive in the political and cinematographic project of Echeverría’s government. As is well known, after the military coup, the condemnation of the Pinochet government was immediate, placing the Mexican government as one of the main defenders of the Latin American left. In the film industry, the arrival in Mexico of several filmmakers close to the Allende government was widely promoted in the media as an example of this international solidarity. In this context, the case of the filmmaker Miguel Littín is paradigmatic.16 By 1973 Littín was already one of the leading figureheads of the rising New Latin American Cinema movement and Third World cinema forums. After a few days in the Mexican embassy, his application for a visa as a refugee was approved without problem. The Chilean filmmaker immediately acquired a stable position and a social circle that included the main representatives of Mexican cinema, such emblematic figures as Emilio ‘El Indio’ Fernández and Luis Buñuel.17 In these favourable circumstances, the filming of Actas de Marusia (Letters from Marusia, 1975) would soon become an opportunity for success both for the exiled filmmaker and for the Third World project of Mexican cinema. Letters form Marusia combined two historical events in northern Chile: the massacre of saltpetre workers perpetrated by the Chilean army on 21 December 1907 in the school of the small town of Santa María de Iquique, and the so-­called Marusia massacre, which took place in that town in March 1925 as the Chilean authorities’ reaction to a strike by the workers of a saltpetre mine. In the narrative, the initial murder of an American mining engineer leads to a series of deadly vendettas between employees and company representatives. The Chilean state, through the army, intervenes on behalf of the foreign capitalists to try to end the conflict. The story ends tragically with the murder of all the villagers at the hands of the state and was enormously attractive to the Chilean filmmaker, because by re-­signifying this historical event he was able to denounce the military coup that had expelled him from his country.

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The far from simple task of filming Chile in Mexico was undoubtedly Littín’s main achievement. However, this condition gave rise to one of the most visible elements of the film: the marked intention to show the uprising of the saltpetre workers in northern Chile as a stage in the long international struggle against imperialist dispossession. In Letters from Marusia Chile seems to be intentionally blurred in the film to give way to a global, almost schematic struggle between exploited and exploiters, colonisers and colonised. No doubt the filming conditions also determined this decision: the need to film the struggle of the Chilean saltpetre workers in a mine in Chihuahua and to replace the Andean workers with Mexicans meant that a South American context that could not be easily illustrated should not be accentuated. In the film, it mattered little that the workers at the turn of the century reproduced the Third World rhetoric of the 1970s: rather than seeking historical fidelity or nationalist appeal, Littín was aiming for the internationalist allegory that in those years was perfectly suited to Mexican Third Worldism. Judging by press releases and interviews with Mexican film officials, for the Echeverrista government the filming of this film was only the beginning of a wide-­ranging project whose main objective was to promote the film worldwide as a masterpiece of Third World cinema. After its completion, the Mexican governmental apparatus launched an intense campaign that saw Littín’s film become one of the leading films in cinema around the world between 1975 and 1976: in 1976 Letters from Marusia was nominated for the Academy Award in the Best Foreign Film category and for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and that same year it opened the Pesaro Film Festival, one of the main meeting points of the Third World film movement.18 In Mexico, however, the reception of Letters from Marusia was quite controversial. After its release, critics and intellectuals either exalted or blamed the Latin Americanist fervour of the director and the government that sponsored him. Many in Mexico did not praise the support given to the Chilean filmmaker. From the left, Ayala Blanco himself mocked the fact that the BNC was now financing ‘the masterpiece of Third World cinema’, the making of which responded to the ‘impatience of the opportunistic Chilean director Miguel Littín, who is about to enter the international leftist big business’.19 In the face of this controversy, Littín had to navigate with difficulty in the forums of Third World cinema to maintain that he was still making anti-­ imperialist and revolutionary films, even though he was making them within a bourgeois production structure and under the protection of an authoritarian state.20 The same was true at the national level. Since his arrival in the country, Littín skilfully navigated between his political militancy and his closeness to the Mexican regime. On the one hand, in the main international forums, he regularly repeated that the film was part of a new, more universal phase of



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Chilean cinema and that the nominations were a victory for the resistance in exile. But, on the other hand, in his interviews in Mexico he bent over backwards to insist that it was an achievement of the new Mexican cinema. The success of this film was undoubtedly a triumph for everyone: on the one hand, Littín obtained economic, logistical and promotional support from the Mexican state to make his film and thus position himself in the main areas of world cinema; on the other hand, the Mexican state was demonstrating its ideological position internationally by sponsoring this exiled filmmaker and making a Third World blockbuster on Mexican soil, which, moreover, became an undeniable international success. While during the first half of Echeverría’s government relations with Chile were at the forefront, the tragic end of the Allende administration made it necessary to focus on a new external source of political legitimacy. Given the understandable constraints that limited his interactions with military regimes in the Western hemisphere, the only possibilities available for developing new nationalist-­left alliances were the governments of Venezuela and Cuba.21 Mexico was not only one of the few countries that maintained, at least formally, diplomatic and commercial relations with the Castro government, but also became one of the main regional supporters of the Cuban regime. However, during the governments of López Mateos and, especially, Díaz Ordaz, the declared friendship between the two governments was more symbolic than effective. The traditional ambiguity of the Mexican state, an undisputed ally of the United States, and the Cuban government’s resolute support for Latin American guerrilla groups until at least 1967, resulted in a relationship of mutual distrust at the height of the Cold War.22 However, new circumstances in both countries seemed conducive to leaving those days behind. On the one hand, the Mexican regime saw the strengthening of its relationship with Cuba as an excellent opportunity to update the social and now Third Worldist character of the Mexican Revolution. On the other hand, from the late 1960s, after the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia and the failure of armed movements in almost all Latin American countries, the Cuban regime almost completely abandoned its policy of permanent revolution and launched an attempt to strengthen its diplomatic and commercial relations with Latin American governments.23 In this new context, the improvement of Cuban-­Mexican relations represented a gain for both governments. However, the new diplomatic stage was still far from leaving behind the practices of mutual distrust. By the early 1970s, Cuba’s importance in both geopolitical and cinematographic terms was indisputable. From the 1960s ICAIC became one of the epicentres of Latin American cinema and the Third World cinema movement. By the early 1970s, in the spaces of this world movement, the prominence of figures such as Julio García Espinosa and, especially, Alfredo Guevara

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was already undeniable. Therefore, if an industry wanted to position itself in these forums, gaining the favour of the ICAIC seemed to be mandatory.24 On 24 June 1974, at Havana’s José Martí International Airport, a group of high-­ranking officials awaited the arrival of an important Mexican delegation. On the small plane was a delegation led by Rodolfo Echeverría (brother of the Mexican president and director of the National Film Bank) and many of the top officials of the Mexican film industry. Their main objective was the organisation of two mutual film weeks. These events, it seems, were not detailed during that first visit and, consequently, had to be planned remotely. The correspondence between Rodolfo Echeverría and Alfredo Guevara on the subject is abundant and is still preserved in the Cinemateca de Cuba. In the exchange, the two officials specified dates, agreed on venues and negotiated the material to be shown at each event. However, as can be seen in the letters, this last point was a delicate issue and required several messages before it was finalised.25 The list of Mexican films proposed by Echeverría included a selection of the most successful films of the new Mexican film project. However, Echeverría’s proposal soon raised the alarm among Cuban officials who, on seeing the works produced by Mexican cinema, began a debate on the appropriateness of screening for Cuban audiences the films of a new Mexican cinema made in an atmosphere of relaxed moral and sexual censorship. After reviewing the material sent by Mexico, in documents with handwritten annotations and continuous corrections, it can be seen how the high authorities of Cuban cinema (Pastor Vega, Julio García Espinosa, and Alfredo Guevara) harshly criticised the content of the Mexican films and communicated the necessary changes. The Mexican films were branded as vulgar. Many of the films included violent sequences, images of masturbation or dialogue that Cuban censors described as ‘reactionary’.26 These censorship actions did not occur in an isolated environment. The period between 1971 and 1976, popularly known as the grey five-­year period (quinquenio gris), was one of the most restrictive for Cuban cinema – and the island’s intellectual production as a whole – in terms of censorship. Although during the 1960s the revolution and modernisation of world cinema coincided and coexisted with the process of political and social revolution on the island, during the following decade, the ICAIC was finally absorbed by the Ministry of Culture, a supervisory body charged with overseeing the content of the country’s artistic and cultural production. As a result, both the Institute’s film production and foreign films shown on the island were subjected to increasingly strict surveillance to prevent the projection of immoral images or ideological deviations to Cuban audiences.27 It is true that during the hardest years of the film restriction, Cuban audiences generally took refuge in the films of the golden age of Mexican cinema,



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which, with certain mutilations, never ceased to be screened, as they were inoffensive despite their capitalist character and often contained a moralising discourse that must have been attractive to the Cuban government. However, in this new period of cinematic rapprochement, the Mexican state was not interested in promoting those works, but in showing off cinema as a symbol of creative freedom and openness. The problem was that those films were full of scenes, rudeness and ideas that were problematic in Cuba in the 1970s and therefore had to be censored. In the end, the Mexican Film Week took place and, according to the official press, was a success. In pursuit of a repeated desire for closer collaboration, the ICAIC screened the reactionary Mexican films and the BNC had to accept Cuban censorship. The distrust between these regimes was mutual and, if the organisation of the Mexican film week tested the tolerance of the Cuban censors, the organisation of the Cuban film week would also put the Mexican surveillance systems to work. A cohort of important figures from the Cuban film industry visited Mexico between 7 and 18 October 1974 and was present at the opening and closing of the week in the recently opened Cineteca Nacional. As can be seen in the articles that monopolised the film sections of the Mexican press,28 at those events, both the Mexican officials and the Cuban guests elaborated complex rhetoric to emphasise the common interests of these film industries while making clear and justifying the obvious political and aesthetic differences. The visit was hardly exceptional. Before and after the Cuban film week, many similar events were held in Mexico with the African, Asian, Latin American or Eastern European film industries, with which the Mexican government was trying to strengthen ties. However, the extensive documentation that exists allows us to observe that the Mexican state did not hesitate to carefully monitor the interest that the Cuban discourse and presence could provoke among young Mexicans. The Federal Security Directorate (the Mexican government’s anti-­subversive office) appointed a group of agents to attend and report on everything that happened at the event. Thanks to the reports of the Mexican spies, we know, for example, that the screenings filled all 620 seats and that approximately 90 per cent of the audience was made up of young university students.29 The agents, who, judging by their reports, seemed to enjoy the Cuban films quite a lot, detailed the number of elements deployed at the event and the way in which they infiltrated the student audience, and gave important names, such as Eduardo Ibarra Aguirre and Alba Martínez, son-­in-­ law and daughter of Arnoldo Martínez Verdugo, first secretary of the Mexican Communist Party. But, as had happened in Havana, amidst mistrust, surveillance and censorship, officials from both countries declared at the end that the film weeks had been an example of brotherhood between the peoples and assured that the

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ties of collaboration would continue to grow closer. After a slow but steady rapprochement, in 1975 Fidel Castro travelled to Mexico and Luis Echeverría flew to Havana to seal a long and fruitful diplomatic process. In 1976, after lengthy negotiations, the ICAIC and the BNC signed a broad collaboration agreement that included technical support from the Mexicans to promote Cuban productions and help from the ICAIC to increase the quality of the products of the CPC. In addition, ICAIC abandoned its strict policy of not participating in co-­productions  – perhaps the most important achievement on the Mexican side – and agreed to make two films with the Mexican government that would promote ‘the affirmation of Latin American friendship and trust’.30

Postcards from a Short-Term Third Worldism Let us return to the film Those Years. Although the imperfection of this film made it an example of the failures of the Third World film project, it would be unfair to say that its poor workmanship is fully representative of Mexican cinema in the 1970s. The film would only be the beginning of a long (and in some cases successful) bid by Mexican cinema to join the side of the regime that sponsored it in the broad and heterogeneous stream of Third World cinema. As part of this drive, between 1972 and 1976, this film industry, increasingly controlled by the government, produced dozens of works under this label. In the 1970s, the Mexican cinema focused extensively on making films depicting the liberation struggles of Latin American peoples and began to produce and co-­produce films whose images and dialogue reproduced the official discourse and the rhetoric and images of South American cinema. To the aforementioned Letters from Marusia we could add, just to mention the clearest examples, Cananea (1976), in which Marcela Fernández Violante emphasises the voracity of foreign entrepreneurs willing to do anything to continue exploiting Latin American territories; the Cuban co-­ production Mina, viento de libertad (Mina, Wind of Freedom, Antonio Eceiza, 1976) which shows the story of the legendary Spanish insurgent who time and again launches into harangues against colonial domination; or perhaps the most emblematic case of what we could call a obstinate Third Worldism, La casa del sur (The House in the South, Sergio Olhovich, 1975), a film in which a desert community embarks on a journey in time and space through each and every stage of colonialism and dispossession that Latin American communities have suffered. If, from the mid-­1940s, the Mexican film industry had opted to maintain its lower-­class audiences in Mexico and Latin America by showing low-­budget films in which apologies for capitalist modernity and exaltations of nationalist



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folklore coexisted, during the 1970s Mexican cinema and the regime that sponsored it decided to make a radical change. During those years, more than one Mexican filmmaker opted to make films aimed at young Latin American leftists. These films generally copied or adapted to Mexican reality the rhetorical forms of the main exponents of the New Latin American Cinema, to which they added (generally unsuccessfully) the Third Worldist discourses of an officialism determined to occupy a place within the Non-­Aligned Movement.31 Towards the end of the Echeverría administration, the Third World euphoria of Mexican cinema was already flooding every space. Directors, scriptwriters, actors and technicians all constantly repeated that their participation in the different productions was not a question of work, but an act of political congruence. Even publications such as Cinelandia, previously dedicated to announcing premieres or airing the private lives of stars, reproduced this rhetoric. In an interview with this magazine, for example, the young Patricia Reyes Espíndola, a supporting actress in the film Letters from Marusia, declared that her participation in that film ‘has awakened my political conscience; it has shaken the bourgeoisie in which I lived’.32 In the case of The House in the South, for example, the director himself repeated time and again that the central theme of his work was the social, political, and economic problems of Latin American peoples. By the end of the Echeverria’s administration, Mexican cinema seemed monothematic and looked like the most Third Worldist on the continent. The pages of its magazines were filled with interviews with Latin American filmmakers or theorists, such as Carlos Álvarez, Jorge Sanjinés or Julio García Espinosa; film directors identified with the world cinematic left, such as Glauber Rocha, Constantin Costa-­Gavras or Santiago Álvarez, paraded one by one through Mexican film offices or attended grand lunches organised at the president’s residence while announcing to the media how pleased they were to see the Mexican industry join the international movement of liberation cinema. At the end of the road, the investment undoubtedly paid off. The incipient collaboration with Chile Films and the reception and promotion of exiled filmmaker Miguel Littín, on the one hand, and the intense programme of collaboration undertaken with the Cuban government, on the other, managed to open doors for Mexican cinema to international spaces where it had previously been virtually unknown. Although films had been watched by large Spanish-­speaking audiences in Latin America and Spain since the 1940s, and although some of its films had achieved international fame or won important nominations, the fame and centrality that national productions achieved during the Echeverría period was unprecedented. Although in this effort, approaches to the Chilean and Cuban industries held a paramount role, these were not the only spaces in which the regime focused its efforts to achieve an

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eye-­catching place in the Third World film scene. Also, as part of this effort, dozens of Mexican film weeks were organised in practically every country in South America, as well as in distant latitudes such as Russia and Algeria. Not only that, but in 1974, in what the press described as an absurdity, the BNC decided to rent permanently the Etoile Hall, located on Champs Elysées Avenue in Paris, to screen both new Mexican cinema and the latest African and Latin American productions. In the end, as a corollary to this extensive effort and thanks to multiple negotiations undertaken by Miguel Littín and representatives of Cuban cinema, the Pesaro Film Festival decided to dedicate a special place in its 1976 edition to Echeverría’s film project. Thus, by the end of the Echeverría’s administration, cinematic Third Worldism seemed to be a success, at least in terms of political effectiveness: abroad, it had managed to place the state industry at the centre of debates on the consolidation of a Third World film movement; at home, the Third World projection of Mexican cinema and the diplomatic relations it fostered were part of the broad strategy of national reconciliation to attract to the state dissident sectors and political groups that, now adhering to the official project, could freely enunciate their revolutionary postulates without posing a threat to national political stability. However, Mexican Third Worldism did not transcend the Echeverría’s administration. Along with other elements of his political project, the course of Echeverría’s diplomacy was reoriented in the following administration and returned to more traditional causes. In this context, as had happened with the national political project from which it emerged, Mexican Third World cinema was short-­lived, and the firmness of its convictions did not withstand the change of administration. Although towards the last months of 1976 Mexican cinema intensified its efforts both to consolidate its anti-­ imperialist content and to establish Mexico as an indisputable reference point for Third World cinema, after the change of government in December 1976, everything seemed to fizzle out. During the first years of José López Portillo’s government, Mexico’s incursion into the Third World movement was heavily criticised  – and not infrequently mocked  – and was commonly blamed for the crisis the country was going through. Similarly, the economic failure of Echeverría’s film project was quickly explained by the fact that films on Latin American themes were the most expensive and least successful of all state productions. Although internationally Echeverría’s renovation plan continued to receive support in some Latin American filmmaker meetings, the pronouncements made in these spaces lost relevance domestically and were not even covered by the national press. Moreover, just as the belligerence of Latin American diplomatic Third Worldism had lost almost all its strength by the end of the 1970s, the institutionalisation of the New Latin American Cinema movement at the Havana Film Festival in 1979 ended two decades



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of political and cinematic effervescence in the region and ushered in a new, much more measured stage. Israel Rodríguez holds a PhD in History from El Colegio de México and a master’s degree in the same discipline from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He has specialised in film history and the history of artistic and political processes in twentieth-­century Mexico. He is the author of the book El nuevo cine y la revolución congelada: Historia política del cine mexicano en los setenta (The New Cinema and the Frozen Revolution: Political History of Mexican Cinema in the 1970s) (UNAM, 2023).

Notes   1.   2.   3.   4.

Pascual, ‘La reformulación del autoritarismo mexicano’, 34. Fein, ‘Hollywood, U. S.-Mexican Relations’, 103–35. Ibid., 114. Between 1945 and 1960, the average annual import of Mexican films in the Andean and Caribbean countries was seventy-­six films. This number was lower (thirty-­nine) in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile). Certainly, this average was much lower than the approximately 250 US films exported to Latin America each year. For an extensive review on the consumption of Mexican cinema in Latin America, see Rosas and Domínguez, Públicos iberoamericanos; Castro and McKee Irwin, El cine mexicano ‘se impone’.   5. Noble, ‘Vino todo el pueblo’, 510; Oroz, Melodrama, 160; Lahr-­Vivaz, Mexican melodrama, 16; Castro and McKee Irwin, El cine mexicano ‘se impone’, passim. Rosas Mantecón, Públicos iberoamericanos, passim.   6. Fein, ‘Hollywood, U. S.-Mexican Relations’, 128.   7. Fein, ‘Everyday Forms of Transnational Collaboration’, 425.  8. Fein, ‘Producing the Cold War in Mexico’, 171–213.   9. Fein, ‘Transcultured Anticommunism’, 82–111. 10. Zolov, The Last Good Neighbor, 5–20. 11. Ibid., 19–20. 12. Pettinà, ‘Global Horizons’, 748–58. 13. In August 1971 and September 1972 Chile Films and ICAIC signed important collaboration agreements in which they stated that ‘in order to deepen the search for both national identities and stop the cultural penetration imposed as a result of neocolonial ­exploitation . . . ­a work plan will be developed that includes the massive exhibition of Cuban cinema in Chile and Chilean cinema in Cuba, as well as the holding of film weeks, festivals, exchange of newsreels, etc.’. Convenio de colaboración Chile Films-­ ICAIC. File Chile, Cinemateca de Cuba, Havana. 14. Amaral de Aguiar, ‘Pueblos hermanos’, 29–38. 15. Ojeda, Alcances y límites, 179.

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16. Rodríguez, ‘Del nacionalismo al tercermundismo’. 17. De Sousa Silva, Cinema, Política e Exílio, 51. 18. The national and international press campaign was extensive. For instance, see Anonymous, ‘Amplia promoción realizan en Hollywood a Actas de Marusia’, 17; Gurezpe, ‘Actas de Marusia, una buena fórmula para penetrar al mercado internacional’, 22; Anonymous, ‘Participará Actas de Marusia en el Festival de Nuevo Cine de Pesaro, Italia’, 16. 19. Ayala Blanco, La condición del cine mexicano, 234–35. 20. De Sousa Silva, Cinema, Política e Exílio, 77. 21. Shapira, ‘La política exterior de México’, 73. 22. Keller, Mexico’s Cold War, 233. 23. Harmer, ‘Two, Three, Many Revolutions?’, 61–64. 24. Salazar Navarro, Cine, revolución y resistencia, 127–220. 25. Correspondencia entre Rodolfo Echeverría y Alfredo Guevara, July 6–September 20, 1974, File México, Cinemateca de Cuba, Havana. 26. Lista de filmes mexicanos pre-­seleccionados; ‘Filmes mexicanos seleccionados; Filmes mexicanos con posibilidades de exhibición. File México, Cinemateca de Cuba, Havana. 27. García Borrero, ‘Cine cubano post 68’, 76–77. 28. Vaylon, ‘Habla Robles Quintero’; Torres, ‘El cine cubano’; Vaylon, ‘El cine, la expresión más lograda por la revolución cubana’, 18. 29. Mexican General Archive. General Directorate of Political and Social Investigations (AGN, DGIPS), box 1159 B, file 3. 30. Quezada, ‘Incrementamos relaciones fílmicas con Cuba’, 3. These films would be the expensive productions El recurso del método (Reasons of State, Miguel Littín, 1977) and Mina, vientos de libertad (Mina, Winds of Freedom, Antonio Eceiza, 1976). 31. Rodríguez, ‘La aventura tercermundista’, 24–30. 32. Nogueron, ‘Intervenir en Actas de Marusia’, 26.

Bibliography Amaral de Aguiar, Carolina. ‘Pueblos hermanos: Chile en el cine del Centro de Producción de Cortometraje mexicano en la década de 1970’, in Mónica Villarroel (ed.), Imaginarios del cine chileno y latinoamericano (Santiago de Chile: LOM, 2018), 29–38. Anonymous. ‘Participará Actas de Marusia en el Festival de Nuevo Cine de Pesaro, Italia’. Excélsior (21 February 1976), 16. ––––––. ‘Amplia promoción realizan en Hollywood a Actas de Marusia’. El Nacional (5 March 1976), 17. Ayala Blanco, Jorge. La condición del cine mexicano. Mexico: Posada, 1986. Castro, Maricruz and Robert McKee Irwin. El cine mexicano ‘se impone’: mercados internacionales y penetración cultural en la época dorada. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2011. De Sousa Silva, Alexsandro. Cinema, Política e Exílio: o caso Miguel Littín. Foz do Iguaçu: Editora CLAEC, 2021.



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Fein, Seth. ‘Hollywood, U.S.-Mexican Relations, and the Devolution of the “Golden Age” of Mexican Cinema’. Film-Historia 4(2) (1998), 103–35. ———. ‘Everyday Forms of Transnational Collaboration: U.S. Film Propaganda in Cold War Mexico’, in Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore (eds), Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 400–50. ———. ‘Transcultured Anticommunism: Cold War Hollywood in Postwar Mexico’, in Chon Noriega (ed.), Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 82–111. ———. ‘Producing the Cold War in Mexico: The Public Limits of Covert Communications’, in Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser (eds), From the Cold: Political and Cultural Dimensions of the Latin American Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 171–213. García Borrero, Juan Antonio. ‘Cine cubano post-68: los presagios del gris’, in Otras maneras de pensar el cine cubano (Santiago de Cuba, Editorial Oriente), 68–114. Gurezpe, Agustin. ‘Actas de Marusia, una buena fórmula para penetrar al mercado internacional’. Excélsior (19 February 1976), 22. Harmer, Tanya. ‘Two, Three, Many Revolutions? Cuba and the Prospects for Revolutionary Change in Latin America, 1967–1975’. Journal of Latin American Studies 45 (2013), 61–89. Keller, Renata. Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Lahr-Vivaz, Elena. Mexican Melodrama: Film and Nation from the Golden Age to the New Wave. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2016. León Quezada, Carlos. ‘Incrementamos relaciones fílmicas con Cuba’. Cine Mundial (4 May 1976), 3. Noble, Andrea. ‘Vino todo el pueblo: Notes on Monsiváis, Mexican Movies and MovieGoing’. Bulletin of Latin American Research 25(4) (2006), 506–11. Nogueron, Nick. ‘Intervenir en Actas de Marusia ha sido determinante para mi persona’. Cinelandia (3 April 1976), 26. Ojeda, Mario. Alcances y límites de la política exterior de México. Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2001. Oroz, Silva. Melodrama: El cine de lágrimas de América Latina. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1995. Pascual Gutiérrez, Iris. ‘La reformulación del autoritarismo mexicano durante la presidencia de Luis Echeverría (1970–1976): La política cinematográfica como ejemplo’. Millars: Espai i historia 41(2) (2016), 15–43. Pettinà, Vanni. ‘Global Horizons: Mexico, the Third World, and the Non-Aligned Movement at the Time of the 1961 Belgrade Conference’. The International History Review 38(4) (2016), 741–64. Rodríguez, Israel. ‘Del nacionalismo al tercermundismo: El itinerario mexicano de Miguel Littín’. Estudios del ISHIR 10 (28) (2020). https://doi.org/10.35305/eishir.v10i28.1322. ———. ‘Renovación fílmica y autoritarismo en México, 1970–1976: Revisión a la idea del Estado cineasta’. Historia y grafía 58(31) (2022), https://doi.org/10.48102/hyg.vi58​ .397. Rosas Mantecón, Ana and Juan Carlos Domínguez Domingo (eds). Públicos iberoamericanos del cine mexicano de la época de oro: Trayectorias analógicas y digitales de una identidad compartida. Mexico: PROCINE, 2021.

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Salazar Navarro, Salvador. Cine, revolución y resistencia: La política cultural del Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos hacia América Latina. Pittsburgh: Latin America Research Commons, 2020. Shapira, Yoram. ‘La política exterior de México bajo el régimen de Echeverría: retrospectiva’. Foro Internacional 19(1) (1978), 62–91. Torres, Rubén. ‘El cine cubano es político, revolucionario y cultural’. El Heraldo (9 October 1974). Vaylon, Estela. ‘Habla Robles Quintero: Descolonización cultural, meta del cine mexicano y del cine cubano’. El Día (26 September 1974). ———. ‘El cine, la expresión más lograda por la revolución cubana: Robles Quintero’. El Día (12 October 1974), 18. Vega, Sara et al. Historia de un gran amor: relaciones cinematográficas entre Cuba y México 1897–2005. La Habana/Guadalajara: ICAIC/CUCSH, 2007. Zolov, Eric. The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

PART III

From Rising Suns to a Slow Sunset: Cooperation, Disillusionment and Transfers

CHAPTER 11

Cold War and Film Festivals in the Aftermath of 1968 Dina Iordanova

The chapter highlights how and why the post-­1968 shifts in the global film festival circuit were a key factor for the emergence of the specific disbalances and exclusions that affected the international circulation of film for decades to come. It seeks to reveal how today’s global inequalities in cultural expression and representation are rooted in the transactional history of seemingly ephemeral yet enduring institutions like film festivals. The aim is to explore what the turn to ‘auteur’ cinema at the ‘Big Three’ festivals – that is, Venice, Cannes and Berlinale as establishments of esteem that competed yet operated similarly – actually meant for those behind the Iron Curtain and in the Third World, and how it reflected on the transmission of international cinema in the 1970s and 1980s. Due to space limitations, the study focuses only on the workings of the main three European festivals whilst keeping in check the dynamics of the global circuit as far as it is relevant to addressing the issues at hand.1 The study demonstrates how this Cold War-­times splitting off from the small yet prestigious circuit of the top three festivals, triggered by the clash between modernising changes at the big West European festivals and the inflexible attitudes of the Soviet sphere countries, where obstinate domestic bureaucratic structures persisted, led to diminished returns for a number of non-­Western national film traditions. And, whilst the dissonance was largely a phenomenon that reflected the realities of the Cold War, it led to enduring underrepresentation that remained unresolved long after its end. In the long history of film festivals, the year 1968 and its aftermath remain associated with the most profound rupture in the way festivals were

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­ rogrammed and run. Triggered by filmmaker-­led events that resulted in the p cancellation of the Cannes festival in 1968, tremors were felt at Berlinale in June, and a deep standoff occurred at the Venice festival at the end of August. This took place, respectively, during the 21st (Cannes), 18th (Berlinale), 29th (Venice) event, at a point when all three festivals were no longer in growing pains but had been staged for, give or take, two decades each. As a result of the unrest, all three festivals experienced profound transformations in the 1970s. By radically altering the configuration of key stakeholders, the ‘revolutions’ at the Big Three film festivals put an end to the festivals as events of cultural diplomacy and transformed them into champions of ‘auteurs’; this was the most important rupture in the history of festivals and had repercussions far beyond the 1970s. In rejecting the ‘diplomacy’ model as part of the post-­1968 transition, the Big Three introduced changes to the structure of the programme, mostly by initiating new programming sidebars that were meant to be independently curated, rather than receiving and accepting submissions by interested international partners. The role of individual programmers increased in importance; they no longer depended on diplomatic supervision and could engage in ‘taste-­led’ programming. The logistics of programming work also changed, as it was no longer a matter of scheduling films nominated by various national committees but a matter of securing films through direct negotiation with their creators and rights holders. In the new configuration, it was easier to secure showcasing films by directors whose work was already known to the programmers. There were ‘foreign’ cinemas that were not familiar to the programmers; these film traditions did not operate to the pattern that was established – so these were, gradually, ignored, except for the occasional ‘auteur’ who would be known to the programmer. In this respect the Big Three mimicked one another, even when competing for the participation of specific ‘auteurs.’2 An ostensible elitist transnational ‘cluster’ that lacked ‘porousness’3 came into being, isolating whole film traditions rather than integrating them. There are three main concepts around which I structure my argument: stakeholders, ownership, logistics – as they relate to the functioning of film festivals. The first concept is the configuration of stakeholders. I believe every festival is defined by a specific configuration of its stakeholders at a given point in time. The stakeholders could be institutions, groups, or individuals, and they each have a vested interest in the event. Depending on their role at the festival, the main types of stakeholders are organisers, participants and commentators – and they can be further broken down.4 Each stakeholder has a different type of involvement with the festival. It is a dynamic association that changes over time: it can strengthen or weaken, or it can shift in different other ways. The changing configuration of stakeholders determines how a



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festival is organised, how it interacts with the outside world, how it presents and narrates itself, and how it contributes to film culture at large. Occasionally, the power dynamics can alter so radically that a leading stakeholder may lose influence – this is what happened with the withdrawal of the autocratic proponents of ‘cultural diplomacy’ (i.e. the diminished role of Soviet apparatchiks but also of Third World pundits) from the Big Three in response to the 1968 protests. Respectively, the other radical change was the power shift in the position of rebelling French, Italian and German filmmakers at the ‘Big Three’ – from mere ‘participants’ they moved to become key ‘organisers.’ The second concept is ownership. There are different forms of ‘ownership’ in cinema. This is particularly important when it comes to film festivals in relation to the stakeholders: in the context of a big festival, various stakeholders may hold different ideas as to who ‘owns’ the festivals or the films that are being shown there. In some countries the films are a product created and generally owned by individual producers and studios; this is true for the lands of the ‘Big Three’ where the support of the government is appreciated but not decisive for the fate of a film.5 In some other countries, however, all films are ultimately ‘owned’ by the state – and this is the case with the countries of state socialism or of ideologically centralised rule (e.g. the USSR, China, Iran, etc.). Such countries do not have mechanisms in place to enable the direct inviting of films – all interactions with the outside world have to go through institutions and commissions. Any festival that takes place in such countries is also ultimately ‘owned’ by the state.6 The differences gained particular importance in the context of organising film festivals in Cold War times, as, depending on the ownership, the organisers of the festival had to enter different arrangements with different participants. For a big European festival to have a film from Canada in the 1970s, it sufficed to agree the terms with the producing company. For a film from the USSR or China to be shown, however, it required a different type of organisational effort, that involved pursuing correspondence through diplomatic channels or obtaining special permissions from authorised bodies for the showing of a film. The participating stakeholders displayed different behaviour which was determined by the way in which they regarded the ownership of the film that was to be shown at the event. The third concept is logistics. Each festival set up and followed certain procedures in organising an event. During the period reviewed in this chapter, the logistics were largely related to identifying and then procuring the 35mm copies of the films considered for the festival, so that they could be viewed by the selectors. Securing the physical copies of the chosen films (normally shipped in several numbered cans of reels), an activity that was often related to clearing customs, was as a substantial task. Coordinating the moves of the bulky cans of 35mm copies between the screening venues during the festival

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was of such complexity that those who worked on print traffic were considered key festival employees. Many festival decisions were determined by such specific logistical considerations.

What Was the Big Three ‘Revolution’ of 1968? Prior to the year 1968, the Big Three film festivals – of which Venice started in 1932, Cannes in 1946 and Berlinale in 1951 – were mainly tools of cultural diplomacy.7 Causes, political persuasions and people in charge were changing, yet the festivals invariably remained international political events. Normally, only countries that had diplomatic relations with the organisers were included at the event; there were quotas of how many films a country could present, usually linked to the number of films a country produced. A lot of diplomatic clout went into negotiating which films to enter in competitions, as the films on the programme would normally be nominated by official representatives of their respective countries, either diplomats or state film bodies. The festivals worked under close supervision from ministers and in close coordination with various other governmental and quasi-­governmental organisations. The directors of the events were political appointees. Juries often included officials, domestic and foreign; various state efforts to influence the nominations and constitutions of juries were not unheard of. The distribution of awards was led by diplomatic considerations at least as much as considerations of artistic merit. Thus, the history of the festivals in this period consists of a plethora of anecdotes related to minor political storms, of protestations and diplomatic manoeuvring. Reading through the history of these events from the period is effectively reading a lengthy and complex report of a string of diplomatic scandals, thus providing abundant material for cultural historians.8 As it was countries that entered the films, matters of (not hurting) national pride prevailed. Delegations sent ultimatums demanding the suppression of certain films, and if it was not done, they either did not arrive or walked out. Whenever they could not control the narrative, the Soviets posted ultimatums.9 China and the GDR were often kept out and there were all sorts of problems with various East European participants.10 With the passing of time, the diplomatic game became tiresome and limiting. It was not only about the ubiquitous presence of national flags displayed around the festival venues. The statutes and principles of film selection and presentation failed to properly recognise the interests of groups of stakeholders that grew in importance and demanded a bigger say in the affairs of the festivals: domestic filmmakers and cinephiles. The most succinct expression of this discontent is summarised in François Truffaut’s early critical comment in regard on the multiculturalism of the Venice Mostra: ‘It seems as if the fal-



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lacy lies in wanting to internationalize festivals. Without speaking in favour of a racist festival, I have the impression that the absence of films coming from Egypt, India, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia or Belgium would not deprive anyone and would allow focusing on serious productions.’11 The backlash to ‘wanting to internationalise festivals’ gradually became a growing consensus which saw the presence of various nations entering films as a matter of diplomatic courtesy as detrimental; the preference was to eliminate the delegations that cultural diplomacy had produced. The aim was to ‘focus on serious productions.’ And, already in the early 1960s Cannes was forced to acknowledge – without much fanfare – that festivals ought to make more space for films selected because of artistic quality and not for commercial reasons nor by diplomatic nomination. The introduction of the Semaine de la Critique as an independently curated section at Cannes in the year 1962 reflects just that. By 1968, there was a widespread recognition that the cultural diplomacy approach to the festival was cumbersome and limiting. There was growing discontent from filmmakers in France, which played out during the revolt that led to the suspension of the May 1968 event. The discontent spilled over to Berlinale (held in June) and seriously undermined Venice (August 1968). The bureaucrats in charge of these events were equally exhausted and unhappy; it did not take much to make them let go.12 Peter Cowie’s book about the confrontations of 1968 and the aftermath is aptly titled Revolution.13 It was a revolutionary situation, indeed: the Big Three festivals found themselves faced with a disruptive situation where those who had the power could no longer exercise it in the customary way, and those who were taking part were no longer willing to obey the status quo. The ‘cultural diplomacy’ model gave way to the pressure of young directors from France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere.14 They insisted that the festivals should refocus, drop the diplomacy and provide a forum that properly represented their work. It played out differently at each one of the Big Three – in different contexts, with different players, at different times and to different results. Both in the case of Cannes and at Venice the protests and the disruption came from well-­known and respected local creative figures who became particularly outspoken enemies of the diplomacy model. As a result of the protests, however, the Venice festival suffered a serious setback and entered a protracted crisis period that was only resolved toward the end of the 1970s. Berlinale seemed unaffected until, in 1970, it experienced similar clashes.15 Still, the direction of the changes was the same for all Big Three festivals. The result was a radical amendment in the configuration of stakeholders. Cinephiles and filmmakers, previously belonging to the category of ‘participants’ whose interests were often overlooked, now landed the opportunity to

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become ‘organisers.’ Those who previously had oversight of organising opted to step back. Essentially, it constituted a widening and diversification of the festivals’ acknowledged organisers, because of the withdrawal of the original stakeholders. The state reduced its role, proclaiming that cinephiles and filmmakers were now in charge and leaving it to them to make the decisions that they had found cumbersome. As a result, programming practices at the Big Three festivals changed. International interactions no longer went through strictly diplomatic channels. Films were no longer chosen based on political considerations but solely on the basis of artistic qualities. Filmmakers now ‘owned’ the festivals. In short, the Western democracies disavowed their stakes in cultural diplomacy through film. On their part, the countries of state socialism did not grasp the subtle consequences of the change. They stepped the pressures up and continued the stubborn insistence on ‘state ownership’ of culture and cinema.

The Big Three in the 1970s: A Cluster and a Club The post-­1968 developments in the work of the Big Three defined the status quo for decades to come.16 Even if they were in competition with one another – for the best films, for the greatest directors, for the biggest stars and for the sponsors with the deepest pockets – the Big Three mimicked each other in the way in which their operation was set up and ultimately formed a cluster of prestige. There were changes in leadership and regulations and in the logistics of programming. The three festivals gradually moved away from direct government oversight. They no longer showcased national cinemas: the focus was on individual auteurs from around the world. Filmmakers and cinephiles became organisers, replacing most of the civil servants of the previous period. Moving away from cumbersome cultural diplomacy in dealing with the countries of the Soviet sphere and the non-­aligned world and adopting taste-­ led programming helped the leading ‘auteurs’ in France, Italy, and Germany to achieve their goals. Yet it deepened the discrepancy in programming practices and effectively bracketed out the cinematic output of countries that did not follow Western aesthetic and ideological paradigms. Only selected films from India, China, Africa, or the USSR were shown at the top world festivals. There was a radical rethinking of festival structures. Venice suspended its competition for a decade, which led to significant loss of prestige and sent the festival into a ‘coma’.17 The removal of awards, however, was regarded as a progressive move by those of leftist persuasion. All Big Three festivals carried out similar adjustments, even if in a different order and at different times. Regulations were changed. New sidebars sprung



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up, first at Cannes and Berlinale and, later on, at Venice. The creation of new sidebars proliferated in the 1970s, typically in recognition of demands from groups of stakeholders who would express discontent. The innovations included new and independently programmed sidebars (to appease activist stakeholders), such as the Forum of Young Cinema at Berlinale (as of 1971) or the Director’s Fortnight (as of 1969) and Un Certain regard (as of 1978, which combined three sidebars that had been introduced respectively in 1975, Les Yeux fertiles, in 1976, L’Air du temps, and, in 1977, Le Passé composé) at Cannes.18 A kind of professionalisation of programming occurred, a development that made Marijke de Valck call this period ‘the age of the programmer’.19 The festivals changed for the sake of accommodating national cinema whilst simultaneously remaining a forum for world cinema, only the line was now that world cinema would be included without censorship. The festival would no longer be a platform for state-­sponsored filmmaking; it would be ‘owned’ by the creators. It was recognised that there may be alternative nouvelles vagues that may not have the look and feel of the French one, so the creation of new sidebars was intended as a compromise that would allow the festivals to preserve the variety of forms and approaches and as way of overcoming exclusions and cultural ghettoisation. The Quinzaine would offer ‘an alternative visibility of the festival’s rituals’.20 It would be a way to accommodate multiple interests – not only artistic ‘auteur’ cinema but also commercial/entertainment and the vestiges of cultural diplomacy.21 Some of the biggest changes were in the logistics of programming. There were no more diplomatic nominations, no commissions of apparatchiks. The result of the change was a growing reliance on personal networks. It was a period of programming where newly minted selectors were reaching out to their personal webs of friends and acquaintances for recommendations and contacts. Bruno Icher’s historical account on the all-­important Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, which was first held in 1969 to appease the disruptors in 1968, reveals that the new sidebar was mainly programmed through personal contacts. He gives a series of examples that can serve as a good illustration of the new approach: Japanese Nagisa Ōshima was in with two films because he had a Paris-­based Quebecois producer, Jacques Brunet. The same was true for Italian Carmelo Bene, who also had two films in, and the same producer as a friend. Several Canadian directors were in because they were Quebecois, i.e. francophone. Cuban directors Manuel Octavio Gómez and Humberto Solás were in due to the recommendation of writer Alejo Carpentier who was Cuba’s ambassador to Paris at the time. Hungarian Miklós Jancsó and Márta Mészáros (who were a married couple at the time) were included because of links to Diourka Medveczky, a French-­based Hungarian sculptor and husband of actress Bernadette Lafont . . .22

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All these are solid directors who probably would have made it in on artistic merit; the study does not mention many of the others whose work was included mainly on the strength of their personal networks. Most certainly, however, there were international cineastes who did not have networks of friends with links in Paris. In this instance there were no clear avenues for entry to the festival: there was no public announcement of the preparation of a new sidebar; it was quietly agreed with the Cannes leadership who sought to avoid another disruption. The very first official mention of cinéma en liberté (as the Quinzaine was called in 1969) was only in April 1969, about a month prior to the festival’s opening. Later, the networks widened, and yet for many years this and other sidebars at Cannes were programmed through word of mouth and personal recommendations. However, even if the festival had an open call and regulated selection procedure, filmmakers from countries where cinema was state-­owned would not have had easy access to it. The Cold War context only strengthened the programming of international cinema through personal networks. One could also describe this approach to programming as ‘six degrees of separation,’ only sometimes the degrees were even fewer. According to Serbian director and festival insider Dušan Makavejev, whatever elements of international cinema would make it to Cannes in the 1970s was all down to Pierre Rissient.23 Gradually, some programmers started travelling to get a wider acquaintance with various foreign cinemas. The Venice festival, which did not run a competition programme in the 1970s (and which introduced sidebars much later than Cannes and Berlinale), was sending individual letters of solicitation to directors whom it was already familiar with; then a group of famous Italian filmmakers viewed the copies that had arrived and gave their blessing for the films to be shown. Studies by Christian Jungen on the tenure of Moritz de Hadeln at Berlinale reveal the high involvement of filmmakers recommending the work of their international friends.24 Sidebars like the Forum were programmed through the involvement of Enno Patalas (1929–2018), Hans-­ Joachim Schlegel (1942–2016), as well as Ulrich and Erika Gregor.25 For at least several years in the 1970s, the non-­national films in the selection at the Big Three mainly came in through the acquaintances of filmmakers – stakeholders who had been participants but now saw themselves in the role of organisers. This is also the period when the strength of curators was defined by the width of the personal networks they had developed over the years, be it through receiving recommendations from friends or through worldwide travels for individual meetings. The Quinzaine, for example, was curated for no less than thirty years by the same Pierre-­Henri Deleau (active between 1969 and 1999). Pierre Rissient (active from the late 1960s to his passing in



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2018), who has had several documentaries made about him but whose ‘huge behind-­t he-­scenes role at the Cannes Film Festival’26 has still not been properly researched, was known as a mover and shaker for nearly five decades. Ulrich Gregor, born in 1932, was formally involved with the Berlinale Forum in one capacity or another for three decades, from 1971 to 2000, and continued to influence it informally for some years thereafter. Such people enjoyed high esteem in the festival space; there seemed to be a porousness between the official programme and the selections they were making for secondary sidebars, based on their respectability. Even where the sidebars were independent from the main festival (often registered as independent bodies for accountancy and other reporting purposes), the outwardly presented façade was of one big and complex festival. One of the key consequences of programming via proactive solicitation through personal networks was the appearance of festival darlings. Each one of the Big Three gradually developed a cohort of international directors, who would come back again and again to showcase their films; what would previously be a national entry of a film was now replaced by the entry of a new film by a respected national ‘auteur’ who was picked by the festival to represent his nation. The ‘age of the programmer’ could also be called the ‘age of the auteur.’ Over time, the Big Three came to function as a European minichain of ‘clubs,’ with ‘auteurs’ moving between their different rooms or between the clubs. These ‘clubs of auteurs’ displayed all features of the phenomenon – opacity, privilege, elitism, exclusivity. There was now a variety of sidebars that could accommodate international films, all curated to the new logistical pattern that evolved around ‘taste’ and the ‘auteur’ – and this often came down to the personal tastes of programmers and to the auteurs they or their friends liked. Any cinema that was different – especially the type of cinema that would previously arrive via diplomatic nomination – now no longer had fluid access to the club. The new logistics of festival selection had not left much space for it. The main logistical nightmares occur when dealing with state socialist countries where the films are not represented by companies but are ‘owned’ by bureaucratic governments. For logistical reasons, it is much easier for the festival to deal with the producers/companies directly. There was no such outlet to mediate in the cases of the Soviets or the Chinese, however. These functions were left to – often heavy-­handed – cultural attachés or film industry apparatchiks in the respective countries. For example, ASAC holds copies of exchanges between the Venice festival and Chinese diplomats from the 1970s, just after the end of the Cultural Revolution but before the reintroduction of Chinese cinema to international audiences in the 1980s.27 At the time, all correspondence had to go through representatives of the Chinese embassy, and it was simply too cumbersome and formal. The diplomats came across as

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fastidious and controlling. Just like in the years of ‘cultural diplomacy’, they insisted on the inclusion of certain films – and those were not the films that the festival would have chosen itself. Still, they managed to agree and in 1971 the festival showed Hóngsè Niángzǐjūn (The Red Detachment of Women, Fu Jie and Wenzhan Pan, 1970); a Chinese delegation was in attendance.28 The bottom line is that programmers could not travel to China for selection nor exchange freely with studios/filmmakers there. They could have Chinese films only on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis. The same political (and logistical) difficulties are evident in the correspondence related to the programme dedicated to the cinemas of Eastern Europe that the Venice festival staged in 1977.29 They had compiled lists of films they wanted to show and the names of possible rights holders  – however, they had no individual addresses, only the general state level contact for each country. In the file there is a last-­minute telegram signed by leading Hungarian filmmakers writing in response to the festival invitation: they all declared in one voice (clearly under guidance) that they did not want their films shown at Venice.30 A last-­minute telegram, dated 11 November 1977, was signed by the head of Bulgaria’s national cinematography, Pavel Pissarev, who refused participation outright and insisted on the withdrawal of the films (all state‘owned’) by referencing the Helsinki Accords of 1975.31 The main beneficiaries of the new configuration were a handful of film directors – undoubtedly of highest artistic calibre – whose international standing and visibility vastly improved. For others, who were not dissidents nor censored, it now became less likely to find a place at the festival, especially if they happened to be favoured by their home regimes; it was also difficult for those who did not have a way to cut through the mechanisms of state control.32 In the early days of the festivals, a wider variety of countries had taken part through the national nomination even if they are rarely mentioned by festival historians.33 Many countries were no longer systematically represented, even if individual directors from the same places would normally be invited – some occasionally and some more systematically.34 The Cold War paranoia continued to take its toll, affecting both programmers and individual directors. The complexity of one such representative clash from the times of Soviet ‘perestroika’ is explored in detail in the biography of Moritz De Hadeln, then Berlinale director.35 It reveals the unnerving and tense interactions between De Hadeln and suspicious Soviet film bureaucrat Shkalnikov in 1987, the year following the Chernobyl incident. The festival was aiming to present the first documentaries about the disaster whilst the Soviets endeavoured to tightly control the narrative. It was a logistical nightmare of frantic faxing back and forth between Berlin and Moscow, expanding beyond the documentaries and affecting dealings with director Gleb Panfilov. Jungen’s discussion persuasively reveals that the policy of courting individual



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auteurs from the opposite camp was no less complex in the 1980s than the interactions from the 1950s and 1960s and required no less diplomatic skill. The discrepancies in programming logistics affected other non-­Western players, for a variety of reasons. In some cases, festival programmers found it difficult to deal with very small producers who did not have international distribution set up to Western standards. One such example is revealed in the extensive correspondence (1970–1972) between the festival and Indian counterparts, related to Mani Kaul’s debut film Uski Roti (Our Daily Bread, 1970), regarded today as one of the most important Indian films of all times. Kaul had been introduced to the festival in a letter by Tamil film dignitary T.M. Ramachandran already in 1970. And whilst Venice did manage – after significant efforts – to obtain a copy and show it in 1971, the correspondence reveals a rift between the expectations of the organisers (a 35 mm copy needed to be sent for viewing and assessment and then, if not accepted, it would be returned – all at the producer’s expense) and the possibilities of the producing side (they came across as cheap in negotiating sending the copy; they then insisted that they could not afford to leave the copy at the festival; they asked the festival to serve as their agent to other festivals and to send out the only copy that was physically in Europe, and so on). The difficulties were of a logistical nature and concerned expenses that would be considered negligeable in a European context but that were difficult to bear by the Indian promoters of the film.36 It is because of such technicality that Kaul never became an ‘auteur’ with significant presence at the Big Three.37 Matters of logistics and ‘ownership’ remained of paramount importance in the workings of the festivals, both where Cold War politics was relevant and where there were other discrepancies with the festivals’ modus operandi. The simple practical question of who to deal with often proved decisive: who had the prints, the contacts, who would deliver the prints, and so on.38 The festivals made it a standard procedure in dealing with producers and directors, yet diplomacy was sometimes still the only route. It was for similar reasons that the gap between the select ‘auteurs’ represented at the Big Three and the national cinemas not only of the countries of state socialism but also of many other countries of the Global South became wider in the following decades. Many of the ‘second-­t ier’ festivals that gained in importance in the next period played a compensatory role in bridging the gap.

Drifting Apart in Hierarchical Circuits: The 1970s and 1980s Insensitive to the changes at the Big Three notwithstanding, the countries in the Soviet sphere continued to insist on the ‘state ownership’ of cinema, a context in which ‘auteurs’ and ‘taste’ could not be curatorial principles.39 To

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them, the new programming logistics of the Big Three equalled an unacceptable cherry picking. They insisted on programming that was done by state employees who had been trained to nominate politically correct films rather than be swayed by worship of individual directors. The countries in the Soviet sphere started to form a relatively independent festival circuit of their own in the early 1960s, with the two flagship festivals (in Moscow, USSR, as of 1959, and in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, as of 1946) agreeing to alternate; both were programmed on a sui generis principle of political correctness  – i.e. programming the output of ‘friendly countries’, and where the West was represented by cherry-­picked filmmakers known for leftist sympathies. Whilst attended by international programmers, these festivals were perceived as a domain that fell under the tight control of security services and never came to be regarded as a trustworthy source for programming.40 A decade to fifteen years after the events of 1968, a range of many more ‘second-­t ier’ festivals  – some in the countries of the Big Three and some taking place around the world  – took on the newly important function of representing a wider scope of regional filmmaking that would be more comprehensive and showcase a more diverse selection than the films of the ‘auteurs’ crowned at the Big Three. Around twenty sizeable and influential regional ‘second-­t ier’ film festivals – some of which were already in existence by 1968 and some of which were established in the 1970s and 1980s – grew in importance in different parts of the world (Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and so on). Whilst they generally avoided receiving nominations from cultural ministries, they took a ‘survey’ stance and tried to cast the net wider, absorbing work that had been left out by the Big Three festivals. This way, the second-­t ier festivals came to function as alternative forums of lesser visibility. The second-­tier festivals did not form a strict circle and did not work in any coordinated manner between themselves. Often regional in scope, they provided networking sites for international filmmakers and excelled in servicing underrepresented transnational communities. But they did not function in an interconnected manner and could not sway the global trade in moving images. They may have served as selection sites for other festivals, yet again their main function remained limited to offering a wider, more balanced, and comprehensive representation of the film production from a certain region. Most of them never developed film markets; only a few made inroads in distribution. Thus, even though they were regionally impactful, they were not able to partake in the mainstream’s lucrative schemes where the Big Three remained more influential; most of the films they promoted are now unavailable. These festivals had importance as sites for survey and discovery. Having undergone their own evolution, they were not affected by the stakeholder



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imbalances that had marked the evolution of the Big Three. Some of the ‘second-­tier’ festivals were competitive but many were not. Many became a gathering place for a new class of programmers who would travel out in search of titles that they would then recommend back to the festivals at home. These festivals aimed to engage in surveying the production of a given territory – not by receiving diplomatic nominations and not by forming clubs of auteurs but by ensuring that the film output of the countries in the region was closely monitored and adequately covered. Thus, one of the effects of the abandonment of film diplomacy was the disenfranchisement of certain national film traditions. Only individual directors – those able to act as free-­floating ‘auteurs’ and having the means and the zeal to organise their own affairs – enjoyed a continuous presence at the big festivals. In spite the efforts of second-­t ier festivals, some of the large world film traditions remained disenfranchised and underrepresented. These include the cinemas of India, China, the Soviet Republics, Iran, and the African continent, among others, a topic that is the subject of my forthcoming writing.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to colleagues who pioneered publishing extensive historical work into festivals in the past two decades, thus deepening and complicating our understanding of the importance of the film festival for film culture at large, as quoted in the bibliography section. I am also grateful to friendly festival organisers and critics from a variety of countries who spent time talking to me and elaborating aspects of the festival dynamics that are still insufficiently understood; I am trying to highlight some of these aspects in this text. In researching for this chapter, I also benefited from direct access to the archival holdings of Biennale di Venezia (ASAC) during my 2022 visit, made even more important in a context where detailed documentary holdings related to festivals are rapidly shrinking. Dina Iordanova is an Emeritus Professor in Global Cinema at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Starting in 2008, she pioneered work on film festivals and has several books on global festivals to her name. She has been guest professor at universities across Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia. A fellow of the European Film Academy, in recent years she has been extensively involved with international film organisations and often serves on film festival juries and expert committees.

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Notes  1. For general observations on the concept of ‘festival circuit’, see Iordanova, ‘The Festival Circuit’. On distinguishing festivals according to ‘stakeholder configuration’, see Iordanova, ‘Yingying, Zhenzhen and Fenfen? China at the Festivals’. My detailed exploration on matters of the ‘second-­t ier’ international festivals is forthcoming.   2. Rachel Johnson offers an excellent analysis of the way in which the A-­festivals cultivated and continuously applied the ‘auteur’ trope. Johnson, Film Festivals, Ideology and Italian Art Cinema, 2024.  3. Elsaesser, European Cinema, 82–107.   4. For example, the organisers include board members, programmers, staff, sponsors, hotel owners, etc.   5. In some cases of indie productions, ownership may even be with the filmmakers.   6. Even at the present time, in the 2020s, the way in which festivals are run in such countries is not very different from the time of the Cold War. The Chinese state, for example, is known to interfere and approve (or disapprove) the programme of the big festivals in Beijing and Shanghai, which it owns: the most notable incident is the highly publicised removal of the 22nd Shanghai IFF’s opening film, Ba bai (The Eight Hundred, Guan Hu, 2019). In 2019 leading Chinese director Zhang Yimou was forced to withdraw his film Yi miao zhong (One Second, Zhang Yimou, 2019) from Berlinale just days prior to the festival’s opening. The Iranian state closed down the international wing of the forty-­year old Fajr Film Festival in 2022 with no notice nor public debate.   7. This is a summary description of the way in which festivals operated. It is derived from several longer and shorter studies that provide detailed examinations of the origins of the festivals and how they were run in the first decades. These include (but are not limited to) studies by Blahova,‘National, Socialist, Global’; Brunetta, La Mostra internazionale; Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany, and ‘The Berlin International Film Festival’; Jacobsen, 50 Years Berlinale; Latil, Le Festival de Cannes sur la scène internationale; Lee, Cinema and the Cultural Cold War; Moine, Screened Encounters; Ostrowska, ‘Three Decades of Polish Films at the Venice and Cannes Film Festivals’; Pisu, Stalin a Venezia, and ‘Transnational Mobilization and Domestic Political Exploitation’; Razlogova, ‘World Cinema at Soviet Festivals’, and others. One must also note that all Big Three festivals were launched with political considerations in mind.   8. This ‘cultural diplomacy’ period not only meant closer state supervision and involvement but also resulted in better and more detailed archival holdings related to the festivals, as many documents originated from official bodies and are kept in national and municipal archives. As a result, the best and most detailed historical studies we have so far relate to the pre-­1968 period. When it comes to later periods, maintaining archives is left to the discretion of the festivals.   9. See Pisu, Stalin a Venezia. 10. Latil, Le Festival de Cannes sur la scène internationale, 108–17. In a study that scrutinises the process of festival invitations, Elizabeth Ward shows how the festivals’ actions of the Big Three in the 1950s were directed ‘to secure the simultaneous diplomatic recognition of West Germany and the non-­recognition of East Germany’ (Ward, ‘Screening out the East’, 38). 11. Truffaut, ‘La Biennale de Venise’, 71.



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12. Brunetta’s discussion of the stance taken by Luigi Chiarini during the 1968 standoff in Venice offers a great case study of the general features that characterise the rupture (Brunetta, La Mostra internazionale, 475–99). For archival research interests, RAI Play, the online platform, has made available a string of some fourteen television news items related to the standoff in Venice and involving directors Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ugo Gregoretti, Gillo Pontecorvo, Marco Ferreri, Carmelo Bene, Carlo Lizzani, Liliana Cavani, screenwriter Cesare Zavattini and others, as reported by Carlo  Mazzarella (Venezia ’68: il Festival contestato). 13. Cowie, Revolution!, 2004. 14. I believe the involvement of foreign directors in these protests needs closer investigation and assessment by festival historians. For example, Peter Cowie quotes filmmakers like Roman Polański and Miloš Forman  – both involved at Cannes in 1968 – essentially saying that they did not exactly understand what the protests were all about but joined in nonetheless, out of solidarity. Krzysztof Zanussi even laments the lost award chances for a Polish film (Cowie, Revolution!, 197–207). Spanish director Carlos Saura and his partner Geraldine Chaplin, reportedly, were fully in support of the protests and even physically prevented the screening of their Peppermint Frappé (Peppermint Frappé, Carlos Saura, 1967) from taking place, one of the culminations of the 1968 protests at Cannes. Then, a month later, Peppermint Frappé was screened at the eighteenth Berlinale and won an award, a Silver Bear. It would be interesting to find out more about this, especially as under the FIAPF rules for A-­Category film festivals – and both Cannes and Berlinale were A-­Category FIAPF authorised festivals at the time – it would not be permissible for the film to have been in competition at both festivals. Wouldn’t they also want the film withdrawn from all events, in the spirit of the time? Evidently not. 15. Whereas there were revolts of filmmakers both at Cannes and Venice, at Berlinale things evolved differently. I speculate this may be because many of the concerns that built up at Cannes had already been expressed in Germany in the context of the Oberhausen festival and addressed in the 1962 manifesto. In addition, the reforms that were applied at Cannes after the showdown of 1968 were quietly applied at Berlinale as well. It was not until 1970 when a Berlinale hiccup exposed the ‘cultural diplomacy’ framework as untenable. The discord evolved around a jury disagreement around Michael Verhoeven’s anti-­Vietnam war film o.k. which led to protests and conflict (Jacobsen, 50 Years Berlinale, 165–85). 16. In comparison with the pre-­1968 period, there is not as much detailed historical writing on the period that followed (even if we still have great studies, such as Pisu, Il XX secolo sul red carpet, or Lee, Cinema and the Cultural Cold War, that track developments related to the festival context at large). I believe that the shortage of such studies is due to shrinking or otherwise inaccessible festival archives. The new times necessitate new methodologies, such as access to personal archives and extensive interviews (as in the case of Jungen, Moritz de Hadeln). I am not sure how many oral histories or memoirs can serve as source material, and I cannot help noticing that a few of the important people who acted during this period have passed away in recent years. The need to hold more interviews with the surviving festival figures of the period is a research emergency. 17. Brunetta, La Mostra internazionale, 511. 18. Even if there is talk of ‘Cannes studies,’ besides the brief Darke and Corless, Cannes: Inside the World’s Premier Film Festival, we still do not have a solid, analytical, and

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comprehensive critical history of Cannes that could stand alongside the works of Jacobsen, 50 Years Berlinale, and Brunetta, La Mostra internazionale. Gilles Jacob’s massive memoirs mainly describe his encounters with stars and directors, along with the occasional anecdote of one PR crisis or another. Even serious writers like Pierre Billard, Le Festival de Cannes, and Serge Toubiana, Cannes Cinéma, have put their names on photographic compendiums that are intended as celebrations and thus smother the controversies. One example of this shortage of scholarship would be that, beyond Latil’s 2005 study that only goes up to 1968, we do not have a consistent and detailed account of various colonial tensions as they played out at Cannes. Africanist Lindiwe Dovey, for example, discusses a major festival disruption that occurred at Cannes in 1975, the year when Algerian saga Chronique des Années de Braise (Chronicle of the Years of Fire, Mohammed Lakhdar-­Hamina, 1975) won (Dovey, Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals, 45–59). This event is generally bracketed out in the scholarship on Cannes. 19. De Valck, Film Festivals. 20. Thevenin, ‘Le cinéma d’auteur au festival de Cannes et à la Quinzaine des Réalisateurs’, 2. 21. Ibid., 3. 22. Icher, Quinzaine des réalisateurs, 67–89. 23. In fact, it was this remark of Makavejev’s, made during a personal encounter in Belgrade in 2001, that made me appreciate the huge importance of personal networks and the role that those who I call ‘sole traders’ (Iordanova, ‘The Festival Circuit’) have played and continue to play in the world of festivals. In the early 1970s Rissient was mainly working to ensure the placement of good American films at Cannes and was not yet the globetrotting power-­broker that he became known as in later years. 24. Jungen, Moritz de Hadeln. 25. Jakobsen, 50 Years Berlinale. 26. Horak, ‘Pierre Rissient (1936–2018)’. 27. ASAC (Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee), Venice, Italy, Fondo Storico, Serie Cinema, XXXI Mostra Internazionale d’arte cinematografica 1970 (Paesi A-­G). 28. The presence of the Chinese film is briefly mentioned by Brunetta, La Mostra internazionale, 526, who focuses the discussion for that year on the critics faced by newly appointed Gian Luigi Rondi. In 1972 there was a special screening of Bái máo nu (The White-Haired Girl, Sang Hu, 1972), a rendering of the famous revolutionary ballet, at the festival in Locarno (Jungen, Moritz de Hadeln, 139). In both cases the screenings were brokered by the respective Chinese embassies that apparently had copies of several films authorised for showing at their premises. 29. ASAC, Fondo Storico, Serie Cinema, Mostra Internazionale d’arte cinematografica, Cinema, Biennale’77: Il Dissenso Culturale’, 1977. 30. Dated 12 November 1977, the last-­minute telegram that refused participation was addressed to President Carlo Ripa di Meana and was signed by András Kovács, Károly Makk, Márta Mészáros, Imre Gyöngyössy, Miklós Jancsó and Sándor Sára. 31. He is most likely to have had in mind the Sixth principle of the Accords, which make provisions for non-­intervention in internal affairs. Clearly, in the conditions of the Cold War, planning to show films ‘owned’ by a Soviet sphere state against its expressed approval was regarded as an unacceptable interference in that state’s internal affairs. 32. A good example of this sort of oversight is the fact that most masterpieces of Ukrainian poetic cinema, whose aesthetics is fully in line with the most celebrated master-



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pieces of East Central European directors  – and particularly the films of Ukrainian ‘auteurs’ like Yuri Ilyenko or Leonid Osyka, as well as singular films by Boris Ivchenko or Volodymir Denysenko – remain completely unknown as they never played at international film festivals. The only film made in the Ukrainian SSR that made it to a major international film festival after 1968 is Vavilon XX (Babylon XX, Ivan Mikolaychuk, 1979), at Locarno. 33. The founding father of Turkish cinema Muhsin Ertuğrul (1892–1979), for example, took part at the Venice festival in 1934, where he presented his Leblebici Horhor Aga (Lord Horhor the Nutroaster, 1933) and even got an Honorary Diploma (Teksoy, Turkish Cinema, 27). The participation of Turkey is indeed mentioned by Brunetta, La Mostra internazionale, 79, alongside several other countries, but nothing more. This makes for an interesting comparison of historiographical methods: whereas for the national film historian participation and a diploma from Venice is a fact of major importance for the development of domestic film culture, for the historian of one of the Big Three this is a registrable yet non-­consequential diplomatic nod. 34. One such festival darling and a member of the ‘auteur’ club is Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov (b. 1945), a radical Russian fundamentalist who, in his nepotistic capacity of president of the Moscow Film Festival from 1999, called for the creation of alternative sphere of pro-­Russian film festivals in 2022. At the time of writing, Mikhalkov remains the most decorated Russian director, having received accolades from the festivals at Venice, Berlinale and Cannes, as well as the Academy Awards, through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. 35. Jungen, Moritz de Hadeln, 306–26. 36. ASAC, the historical archive of La Biennale di Venezia, holds a batch of letters exchanged over two years (1970–1972) between the festival and Indian counterparts, revealing the growing unease in the relationship. Brunetta speaks of two Indian films having played at the festival in 1971 (La Mostra internazionale, 527), but only explicitly mentions Pratidwandi (The Adversary, Satyajit Ray, 1970), a copy of which the festival obtained easily as Ray was a known ‘auteur’ to them by then. The fact that only Ray’s film is mentioned and Kaul’s film is not named (as Kaul’s name was not known at the time, and he never became a true ‘auteur’ in the sense of in the Big Three) illustrates how the ‘auteur’ approach shapes historiography as well. ASAC, Fondo Storico, Serie Cinema, XXXI Mostra Internazionale d’arte cinematografica 1970, (Paesi I-­V). 37. There is a constellation of major Indian auteurs  – such as Ritwik Ghatak, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Mani Kaul, Shyam Benegal, John Abraham and so on – who never entered the Big Three’s direct entourage. The same is true for major Iranian ‘auteurs’ who remained on the periphery, such as Behram Beyzaie, Amir Naderi, Abdolfazl Jalili, Darius Mehrjui and others. This list could be significantly expanded. 38. In a context of shifting networks and linguistic challenges, Mme Kawakita’s Paris office, an outlet that acted as an intermediary between the festivals and Japanese cinema at large, was particularly successful throughout the 1970s. The earlier connections of Japanese studios with Europe had been disintegrating and new players were coming on the stage, so the office took care of all logistical and linguistic aspects that facilitated interactions and helped to ensure that a wide range of Japanese films were continuously being included at the Big Three. 39. My investigation is limited due to the lack of space. It will be essential, however, to explore the role of such important second-­tier survey festivals like the Locarno

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International Film Festival (as of 1946), San Sebastian Film Festival (as of 1953), the Pesaro Film Festival (since 1965) and other events in Italy, the 3 Continents festival in Nantes, France (as of 1979), the Moscow Film Festival (as of 1959), the Karlovy Vary Film Festival (as of 1946), the Rotterdam IFF (as of 1972), the Hong Kong International Film Festival (as of 1976), The Istanbul IFF (as of 1982), the Fajr IRR (as of 1982), as well as the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de La Habana (as of 1979), the Hawaii IFF (as of 1980), the Montreal World Film Festival (1977–2018), the Toronto IFF (as of 1976) and Telluride (as of 1974), which play a definitive role in the landscape of North America, as well as other festivals that played an important role at the global festival circuit. They will the subject of a separate study that I am working on. 40. Two such festivals included the domestic Soviet All-­Union festival, which surveyed the production of all republican studios, and the biennial festival of Asian, African, and Latin American films in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbek SSR (1968–1988), both run on the Soviet principle of ‘state ownership’ and routinely shunned by Western programmers, even if attended by individual leftist intellectuals. There was also no programming, normally, from the Moscow International Film Festival, resulting in the oversight of important films whose ‘auteurs’ did not have extensive personal networks. For example, one of the winners at Moscow in 1971 was Bilyi Ptakh z Chornoyu Oznakoyu (The White Bird Marked with Black, Yuri Ilyenko, 1971), produced by the Dovzhenko-­studios in Kyiv, a masterpiece showing the complexity of ideological divisions within the USSR during the Second World War that would have had every chance to compete at one of the Big Three. The award notwithstanding, it was banned soon after the Moscow festival and was never shown in the USSR, thus bringing the career of Ilyenko to a standstill. It was also never programmed by festivals in the West.

Bibliography Billard, Pierre. Le Festival de Cannes: D’or et de palmes. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Blahova, Jindriska. ‘National, Socialist, Global: The Changing Roles of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, 1946–1956’, in Lars Karl and Pavel Skopal (eds), Cinema in Service of the State: Perspectives on Film Culture in the GDR and Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2015), 245–72. Brunetta, Gian Piero. La Mostra internazionale d’arte cinematografica di Venezia 1932– 2022. Venice: La Mostra di Venezia/Marsilio, 2022. Cowie, Peter. Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the Sixties. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. ———. The Berlinale Festival. Berlin: Bertz + Fisher, 2010. ———. Happy 75: A Brief Introduction to the History of the International Film Festival. Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, 2018. Darke, Chris and Kieron Corless. Cannes: Inside the World’s Premier Film Festival. London: Faber & Faber, 2007. de Valck, Marijke. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008.



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Dovey, Lindiwe. Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Elsaesser, Thomas. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2005. English, James. Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Fehrenbach, Heide. Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler. Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 1995. ———. ‘The Berlin International Film Festival: Between Cold War Politics and Post-war Reorientation’. Studies in European Cinema 17(2) (2020), 81–96. Horak, Jan-Christopher. ‘Pierre Rissient (1936–2018)’, Archival Spaces (2018). https://​ www.cinema.ucla.edu/blogs/archival-spaces/2018/05/25/pierre-rissient (accessed 27 February 2023). Icher, Bruno. Quinzaine des réalisateurs: Les jeunes années, 1967–1975. Paris: Riveneuve, 2018. Iordanova, Dina. ‘The Festival Circuit’, in Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne (eds), The Film Festival Circuit (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009), 1–9. ———.‘East Asia and Film Festivals: Transnational Clusters for Creativity and Commerce’, in Dina Iordanova and Ruby Cheung (eds), Film Festivals and East Asia (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2011), 1–37. ———. ‘Yingying, Zhenzhen and Fenfen? China at the Festivals’, in Chris Berry and Luke Robinson (eds), Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 217–37. Jacob, Gilles. Citizen Cannes: The Man Behind the Cannes Film Festival. New York: Phaidon, 2011. ———. Dictionnaire amoureux du festival de Cannes. Paris: Plon, 2021. Jacobsen, Wolfgang. 50 Years Berlinale: Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin. Berlin: Nikolai, 2000. Johnson, Rachel. Film Festivals, Ideology and Art Cinema: Politics, Histories and Cultural Value through Italian Cinema. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2024. Jungen, Christian. Moritz de Hadeln: Mister Filmfestival. Zürich: Rüffler & Rub, 2018. Latil, Loredana. Le Festival de Cannes sur la scène internationale. Paris: Nouveau monde, 2005. ———. ‘Les cinéastes à l’assaut de la forteresse cannoise: les évènements cannois de 1968’, in Olivier Thevenin (ed.), La S. R. F. et la Quinzaine des Réalisateurs: 1968–2008. Une construction d’identités collectives (Paris: Aux lieux d’être, 2008), 39–48. Lee, Sangjoon. Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. Moine, Caroline. Screened Encounters: The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, 1955– 1990. Oxford: Berghahn, 2018. Ostrowska, Dorota. ‘Three Decades of Polish Films at the Venice and Cannes Film Festivals: The 1940s, 1950s and 1960s,’ in Ewa Mazierska and Michael Goddard (eds), Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014), 77–95. Pisu, Stefano. Stalin a Venezia: L’URSS alla Mostra del cinema fra diplomazia culturale e scontro ideologico (1932–1953). Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2013. ———. ‘The USSR and East-Central European Countries at the Venice International Film Festival, 1946–1953’. Iluminace 25(3) (2013), 51–65.

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———. Il XX secolo sul red carpet: Politica, economia e cultura nei festival internazionali del cinema (1932–1976). Milan: FrancoAngeli Edizioni, 2016. ———. ‘Transnational Mobilization and Domestic Political Exploitation: The 1977 Venice Biennale of Dissent’, in Andreas Kötzing and Caroline Moine (eds), Cultural Transfer and Political Conflicts: Film Festivals in the Cold War (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2017), 123–39. Razlogova, Elena. ‘World Cinema at Soviet Festivals: Cultural Diplomacy and Personal Ties’. Studies in European Cinema 2(17) (2020), 140–54. Teksoy, Rekin. Turkish Cinema. Istanbul: Oglak, 2008. Thevenin, Olivier (ed.), La S. R. F. et la Quinzaine des Réalisateurs: 1968–2008. Une construction d’identités collectives. Paris: Aux lieux d’être, 2008. ———. ‘Le cinéma d’auteur au festival de Cannes et à la Quinzaine des Realisateurs’. Savoirs: norms et sensibilities, Centre Georges Chevrier CNRS-iB (January 2012), 1–5. Toubiana, Serge. Cannes Cinéma: A Visual History of the World’s Greatest Film Festival. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2011 [1993]. Truffaut, François. ‘La Biennale de Venise  – Excellente première semaine’. Arts (7 September 1955), 71. Ward, Elizabeth. ‘Screening out the East: The Playing out of Inter-German Relations at the Cannes Film Festival’. German Life and Letters 68(1) (2015), 37–53.

CHAPTER 12

To Catch Up and Overtake . . . Europe Technology Transfer and Its Limits in the Soviet Cinema under Brezhnev Catriona Kelly

The most familiar aspect of the Soviet cinema between 1964 and 1982, according to the traditional historiography, is ‘calcification’: progressively tighter control over filmmaking, and ever rising numbers of movies that were ‘shelved’ (stopped in production or removed from circulation).1 Over the past twenty years, this bleak picture has come under scrutiny: film historians emphasise that the Brezhnev years also witnessed energetic development of box-­office-­oriented movies (kassovye fil’my), as well as a flowering of film festivals, co-­productions, and other collaborative endeavours.2 To be sure, ideology still counted in cinema planning, as a list of ‘state commissions’ [goszakazy] put together by the State Committee on Cinematography (Goskino) in 1970 makes clear. Among the projects considered worthy of special financial support were two war films, one about border guards, and a fourth about a whistleblowing US journalist.3 Goskino’s selection of foreign films for showing in the USSR was also prescriptive: the list for the Moscow Film Festival in 1971 comprised ‘works of progressive cinema art denouncing the bourgeois way of life’.4 Yet when it came to films for the Soviet public generally, rather than festivals (or viewings at Party congresses), political rectitude was not the sole criterion. It was big box-­office foreign films, such as Claude Lelouch’s romantic drama, Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman, 1966), or Pietro Germi’s comedy, Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style, 1961), that made

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their way into mass circulation, and sometimes even into the programmes of the Filmmakers’ Union clubhouses (Doma kino).5 The principle, ‘it’s totally absurd to throw money at films that don’t make a profit’,6 applied alike to imported and home-­produced movies. The difficulty for Soviet cinema managers was less ideological divergence than paying the substantial fees that Western distributors charged for such hits.7 Equally, hopes for the commercial release of Soviet films in the West were at least as widespread as aspirations for impact on the intellectual and political horizons of foreign viewers.8 There was widespread East-­West contact and cooperation also when it came to the subject of the present article  – technology. (By ‘technology’, I mean both the ‘hardware’ of the film industry, such as cameras, editing tables, film stock, amps, mixers, and so on, and its ‘software’ in the sense of techniques of management and the organisation of publicity and promotion.) Concession of foreign superiority in these areas was widespread in the late Soviet period, despite the political tensions that accompanied the Cold War’s later phases.9 The background was the technocratic admiration for ‘efficiency’ as a value for its own sake, as well as a sense of the need for Soviet cinema to compete in the home (and export) market with foreign products. At the same time, the history of isolationism during previous decades made ‘technology transfer’ less than straightforward. In the early years of the USSR’s existence, such transfer had been conducted on a relatively ideology-­free basis, as witnessed by the significant impact of ‘Taylorist’ principles of rational management on planning in Soviet industry, and by the respect accorded to foreign-­produced machinery in the political elite, from Lenin and Stalin’s liking for prestigious imported cars to Sergei Kirov’s American-­made refrigerator.10 However, as ‘socialism in one country’ took hold, the place of origin of tractors, textiles, or toffee was no longer a neutral issue, and there was a drive to replace imported goods. Thus, in 1930, the Stalingrad Tractor Factory began producing a locally designed tractor (replacing the Fordson, manufactured under licence between 1924 and 1930), and the country acquired its own automobile industry.11 Attacks on ‘kow-­towing to foreigners’ during the last years of Stalin’s leadership extended to things as well as ideas. Herbert Rappaport and Viktor Eisymont’s postwar biopic, Aleksandr Popov (1949), presented radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi as a charlatan in thrall to commercial interests and a plagiarist, who had stolen his inventions from the Russian inventor at the movie’s centre. This transition from the fetishisation of imported goods to the celebration of their home-­manufactured equivalents was also characteristic of the film industry. The leading camera operators of the 1920s and early 1930s were used to working with top-­quality equipment: Eduard Tisse, for example, used a US-­produced Bell & Howell and French DeVry camera, ‘both of them modern and sophisticated apparatuses’. The Debrie Parvo was also widely



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adopted in the Soviet film industry of the era, and foreign-­made lenses, diffusion and light filters, and lighting equipment were all employed freely.12 But the USSR’s isolationist drive soon made itself felt here also. Just as important as the announcement in the credits of Veselye rebyata (Jazz Comedy, Grigory Aleksandrov, 1934) that the film was not starring Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, was the announcement that its sound was recorded on ‘Professor A. Shorin’s Kinap system’. The development of sound, indeed, generated a wide sense of confidence in the Soviet cinema’s capacity to follow its own path. The short time-­lag in the arrival of sound film meant that filmmakers in the USSR were able to benefit from the experience of their Western colleagues, and to avoid some of the dead ends and pitfalls that bedevilled the initial period of sound’s existence. ‘As a result, they made remarkable films that reflected the chaos but also the possibilities of the new sound apparatus, and that were totally unlike those created in the West.’13 Alongside this, ‘in 1930, the USSR virtually stopped importing foreign movies, technology, or film stock’.14 The Khrushchev era saw an end of isolationism in technology alongside ideas, but the impact was ambiguous. In the film industry as in other areas of manufacture, the emphasis was on ‘catching up and overtaking’ the West, not on assimilation.15 A retrospective survey published in the run-­ up to Lenfilm studio’s fiftieth anniversary (1966) listed a whole variety of technical advances, including not just the introduction of sound back in the 1930s or wide screen in the 1950s, but colour in the 1960s. ‘Lenfilm was the first feature film studio to move permanently to shooting on triacetate-­base colour stock.’16 The studio archive holds a glossy album, compiled in about 1965, commemorating not just the studio’s major films from 1954 to 1964, but also the re-­equipping of major facilities, including film and sound editing, special effects, and film processing.17 At the USSR-­wide level, in 1965, the formerly anonymous film manufactured in Shostka, Ukraine, was rebranded as ‘SVEMA’: the name may have been intended to suggest an associative link with the German company AGFA, which had been manufacturing film since the 1890s. Like the sound machines of the 1930s, the film stock of the 1960s and 1970s was ‘advertised’ in the credit sequences of Soviet films, as a kind of local answer to ‘Technicolor’ or ‘Kodak’. SVEMA had scarcely been launched, however, when the Soviet film industry began a transition from a model of competition (the generation and production of technology in parallel) to one of assimilation. While Western movies, as the Cold War heightened, were assumed to pose an increasing political threat, technological and management advances were not.18 Amid the political tensions of the summer of 1968, it is not at all surprising to find proposals for a crackdown on Western-­produced films (‘We should make fewer copies of Western films’) and criticisms of the jury’s selections for viewing at Cannes as ‘reactionary’ and ‘tendentious’.19 Considerably more startling, however, is

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the respectful discussion on 9 August 1968 at Goskino of a fact-­finding visit by Soviet film managers to Italy. As A.F. Barinov reported: We visited almost all the large film studios in Italy (five in all), four film copying factories and a film processing laboratory, two sound studios, one huge film manufacturing plant, and almost all the largest firms in Italy that produce equipment for every type of process involved in film production. We were given masses of catalogues, prospectuses, blueprints, film samples, and so on. We selected a few kinds of new equipment and made arrangements to purchase ­t hem . . . ­Throughout our visit, we were treated very attentively and courteously, except in two companies that are US-­owned – Technicolor and Ferrania. We weren’t allowed to see everything there.20

The Soviet visitors were impressed by the scale of the Italian film-­making operation (240 titles a year).21 (This was about twice what the Soviet film industry managed even at the height of its powers, for all the vastness of the country.)22 They observed that the Italians ‘have gone over entirely to colour film production’, and that, while wide-­screen was in extensive use, stereo sound had now been dropped as ‘unprofitable’.23 They noted lessons for the Soviet film industry: more attention to ‘a sensible, professionally competent, solution to engineering and architectural problems’, and to improved work practices: We must conclude that in our work so far, we have paid insufficient attention to creating specific services in the studio connected with the planning and placement of staff actors and production groups. We’re still working to the norms that operated back in the War, and we must sort that out, it’s a serious ­disadvantage . . . W ­ e don’t operate the same sterile conditions for work with the negatives – as they put it, ‘like in a hospital’. That’s how we end up with scratches – on top of the ones the film comes with in the first place.24

There was enthusiasm for the Technicolor facility (‘over the last twenty-­five years almost no cinema professional from the USSR has managed to visit’). Impressive, too, was the De Laurentiis studio, though the visitors noted that most of the equipment was in fact rented.25 No collaboration with Technicolor appears to have resulted from the Goskino officials’ trip, and studios continued to be supplied with equipment outright, to be purchased out of their budgets, rather than hired.26 There were no reforms, either, to the standard methods of managing facilities for staff actors and production crews. But at this period of Soviet history, European practices had a lustre that rivalled or indeed surpassed the traditions of Hollywood. This was partly because Soviet filmmakers were aware of their own restricted circumstances. Thus, advocating the use of masked frames rather than the anamorphic system preferred in the US, a camera operator



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at Lenfilm motivated his arguments by lack of access to the optics required if lens distortion or lack of depth of field were to be avoided, and by the shortage of cinemas in the USSR that were adapted for wide screen. Rather than end up with an artistically unsatisfactory product, he argued, why not follow Fellini and simply use the masked frame system?27 Even a few years later, in 1972, Nikolai Sizov, the general director of Mosfilm, was far from star-­struck by a similar fact-­finding visit to the USA: The Hollywood of fairytales of course no longer exists. Those studios are in dire straits. A whole lot of them are selling off land for other uses, and many are amalgamating and struggling to remain at the same ­level . . . ­TV is the main thing in life and it drives everything else. Every American watches six hours a day on average. There are eleven channels.28

The equipment generated little excitement. ‘It’s all old, it works OK, there’s no point in replacing it.’ Only a German bus ‘with everything fitted up in it that you need for a shoot’ represented something out of the ordinary. What did impress him was the work ethic: ‘Despite the downturn, there’s no chaos, no people hanging round with nothing to do. The working rhythm has a clear beat to it; nobody switches off.’29 In the following years, however, attitudes towards the US film industry and US technology were to become more positive. One important underlying factor was the vastly enhanced attention, after Filipp Ermash took over as chairman of Goskino in 1972, to ‘spectator-­friendly’ (zritel’skie) films. There was a growing concern that the Soviet cinema should offer ‘value for money’ in terms of the state’s investment. Yet the frequent audience surveys produced rather depressing evidence of Soviet films’ competitiveness relative to other contenders for the attention of the home audience. In 1975, for example, even the most successful Soviet films could only manage about half the number of viewers racked up by Indian movies such as Bobby (Raj Kapoor, 1973), which grossed over 125 million ticket sales, according to official statistics, let alone the Mexican hit Yesenia (Alfredo B. Crevenna, 1971), with a staggering 182 million.30 Figures for the small numbers of US films actually released in the USSR were less impressive; for instance just 26 million for The Day of the Dolphin (Mike Nichols, 1977).31 However, Soviet commentators were aware that US cinema’s global reach extended much further than the films circulating in the USSR, and indeed was not limited to ‘American films’ in the primary sense. As Andrei Konchalovsky lamented in 1979, the Americans had ‘seized in a vice-­like grip not just the developing countries, but the once mighty cinematic powers of Western Europe. Almost a quarter of national film production in England [sic.], France, Spain, and the FRG, and almost half of Franco-­Italian co-­productions are financed by US film companies.’32 There was increasing awareness, too, that US cinema was in recovery: ‘According to

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materials in the Journal of the Institute of Market Conditions, the US project is not in dire straits at all, measures have been taken.’33 Americans had arrived back on the commercial track just as the USSR was starting to move hesitatingly in the same direction. This was a discovery unlikely to increase confidence within the Soviet film industry. Frustration with the technological resourcing and management practices of the Soviet film industry began to rise. Abundant evidence of this can be found in the files of Lenfilm studio, where technological failure was one of the commonest themes of discussions at Party meetings.34 Occasionally, professionals still claimed that Soviet machinery was, say, ‘more modern than at DEFA’ (the East German state film studio), or that ‘our film stock is better quality’ than film stock from other places.35 Far commoner were complaints about the technology available. ‘You’re supposed to produce the footage, only you can’t, because the film’s defective. Our nerves are in shreds. You’ve lost a lot of time. So you’re under pressure to work quickly, then quality suffers,’ complained a representative of the film processing workshop in 1973.36 Even if the film itself was not at fault, issues could crop up with the equipment, as director Evgeny Tatarsky lamented: We didn’t have any kind of a camera, and if we did, it was dreadful; we were shooting with Kodak that was used for The Blue Bird, and there was no problem with it then, but when we were making 720, the Kodak fouled up all the time – it bent, it tangled, it cracked, and not one of the technical services got a reprimand or lost a bonus when things went wrong.37

The practical difficulties of the Soviet film industry were common knowledge, and as early as 1971, they had been addressed at the Twenty-­Fourth Party Congress, which was concerned not just with increasing pressure on industry to deliver, but with incentivisation (stimulirovanie) and technical support. But as Ivan Provotorov, a senior administrator at Lenfilm complained, in real terms this meant nothing: Boris Pavlenok, vice chair of Goskino, had told filmmakers, ‘Go to the Central Committee and ask for a billion dollars to build a new factory for film stock.’38 Rather than capital investment of this kind, Goskino offered support at a piecemeal level: purchases of Western technology – at least for the luckiest filmmakers. One item acquired supreme status as an object of desire. This was the Arriflex camera, manufactured at the Arri factory in West Germany from 1937. Its availability or non-­availability became a theme song in the Soviet film industry during the late 1970s. The actual numbers circulating were minuscule, in the context of an enormous country and well-­developed cinema culture. As late as 1982, the USSR had only sixty Arriflexes for the entire film industry; nineteen were assigned to Mosfilm.39



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Yet Arriflexes had far more significance for the Soviet film industry than their mere physical presence. To begin with, they created a point of aspiration. In order to use Kodak film, directors and camera operators already had to have a special reason – filming was going to take place in difficult low-­light conditions.40 When it came to using one of the precious Arriflexes, you had to be a leading director engaged on an obviously prestigious project. In 1983, Lenfilm’s TV unit requested an Arriflex for the TV documentary, Na beregakh plenitelnykh Nevy (On the Neva’s Captivating Banks, Ilya Averbakh, 1983).41 Averbakh was one of the studio’s most admired directors, and the film had been commissioned by the production company, Trans World Film, for an Italian TV series, ‘Capitals of European Culture’. The production company had offered to supply Kodak film stock. Had this ended up being wasted, the studio and Gosteleradio would have faced a diplomatic incident.42 Still more embarrassing would have been failures with Lenin biopics. The stills file for Doverie (Trust, Edvin Laine and Viktor Tregubovich, 1975), originally Lenin v Finlyandii (Lenin in Finland), includes a wonderful shot of Dmitry Meskhiev, the film’s director of photography, squinting down the lens of an Arriflex. While not all cases were so compelling, seniority and established reputation carried the day, as with Ukhodya-ukhodi (Go Away, 1979), also by Tregubovich, by now an Honoured Artist of the RSFSR, and Vpervye zamuzhem (Married for the First Time, Iosif Kheifits, 1979) who had reached the stellar heights of Hero of Socialist Labour (1975) as well as People’s Artist of the USSR (1964).43 The Kheifits case also provides an illuminating sense of an Arriflex’s place at the apex of desirable, foreign-­produced technology. Petitioning O.I. Ioshin, one of Goskino’s deputy chairs, Vitaly Provotorov, the general director of Lenfilm, requested supply of an ‘Arriflex 35 BL’, along with a ‘complete set of optics’. But a fallback list was also provided: ‘Should it be impossible to supply the camera, we request supply of a Cooke Cine Varotal zoom, 20–100 mm, or a Canon K-­35 macrozoom K5X25, 25–125 mm, and a Zeiss Opton prime lens – 25, 36, 50, 85, and 135 mm.’44 Cooke lenses were made in Britain, Canon in Japan; Opton lenses were produced by Zeiss’s East German branch at Jena. The ranking descended from Europe through the Far East, with the socialist world at the bottom. As early as 1963, technicians at Lenfilm had expressed deep dissatisfaction with DEFA-­made film processors: ‘We didn’t think the GDR would send us garbage of this kind.’45 As time went on, dissatisfaction with socialist-­produced, let alone Soviet-­produced, equipment only became more entrenched. ‘What use are two Arriflex cameras when 80 percent of the photography equipment is obsolete stuff that the production department should have got rid of ages ago?’ asked cameraman Eduard Rozovsky at a Lenfilm Party meeting on 25 January 1979.46

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Notable, too, was the derision when Arriflex’s Soviet competitor was finally released in 1986. Lenfilm’s chief engineer, V.P. Belousov, commented: For many years, the filmmakers of this country have been patiently awaiting the new Kinor movie camera, one modelled in every way on world-­leading cameras such as the Arriflex. Alas, on this occasion, too, they have been bitterly disappointed. Twice the camera has had to be returned to the factory that produced it so that faults could be put right, but without any success.47

It was small consolation that two leading camera operators at the studio, Dmitry Dolinin and Sergei Yurizditzky, considered the Kinor the best camera Soviet manufacturers had yet invented.48 No wonder that diversification in the Soviet film industry increasingly took the form not of capitalist plus socialist, but of differential choices within the capitalist world. By the early 1980s, as Filipp Ermash recalled in 2001, Goskino was investing in US-­made Panaflex cameras as well as the German Arriflexes: By agreement with the Americans, I visited that company myself, Panavision, and we agreed they’d make 300 cameras for us, and I did get the money. But then the State Department butted in – hem, sensitive technology, and so on. We found a way out, a way round all that, but then, unfortunately, all the uproar started and the whole thing went down the plug.49

However, all of this came very late. By ‘uproar’, Ermash is referring to perestroika, which hit the Soviet film industry in 1986. Prior to this, there was nothing to challenge the Arriflex as such. Modern technology was not the be-­all and end-­all of Soviet filmmakers’ existence. If you could not use Kodak, you processed Svema in ways that produced interesting effects.50 Given that Goskino’s intervention was usually limited to suggestions, rather than subsidies, studios were resigned to compromise and inventiveness.51 A bigger issue than equipment as such was work practices. Crews were so careless that the equipment was often broken immediately.52 It was a moot point whether the GDR film processing machines were more or less to blame for regular disasters in Lenfilm’s film processing department than the staff turnover, drinking, or, in one case, a plumbing leak that held up the release of important new titles for several weeks.53 Here, though, Soviet studios were much less permeable to external influence than when it came to material goods. The extraordinary quality of the makeup brought by the American crew of The Blue Bird (George Cukor, 1976) when they worked at Lenfilm in 1975 was still remembered clearly by eyewitnesses four decades later.54 The meticulous timesheets that were also used for the shoots did not make the same impact. Equally, the Soviet film world never developed anything like film advertising as it was known in the West. Though dissatisfaction with the methods in



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use became common in the course of the 1970s, it was newspapers and radio announcements, crudely printed flyers in small print runs, and hand-­painted posters outside cinemas themselves, that remained the principal routes to the public.55 In itself, this was reasonable. As Grigory Chukhrai commented in 1978, ‘In the capitalist world, they have a purely commercial approach. We’re the socialist world, so we modify that by attention to ideology.’56 Yet it turned out that the material objects produced by the Western capitalist machine, unlike its management or marketing techniques, somehow managed to transcend their original context.57 All in all, interaction with ‘the West’ during the last fifteen years of the Soviet film industry’s existence prior to the total restructuring of 1986 had contradictory effects. While the film culture was in many ways more permeable to equipment and machinery than it was to Western film aesthetics and film content, ‘technological transfer’ had limits of its own. These lay, to begin with, in the constrained access to imported machines and other items needed for film production, and indeed Kodak film stock. There was a distribution hierarchy that privileged Moscow studios (particularly Mosfilm) over those housed in other places. Within each studio, the most favoured film directors (senior in years, experienced, prize-­winning) were far more likely than the junior and the marginal to petition successfully for access to prized goods. But if imported goods were certainly not available to all, they were familiar at second hand, at least, to a very wide audience; if you did not have access to an Arriflex, you dreamed of the day when you might. Access to ‘technology transfer’ as a state of aspiration, if not as a lived reality, was near-­universal. Yet the work practices in which the imported goods and equipment had been created, and in which they were used in Western studios, had far less impact on Soviet working life than did the goods and equipment themselves. Enormous efforts were made in order to keep the management schedules of co-­productions running smoothly: the convulsions at Lenfilm created by the demands of The Blue Bird (everything up to the installation of new lavatories for the foreign visitors) are abundantly documented in the studio’s files, and they also left deep traces in studio folklore.58 However, this sort of effort, in a system where pressures on studio resources were intense and technology unreliable, was simply not possible in the general run. The indifference or incompetence of management right at the top contributed to the problems. Commenting on the troublesome Soviet-­Hungarian co-­production, Derzhis za oblaka (Kapaszkodj a fellegekbe!/Hold onto the Clouds, Péter Szász and Boris Grigorev, 1971), Goskino chair Aleksei Romanov growled that actors should be ‘made to’ conform to Western production norms, ‘which are three times higher than ours’, but without suggesting exactly how this might be achieved, or how to ensure the success of higher production norms in a work

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culture where levels of pay were, internationally speaking, low, and incentives to productivity limited.59 While selected objects made the leap to an honorific presence in Soviet culture, they ended up embedded in an unfamiliar, and radically different, managerial and social system. In this sense, late Soviet film culture did not so much ‘catch up with’ or ‘overtake’ the technological arrangements of Europe or the US as diverge from these, even as managers pushed for more convergence. All the same, the rising prominence of imported goods, as time wore on, had a significant and specific effect – the increasing contempt for locally-­ produced equipment. In this way, Goskino’s efficiency drives, combined with under-­resourcing, gave imported technology such as the much-­admired Arriflex something like the status of the objects of cargo culture – the apparently neutral items that reduce recipients to the level of colonised subjects – with the paradox that, in this case, the colonisation was warmly welcomed by those exposed to the technology transfer encouraged by film industry management.60

Acknowledgements The research for this chapter was supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship and the Ludwig Fund at New College, Oxford, and by Trinity College, University of Cambridge; my gratitude to these funding bodies, and to the editors for inviting me to contribute to this collection. Catriona Kelly is Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Soviet Culture at Trinity College in the University of Cambridge. Her previous books include Soviet Art House: Lenfilm Studio under Brezhnev (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), and she is currently working on a study of films in the USSR during the period 1956–1991.

Notes   1. For ‘calcification’, see Woll, Real Images, 9; on ‘shelving’, see e.g. Fomin, Polka.  2. See e.g. Roth-­ Ey, Moscow Prime Time; Prokhorov and Prokhorova, Film and Television Genres; Pisu, La cortina di celluloide; Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism.   3. Stenogramma zasedaniya Komiteta po kinematografii [henceforth KK], 4  August 1970; Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva [henceforth RGALI], 2944/5/294/109.



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  4. KK, 25 June 1971; RGALI, 2944/1/771/22.  5. On Divorce Italian Style, see ibid., d. 497, l. 73. The same was true of US films: in 1972, Mosfilm general director Nikolai Sizov commented that The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) and The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971) were ‘out of the question’ for us; instead, the USSR was making arrangements to purchase Airport (RGALI, 2944/1/852/137). As for the Dom kino network, in 1969, for example, the Leningrad one showed a run of middling foreign films, such as Sweet Charity (Bob Fosse, 1969), The Comedians (Peter Glenville, 1967) and Françoise ou La vie conjugale (Anatomy of a Marriage, André Cayatte, 1964): Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva, St Petersburg [henceforth TsGALI-­SPb.], 182/1/232/1-­48. In 1973, things were more adventurous, with Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970) as well as The Sandpit Generals (Hall Bartlett, 1971) and Addio Zio Tom (Goodbye Uncle Tom, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, 1971) (ibid., 253/1–98).   6. Goskino chair Aleksei Romanov, 1971, RGALI, 2944/1/770/79.  7. For example, the rights-­holders for David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) originally wanted a million dollars for Soviet distribution; in 1968 (by which time the film was over a decade old) they dropped the sum to $300,000. RGALI, 2944/1/497/16.   8. See, for example, ‘Zapiska rezhissera Andreya Mikhalkova-­Konchalovskogo ob aktivizatsii ideologicheskoi bor’by dvukh system na sovremennom etape (1979, RGANI, 5/76/294/7)’, where Andrei Konchalovsky points to Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, 1975) and Raba lyubvi (A Slave of Love, Nikita Mikhalkov, 1976) as positive examples of commercial success.  9. For the overall context, see Autio-­ Sarasmi, ‘Soviet Economic Modernisation’. Cooperation projects included, for example, the Togliatti plant, with input from Fiat, and the Kama Truck Plant (ibid., 111); see also Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades. 10. Lenin’s vehicles included a Rolls Royce converted for winter conditions that had once belonged to Nicholas II, another Rolls Royce imported for his personal use in 1922, and many others. Stalin’s particular favourite was a Packard 2, the gift of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935: Timofeychev, ‘Kremlin Cars’. The refrigerator is on show in the Kirov Apartment Museum, St Petersburg (personal visits; see also http:// kirovmuseum.ru/node/21). 11. The developments were showcased in albums such as Industriya sotsializma and in the journals SSSR na stroike and Nashi dostizheniya. On the development of car production, see Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades. 12. See the discussion of technology in Cavendish, The Men with the Movie Camera, 42–48. 13. Kaganovsky, The Voice of Technology, 13. 14. Ibid., 9. For the Soviet decision to pursue a Sonderweg in visuals, see Cavendish, ‘The Political Imperative of Color’. 15. For a discussion of one famous event in the ‘catch up and overtake’ campaign, the so-­called ‘kitchen debate’, see Reid, ‘“Who Will Beat Whom?”’. 16. Kadr 7 (22 April 1967), 1–2. 17. Archive of Lenfilm (examined 21 September 2020). 18. This had of course also been the case in the 1920s (see above), but represented a sharp break with the immediate past. 19. Fewer copies: ‘Stenogramma zasedaniya KK’, RGALI, 2944/1/497/76 (28 June 1968); Cannes, ibid., 496/123 (29 May 1968).

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20. ‘Stenogramma zasedaniya KK’, 9  August 1968, RGALI, 2944/1/497/195. Later, Barinov commented, ‘We were able to buy in the latest optical technology’ (ibid., 204). 21. Ibid., l. 197. 22. See e.g. Ob utverzhdenii tematicheskogo plana polnometrazhnykh khudozhestvennykh fil’mov vypuska 1969 g.: Prikaz Predsedatelya KK pri SM SSSR’, 14 November 1968, TsGALI-­SPb., 257/18/2333/6-­63. 23. Stenogramma zasedaniya, 9 August 1968, 201. 24. Ibid., 204. 25. Ibid., 210–11. In contrast (ibid., 215), Aleksei Romanov remarked that Polish and Hungarian technology was not particularly impressive: ‘The Hungarian film industry has had practically no inventions in all this time. The sound stages are just as they were back in Alexander Korda’s day, and the technology is exactly the same too.’ 26. For the need for studios to underwrite purchasing costs, see the order quoted below sent by Lenfilm in 1979 for an Arriflex camera plus lenses or foreign-­produced lenses, which concludes, ‘The studio has the money to pay for these items.’ TsGAIPD, 257/31/309/102. For the dimensions of the purchases (2.1 million roubles on equipment, 2.3 million roubles on film stock, 1966–1971), see RGALI 2944/1/799a/272. 27. Sokolsky, ‘Anamorfotnaya sistema’. An interesting detail is the significant rise of interest during the late 1960s in the use of subtitling rather than dubbing (hitherto the pride of the Soviet cinema, on which see Gilburd, To See Paris and Die. A Goskino meeting on 28 June 1968 concluded that ‘the technical base should be expanded’ (RGALI, 2944/1/497/31). The economy criterion (that subtitling is cheaper than dubbing) was not mentioned; this was also a case of imitating Western practice because that was seen as more ‘advanced’. By 1972, the primary argument became that dubbing was a ‘very long-­drawn-­out and expensive process’ (ibid., 850/136). 28. ‘Stenogramma zasedaniya KK’, 12 May 1972, RGALI, 2944/1/852/117. 29. Ibid., 118. 30. V.P. Ostashevskaya, ‘Lenfilm i zritel’, report presented to the Creative Workers’ Party organisation at Lenfil’m, 11 August 1977, TsGAIPD-­SPb., 1369/5/191/62. 31. Ibid. 32. ‘Zapiska rezhissera Andreya Mikhalkova-­Konchalovskogo’, 5. 33. O.P. Khaneev, speaking in the discussion of Ostashevskaya, ‘Lenfilm i zritel’, TsGAIPD-­ SPb., 1369/5/ 191/71. It is not entirely clear what Khaneev means by ‘kon”yunkturnyi ‘Vestnik’’, but presumably the journal published by the Scientific Research Institute of Market Conditions (from 1978, All-­Soviet Scientific Research Institute of Market Conditions) in Moscow. 34. For a broader overview of these discussions and their context, see Kelly, Soviet Art House. 35. Sound operator Igor Vigdorchik, at a meeting of the Creative Workers’ Party organisation, Lenfilm, 19 December 1976, TsGAIPD-­SPb., 1369/5/179/129. 36. Minutes of studio-­wide Party meeting, Lenfilm, 29 November 1973, TsGAIPD-­SPb., 1369/5/132/147. 37. Minutes of studio-­wide Party meeting, Lenfilm, 25 December 1976, TsGAIPD-­SPb., 1369/5/174/128. 38. Minutes of studio-­wide Party meeting, Lenfilm, 15  February 1973, TsGAIPD-­SPb., 1369/5/131/52. 39. Ibid., 259/5. An Arriflex camera is still on proud display in Mosfilm’s on-­site



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museum (visit, April 2018). By 1971, Mosfilm also had industry-­standard recording equipment (the Swiss Nagra) and was pushing for modern lighting also. RGALI, 2944/1/771/84-­5. 40. For examples of this kind of argument, see LF’s 1974 correspondence with Goskino, TSGALI-­SPb., 257/24/288/110. 41. See the letter from the TV unit of Lenfilm to Gosteleradio, 10 March 1983, TsGALI-­ SPb., 257/40/77/178. 42. See the letter from Gosteleradio to Lenfilm, 1  February 1982, TsGALI-­SPb., 257/40/47/1a. (My thanks to Marina Samsonova for copying this document.) In fact, more sensitive film had to be substituted in order to allow the shooting of certain scenes (ibid., 21), but, presumably, also Kodak. 43. RGALI, 2944/4/4522/10 (Tregubovich, 1979); TsGAIPD, 257/31/309/102 (Kheifits, 1979). 44. Ibid. 45. TsGAIPD-­SPb., 1369/5/58/13. 46. TsGAIPD-­SPb., 1369/5/218/39-­40. 47. Minutes of a Lenfilm Party Committee meeting, 9  January 1986, TsGAIPD-­SPb., 1369/5/275/5. 48. Ibid. For footage of a Kinor, see the ‘Muzei Retro Tekhnika’ video, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTDNlhwCPX0. As of October 2020, a used Kinor could be obtained for just $820 on ebay, or 25 per cent of the minimum price for an Arriflex, indicating that the camera’s reputation has not worn well in post-­Soviet times either. 49. My thanks to Lyubov Arkus and her colleagues at Seans for access to this interview. 50. For a more detailed discussion, see Kelly, Soviet Art House, Chapter 3. 51. Exemplifying the style, deputy chair of Goskino, Boris Pavlenok, told Lenfilm’s chief engineer, I.N. Aleksander, that the studio needed its own ‘technology village’, but made no suggestions about funding (KK meeting, 28  December 1971, RGALI, 2944/1/776/60). On comparable discussions, see Rusinova, ‘Debates on Sound in the 1970s and 1980s’. 52. TsGAIPD-­SPb., 1369/5/218/39-­40. 53. Complaints about drinking and turnover are ubiquitous in studio records. For the flood, caused by a burst main in early 1979, see TsGALI-­SPb., 257/32/79/48. 54. See Catriona Kelly and Marina Samsonova, interview with Lenfilm makeup artists, 2016. 55. These comments are based on the archival holdings at Lenfilm and on personal observation in the USSR during the 1980s. 56. ‘Stenogramma zasedaniya KK, 25 July 1978, RGALI’, 2944/1/1345/215. 57. In the long run, the incursion of Western technology was probably to the detriment of Soviet filmmaking because it made audiences accustomed to a slicker style, and hence more demanding about the home product. 58. See Kelly, Soviet Art House, chapter 3. 59. Discussion in KK, 22  October 1971, RGALI, 2944/1/773/48. In the Brezhnev era, monetary wage bonuses, originally the reward for exceptional effort, became thoroughly routinised, as satirised in a famous ‘production movie’ set on a Soviet building site, Premiya (The Bonus, Sergei Mikaelyan, 1974). 60. One could say that this was a case of the ‘internal colonisation’ much discussed in recent years by commentators on Russia. See e.g. Etkind, Internal Colonization;

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Etkind, Uffelmann, and Kukulin, Tam, vnutri. In the post-­Soviet period, film production has been conquered by Western-­produced technology: the pride of every working studio is its Dolbi saund [Dolby Sound]. Even terminology is simply adopted, rather than adapted (cf. the words for various types of technology-­specific profession, such as dol’shchik, dolly camera operator).

Bibliography Anonymous. No title. Kadr (22 April 1967), 1–2. Autio-Sarasmi, Sari. ‘Soviet Economic Modernisation and Transferring Technologies from the West’, in Markku Kangaspuru and Jeremy Smith (eds), Modernisation in Russia: Studia Fennica Historica 12 (2006), 104–23. Cavendish, Philip. The Men with the Movie Camera: The Poetics of Visual Style in Soviet Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1920s. Oxford: Berghahn, 2013. ———. ‘The Political Imperative of Color: Stalin, Disney, and the Soviet Pursuit of Color Film 1931–45’. Russian Review 78 (2019), 569–94. Djagalov, Rossen. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between Second and Third Worlds. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020. Etkind, Alexander. Internal Colonization. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Etkind, Alexander, Dirk Uffelmann and Ilya Kukulin (eds). Tam, vnutri: Politika vnutrennei kolonizatsii v kul’turnoi istorii Rossii: Sbornik statei. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2012. Fomin, Valentin I. (ed.). Polka: dokumenty, svidetelstva, kommentarii. Moscow: Nauchnoissledovatel’skii institut kinoiskusstva, 1992. Gilburd, Eleonory. To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Industriya sotsializma. 7 vols. Moscow: Izogiz, 1935. Kaganovsky, Lilya. The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1928– 1935. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018. Kelly, Catriona, Soviet Art House: Lenfilm Studio under Brezhnev. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pisu, Stefano, La cortina di celluloide: Il cinema italo-sovietico nella Guerra fredda. Milan: Mimesis, 2019. Prokhorov, Aleksandr and Elena Prokhorova. Film and Television Genres of the Late Soviet Era. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Reid, Susan E. ‘“Who Will Beat Whom?” Soviet Popular Reception of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959’. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 9(4) (2008), 855–904. Roth-Ey, Kristin. Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cold War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Rusinova, Elena. ‘Debates on Sound in the 1970s and 1980s and the Beginning of Vocational Training for Sound Editors at VGIK’. Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 13(2) (2019), 199–207. Siegelbaum, Lewis. Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.



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Sokolsky, L. ‘Anamorfotnaya sistema otzhila svoi vek’. Kadr (21 April 1966), 3–4. Timofeychev, Aleksei. ‘Kremlin Cars’. Russia Beyond the Headlines (27 May 2018). https://​ www.rbth.com/lifestyle/328376-kremlin-cars-favorite-rides. Woll, Josephine. Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000.

CHAPTER 13

Missed Opportunities and Unexpected Success Film Relationships between France and the GDR in the 1970s Perrine Val

On 30 March 1973, the film Die Legende von Paul und Paula (The Legend of Paul and Paula, Heiner Carow), which was to be the biggest public success in the GDR, was released in theatres in East Germany. In the preceding weeks, the GDR’s existence had been officially recognised by Western countries and official diplomatic relations were established with the West, particularly with France. This official recognition enabled the DEFA (Deutsche F ilm A.G., the state-­owned film production and distribution company in the GDR) to compete in the Cannes International F ilm Festival for the first time in its existence. The organisers of the Cannes F ilm Festival approached the DEFA to include Heiner Carow’s film in the competition. From the second half of the 1940s onwards, the DEFA was constantly trying to present its productions at Cannes, even though the only German films officially allowed to be screened there were those from West Germany. In Spring 1973, all the circumstances seemed to finally be combined to ensure success and the long-­awaited recognition: the DEFA received official authorisation to compete at Cannes, it had a film that had already attracted the East German public, and Western audiences were curious to discover a production from this little-­known film industry. However, this chance turned into a missed opportunity when, against all odds, East German politicians finally reversed their decision and refused to allow The Legend of Paul and Paula to represent the GDR at the Cannes Festival.1 The DEFA only competed at the



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French festival two years later with Lotte in Weimar (Lotte in Weimar, Egon Günther, 1975). This apparent paradoxical movement of openness and withdrawal characterises quite well the turn taken by the film relationships between the GDR and France in the 1970s. Since the creation of the GDR in 1949, the lack of recognition west of the Iron Curtain was one of the points of tension that guided part of the DEFA’s activities. The national film company was indeed encouraged by the political leadership to produce a positive and enhancing image of the GDR outside its borders, in order to limit the weak representation of East Germany and to compete with the FRG. In the 1950s, foreign (especially French and Italian) filmmakers and actors were invited to work in the prestigious Babelsberg Studios. In 1958, the Association des Échanges Franco-­Allemands was founded to compensate for the lack of information about the GDR in France. Although West German cinema dominated French screens and the proximity of several filmmakers of the New German Cinema to France tended to obscure the existence of East German cinematography, the communist and Germanist networks nevertheless contributed to the regular circulation of films and professionals between France and the GDR. The 1970s began with a succession of political and cultural openings and rapprochements, first between the two Germanies with Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik and the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1972, and then with other Western countries. From the cinematographic and audiovisual perspective, the rapprochement with France took various forms: the purchase in 1969 by the USSR and then by the GDR of the French SECAM colour television system (at the disadvantage of the West German PAL system)2 can be seen as the beginnings of more regular ties, such as the reciprocal organisation of film weeks (DEFA week in Paris in April 1971, French film week in the GDR in December 1972, etc.) or the increase in the number of French films exported to the GDR, until the signing of cultural cooperation agreements in 1980 which further institutionalised these exchanges. In this chapter, I propose to look back at several episodes in the GDR’s cinematographic relations with France during the 1970s, a pivotal decade marked by a simultaneous geopolitical rapprochement and by the disintegration of certain proximity. How did this double movement of opening and distancing take place? I will show how the quantitative increase in the number of films exchanged allowed by the official recognition of the GDR was to the detriment of the companionship and also sometimes of the mutual understanding and synergy that distinguished Franco-­East German cinematographic relations during the previous decades.

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Normalised but Unbalanced Film Exchanges When it was created in the immediate postwar period, the DEFA inherited the Babelsberg studios, but lacked both film professionals and international recognition.3 Some projects resulting from professional friendships forged before the war resurfaced and some French filmmakers were approached by the DEFA, which offered them the opportunity to work in East Berlin. This interest was reciprocal. Indeed, for Western producers (French, but also Italian), the strategy of co-­productions established in the second half of the 1940s to stimulate national production and respond to competition from Hollywood encouraged partnerships with communist studios in Central and Eastern Europe to shoot at lower costs. If geopolitical obstacles slowed down these collaborations between East and West, professional friendships and/ or communist companionship formed the ground on which several France-­ GDR co-­productions emerged in the 1950s and compensated for the lack of official diplomatic relations between the two countries. French producers also worked with their Soviet, Romanian, Polish or Czechoslovakian counterparts,4 while the DEFA sought similar collaboration with Italy (although no co-­production project between Italy and the GDR was ever concluded).5 For the communist studios, collaborations with France or Italy meant access to the Western market and recognition beyond the Iron Curtain. The role of individuals was therefore major in the co-­productions between East and West: it was the commitment of Georges Sadoul, Gérard Philipe and Joris Ivens that favoured the coproduction of Les Aventures de Till l’Espiègle (Bold Adventures, Gérard Philipe, Joris Ivens, 1956); Simone Signoret’s links with the DEFA during an interrupted shooting enabled Raymond Rouleau to adapt the play The Witches of Salem for the cinema, in a film shot entirely in the GDR in 1957; and it was thanks to the invitation extended by the DEFA to Louis Daquin, a communist filmmaker, that the adaptation of the novel La Rabouilleuse (Les Arrivistes, The Opportunists, 1959) was filmed. Despite the distance and the geopolitical situation, the links between film professionals from the two countries were real and often warm, as shown for example by Simone Signoret’s correspondence with Kurt Maetzig or Bertolt Brecht.6 However, these links weakened during the 1960s: the construction of the Berlin Wall, the disenchantment of several companions of the French Communist Party with the reality of socialist countries, and the increased difficulty of meeting in real life gradually distanced personal and professional relations. At the beginning of the 1970s, when relations between the two Germanies were normalised and exchanges with the GDR became more accessible, there was already a film network on which to build, but it was no longer as lively as in the 1950s. The exchanges that were resumed were less on an individual level than on an institutional one. Film professionals still



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played a key role, but the structures (festivals, film libraries, archives, cultural institutions) took over. This development had a double consequence: it allowed exchanges on a larger scale, in greater quantities, at the cost of a form of standardisation and depersonalisation of relations. The 1970s was the decade during which French films were most widely distributed in the GDR, with an average of fifteen films per year (which dropped to eleven in the 1980s). This high average was accompanied by success with the East German public. For example, in 1971, seven of the thirty-­seven films (East German and foreign) that were programmed for more than 100 days in the GDR were French. In the course of the decade, France became the third Western country (ahead of West Germany and Italy) to supply films to the GDR (the USSR remained the leading film exporter), behind the United States and England. Between 1970 and 1989, the GDR imported a total of 146 French films (compared to 168 American films), i.e. more than Bulgarian (108) or Romanian (133) films and barely less than Polish films (172). Only eighty West German films were imported during the same period.7 Television also played an increasingly important role in the distribution of French films in the GDR. From three French films broadcast on East German television in 1965, this increased to twenty-­three in 1970, then forty-­four in 1973. In the following years, an average of twenty French films were broadcast each year. The purchase of French films was handled by Unifrance Film on the French side, and by the DEFA-­Außenhandel on the East German side. In the agreements signed between the partners, emphasis was placed on the reciprocity of exchanges. In reality, these exchanges were essentially one-­way, limited to the purchase of French films by the GDR. In the 1970s, there were only two commercial releases of DEFA productions in France: Hostess (Rolf Römer, 1976) and Bankett für Achilles (Banquet for Achilles, Roland Gräf, 1975) were released on 26  October 1979 and garnered 56 and 148 admissions respectively,8 which fell far below East German expectations. The obvious disparity set in during the 1970s and lasted until 1989. The situation pleased the managers of Unifrance Film: the GDR was considered a gateway to the film market of the communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe,9 and the success of French films was not accompanied by any real compensation. More surprisingly, East German officials also accepted the situation. In 1963, Deputy Minister of Culture Hans Rodenberg listed the criteria for selecting films purchased abroad and wrote that it was ‘particularly important that [the subjects of imported films] contribute to the development of solutions to the political, economic and educational challenges of the GDR, provided that they are accessible and comprehensible to our viewers, artistically and ideologically profound, realistic, captivating and moving’10  – all criteria that seem rather incompatible. Ten years later, however, the

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DEFA‑Außenhandel’s buying committees had no problem selecting comedies from the Gendarme in Saint-Tropez series with Louis de Funès or the adventures of Le Grand Blond avec une chaussure noire (The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe, Yves Robert, 1972) played by Pierre Richard, which certainly seem ‘accessible and comprehensible’, but in which one struggles to find ‘solutions to the political, economic and educational issues of the GDR’. The East German public’s enthusiasm for French comedies and crime films took precedence over political considerations. At first, East German critics from magazines such as Kino DDR, Filmspiegel or Film und Fernsehen justified these choices and defended French films that were far from socialist, seeing in them a critique of capitalism or an illustration of the evils of capitalism. Gradually, faced with the growing impossibility of defending films far removed from socialism, the critics reduced to factual presentations of French films, without engaging in any further analysis. The films made by companions of the French Communist Party in the 1950s thus gave way to a commercial cinema.

Interlude: The Misadventures of Vivre en paix – RDA 1974 (To Live in Peace – GDR 1974, Daniel Karlin, 1974) The early 1970s saw a (temporary) withdrawal of French communists from the network of film exchanges between the GDR and France. One episode provides a better understanding of the reasons for this, namely the disappointment caused by the documentary To Live in Peace  – GDR 1974, co-­ produced by the two countries. The ambitious title (‘living in peace’) of this medium-­length film, which was shot in Karl-­Marx-­Stadt (now Chemnitz) and followed two families, testifies to the great ambitions of the French team to present the GDR as a workers’ paradise, as the country with all the conditions necessary for individual fulfilment. The film was a response to the rise of anti-­communism in France. UniCiTé, the audiovisual structure of the French Communist Party, was embarking on the production of a documentary series aimed at showing what the ‘real life’ of the inhabitants of the communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe would be like, far from preconceived ideas and without overlooking the pitfalls. The second episode of the series, Vivre en paix – RDA 1974, also marked the early end of the series, as it was so disappointing. The film was first carried by a team of young French professionals (Daniel Karlin, Bernard Eisenschitz and François Mathieu) who prepared the film together.11 When they arrived on location, they were accompanied (guided and supervised) by their counterparts from the Camera DDR group, which specialised in the production of medium-­length documentaries on the GDR for foreign markets. Although on paper the co-­production between



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UniCiTé and Camera DDR makes sense, the French team did not have the support they had hoped for. The families selected by Camera DDR seemed too well off to be representative of East German society and Daniel Karlin, the director, managed to replace them with two others.12 The final film, however, is far from renewing the representation of the GDR. The aesthetics are very classical, the emphasis is on the balance between family, work, community involvement and hobbies. Even if the voice-­over allows itself a few ironic comments on a meeting that is not very exciting or a Trabi that breaks down, the film is characterised by a very polished formal and narrative discourse.13 Despite the director’s commitment to the project, the film was only screened to a limited extent (mainly at the Fête de l’Humanité) and was soon forgotten.

From the GDR through Chile to France Following this disappointing experience, UniCiTé decided not to continue its documentary series on life in communist countries. Nevertheless, its members soon discovered the East German documentaries produced by Studio H&S, ‘H’ for Walter Heynowski and ‘S’ for Gerhard Scheumann. Among all the East German films released in France between 1949 and 1989, documentaries produced by this East German Studio H&S on the situation in Chile in the early 1970s achieved the greatest public and critical success. Heynowski and Scheumann began their careers as television journalists. In 1965, they filmed Der lachende Mann  – Bekenntnisse eines Mörders (The Laughing Man – Confessions of a Murderer, 1965), a documentary in which a West German legionnaire nicknamed ‘Kongo Müller’ recounts on camera and with a smile the abuses committed by German soldiers in the Congo. Heynowski and Scheumann saw in him the incarnation of the former Nazi who continues to act with impunity, protected by the FRG. The denunciation of a continuity between the Third Reich and the FRG was a recurring theme in the DEFA’s documentary films of the early decades, and Der lachende Mann pursues the same aim, but with the use of particularly modern and effective direction and editing. The documentary filmmakers pose as West German journalists who would approve of Müller’s speech. They give him confidence and make him drink alcohol. Müller sits in front of a black background and recounts the actions of his (mostly West German) mercenaries in Congo. The directors then denounce the cruelty of his words through editing, isolating certain details with close-­ups of his Wehrmacht iron cross or his smile, which appears particularly perverse, and interspersing Müller’s interview with photographs of the victims and the fighting. The film was so successful that Heynowski and Scheumann obtained the creation of their own production studio and were authorised to film abroad, a rare privilege for East Germans at the time. The

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two men openly claimed to be propagandists and put their cinematographic art at the service of the official ideology. Heynowski and Scheumann collaborated with the cameraman Peter Hellmich, who had a West German passport. Hellmich had travelled to Rome, where he met the producer Renzo Rossellini. In 1971, the latter accompanied his father, Roberto Rossellini, to Chile for an interview with Salvador Allende (Intervista a Salvador Allende: la forza e la ragione [Interview with Salvador Allende: Power and Reason], Emidio Greco and Helvio Soto, 1971) for Italian television. In 1970, Salvador Allende was the first socialist politician to win presidential power democratically in a Latin American country. This unprecedented election raised many hopes among the Chilean population, but also among Western European left-­wing sympathisers. In fact, French and Italian leftists found a new source of inspiration in the Chilean experience: the disillusionment embodied by the communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe faded in the face of the unprecedented situation Chile experienced in the 1970s. Nevertheless, despite his election, Allende was far from being unanimously supported in Chile. He was opposed by the conservative right, and he also faced opposition from the left. These tensions aroused the interest of European observers. In 1972, Renzo Rossellini encouraged the Spanish-­speaking journalist and director Miguel Herberg to go there as well. At the same time, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, East German officials also decided to send their favourite film duo, Studio H&S, to Chile. With the intermediary of Renzo Rossellini and Peter Hellmich, Herberg, Heynowski and Scheumann decided to join forces and to travel to Chile together. In the spring of 1973, they interviewed Chilean extreme right-­wing leaders together. However, disagreements arose and Herberg asked Hellmich to join him in Santiago. Heynowski and Scheumann continued filming on their own, mainly in northern Chile. They all returned to Europe in mid-­April 1973. Hellmich and Herberg made another trip to Chile in July. Hellmich returned again in early September and waited for his Spanish colleague in Santiago. During the military coup of 11 September, he filmed the bombing of the presidential palace La Moneda from his hotel room, and his images were frequently used afterwards. Contrary to what they suggested before denying it in 2012, neither Heynowski nor Scheumann returned to Chile after the spring of 1973. Peter Hellmich, Miguel Herberg and Manfred Berger (soundman for Studio H&S) did, however, make another journey there in January and February 1974. They met Pinochet, interviewed him and visited the Pisagua and Chacabuco prison camps. These images enabled Studio H&S to produce a whole cycle of films on Chile, including the four films Der Krieg der Mumien (The War of the Mummies, Walter Heynowski, Gerhard Scheumann, 1974), Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein (I Was, I Am, I Shall Be, Walter Heynowski, Gerhard Scheumann, 1974), El Golpe blanco (The White Coup, Walter Heynowski



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and Gerhard Scheumann, 1975) and Eine Minute Dunkel macht uns nicht blind (A Minute of Darkness Doesn’t Blind Us, Walter Heynowski, Gerhard Scheumann, and Peter Hellmich, 1976). These films were released at close intervals on East German screens: the second film in the cycle was released three months after the first one, exactly one year after the Pinochet coup, on 11 September 1974. A Minute of Darkness Doesn’t Blind Us was released in January 1976 and The White Coup in March 1977. The documentaries benefited from significant promotional resources that allowed them to be exported quickly. Film festivals played a decisive role in their international circulation. Pinochet’s military coup d’état aroused strong reactions throughout the world and many of Allende’s supporters chose to go into exile, particularly in Europe. A movement of international solidarity was then set up: unable to intervene in Chile, Europeans in solidarity displayed their opposition to the military junta of Chilean generals through the organisation of demonstrations, cultural events, screenings, etc.14 Nicolas Prognon insists on the importance of this resistance through culture and on the diversity of forms it took.15 Exhibitions, music, theatre, literature, magazines, etc., all artistic means were used to make the voice of the Chilean oppressed heard. These actions carried out by various associations encouraged public opinion to see Pinochet as the very incarnation of fascism. In these conditions, any denunciation or challenge to the Junta was welcome. The Chilean coup d’état appeared to be a unifying event for the international left. Cinema played an important role in this solidarity movement and the documentaries of Studio H&S were part of a vast filmography on Chilean events.16 This cinematographic abundance can be explained first of all by the militancy of many Chilean filmmakers forced into exile and whose films were supported by foreign producers. These productions then circulated through the network of festivals, notably at the Venice Festival in 1974 and 1975 as part of a programme entitled ‘Libertà per il Cile’ (Freedom for Chile). The 1970s coincided with the creation of smaller film festivals which sought to distinguish themselves by the originality of their programming, notably by focusing on foreign filmographies that were not easily accessible on the commercial circuit. Films made about Chile and/or by exiled Chilean filmmakers therefore contributed to the renewal of these programmes. This context was therefore favourable for the Chilean cycle produced by Studio H&S, and in particular for The War of the Mummies and I Was, I Am, I Shall Be: Studio H&S benefited from all possible support from the political leaders of the GDR and enjoyed a comfortable budget that allowed the publication of quality promotional material (publication of documents in different formats, in colour, printing of multilingual brochures, etc.). The members of UniCiTé were a dynamic relay for their promotion in France and the network of festivals was booming; finally, French public opinion was sensitive to the fate of Chileans and eager for information

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and images on Chile. These favourable circumstances enabled the documentaries to enjoy the greatest public and critical success ever achieved in France by East German films. The critical success was reflected in the unanimous praise for Studio H&S films. In August 1975, the film was awarded the Jury Prize at the International Short Film and Documentary Film Festival in Grenoble. The most enthusiastic journalists were those of the communist newspaper L’Humanité, which published three dithyrambic articles on Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein in September 1975. The journalist Samiel Lachize wrote that the film was ‘the event of the year’.17 His colleagues at Le Monde, Le Monde diplomatique, and Politique Hebdo (whose editorial lines, although not communist, are also politically left-­wing) also considered the film to be a crucial testimony to the repression carried out by the military junta in Chile and did not express any hesitation or negative criticism. Film critics joined in the general enthusiasm. Serge Toubiana, in Les Cahiers du Cinéma, described the film as a ‘filmic scoop’.18 These positive reactions allowed the films to be released in cinemas. For The War of the Mummies, 520 screenings were recorded, with nearly 22,000 spectators, in about thirty different cities, between April 1975 and May 1977. What is noteworthy is not so much the number of spectators or screenings, but the duration and the geographical diversity of the screening locations. Previously, films distributed in France through the audiovisual structures of the Communist Party (and East German films in particular) were only programmed for particular occasions, on an occasional and restricted basis. Here, it was a commercial distribution, admittedly modest in comparison with contemporary national releases, but very successful in comparison with previous distributions of DEFA productions. Moreover, the fact that this distribution was spread over two years underlines the fact that this success was due to word of mouth and the commitment of the French communist distributor. For I Was, I Am, I Shall Be, more than 600 screenings took place and brought together nearly 33,000 spectators. The main difference with the screening of The War of the Mummies is that a dozen cinemas programmed the film several times, a few months apart, which shows the public demand. This public and critical success remains absolutely unprecedented for East German productions in France. The enthusiasm of the French audience for the Chilean cycle of Studio H&S was part of the general craze for films linked to the international solidarity movement. The other documentaries (European or Chilean) released at the same time on Chile were received with the same praise. Despite their singularity, the inclusion of Heynowski and Scheumann’s films in a wider filmography on Chile both supported and confined them. Indeed, very few critics looked at the films more closely and saw in them something other than what they projected from the outset, namely a new



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manifestation of solidarity with Chile and a further denunciation of the crimes committed by the Junta. If this interpretation benefited the positive reception of the films, it also overshadowed part of their real discourse. Despite its formal innovations, Studio H&S has built its filmography in the line of the East German documentaries that denounced the continuation of fascism in the Western world, particularly in the FRG. Whether it was the exactions committed by West German mercenaries in the Congo or by American soldiers in Vietnam, the documentaries of Studio H&S aimed first and foremost to denounce the actions of the FRG and the USA. By giving their ideological opponent a voice, Heynowski and Scheumann hoped that he would denounce himself through his own words. The victims of the conflicts, on the other hand, are given much less say. The Chilean cycle was initiated with a similar intention. When Heynowski and Scheumann were sent to Santiago, Pinochet’s coup d’état had not yet taken place, and their aim was to document the attempts by his opponents to destabilise Allende’s government. This is why the East German duo chose to travel to northern Chile in the spring of 1973. A strike in the copper mines was taking place there, paralysing the country’s economy. Several strikers and one of their leaders, Julio Bazan, appear in The War of the Mummies. Interviewed by Heynowski and Scheumann, Bazan explains that the strikers are asking for a pay rise. However, the voice-­ over quickly covers him to explain that Bazan was working for the CIA and that the strike was intended to destabilise Allende. The voice-­over goes on to argue that the conspiracy is orchestrated by the United States, which is against a Latin American country being led by a socialist president. Later on, the commentary explains that the majority of shareholders in the Chilean copper industry are West Germans. This clarification then allows the film to denounce the role played by the FRG in supporting Allende’s opponents. These West Germans who allegedly supported the fascist junta are embodied by a member of the CDU, Heinrich Gewandt, who is seen shaking hands with Pinochet as part of a group of West German economic experts who came to Chile after the coup. This figure of the West German who supports Pinochet is countered by that of an East German engineer who has come to provide support to the Chilean miners. Heynowski and Scheumann’s editing underlines the opposition between the two men. Gewandt is filmed indoors, in a suit, as a businessman close to Pinochet, while the East German engineer is filmed outside, close to the Chilean miners, in work clothes. Thus, even far away from Europe, the opposition between the two Germanies in the context of the Cold War is still staged. The second film in the cycle Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein goes even further by implicitly presenting the Chilean dictatorship as a possible resurgence of Nazi Germany. The Chilean prison camps are filmed as if they were Nazi concentration camps, with close-­ups of the barbed wire and long shots of the barracks lined up.

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However, despite the violence of the coup, the wave of repression against Chileans close to the left cannot be compared to the massive deportations and destructions undertaken by the Hitler regime during the Second World War. The parallel proposed by Studio H&S takes up a strong historical symbol, which raises awareness effectively, but it runs the risk of evading the specificity of the Chilean situation. If the torture and summary executions did take place in Chile, the ideological filter proposed by the documentaries does not grasp their singular importance. This reading of the Chilean events as a reproduction of a mass fascist extermination was nevertheless reproduced by several French journalists: ‘Admittedly, these shots do not show us scenes of torture and execution: everything is calm and clean, as in the Nazi camps when the Red Cross Commission announced its visit, but the reality of the facts is well known elsewhere’.19 These images show rather idle prisoners, keeping themselves busy by doing manual work. Similarly, in the interview with Pinochet, who is pleased with himself, only his expression ‘the spectre of communism’ is played several times, even though his anti-­communism is not a new fact. A specialist in plagiarism, researcher Jean-­Noël Darde conducted an investigation based on Miguel Herberg’s personal archives to reveal that Herberg shot most of the footage that made the films such a sensation.20 At the risk of his life, Herberg interviewed Pinochet, obtained official authorisations from him and then partly misused them to film the prisoners in the Chacabuco and Pisagua camps, which were under the control of the Junta. These filming conditions explain the very neutral statements of the prisoners who speak in Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein: they did not know for whom these images were intended and did not want to risk putting their lives in danger. The editing carried out by Heynowski and Scheumann, the isolation and repetition of certain details, and the addition of a very present commentary guide the viewer’s reading of the images and the promotional work that transformed these images into a ‘filmic scoop’. The distribution and success of Studio H&S’s Chilean cycle in France can be considered as one of the most striking examples of the paradoxes of the cinematographic relationships between France and the GDR: their success was achieved at the price of a non-­perception of their East German origin and of a non-­understanding of their ideological anchorage. The films were received as additional support for the Chilean cause, and in no way as a denunciation of the actions or complicity of the USA and the FRG. The recognition that Heynowski and Scheumann’s Chilean cycle received came at the cost of the GDR’s oblivion, but to the benefit of the Chileans oppressed by the Junta.



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Conclusion During the 1970s, film exchanges between the GDR and France were punctuated by a few highlights, culminating in the French success of the Chilean cycle of Studio H&S, and which were matched by disappointments – such as that of To Live in Peace – GDR 1974. In terms of the number of films exchanged and the number of laudatory reviews written, the 1970s were a peak in the history of film relationships between the two countries. After the success of the Chilean cycle of the Studio H&S, a few other DEFA films caught the attention of French festival programmers, but did not reach as many audiences. The 1980s continued in this vein with, in particular, major exports of French films to the GDR, but without any success comparable to that of the Studio H&S. In 1982, the death of Rainer W. Fassbinder and, in his wake, the end of the New German Cinema, led French festival curators to look for ‘new’ German films and filmmakers. Then, festivals such as La Rochelle and Cinéma du Réel successfully programmed a few DEFA filmmakers such as Konrad Wolf or Jürgen Böttcher. These exceptions aside, there was then an automatisation of film exchanges, with the regular export of French films to the GDR and the systematic sending of documentaries produced by Camera DDR to promote the image of the GDR abroad – films that seem to have been very little screened in reality. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the GDR led to a renewed interest in the DEFA in France. The filmmakers who were victims of censorship were the objects of several retrospectives in France. To this day, DEFA productions continue to be shown on some French screens – confidentially in the context of festivals, but nonetheless fairly consistently. Despite their success in the 1970s, the Chilean films of Studio H&S seem to have fallen into oblivion, even if their images (some of which have become iconic, such as those of the bombing of the Moneda on 11 September 1973) are still today part in the cinematographic writing of Chilean history. Perrine Val is a film historian and Assistant Professor at the Université Paul-­ Valéry Montpellier 3. She is the author of a thesis on cinematographic relationships between France and the GDR from 1946 to 1992 (published in 2021 by Presses Universitaires du Septentrion). Together with Lucie Česálková, Johannes Praetorius-­Rhein, and Paolo Villa, she is co-­editor of the volume Non fiction Cinema in Postwar Europe: Visual Culture and Reconstruction of Public Space (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). Her research focuses on transnational film relationships in the second half of the twentieth century.

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Notes   1. Martin, ‘Festival de Cannes’, 34.  2. Fickers, ‘Politique de la grandeur’ versus ‘Made in Germany’.   3. Allan and Heiduschke, Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts; Arndt-­Briggs et al., DEFA International.   4. Palma and Pozner, Mariages à l’européenne; Gallinari, ‘L’URSS au festival de Cannes’; Mityurova, ‘Tra apertura e diffidenza’.   5. Locatelli, ‘Wunschvorstellungen im Kalten Krieg: Austauschbeziehungen zwischen der DEFA und Italien’.  6. Akademie der Künste (Berlin), Bertolt-­ Brecht-­ Archiv 0889/001-­ 107 and Maetzig 627.  7. Stott, Crossing the Wall, 28.   8. Source: CNC.   9. Unifrance-­F ilm, Informations économiques, 1972. 10. Hans Rodenberg, ‘Konzeption für den Ankauf von Spielfilmen’ (30  March 1963), BArch DR 1/8926. 11. File ‘Comment vit le travailleur en RDA’, fonds Ciné-­Archives, AD 93. 12. Interview with Daniel Karlin made in Le Pré Saint-­Gervais, 24  November 2010. 13. The film is accessible online: https://www.cinearchives.org/Catalogue_d_exploitation​ -­494-­317-­0-0.html?db_q=daniel%2520karlin& (accessed 24 April 2023). 14. Compagnon and Moine, Chili 1973, un événement mondial. 15. Prognon, ‘La culture chilienne en exil, en France’, 205. 16. Barbat and Roudet, De l’Unité populaire à la transition démocratique. 17. Samuel Lachize, L’Humanité Dimanche. 18. Serge Toubiana, ‘J’étais, je suis, je serai’, 95. 19. ‘Certes, ces prises de vues ne nous font pas assister à des scènes de torture et d’exécution: tout est calme et propre, comme dans les camps nazis lorsque la Commission de la Croix-­Rouge annonçait sa visite, mais la réalité des faits est suffisamment connue ailleurs’, in Écran 36 (May 1975), 68. 20. See Jean-­Noël Darde’s online blog: http://cluster014.ovh.net/~chilirda/chili73/?page​ _id=3757 (accessed 24 April 2023).

Bibliography Akademie der Künste (Berlin), Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv 0889/001-107 and Maetzig 627. Allan, Sean and Sebastian Heiduschke (eds). Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016. Archives départementales de Seine-Saint-Denis (AD 94). File ‘Comment vit le travailleur en RDA’, Ciné-Archives collections (1973). Archives nationales. Unifrance-Film, Informations économiques (1972). Arndt-Briggs, Skyler et al. (eds). DEFA International: Grenzüberschreitende Filmbeziehungen vor und nach dem Mauerbau. Wiesbaden: Vs Verlag, 2012.



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Barbat, Victor and Catherine Roudé (eds). De l’Unité populaire à la transition démocratique: représentations, diffusions, mémoires cinématographiques du Chili, 1970–2013. Paris: Actes des journées d’étude INHA, 2013. Buffet, Cyril. Défunte DEFA: histoire de l’autre cinéma allemand. Paris and Condé-surNoireau: Cerf-Corlet, 2007. Bundesarchiv (BArch), DR 1/8926. Rodenberg, Hans. ‘Konzeption für den Ankauf von Spielfilmen’ (30 March 1963). Compagnon, Olivier and Caroline Moine (eds). Chili 1973, un événement mondial. Rennes: PUR, 2015. Dulphy, Anne et al. (eds). Les Relations culturelles internationales au XXème siècle: De la diplomatie culturelle à l’acculturation. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010. Écran 36 (May 1975), 68. Fickers, Andreas. ‘Politique de la grandeur’ versus ‘Made in Germany’: Politische Kulturgeschichte der Technik am Beispiel der PAL-SECAM-Kontroverse. Munich: Oldenburg Verlag, 2007. Fleury, Antoine and Lubor Jílek (eds). Une Europe malgré tout, 1945–1990: contacts et réseaux culturels, intellectuels et scientifiques entre Européens dans la guerre froide. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009. Jordan, Günter. Film in der DDR. Potsdam: Filmmuseum Potsdam, 2009. Lachize, Samuel. L’Humanité Dimanche (1975). Locatelli, Massimo. ‘Wunschvorstellungen im Kalten Krieg: Austauschbeziehungen zwischen der DEFA und Italien’, in Sky Arndt-Briggs et al. (eds), DEFA International (Wiesbaden: Vs Verlag, 2012), 291–303. Major, Patrick and Rana Mitter (eds). Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History. London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2004. Martin, Marcel. ‘Festival de Cannes’. L’Écran 27 (1974), 34. Mityurova, Ekaterina. ‘Tra apertura e diffidenza: il Sovinfilm e le coproduzioni cinematografiche franco-sovietiche negli anni della distensione’. Cinema e storia 6 (2017), 175–91. Moine, Caroline. ‘Entre propagande et Nouvelle Vague, le film documentaire est- allemand dans les années 1960’, Allemagne d’aujourd’hui 168 (2004), 191–207. ———. ‘Filmer pour témoigner: Documentaires et «Solidarité internationale» contre le régime de Pinochet’, in Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit (ed.), Lorsque Clio s’empare du documentaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), 195–207. ———. Cinéma et guerre froide: Histoire du festival de films documentaires de Leipzig (1955–1990). Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2014. Muñoz, Jorge and Jimena Paz Obregon Iturra (eds). Le onze septembre chilien: le coup d’État à l’épreuve du temps, 1973–2013. Rennes: PUR, 2015. Palma, Paola and Valérie Pozner (eds). Mariages à l’européenne: Les coproductions cinématogra-phiques intra-européennes depuis 1945. Paris: AFRHC, 2019. Prognon, Nicolas. ‘La culture chilienne en exil, en France, une forme de résistance à la Junte (1973–1994)’, Pandora, revue d’études hispaniques 8 (2008), 205–20. Steinle, Matthias. Vom Feindbild zum Fremdbild: Die gegenseitige Darstellung von BRD und DDR im Dokumentarfilm. Konstanz: UVK, 2003. Stott, Rosemary. Crossing the Wall: The Western Feature Film Import in East Germany. Bern: Peter Lang, 2011. Toubiana, Serge. ‘J’étais, je suis, je serai’. Les Cahiers du Cinéma (1973), 95. Val, Perrine. ‘Le documentaire en tant qu’arme dans la Guerre froide: Les films est-allemands du Studio H&S et leur réception en France’, in Christin Niemayer and Ulrich Pfeil

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(eds), Der deutschen Film im Kalten Krieg (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2014), 283–99. ———. Les relations cinématographiques entre la France et la RDA: entre camaraderie, bureaucratie et exotisme (1946–1992). Villeneuve d’Asq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2021. Westad, Odd Arne. The Cold War: A World History. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

CHAPTER 14

The Chilean Cultural Project during Unidad Popular (1970–1973) The Interview between Roberto Rossellini and Salvador Allende Margherita Moro

This chapter aims to draw attention to the interview between Roberto Rossellini and Salvador Allende entitled La forza e la ragione (Strength and Reason), which was broadcast by the Italian national TV channel Rai 1 on 15 September 1973, just four days after the coup d’état that led to the death of President Allende. During the broadcast, Roberto Rossellini and Enzo Biagi were in the studio to comment on the events that had just taken place. The interview was produced by San Diego Cinematografica and Orizzonte 2000, with Emidio Greco and Helvio Soto as directors, and Roberto Girometti as cinematographer. This case study allows us to take a closer look at the situation in Chile in the early 1970s, with particular reference to the figure of Salvador Allende. Starting from the broader scenario of the Cold War and leaving behind the more significant US–USSR bipolarity, the Chilean case is useful to reflect on certain practices and cultural aspects that distinguished it. Through the identification of the peculiarities of this documentary, we will explore Rossellini’s desire to use cinema and television as educational tools for audiences, and his interest in developing countries. The use of the interview as a form of access to and for propaganda for political projects allows us to investigate Allende’s cultural programme from the perspective of political and financial support for culture during his administration and the ­consequent

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international contacts. Alongside these themes, this chapter also aims to highlight the points of contact with Third Cinema and the ideas shared by the president and the filmmaker, such as the influence of Marx on their views and the use of knowledge as an instrument of liberation, reflecting on the role of cinema in Chile during the Cold War. The historical and cultural context in which the interview took place recalls the international movement away from imagining US–USSR bipolarism as the only hypothesis for articulating power, and towards examining a reality governed by several powers. These are the themes that Rossellini addresses in the interview by openly asking the president, in relation to the International Movement of Non-­Aligned Countries, which took its first steps at the Bandung Conference in 1955 and was consolidated with the Belgrade Conference in 1961, whether it is his intention to embrace that coalition of countries that did not want to side with the two great opposition blocs, the USA and USSR. In reply, the president declares that he wants to ensure that the United States establishes a dialogue with Third World countries, because countries like Chile are fighting ‘for social coexistence and not injustice’.1 The interview took place in 1971, at which point Roberto Rossellini had long since devoted himself to turning audiovisual media into educational tools. In these years the director ranged from past to contemporary history, attempting to deal with topics from science to world hunger. It was a period of experimentation from every point of view, both conceptual and technical, which captured the image of a man eager to ‘make known certain junctures in the history of our civilization, certain junctures that cannot be ignored if we want to know the world we live in, the society we live in’.2 Rossellini’s interest in developing countries began to manifest itself concretely towards the end of the 1950s, when among the director’s first experiences in South America, through several journeys in Brazil, was his unfinished attempt to make a film adaptation of Brazilian sociologist Josuè De Castro’s text Geography of Hunger, published in Italy in 1954.3 The end of the 1950s is also characterised by Rossellini’s relations with UNESCO, when he cultivated friendships with ‘third worldists’ such as Enrico Fulchignoni and Fereydoun Hoveyda.4 According to his son Renzo Rossellini, it appears that in those years, in addition to his interest in De Castro’s text, Rossellini began to read works by new Marxist sociologists such as Sweezy, Baran, Fromm, and Marcuse. The Brazilian project was not completed for various reasons, but it is important to note that in the same year that Rossellini began contacting De Castro, taking a trip to Brazil to try to make the arrangements for the film, negotiations with India took place, which between 1957 and 1959 allowed the director to film the documentary India Matri Bhumi and the ten episodes entitled L’India vista da Rossellini.5 For Rossellini, the trip to India was ‘a good example of how we can approach the reality we want to know in a demystifying way – that is, by removing the



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blinders imposed on us by tradition’.6 The Indian experience marks the ultimate shift from cinema to television, which led the director to firmly believe that ‘taking advantage of part of the time occupied by the mass media would be sufficient to make us mature and teach us “how to think rather than teach us what to think”’.7 Moreover, as underlined by Luca Caminati, ‘India and the India Project stand at an interesting crossroads even beyond Rossellini’s own career. Specifically, they [allow us] to think in larger terms of the geopolitical imaginary world of the 1960s, the role of nonaligned countries in the global sphere, and the intervention of moving images in this scenario’.8 By the 1970s, when Rossellini’s television work was already well established, he travelled more often to the United States to give a series of lectures at some of the country’s most important universities, to supervise the construction of a Media Centre at the Rice University campus in Houston, and to begin filming an unfinished project on science. In 1971 Rossellini also tried to travel to China to interview Mao Zedong, inaugurating what Adriano Aprà believed could have been, if pursued, a sort of political encyclopedia that would have merged the precise analysis of historical facts with the testimonies of the personalities who experienced them.9 In the same years, Rossellini worked on the documentary The World Population, also known as A Question of People, commissioned in 1973 by the United Nations Fund for Population Activities and presented at the ONU conference on World Population in Bucharest in 1974. The work, which at the Archivio Centrale di Stato in Rome is identified with the title Il problema della popolazione mondiale, was to be divided into three short films entitled Perché noi?, Terzo mondo: Quale ipotesi? and Mal d’Africa.10 The three titles hint at the desire to investigate some central topics in developing countries, which, if addressed correctly, would have allowed for more conscious action for the future.11 The examples briefly listed so far epitomise the themes and objectives that Rossellini attempted to pursue in the period of the interview with Allende. In a letter to Matteotti, Minister of Tourism and Entertainment, dated 31 October 1971, the director confirmed the need to ‘facilitate the promotion of voices that can be understood and participate in the great dialogue of all men’.12 There are also two significant aspects of the director’s practice that we can analyse through the interview with Allende. The first, as already pointed out, is the fact that in 1971 Rossellini, in addition to the meeting with Allende, tried to schedule an interview with Mao and had several meetings with scientists from the Rice University campus in Houston to prepare the unfinished ten-­ hour television programme on science. From what seems to be a tendency of the director to focus on the identification of macro-­areas that can then be investigated in detail via the analysis of personalities, historical and contemporary, and geographical locations, in 1971 a new stylistic trend emerged that led Rossellini towards an attempt to use the interview as a means of

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c­ ommunication to address important issues to be included in his vast project of spreading knowledge. The use of the interview seems to become for Rossellini a direct vehicle to the kind of education that had to learn from the history and the past, but above all, had to look to the future to provide the necessary tools for a collective awareness that would allow deliberate action towards progress. The second aspect concerns some methods of production that the director includes in his practice from 1966. As already mentioned, the interview with Allende was also produced by Orizzonte 2000, a production company founded by Renzo Rossellini in 1966. There is no space to describe specifically the history of Orizzonte 2000, but to illustrate some of the director’s production choices, it is fundamental to note that Orizzonte 2000 was born from his desire to build a productive organisation as autonomously as possible. Thanks to important documentation found in the archive of Rossellini’s son, it is possible to observe the production channels that the director wanted to access, such as schools, political institutions, industries, and private foundations.13 Moreover, in Rossellini’s design and production practice, national and international political figures played a crucial role for many years, like the Christian Democratic party in Italy, Pandit Nehru while Rossellini was in India, or the already mentioned De Castro in Brazil. In this regard it is interesting to mention at least one document, found in Renzo Rossellini’s private archive, which contains a draft of all the meetings that Rossellini held in Paris, presumably in February 1965, while looking for funding for the realisation of the twelve-­ hour La lotta dell’uomo per la sua sopravvivenza (1967–1969). Among different meetings with several ministers, there is evidence of two meetings with the FFHC committee, the committee of the Freedom From Hunger Project, engaged since 1960 in a major campaign to resolve the problem of hunger and malnutrition worldwide, and a second meeting with UNESCO. From the meeting with the FFHC emerges Rossellini’s will to be involved in the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) project, also requesting an economic contribution from several private industries.14 The interview with Allende fits into this trajectory of production that led the director to identify alternative ways to realise his projects. Working with institutions like UNESCO and FAO or building relationships with the new democracies of the non-­aligned countries gave Rossellini the chance to proceed through a conception of cinema different from the classic market economies. Rossellini wanted to work for public institutions with his utopian knowledge-­ based project by working independently with various public clients. The conversation with the president of Chile, which took place in May 1971, provided Rossellini with the opportunity to engage himself with a figure with whom he shared many ideals, including the awareness that ‘man counts for his intelligence, for his ability to understand, for his capacity to be absolutely conscious’.15



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The meeting between Rossellini and the president was organised thanks to the filmmaker’s son Renzo, who in 1970 was engaging with the revolutionary movements for democratic change in Latin America on behalf of the Algerian section of the ‘Tricontinental’ founded by Che Guevara. As Aijaz Ahmad wrote, the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) was founded at the end of the Conference, in January 1966, which, in turn, published the Tricontinental Bulletin that disseminated news of anti-­ imperialist struggles from all corners of the three continents, and the bimonthly theoretical organ, Tricontinental, which served as a forum for publishing the writings of anti-­imperialist thinkers from the oppressed nations.16

Renzo Rossellini had travelled to Chile to follow the electoral campaign Unidad Popular against former Christian Democrat president Frei. After the election was won, the Chilean president and his advisor Danilo Trelles asked Renzo to take charge of a campaign called ‘Operacion Verdad’ (Operation Truth) that would show the conditions in which Unidad Popular had inherited Chile. Renzo organised a visit for intellectuals and journalists from all over Europe, including Carlo Levi, Luigi Nono, and his father, who was in Texas at the time for several lectures.17 In addition, in those years Renzo Rossellini joined the radical groups of the Italian Left and in 1969 founded the San Diego Cinematografica, a film production company that began to specialise in documentary and political cinema in the Third World, depicting the experiences of liberation movements in many countries and offering them the technical support necessary to give voice to their struggles. Between 1969 and 1975 the production company produced documentaries on liberation struggles in Angola, Eritrea, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Cuba, and Vietnam, including, as mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, the co-­production of the interview between Rossellini and Allende with Orizzonte 2000.18 As Mariano Mestman wrote, ‘The San Diego laboratories operated as a regular meeting place of Third World filmmakers’.19 Moreover, given the ties between Renzo Rossellini and some exponents of Third Cinema,20 the interview between Roberto Rossellini and Allende should be included in the broader debate that was becoming increasingly important in those years about the birth of Third Cinema. In ‘Towards a Third Cinema’, published for the first time in 1969 in the magazine Tricontinental,21 Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino provide the by-­now well-­known taxonomy of cinema, dividing it into First, Second and Third Cinema, with the First being the cinema of spectacle, produced chiefly in Hollywood, and the Second being auteurist cinema. Third Cinema differs from

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them on several accounts. One of them concerns geography: Third Cinema is mainly produced in the Third World, in ‘developing countries’, arising from colonial oppression. Another characteristic of Third Cinema is its active character: its goal is encouraging and assisting people in their political struggles as opposed to merely representing the world or creating enticing spectacles.22

Together with other manifestos related to Third Cinema, like Glauber Rocha’s Aesthetic of Hunger (1965) and Julio García Espinosa’s For an Imperfect Cinema (1969), Solanas and Getino pointed out that one of the essential aspects of Third Cinema is to make the viewer an active participant in what is being narrated in the film. So ‘the notion of “film act”/ “film action” . . . as a tool to convert the spectator into “protagonist” of the screening event and “actor” (militant) in the political process, assumed a fundamental role’.23 As Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen point out, in the modes adopted by Third Cinema many points of contact with Marxism can be identified. For example, the authors compare the positions of Solanas and Getino with some of Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. In the eleventh thesis, Marx argues that ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’.24 So, paraphrasing Marx’s words, according to Mazierska and Kristensen, in the thought of Solanas and Getino the awareness can be found that, filmmakers have hitherto only represented the world; the point is to change it and, of course, they cannot change it by themselves; they have to involve the viewers. The change is meant to consist of liberation, primarily from inequalities resulting from capital accumulation, of which colonialism is the most extreme manifestation.25

The interview between Allende and Rossellini, beyond Renzo Rossellini’s ties and interests, turns out to be a product along the lines of the needs and goals of Third Cinema. Through the conversation with Rossellini Allende has the opportunity, as already mentioned, to share, in addition to his ideals, the battles he is trying to pursue for Chile. Allende, after years of struggles that led to his defeat in elections in 1952, 1958 and 1964, felt the need to show the world the injustices, and at the same time the potential, of his country. During his inaugural speech at the national stadium in Santiago on 5  November 1970, Allende described his victory as a victory of the workers, arguing that ‘the backwardness, ignorance, and hunger of our people and of all the peoples of the Third World exist and persist because they are beneficial to a privileged minority’. Finally, he lamented having inherited a Chile torn ‘by social inequalities, a society divided into antagonistic classes of exploited and exploiters, a society in which violence is embedded in the very institutions, a society that condemns men to



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insatiable greed, to the most inhuman forms of cruelty and to indifference in the face of the suffering of others’.26 Pablo Neruda describes Allende’s government as a collective government, headed by a man who fought until the end to abolish the corruption and exploitation of Chile. It follows that ‘Allende’s works and choices, of indelible national value, made the enemies of our liberation furious’.27 It seems clear, therefore, that for Allende the chance to conduct an interview with a director like Rossellini represented a great opportunity to explain in detail the political programme carried out by his party. It is essential to observe that ‘the oscillation of the coalition’s political project between the centralist State and the “people’s power” also took place in the cultural field’.28 In 1960, the State University founded the Cine Experimental Section and created the film library, while in 1962 a number of politically committed filmmakers founded the Cineclub de Viña del Mar, an organisation set up to produce 8 mm and 16 mm films and promote events linked to Latin American cinema. The holding of festivals and exhibitions represented an opportunity for Chilean filmmakers to meet authors from other Latin American countries and to build relationships with foreign directors. In Chile at the time, Joris Ivens made films that were part of his commitment to documenting revolutionary movements and liberation struggles, such as À Valparaiso (1963), in collaboration with Miguel Littín. Many filmmakers supported the Unidad Popular government and the figure of Allende, sharing his ideals and documenting his activities in works such as ¿Qué hacer? (1970) by Saul Landau, Raúl Ruiz and Nina Serrano, or El primer año by Patricio Guzmán (1971). Littín carried out a film interview with Allende entitled Compañero presidente (1971) and became president of Chile Films in 1970, which was relaunched as a state film company.29 The cultural drive promoted by Unidad Popular (UP) ‘led artists to participate, as never before in the history of the country, in the generation of a culture that broke with the elitist structures with which it had developed until then’.30 However, the absence of a national film law, which if proposed would have been blocked by Allende’s opponents, caused certain problems that pushed some of the filmmakers toward the creation of a language accessible to the masses. The use of television as a means of accelerating the ‘awareness of the workers’ led some of the filmmakers to create means of political education to raise the workers’ ideological level and, at the same time, explain to the masses what was really happening to provide them with elements of analysis.31 According to filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, while it is true that during Allende’s presidency the mass media saw a significant renaissance, it is equally important to emphasise that American companies tried to block Chilean productions in those years. The alliance between the American distribution companies and the national distributors led to the increase of ticket prices for cinemas and the suspension of releases

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of new films, creating a serious shortage of film material. This process led Allende’s opponents in parliament to claim that Marxist censorship deprived the country of great films from abroad and that the inefficiency of the Marxist government prevented negotiations with the Americans. The fact is that ‘the arrival of Unidad Popular cause[d] the desire, the need to design, imagine, create, make what for decades couldn’t happen in Chile’, and this drive led filmmakers to create independent production companies and establish agreements among themselves or with foreign companies.32 The point is that ‘UP is a program that combines elements of socialism, democracy, and populism, devised by a candidate whose approach is ideological and political but also pragmatic and personalist, and by an electoral and then governing coalition that is genuinely committed to creating the conditions for a transition towards democratic socialism but is deeply conflicted about the way forward’.33 Although Allende’s cultural drive was severely hindered by its opponents, who saw the ‘Chilean way to socialism’ promoted by Unidad Popular as a serious issue to be faced, it is clear that the interview with Rossellini was perfectly consistent with UP’s political-­cultural project. For Rossellini, therefore, who since the end of the 1950s, with his trip to India, had begun an anthropological investigation ‘aimed at the discovery of the historical-­materialist context’ that emphasised experience through the eyes of the protagonists,34 the interview with Allende was a new opportunity to identify with one of those ‘individuals of history’, and to share a vision with his interlocutor to examine things ‘“as if”/“from the point of view of”’, without compromising authorial influence.35 It is therefore not surprising that the conversation began with these words: ‘I would like to tell you, Mr Roberto Rossellini, how delighted I am to converse with you because you, with your experience, will be able to evaluate the usefulness of the struggle we are engaging in, and the reasons for our battle’.36 According to Renzo Rossellini, there were two meetings between Allende and the director. The former took place at the president’s private residence in Calle Tomás Moro, and the latter was the following day at the presidential studio in La Moneda Palace, where Renzo and his father also met General Pinochet.37 Rossellini found in Allende important commonalities, for instance concerning the use of mass media to increase the awareness of individuals and to make them active participants in contemporaneity, and concerning Marxist influences, to which the director intended to devote a film entitled Working for Humanity. We find ample traces of this project in Rossellini’s writings, and he saw in Marx’s intellectual process a ‘method aimed at deepening a meticulous analysis of human society: a true “anatomical” method’ through which to bring out the authenticity of each individual in order to create an equal and free human society.38



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As Patricio Guzmán points out, the Chilean cinema of the time, from an ideological point of view, had to face the problematic nature of the desire to create a revolutionary cinema within a bourgeois apparatus.39 In fact, ‘if the nationalist discourse of the 1960s drew sharp lines between First World and Third World, oppressor and oppressed, post-­nationalist discourse replaces such binarism with a more nuanced spectrum of subtle differentiations, in a new global regime where First World and Third World are mutually imbricated’.40 For Allende, revolution, seen from a sociological perspective, occurs when a ‘social class that is in the minority ceases to hold power in its own hands so that another social class, which is in the majority and which has been politically oppressed and economically exploited, comes to assume it in turn.’ He used these concepts to explain that what happened to Chile lay in the defeat suffered by the traditional sectors of the Chilean plutocracy at the hands of Christian democracy in 1964. Allende wanted to provide a very different view of Chile from the one fomented by the United States in those years, which, through the international press, described the political process implemented in Chile very negatively.41 Allende’s victory, and the events that took place in 1973 with the coup and Pinochet’s rise to dictatorial power, arose in a context animated by the USA’s fear of having to face another communist country. Famously, Kissinger said: ‘I see no reason why we should stand idly by and watch a country become communist because of the irresponsibility of its people. The issue is too important for Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.’42 In 1972 Allende himself stated at the United Nations General Assembly that since his electoral victory, his government had been ‘subjected to increasing external pressure of great importance, directed first to prevent the establishment of a government freely elected by the people and then to overthrow it’. He explained that since the beginning of his government in Chile, funding had been provided by various organisations, and that this funding had been brutally interrupted, thus exerting ‘coercion on an economically weak country’. Allende went so far as to claim that he was facing a serious head-­on conflict with the United States.43 Thus, in this context, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the interview conducted with Rossellini seemed to arise from an urgent need to take advantage of every possible medium, in this case cinema and television, to show the West the work carried out in Chile. The interview was the space within which to address issues related to the awareness of the people promoted by the president and the consequent desire not to allow a working-­class aristocracy. It is not difficult to imagine why Rossellini was fascinated by Allende’s desire to reason from a common point of view, solid because moved by a collectivity that animated his ideals and actions. Rossellini in his Un Esprit libre argued that it was time to direct the

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masses and political, economic, and technological powers toward authentic knowledge; the Industrial Revolution, and media among its outcomes, could provide the material and means to produce such shared knowledge and as Karl Marx says, a complete transformation of society could be achieved by abolishing classes. But to get there, Marx goes on, we must make ourselves capable of eradicating the fetishes we have built for ourselves and the habit of being alien to our authentic human nature. The only remedy to heal us, to cure us of alienation, is authentic knowledge.44

Thus, for Allende, popular awareness implies that workers understand how the revolution depends on them, and how deeply committed they need to be. There are many points shared by Allende and Rossellini, and they emerge several times during the interview as a common thread in the dialogue between the two. Allende’s desire to use cinema and television as essential and functional tools for his cultural programme stems from the acknowledgment, well explained in his answer on workers’ awareness, that without knowledge no individual is truly free. That is why during UP, the restructuring of the state was oriented towards the desire to provide services that could produce, for example, biweekly news programmes to be shown in cinemas; and that is why filmmakers finally took on the political commitment that allowed them to claim the creative freedom at the origin of art. The peculiar thing about that period, so lively in the cultural sphere in Chile, was that musicians, writers, painters, and in some cases even workers and students hybridised their respective activities to make cinema a common art that could restore the images and feelings of that historical moment, which for many represented freedom. In the world of culture in Chile, there was a climate of constant euphoria and excitement, and in the film industry, this culminated in the launch of a ‘Manifesto of Unidad Popular Filmmakers’ in 1970, which came to stand not only as a body of principles but also as a kind of programme guide for specific film works. The document is the product of a state of mind dominated by the extreme views of the most radical sector of the cultural world, which explains the aggressive subjectivity of its postulates, wrapped in rhetorical language. From the outset, the government found itself surrounded, on the one hand, by a fervent mass of followers and an unprecedented wave of support and solidarity worldwide, and on the other, by those local and international sectors whose hostility led them to seek its violent overthrow. In cinema, Chile Films was set up and energised as the axis of cultural policy in this field. Here the line drawn by the Manifesto dominated, which specifically proposed itself as a programme for films in predetermined thematic areas: the preservation of natural resources, the issues of social property, the peasant question, and the achievements of the working class. These were films that promoted the



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necessity of the social transformations proposed by UP, in the form of a militant cinema with an immediate propagandistic purpose.45 What is most fascinating about this interview, in addition to its unconventionality in some passages, is that Rossellini was not the classic interviewer towards Allende but acted as if a comparison between personalities was being made in which many more similarities than differences ultimately emerged.46 It follows that the encounter with Allende was for Rossellini ‘a sort of encounter with himself, with that part of himself that has transposed the clarity of his ideals and the fervor of his dynamism into politics. Allende is a Rossellini devoted to politics.’47 Rossellini’s last question clearly encapsulates the themes dear to the director in the early 1970s. Thus, citing the moon landing and the consequent awareness of being ‘a vessel sailing in the universe, towards immense distances’ where we human beings are a crew bound to its destiny, the director bluntly asks the president what future awaits them. Allende’s reply encapsulates with extreme clarity the point of contact between the president and the filmmaker. Allende’s hope is that the man of the twenty-­first century will be a man with a different conception of the universe, with a just sense of values, a man who does not think and act basically in terms of money, a man who is fortunate enough to realize that there are wider dimensions to concentrate his intelligence on, that intelligence that is his great creative strength. I have faith in man but as a real human being with the accent on his humanitarian qualities – a man who lives in a world where we are all brothers, not merely individuals seeking to live by exploiting others.48

In the words of Allende in 1971 we find a Rossellini who, when addressing the subject of intelligence, states that ‘it would be marvellous to have a society that made use of all possible human intelligence’.49 Thus, in conclusion, the approximately forty-­minute interview between Roberto Rossellini and Salvador Allende accurately portrays the situation in Chile in the early 1970s – a context that clearly reveals the dramatic implications of a country that was struggling to confront one of the world’s two superpowers during the Cold War. On 11 September 1973, a coup d’état took place that resulted in the death of President Allende and the rise to power of General Pinochet. This was an event that prevented Chile from achieving the freedoms that the socialists tried to introduce and defend. The coup also greatly affected the Chilean film industry of the time. With the destruction of the Chile Film factories, most of the filmmakers active in those years were forced to leave Chile, living in hiding. Gabriel García Márquez recalls that ‘the tragedy happened in Chile, to

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the detriment of Chileans, but it must go down in history as something that inevitably happened to all men of this time’.50 Margherita Moro (PhD University of Udine) is a research fellow at La Sapienza University of Rome. She has extensively researched Roberto Rossellini’s TV production and unfinished projects. In 2015 she carried out research activities at the Menil Collection in Houston (Texas, USA) where she surveyed Rossellini’s unfinished science project.

Notes   1. Quotations from the interview are from a transcript found in Renzo Rossellini’s private archive.  2. Rossellini, Il mio metodo, 420.   3. De Castro, Geografia della fame.   4. Contenti and Rossellini, Chat Room, 79.   5. For an overview, see Cassarini, Miraggio di un film.  6. Roncoroni, Quasi un’autobiografia, 121.  7. Rossellini, Un esprit libre, 178.  8. Caminati, Traveling Auteurs, 59.   9. Aprà, ‘Rossellini documentarista?’, 129. 10. Rome, Archivio Centrale di Stato, CF 06691, b. 805, ID 2955. 11. Rome, Biblioteca Luigi Chiarini, ‘Fondo Roberto Rossellini. Manoscritti e dattiloscritti’, Ros 01 004 01 A-­B, b. 1, f. 1, inv. 64173. 12. Rome, Biblioteca Luigi Chiarini, ‘Fondo Roberto Rossellini. Manoscritti e dattiloscritti’, Ros 01 002 05, b. 3, f. 7, inv. 62054. 13. The production company Orizzonte 2000 was also founded as a result of support provided to Rossellini by the nonprofit foundation Horizon 2000, of which prominent American industrialists were members. 14. Renzo Rossellini’s private archive. 15. Rossellini, Il mio metodo, 440. 16. Che Guevara did not attend the conference since he was on his mission of revolutionary solidarity in Africa, but he drafted his message not for the conference itself but for a special inaugural issue of the journal that was published in April 1967. For an overview, see Ahmad, ‘Introduction’. 17. For an overview, see Contenti and Rossellini, Chat Room, 114; Izzi Benedetti, Oltre il Neorealismo, 179–88. 18. Mestman, ‘Postales del cine militante argentino en el mundo’. 19. Mestman, ‘From Algiers to Buenos Aires’. 20. Mestman, ‘Postales del cine militante argentino en el mundo’, footnote 26. 21. Solanas and Getino, ‘Towards a Third Cinema’. 22. Mazierska and Kristensen, Third Cinema, 2. 23. Buchsbaum and Mestman, ‘Documenting Third Cinema’, 7.



The Chilean Cultural Project during Unidad Popular 243

24. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 199. 25. Mazierska and Kristensen, Third Cinema, 2. 26. Allende, La forza e la ragione, 3–22. 27. Neruda, Confesso che ho vissuto, 449–53. 28. Ayo Schmiedecke, ‘Los intelectuales’, 17. 29. Prudenzi, ‘Cile’. 30. Rojas Castro, ‘Poder popular’, 6. 31. Guzmán, ‘1970–1973’, 212. 32. Ibid., 214. 33. Stabili, ‘Cile 1970–1973’, 151. 34. Caminati, Roberto Rossellini documentarista, 56. 35. Ibid., 66. 36. Transcript from Renzo Rossellini’s private archive. 37. Contenti and Rossellini, Chat Room, 115. 38. Rossellini, Il mio metodo, 472–76. 39. Guzmán, ‘1970–1973’, 210. 40. Stam, Beyond Third Cinema, 33. 41. Rondolino, Rossellini, 309–10. 42. Giovannetti, Le regole del gioco, 229, note 22. 43. Allende, La forza e la ragione, 69. 44. Rossellini, Un esprit libre, 84–85. 45. Mouesca, El documental chileno, 72–82. 46. Marzi, ‘Rossellini in Cile’, 9. 47. Ibid., 8. 48. Transcript from Renzo Rossellini’s private archive. 49. Rossellini, Utopia Autopsia 1010, 63. 50. García Márquez, ‘Chile el golpe’, 28.

Bibliography Ahmad, Aijaz. ‘Introduction’, in Guevara, Ernesto, On Socialism and Internationalism (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2020), 17–31. Allende, Salvador. La forza e la ragione [Strength and Reason]. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1973. Aprà, Adriano. ‘Rossellini documentarista?’, in Luca Caminati, Roberto Rossellini documentarista: Una cultura della realtà (Rome: Carocci, 2012), 125–31. Ayo Schmiedecke, Natália. ‘Los intelectuales y la cuestión de la cultura popular: interpretaciones e iniciativas durante la Unidad Popular’, in Loreto López González and Jaume Peris Blanes (eds), ‘La vía cultural al socialismo: Políticas de la cultura en el chile de la Unidad Popular’, Kamchatka 17 (2021), 15–41. Buchsbaum, Jonathan and Mariano Mestman. ‘Documenting Third Cinema (1968–1979): Overlooked and Little-Known Documents Around Third Cinema’. Framework 62(1) (2021), 5–21. Caminati, Luca. Roberto Rossellini documentarista: Una cultura della realtà. Rome: Carocci, 2012.

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———. Travelling Auteurs: The Geopolitics of Postwar Italian Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2024. Cassarini, Maria Carla. Miraggio di un film: Carteggio De Castro-Rossellini-Zavattini. Livorno: Erasmo, 2017. Contenti, Osvaldo and Renzo Rossellini. Chat Room Roberto Rossellini. Rome: Luca Sossella, 2002. De Castro, Josué. Geografia della fame. Bari: Leonardo da Vinci, 1954. García Márquez, Gabriel. ‘Chile, el golpe y los gringos’. Alternativa (1) (1974), 15–28. Giovannetti, Giorgio. Le regole del gioco: Parlamento e lotta politica in Italia, 1948–1994. Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per l’Età Moderna e Contemporanea, 2010. Guzmán, Patricio. ‘1970–1973: El cine chileno durante Salvador Allende’, in Loreto López González and Jaume Peris Blanes (eds), ‘La vía cultural al socialismo: Políticas de la cultura en el chile de la Unidad Popular’, Kamchatka 17 (2021), 207–16. Izzi Benedetti, Gabriella. Oltre il Neorealismo. Florence: Mauro Pagliai, 2020. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology: Parts I and III. New York: International Publishers, 1947. Marzi, Pier Dario. ‘Rossellini in Cile: Allende, la balena e i granchi’. Cabiria 45/46(181– 182) (2015–2016), 8–16. Mazierska, Ewa and Lars Kristensen (eds). Third Cinema, World Cinema and Marxism. New York, London, Oxford, New Delhi and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2020. Mestman, Mariano. ‘Postales del cine militante argentino en el mundo’. Kilómetro 111 (2) (2001), 7–30. ———. ‘From Algiers to Buenos Aires: The Third World Cinema Committee (1973–1974). Journal of Contemporary Film 1(1) (2002), 40–53. Mouesca, Jacqueline. El Documental Chileno. Santiago: LOM, 2005. Neruda, Pablo. Confesso che ho vissuto. Turin: Einaudi, 2016. Prudenzi, Angela. ‘Cile’, in Enciclopedia del cinema (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2003), 5–7. Rojas Castro, Braulio. ‘Poder popular, arte y política cultural en la vía chilena al socialismo’. Cahiers du GRM 19 (2022), 1–20. Roncoroni, Stefano. Quasi un’autobiografia. Milan: Mondadori, 1987. Rondolino, Gianni. Rossellini. Turin: UTET, 2006. Rossellini, Roberto. Utopia Autopsia 1010. Rome: Armando, 1974. ———. Un esprit libre: Ne doit rien apprendre en esclave. Paris: Fayard, 1977. ———. Il mio metodo, ed. Adriano Aprà. Venice: Marsilio, 2006. Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino. ‘Towards a Third Cinema’, in Robert Stam and Toby Miller (eds), Film and Theory: An Anthology (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 [1969]), 265–86. Stabili, Maria Rosaria. ‘Cile 1970–1973: Allende, la Unidad Popular, il golpe’. Rivista dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea (14) (2015), 141–65. Stam, Robert. ‘Beyond Third Cinema: The Aesthetics of Hybridity’, in Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake (eds), Rethinking Third Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 31–48.

CHAPTER 15

‘Ideological Threat of Italian Movies’ The KGB, Mafia, Punk Rock and Rise of Neo‑Fascism among Soviet Youth (1982–1985) Sergei Zhuk

At the end of the 1970s, the KGB officers in Soviet Ukraine initiated a series of special operations against the rise of neo-­fascism among Soviet high school and college students. Hundreds of students in Chernivtsy, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk were arrested for openly expressing neo-­Nazi and neo-­fascist views, wearing various Fascist insignia, such as swastika, idealising Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, worshipping the figures of Ukrainian nationalism, such as Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, listening to ‘Fascist punk rock’ music, and organising a movement against ‘a rule of Communist Mafia’ in Soviet Ukraine. As it turned out, those Soviet students borrowed the images of young neo-­fascists and the notion of the Mafia from numerous Italian feature films, which were selected, awarded and sponsored by various Moscow International Film Festivals for screening in the USSR. Using archival documents, contemporary periodicals, personal diaries and interviews with participants of the events, this chapter explores how the particular forms of cultural consumption, especially the consumption of Italian films and Anglo-­ American rock music by young people of Soviet Ukraine during late socialism, contributed to a formation of their new cultural practices, reminiscent of neo-­ fascism, distancing themselves from the Soviet political system, which they associated with ‘the Mafia state.’ In the autumn of 1982, in their letters to the communist leadership of Soviet Ukraine, the KGB officers demonstrated their concern about­ ‘the

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­ bvious expressions of Neo-­Nazism and Fascism’ among Soviet Ukrainian o youth. ‘Since 1979,  – they reported in September 1982,  – in the city of Chernivtsy, the unknown persons left the numerous pictures of Fascist swastika on sidewalks, the walls of public buildings and telephone booths.’1 The KGB established the identity at least five former students from the local technical schools (all of them were seventeen-­nineteen years old), who were engaged in those ‘Neo-­Fascist acts.’ According to the KGB description of their prophylactic measures, it turned out that after watching the Italian film San Babila ore 20: un delitto inutile (San Babila–8 PM, Carlo Lizzani, 1976), ‘a film about the outrages of Fascist youth [in Italy],’ those young people ‘demonstrated the strong interest in fascist ideology, symbols and paraphernalia.’2 Eventually, the KGB experts realised that this Italian feature film of 1976 was directed by Carlo Lizzani. It was entered into the 10th Moscow International Film Festival in 1977. The film was inspired by the violent events that occurred in Piazza San Babila in Milan in 1975, where groups of neo-­fascists and anarchist communists were the protagonists. Four Milanese boys were part of a fascist group, claiming with all sorts of violence a new order based on the ideas of the fascist movement of ‘squadrism’ of Benito Mussolini. The boys were fighting with the institutions and against the youth group of the communists and the anarchists, and often collided during the protests, with violent outcomes. One day the leader of the fascist group asked Franco, the most insecure boy of the brigade, to perform a violent and demonstrative act against a randomly chosen communist boy, in order to redeem his ‘honour.’ So, one night in Piazza San Babila the boys met a couple of engaged young man and woman, dressed in red (believed to be communists), and the group’s madness pushed the boys to chase them, and to stab them. Franco was shocked and ran away from home, denouncing the assault to the police. The KGB officer realised that young Ukrainian imitators of Italian neo-­fascism were especially influenced by the images of modern fashionable dress and behaviour models of the young neo-­ fascist heroes from this Italian film.3 The young Ukrainian imitators of Italian neo-­fascists organised their meetings at a downtown Chernivtsy café, listened to rock music and, ‘being under the influence of the foreign radio stations, they used to listened at home, they pronounced in public the apparent anti-­ Soviet judgements’ about Soviet politics.4 Two of those students, leaders of that group, ‘openly spoke out about the necessity of the replacement of the political system in the USSR, the transfer of political power to “the military regime” and applying in state management of the fascist methods of political rule,’ and they ‘worshipped the figures of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism, such as Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, who could save Ukraine from corruption.’ As the police discovered, these students demonstrated in public with large images of swastikas. They were suspected in the public



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burning of the state Soviet banner on the façade of a public building in downtown Chernivtsy on 10 May 1981.5 These students referred to the Soviet political system as a ‘Mafia State,’ which had to be replaced with the strong authoritarian power of the fascist state. The police discovered that major groups of young Soviet imitators of neo-­fascism in major Ukrainian cities compared the Communist party system to ‘Mafia rule.’ And again, all the arrested Ukrainian neo-­fascists emphasised an influence of the Italian films about the organised crime on them.6

Soviet Notions about the Mafia Among Soviet audiences, the first images of organised crime in the capitalist West and notions about the Mafia came from the film screen, from the political films directed by the Italian film director Damiano Damiani.7 Two of his best films about organised crime were popular in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s. Soviet ideologists and the KGB officers considered them as a serious alternative to other Western films about crime. Damiani’s first film about the Italian Mafia was an adaptation of Leonardo Sciascia’s novel The Day of the Owl. In this film, released in 1968, the young police inspector Bellodi (Franco Nero) begins his investigation of Mafia crimes in Sicily but encounters a wall of silence and isolation. As a result, all his efforts to discover the truth about these crimes fail. This film was released in the Soviet Union in 1969 under the title Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl, Damiano Damiani, 1968). From the first days of the film’s release, Soviet ideologists used it as their counter-­propaganda to the Western style of life.8 On 19 July 1970, a twelve-­year-­old boy noted in his personal diary, ‘Tonight my mom and I watched an Italian color film The Day of the Owl in the summer movie theater. This is a detective story about the killings committed by the Mafia organisation. How fortunate we are that we live here in the Soviet country! It looks like the Mafia is ruling the West!’9 This was the exact reaction which Soviet ideologists hoped to get from the Soviet audience after watching Damiani’s film. These films offered a criticism of the Western capitalist system, a vituperative critique which had already been part of everyday Soviet propaganda.10 The most successful and impressive political film about the Mafia was Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della Repubblica (Confessions of a Police Captain, Damiano Damiani, 1971). According to Howard Hughes, this ‘remains Damiani’s best and most controversial film.’ In this film, Italian film star Franco Nero plays Traini, ‘a young district attorney assigned to investigate an assassination attempt with police captain Bonavia (Martin Balsam).’11 Eventually, Traini discovers that his supervisors, representatives of the elite of Italian jurisprudence, are connected to

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the Mafia. All the information about the new facts of Mafia criminal activities, which Captain Bonavia has submitted to the young district attorney’s office, becomes known to Mafia leaders. Bonavia realises that he is powerless in the struggle with the Mafia because even his bosses are part of the same system of the organised crime. In an act of despair, acting alone, he shoots and kills a leader of the Mafia group. Bonavia is indicted for premeditated manslaughter and sent to prison. The final scene is the most tragic and heart-­rending in the film. In this scene a bleeding Bonavia is dying in a prison film theatre after being stabbed in the prison dining room by the criminals who had worked for the Mafia. Everybody is laughing at the jokes of a comedy film in the prison film theatre. Nobody pays attention to the former police captain who is silently dying in his theatre seat. Confessions of a Police Captain was shown for the first time in the Soviet Union as part of the programme of the Seventh Moscow International Film Festival during the summer of 1971. Even traditionally conservative Soviet film critics who covered the Moscow Film Festival praised Damiani’s film as ‘an important contribution to a progressive humanistic tradition of the Western filmmakers.’12 Soviet ideologists in Ukraine immediately followed this positive evaluation of Damiani’s film. They promoted the release of this film all over Ukraine during the autumn of 1972. Confessions of a Police Captain reached Ukrainian cities at the end of September 1972 and immediately became a blockbuster in local film theatres.13 Moreover, this film became a real box-­office success all over the Soviet Union. According to the All-­Union readers’ survey of Sovetskii ekran, Confessions of a Police Captain was the most popular foreign film of 1972 in the USSR after the British film Romeo and Juliet (Franco Zeffirelli, 1968) which beat all the records of foreign film releases in the country.14 Even two years after its release in the Soviet Union, Damiani’s film remained competitive with new Western adventure films, such as Mackenna’s Gold (Jack Lee Thompson, 1969) and The Sandpit Generals (Hall Bartlett, 1971).15 Soviet ideologists in Ukraine were always more cautious and conservative than their colleagues in Moscow. Conservative attitudes influenced the Ukrainian Soviet apparatchiks who were responsible for the release of foreign films in the republic. The positive evaluations of Moscow of Carlo Lizzani’s films about Italian neo-­fascist youth also influenced the Ukrainian Communist ideologists, who ignored the critical remarks of the Ukrainian KGB officers about the ‘ideological threat of the Italian movies.’16 During the 1970s, the Italian films about the Mafia became the most important ideological tool for diverting young filmgoers from their favourite Westerns and foreign adventure films. On the one hand, Soviet ideologists tried to use Damiani’s films to discredit the popularity of the West in the popular imagination of the local filmgoers. On the other hand, they tried to stop a rise in crime among the



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local youth. Instead of the films about the French fictional criminal Fantomas, or Japanese martial arts, or Hollywood Westerns, which triggered various forms of criminal activities, Soviet ideologists promoted anti-­Mafia films.17 The official promotion of Damiani’s films did not stop the rise of the crime among the Ukrainian youth. Instead, more and more filmgoers began using the term ‘Mafia’ in their description of the local everyday realities of corruption in Soviet organs of power – which had failed to prevent a catastrophic growth of crime in Ukrainian cities. And the most articulate consumers of the Italian anti-­Mafia films were the young Ukrainian imitators of neo-­fascism, who applied the Mafia model to the realities of Soviet domestic politics.18 At the same time, the police discovered another unusual source of inspiration for the young Ukrainian neo-­Nazis. It was Anglo-­American rock music, known under such alien names as ‘punk’ and ‘heavy metal.’19

Soviet Interpretations of Punk In Soviet Ukraine, the KGB campaign against the young imitators of neo-­ fascism converged with the old ideological campaigns against the ‘ideological dangers of Western popular music.’ This campaign, which started in the 1960s as a struggle against the ‘beat music’ of the Beatles and Rolling Stones, reached a peak in 1980–1981 as a new campaign against ‘Fascist punks.’ This campaign was a reaction, to some extent, to confusing information in the central Soviet periodicals, where such new cultural phenomena as British punks were presented as neo-­fascists, as ‘skinheads.’ Therefore, all Western music, which was associated with the punk movement and used fascist symbols, had to be prohibited for mass consumption in the Soviet Union. According to Soviet music critics, the periodicals’ description of punks as fascists confused and disoriented thousands of communist ideologists in provincial cities of Soviet Ukraine: The only thing anyone knew about punks was that they were ‘fascists’ because that’s how our British-­based correspondents had described them for us. Several angry feature articles appeared in the summer and fall of 1977 with lurid descriptions of their unsavoury appearance and disgraceful manners, including one that quoted sympathetically a diatribe from the Daily Telegraph. To illustrate all this, a few photos of ‘monster’ with swastikas were ­printed . . . T ­ he image of punks as Nazis was established very effectively, and in our country, as you should understand, the swastika will never receive a positive reaction, even purely for shock value.20

For many discotheque activists the new anti-­punk campaign was a shock. In Soviet Ukraine the local disc jockeys played the music of British punk rock

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bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash as an obligatory, ideological part of their dance programmes during 1979 and 1980. This was in accord with a critique of the ‘political agenda’ of progressive rock and punk musicians offered by Rovesnik, a central Komsomol magazine. It praised the anti-­capitalist spirit of ‘young English rock musicians’ who followed the traditions of legendary, intellectual rock bands like Pink Floyd. Komsomol journalists from Moscow wrote about the collaboration between the Clash and British communists in their struggle against racism and neo-­fascism, and about the criticism of capitalist reality in Pink Floyd’s album ‘The Wall.’21 KGB officials and Communist ideologists in Ukraine followed conflicting ideological recommendations from their ideological supervisors: they interfered in local youth clubs and banned the music of any musician who was associated with the word ‘punk.’ According to the KGB’s taxonomy from Kyiv, the ‘punk movement’ was considered to be a part of international neo-­fascism. Therefore, music by the Clash or the Sex Pistols was forbidden in all regions of Soviet Ukraine as early as 1980.The Soviet ideologists used ‘a description of a British punk from the atlas of TASS (Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union),’ the secret digest of foreign press for Communist propagandists: the main identifying sign of a fascist punk was his shaven head. Apparently, it was a misunderstanding because the author of the original article dealt with British skinheads, and he compared punks and skinheads as the most fashionable trends in Western popular culture. In a confusing translation from English into Russian, a typical punk had shaved temples or, to put it correctly, according to this description, a punk’s hair had to be removed over his ears. When this interpretation was included in an ideological portrait of ‘fascist punk’, Komsomol ideologists were ready to identify as a punk any young man with long hair and a ponytail. As a result, many heavy metal fans from Soviet Ukraine were arrested during 1983–1984 because the ignorant policemen were not able to tell one fashionable hairstyle from another or distinguish between ‘hard rock’ and ‘punk rock.’22 Police and Komsomol activists thought punk and fascist were the same. All Komsomol propagandists and people in charge of discotheques in Soviet Ukraine received special notices about punk ideology with Russian translation of British punk phrases. This information was reprinted in many publications by Ukrainian journalists who covered this anti-­punk campaign. The journalists of the youth periodicals quoted the punk slogans: ‘Live by today’s day only! Do not think about tomorrow! Do not give a damn about all these spiritual crutches of religion, utopia and politics! Forget about this. Enjoy your day. You are young, and do not hurry to become a new young corpse [sic!].’ Ukrainian journalists usually added their comments about the anti-­human essence of the ‘fascist punk music’: ‘These were slogans of punks, preachers of bestial cynicism and meanness, who were the real spiritual mongrels of the twentieth century.’23



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Symbols of Nazi and Other Anti-Soviet Images and Ideas Anti-­punk hysteria resulted in the prohibition of bands that were tremendously popular among the Soviet high school and vocational school students. AC/DC and Kiss had nothing to do with the punk movement at all, yet after 1980, the local Komsomol apparatchiks officially considered them ‘fascist, anti-­Soviet bands.’ Komsomol ideologists in Kyiv ‘discovered’ elements of insignia from Nazi Germany in the names of these bands. The combination ‘SS’ presented as a symbol of lightning in their logos was interpreted as an expression of the musicians’ fascist ideology. Komsomol leaders in Soviet Ukraine followed the recommendations of the Kyiv ‘experts’ and tried to ban the music of ‘fascist rock-­n-rollers.’24 Soviet cultural consumption of Western products was always very limited and censored. On the one hand, forms of this consumption were regulated by various ideological requirements, and on the other hand, they were influenced by consumers’ demands. The more the ideological experts tried to ban a product, the more desirable it became. This happened with music by Kiss and AC/DC, which became the most profitable item sold on the music markets all over Ukraine. Both central Komsomol and local periodicals disoriented and confused their readers when they directly connected criminal anti-­Soviet and neo-­fascist behaviour with ‘forbidden music.’ The first public scandal, which involved both ‘fascist music’ and the display of ‘fascist symbols’ and was recorded by the KGB, took place in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk during the autumn of 1982. The city police arrested two college students, Igor Keivan and Aleksandr Plastun, who had their own collections of Western music records with ‘fascist symbols’ and who demonstrated their ‘Neo-­Nazi’ behaviour in downtown Dnipropetrovsk. These students were dressed in T-­shirts with images of Kiss and AC/DC which attracted the policemen who interpreted such images as ‘fascist’ ones. After the arrest of Kievan and Plastun and the confiscation of their ‘fascist’ records, the police sent information about these students’ anti-­Soviet behaviour to their colleges. In December of 1982 the entire city and region of Dnipropetrovsk experienced the beginning of the anti-­fascist and anti-­punk campaign. Dnipropetrovsk City Committee of CPSU approached Nadezhda A. Sarana, an old communist and member of the anti-­fascist resistance group during the Second World War, to write a letter about the dangerous fashion of ‘Fascist punks.’ On 22 December 1982, they staged an open public meeting with participation of all communist and Komsomol activists in downtown Dnipropetrovsk. During this meeting all activists supported Sarana’s letter against punks and ‘declared war on the punk movement’ in Soviet Ukraine. Later, under KGB pressure, the local ideologists organised a special public trial of Keivan, Plastun and another young punk Vadim Shmeliov who were

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expelled from Komsomol and their colleges in January 1983. The KGB officers were especially outraged about an attempt by Keivan and Plastun to ‘interpret’ this punishment as a violation of their human rights. From this time on, all Komsomol organisations of the region began to purge Komsomol members who were suspected of unusual enthusiasm for the forbidden music. The KGB used this trial in Dnipropetrovsk as the model for ‘active measures’ in the whole of Ukraine.25 The KGB also noticed ‘the punks’ dangerous presence’ during a concert tour of the Estonian hard rock band Magnetic Bend in Ukraine, which visited such Ukrainian cities as Zhitomir, Lutsk, Vinnytsa, and Lviv in September 1982. The KGB witnessed the expressions of ‘Fascist punk’ behaviour during this tour by Ukrainian fans of this Estonian band. Komsomol ideologists who organised this tour were punished and demoted according to the official KGB complaints. More than ninety fans who demonstrated pro-­punk and anti-­ Soviet behaviour were arrested by the police and ‘prophylactirovany’ by the KGB (a specific kind of interrogation). All of them confessed that they also liked Neo-­Nazi characters from the Italian film by Carlo Lizzani.26 According to KGB officers, ‘a youth culture of fascist music’ was also connected to an idealisation of Hitler and Ukrainian nationalist leaders during the Second World War, such as Stepan Bandera. From 1938, Bandera led the radical branch of the Organization of the Ukrainian Nationalists, which became a centre of military resistance to the Soviet Army after 1944 in the Western Ukraine. After the suppression of the anti-­Soviet activities of the Bandera troops, Bandera became a heroic symbol for many Ukrainian patriots. In 1983 and 1984 the police arrested members of ‘a fascist Banderite group’ who were students of the Dnipropetrovsk agricultural college. These students  – Konstantin Shipunov and his five followers – listened to ‘fascist rock music, such as AC/DC, Kiss, Iron Maiden and Sex Pistols, organised their own ‘party’ and popularised the ideas of Nazi leaders and the Ukrainian nationalist politicians. They criticised the Russification of cultural life in Ukraine, emphasised the necessity of Ukrainian independence from the Soviet Union and insisted on protecting the national rights of all Ukrainian patriots.27 The criminal cases of Ukrainian ‘fascist’ heavy metal fans revealed the surprising connections between different forms of cultural consumption in the closed city during the 1982–1984 period. The members of Onushev’s and Shipunov’s groups who were arrested confessed that they were inspired by the images of ‘clean, intelligent and civilized’ Nazi officers portrayed in the Soviet TV series Semnadtsat’ mgnoveniy (Seventeen Moments of Spring, Tatyana Lioznova, 1973). Based on the novel by Yulian Semenov, a famous Soviet writer of mystery and spy novels, this TV film about Stirlitz (Vyacheslav Tikhonov), a Soviet agent posing as a Nazi officer in Hitlerite Germany in the spring of 1945, during the final months of the Second World War, became



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a real blockbuster during the 1970s through to the early 1980s in the USSR. Many ‘fascist’ heavy metal fans and local ‘punks’ tried to imitate the dress and behaviour of the Nazi characters from this old Soviet TV film. Some members of those groups also referred to Carlo Lizzani’s film about Milanese neo-­fascists.28 Another relatively new detail revealed during this anti-­punk campaign was a shock for the KGB officers. All members of Dnipropetrovsk ‘fascist punk’ groups referred to the Soviet political system as ‘the corrupt Mafia state.’ After the public trial of Keivan and Plastun in 1982, when the student ‘punks’ had publicly accused the police of a violation of the students’ human rights, as a proof of Soviet police’s Mafia origin, the KGB recommended that the local ideologists in the future should avoid such public trials over ‘intellectual fascist punks.’29 As early as December 1983, Dnipropetrovsk regional Komsomol committee reported to the Ukrainian Komsomol Central Committee to Kyiv that in February-­March 1983, local ideologists encountered the beginning of punk movement in the city of Dnipropetrovsk. But during spring to autumn of that year, they mobilised all activists and ‘Soviet patriots,’ organised special counter-­propaganda events all over the city and region as well, and finally stopped this ‘fascist movement.’ A secretary of Dnipropetrovsk regional committee, O. Fedoseiev, finished this report with a phrase: ‘As a result of our anti-­punk campaign, there are practically no young people, who would imitate “punks” in the region.’30 In 1984–1985, the Ukrainian police discovered new groups of ‘fascist-­ punks’ with hundreds of their followers. Only a few of them had anything to do with Nazi ideology or fascism. All twenty groups, arrested by the police, used various fascist symbols and paraphernalia, painted their faces ‘in punk fashion’ and had shaven temples without hair. Because the Komsomol said repeatedly that the main sign of punk behaviour was ‘shaven temples of the head,’ this was enough to be arrested in Soviet Ukraine during 1983–1985. Hundreds of rock music fans in the region of Dnipropetrovsk were detained and their music records and audiotapes confiscated as a result of the anti-­ punk and anti-­fascist campaign.31

Conclusion According to contemporaries, the KGB anti-­fascist campaigns in Soviet Ukraine did not stop the young Ukrainians’ fascination with the products of Western popular culture, such as feature films and pop music, nor their idealisation of modern images of neo-­fascists from the West. Moreover, they contributed to the immense popularity of forbidden Western cultural products among young

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consumers and also among their ideological supervisors who had already greatly appreciated and enjoyed these products.32 The KGB officers and local ideologists noticed a new surprising result of the anti-­punk campaign in Soviet Ukraine. During 1982–1984 the young ‘fascist punks’ openly criticised Soviet political system as the ‘Mafia state.’ The most unpleasant discovery for the local KGB officers, who supervised student activities in the Ukrainian cities, was the involvement of the political elements in the discussion of the forbidden Western cultural products such as rock music. During the traditional old anti-­hippie campaigns in Soviet Ukraine, which had started as early as 1967, the KGB was always afraid of the ‘politicisation’ of cultural consumption by local youth. In contrast to the peaceful and relatively apolitical Soviet hippies’ acts, Ukrainian ‘Fascist punks,’ inspired by Italian films and Anglo-­American rock music, demonstrated a dangerous alternative to the political behaviour of Komsomol members. They offered an obvious political programme of using neo-­fascist cultural practices and the legacies of Ukrainian Stepan Bandera’s nationalism to challenge the Soviet political system as the ‘corrupt Mafia state,’ which had to be replaced by the ‘more efficient, honest and stable’ authoritarian system. Eventually, many Ukrainian punks demanded ‘the liberation of Ukraine from Russian exploitation.’33 These trends of mixtures between popular culture and political nationalism among young Ukrainians had survived the KGB persecution and they are now being revived in post-­Soviet Ukraine as well. Paradoxically today, the post-­ Soviet regime of Russia, led by a former KGB officer, still implements the old Soviet KGB ‘anti-­fascist narrative’ to blame and attack its neighbour, independent Ukraine, while using the brutal terrorist genocidal means of suppression, reminiscent of the ‘fascist Mafia’ state, which was a major goal of criticism of the young Ukrainians during the 1980s. Moreover, many features of Putin’s political regime today, especially with its genocidal war against heroic Ukrainians, are the very features of the ‘fascist Mafia political system’ which the successors of the Soviet KGB in Russia planned to destroy in independent democratic Ukraine, by its supposed ‘demilitarisation and de-­Nazification.’ Sergei Zhuk is Professor of History at Ball State University, Indiana, USA. A former Soviet expert in US history, he moved in 1997 to the United States, and defended his American PhD dissertation about imperial Russian history at Johns Hopkins University in 2002. His research interests are Soviet/Russian/ Ukrainian history, imperialism and fascism in Russian past and present, Russian intelligence, international relations (especially US-­Russia relations), knowledge production, popular culture and cultural consumption. His recent publications include books such as The KGB, Russian Academic Imperialism, Ukraine, and Western Academia, 1946–2024 (2024), KGB Operations against the USA



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and Canada in Soviet Ukraine, 1953–1991 (2022), and Soviet Americana: The Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists (2018).

Notes   1. Haluzevyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrainy (hereafter: SBU), f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1200, ark. 68.   2. SBU, 16/1/1200/68. In the original KGB report, they described the film as a story about ‘beschinstvakh fashistvuiushchei molodiozhi.’   3. Stepan K. (retired SBU/KGB officer), interview with the author, Kyiv, Ukraine, 2 February 2019.   4. SBU, 16/1/1200/68.  5. Ibid.   6. Stepan K. (retired SBU/KGB officer), interview with the author, Kyiv, Ukraine, 2 February 2019.   7. See the Westerner opinion in Hughes, Once Upon a Time in the Italian West, 105.   8. See the information in Dneprovskaia Pravda (5 October 1969), 4.   9. Aleksandr Gusar, School diary, 19 July 1970. 10. See how the conservative Ukrainian film critics interpreted Damiani’s films in Anonymous, ‘Rozpovidaie Damiano Damiani’, 15. 11. Hughes, Once Upon a Time in the Italian West, 105. 12. Kapralov, ‘Utverzhdenie istiny, razoblachenie mifov’. 13. Dneprovskaia Pravda, 30 September 1972. 14. See the results of the readers’ survey in Sovetskii ekran 10 (1973), 12. 15. Mikhail Suvorov, School diary, 17  June 1974. He wrote, ‘With friends I visited our summer movie theater tonight and saw the Italian feature film by director Damiano Damiani Confessions of a Police Captain. This film tells the story of an unsuccessful struggle of a police Commissar Bonavia with the Mafia in Sicily.’ A similar entry appeared in the school diary of Andrey Vadimov, 23 June 1974. During the summer of 1974, the most popular foreign film was Confessions of a Police Captain. See Dneprovskaia Pravda (22 June 1974), 4. 16. Sovetskii ekran 2 (1974), 14–15; Baranovs’kyi, ‘Buty ‘lidynoi chesti’. . .’. See also Igor T., who confirmed the Ukrainian KGB concerns about the ‘political’ threat of those films. Igor T. (retired KGB officer), interview with the author, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, 2 April 2002. 17. Soviet ideologists also promoted Romanian gangster ‘Westerns’ about the struggle of the Bucharest police with criminals in postwar socialist Romania. These films, such as Cu mâinile curate (With Clean Hands, Sergiu Nicolaescu, 1972) and Ultimul cartuș (The Last Bullet, Sergiu Nicolaescu, 1973), also became popular films among young filmgoers in 1974–1976. See the critical review in Sovetskii ekran 23 (1974), 4; for more on the popularity of these films, see Sovetskii ekran 10 (1976), 18–19, Dneprovskaia Pravda (15 December 1974), Dneprovskaia Pravda (11 May 1975). 18. Vitalii Pidgaetskii, interview with the author, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, 10 February 1996. Even in 1984 ‘Mafia films’ were still popular in Dnipropetrovsk. See

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Dnepr Vechernii (8  December 1984), 4. Compare with the KGB report in: SBU, 16/1/1200/68-­69. 19. SBU, 16/1/1200/199, 236–237, 267–268. 20. Troitsky, Back in the USSR, 42–43. 21. On the Clash, see Rovesnik 6 (1978), 13–15; Rovesnik 10 (1980), 26; Rovesnik 4 (1982), 22–23. Rovesnik reprinted the sheet music and lyrics of two Clash songs: ‘The Guns of Brixton’ (4, 1982), and ‘Know Your Rights’ (10, 1983). On Pink Floyd’s album ‘The Wall’, see Rovesnik 11 (1981), 24–26. 22. Vladimir Demchenko (a former public lecturer of ‘Society of Knowledge’), interview with the author, Dnipropetrovsk, 12 January 1992; Serhiy Tihipko (a director of ‘Privatbank’), interview with the author, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, 12 October 1993. On the persecution of punk musicians in socialist Hungary, see Szemere, Up from the Underground. 23. Even during perestroika, the local journalists and KGB officials still used these materials. They reprinted some British punks’ declarations for use by Komsomol ideologists. See Gamol’sky, Efremenko and Inshakov, Na barrikadakh sovesti, 139; Igor T. (retired KGB officer), interview with the author, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, 2 April 2002; Mikhail Suvorov, School diary, 17 June 1974. 24. Pozdniakov, ‘Piraty vid muzyky’, 3. 25. See a letter by a CPSU veteran Nadezhda Sarana against local punks under the title ‘We declare war on everybody who interferes in our life and work!’: ‘Boi tem, kto meshaet nam stroit’ i zhit’!’, 3; and Liamina and Gamol’sky, ‘Grazhdaninom byt’ obiazan’,, about a public trial that took place on 22 December 1982 in Dnipropetrovsk. Compare with the reaction of activists in Anonymous, ‘Iz vystuplenii uchastnikov sobrania’, 3. I refer to the ‘active measures’ that were defined by Vladimir Bukovsky as ‘[a]ctions of political warfare conducted by the Soviet and Russian security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, FSB) ranging from media manipulation to outright violence.’ See Bukovsky, Judgement in Moscow, 629. 26. SBU, 16/1/1200/267-­268. 27. Gamol’sky, Efremenko and Inshakov, Na barrikadakh sovesti, 137. 28. For more on this film and similar cases during perestroika, see Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 152, 168, 170. Igor T. mentioned the Italian film’s influences in his interview as well. Igor T. (retired KGB officer), interview with the author, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, 2 April 2002. 29. Mentioned by Igor T. (retired KGB officer), interview with the author, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, 2 April 2002. 30. See ‘Otchet Dnepropetrovskogo OK LKSMU ot 23 dekabria 1983 g.’ in Tsentral’nyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Gromads’kykh Ob’ednan’ Ukrainy, 7/20/3087/43. 31. On the arrests of black marketers, see Skoryk, ‘Komersant (Sudovyi narys)’, 3; Ivangora, ‘“Dyskostoianka”, 3. Students from Dnipropetrovsk State University and Dnipropetrovsk Medical Institute were constantly harassed for their music preferences, especially the music of AC/DC. 32. Natalia Vasilenko, interview with the author, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, 19 July 2007. 33. SBU, 16/1/1192/68-­69, and 16/1/1199/49.



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Bibliography Anonymous. ‘Rozpovidaie Damiano Damiani’. Novyny kinoekranu 12 (1970), 15. ––––––. ‘Iz vystuplenii uchastnikov sobrania’. Dnepr vechernii (3 December 1982), 3. Baranovs’kyi, Valerii. ‘Buty ‘lidynoi chesti’. . .’. Novyny kinoekranu 5 (1978), 12–13. Bukovsky, Vladimir. Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity, trans. Alyona Kojevnikov. Westlake Village, CA: Ninth of November Press, 2019. Dnepr Vechernii (8 December 1984), 4. Dneprovskaia Pravda (5 October 1969), 4. Dneprovskaia Pravda (30 September 1972). Dneprovskaia Pravda (22 June 1974), 4. Dneprovskaia Pravda (15 December 1974). Dneprovskaia Pravda (11 May 1975). Gamol’sky, L., N. Efremenko and V. Inshakov. Na barrikadakh sovesti: Ocherki, razmyshlenia, interviu. Dnipropetrovsk: Grani, 1988. Hughes, Howard. Once Upon a Time in the Italian West: The Filmgoers’ Guide to Spaghetti Westerns. London: I.B. Tauris, 2004. Ivangora, O. ‘“Dyskostoianka” . . . dlia khapug’. Prapor Iunosti (5 July 1984), 3. Kapralov, G. ‘Utverzhdenie istiny, razoblachenie mifov’, Iskusstvo kino 11 (1971), 2–18. Liamina, A. and L. Gamol’sky. ‘Grazhdaninom byt’ obiazan’. Dnepr vechernii (23 December 1982), 3. Pozdniakov, M. ‘Piraty vid muzyky (v tumani antymystetstva)’. Prapor iunosti (14  June 1984), 3. Rovesnik 6 (1978), 13–15. Rovesnik 10 (1980), 26. Rovesnik 11 (1981), 24–26. Rovesnik 4 (1982), 22–23. Rovesnik 4 (1982). Rovesnik 10 (1983). Sarana, Nadezhda. ‘Boi tem, kto meshaet nam stroit’ i zhit’!’. Dnepr vechernii (23 December 1982), 3. Skoryk, M. ‘Komersant (Sudovyi narys)’. Prapor iunosti (14 July 1983), 3. Sovetskii ekran 10 (1973), 12. Sovetskii ekran 2 (1974), 14–15. Sovetskii ekran 23 (1974), 4. Sovetskii ekran 10 (1976), 18–19. Stites, Richard. Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Szemere, Anna. Up from the Underground: The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Troitsky, Artemy. Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia. London: Omnibus Press, 1987.

CONCLUSION

Close Encounters around the World Stefano Pisu, Francesco Pitassio and Maurizio Zinni

In 2019, operator and cinematographer Alexandr Calzatti, son of the more famous Arkady Calzatti, who worked for many years as Fridrikh Ermler’s cinematographer and a director in his own right, recalled for American Cinematographer his experience on the set of Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba, Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964). As is well known, the film was a Soviet–Cuban coproduction, respectively by Mosfilm and the Instituto Cubano del Arte y Industria Cinematográficos, celebrating the revolutionary endeavour to free the island’s population from the yoke that dictator Fulgencio Batista imposed. Neither the Soviet nor the Cuban political establishment appreciated the film, which had very limited circulation back in its day.1 However, since its restoration in 1992, film historians and critics have praised its inventive cinematography by Sergei Urusevsky and its daring technical performance. In the interview Calzatti remembers three key factors for these achievements. Firstly, he highlights the cooperation between the Soviet crew and the inexperienced Cuban personnel, who were however eager to find hand-­made, effective solutions. Secondly, Calzatti describes Soviet technological backwardness, which led the crew and Calzatti himself to experiment, such as when he bought infrared negative film from a manufacturer working in Kazan for the army to shoot the sugar cane sequence. Finally, he mentions the technological exchange within the Soviet area of influence – for instance regarding the film used for most of the shooting, which was an Orwo 64 ASA produced in the GDR – and includes the contribution that the USSR gave to Cuba at the time of the coproduction:



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We delivered equipment to Cuba, and Cuba gave us hotels, transportation, food and many things. We gave Cuba 20 small Vassilev cameras that were a strange combination of Éclair and Arriflex, and a camera named Friendship that was much like a BNC with reflex. This camera was never used in Cuba because of the motor works on 50 cycles and Cuba uses 60 cycles. They tried to make a device to compensate, but it never worked.2

The story of I Am Cuba, its geopolitical and historical background, and the artistic, cultural, and technological exchange behind it, as well as its belated celebration, might well represent the concerns at the heart of this volume. In fact, the research presented in this collection aspires to develop a multidimensional approach, with the purpose of emphasising how articulated the dynamics of the cinematic Cold War were, or, rather, how rich the dynamics and experience were of ‘cinema during the Cold War’. In fact, this volume adopted the lens of ‘entangled history’,3 while expanding the scope of the research well beyond the usual protagonists of the Cold War, that is, the USA and USSR, and therefore embracing the ‘global history’ perspective fostered in the past decades.4 On the one hand, the chapters in this volume assume that events, initiatives, personalities, cultural forms such as film style, modes of production, ideologies, and so forth exceed national boundaries and should be researched and described in a transnational and interconnected perspective. If entangled history proved to be a valid approach to modern times, it is even more so when discussing the world emerging from the devastation that the Second World War produced across the globe, with two key players expanding their influence far beyond their respective national borders. On the other hand, a more rigorous, thorough look at regional, national, and international scenes inspired contributors to account for happenings, exchange, and development through the perspective of global history: whereas the notion of the cinematic Cold War emphasises the role of the superpowers, this volume posits that relations, influences, and negotiations across a varying network of national and supranational agencies and subjects should be taken into full account. Such a description brings us back to a wide array of players’ respective functions and roles in defining what cinema during the Cold War was, all over the world. To sum up, this book not only describes the policies and actions that the USA and USSR implemented and pursued between 1947 and 1991, and their effects on national cinemas of those countries that fell within their respective areas of influence. Conversely, it attempts to depict a network of actors, which, according to the opportunities that political, economic, and geographical status respectively granted, interacted and fought for individual or collective interests. Part and parcel of this wider, more articulated network was the Non-­Aligned Movement, emerging from decolonisation and providing the superpowers with an arena for confrontation, but also with fierce

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counterparts, with their own traditions, know-­how, pathways, and goals  – this was the case of key actors, such as the Popular Republic of China, but also of important European players from the late 1940s, such as Yugoslavia, recently independent countries, such as India or Indonesia, or champions of the ‘Third Way’, such as Chile. This broad, complex scenario was often the stage for performing cultural diplomacy, nurturing cultural endeavours, or exchanging technology. The case of I Am Cuba, a story that this volume does not cover, is a very fitting example of such entanglements. I Am Cuba, and the most celebrated work by Mikhail Kalatozov, Letyat zhuravli (The Cranes Are Flying, 1957), can very easily be read against the events of the Cold War. In fact, the former’s production started just a few weeks after the Cuban missile crisis (October 1962), and one year after the total failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion (April 1961). By reconsidering the rhetoric of the Great Patriotic War, the latter was celebrated as one of the most telling signs of the Khrushchev Thaw in Soviet film production, following the death of Stalin, and was awarded the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival (1958). However, the research undertaken for this volume in many cases clarifies that the entanglement between international relations and film industry and culture exceeds canonical periodisation. As recent findings in international relations and contemporary history show, Soviet–American confrontation, and its consequences for cultural and film relationships, should be dated before the traditional period of 1947–1948, and coincides with the final stage of the Second World War and its political, economic, cultural, and military implications.5 Recent research on the transition from planned economy to capitalism, notably for European satellite countries of the USSR, describes the shifts as regards property, production, and themes. However, so far little has been done regarding the cultural media memory of the Cold War or production culture.6 Future research might contribute to expanding recent boundaries of the cinematic Cold War, as much as this volume has reconsidered more remote ones. To recapitulate, one of the achievements of the chapters is revising received wisdom about the geographical and chronological limits of cinema during the Cold War. Transnational creation and international exchange deal with mutual representations and reception practices.7 Too narrow an understanding of cinema during the Cold War, rooted in a rigid conception of the power of the state and politics, jeopardises the chances to fully grasp the much richer experience of circulation, consumption, appropriation, and cultural resistance. This book also taps into such issues, which, we firmly believe, are areas deserving much greater attention in the future, to give back to the film experience its relevance and power and achieve a more accurate appreciation of the role it played in defining individual and collective identities, political allegiances, and cultural legacies.8 Furthermore, we think that this survey is becoming increas-



Conclusion 261

ingly urgent, because of the progressive disappearance of those generations that grew up and went to the cinema during the Cold War: collecting their memories of film-­going practices, as recent initiatives have attempted to do,9 might provide researchers with rich and invaluable accounts of what cinema meant in this period, including a much neglected subject in Cold War studies, popular cinema.10 As we come to the end of a long pathway that we walked together with amazingly generous colleagues, who contributed to what we consider a step forward in our knowledge of cinema during the Cold War, we are also aware that there is still much room and many opportunities for potential research. In fact, because of the limits of our expertise and for want of time and space, we could not take into account many issues and directions deserving of more thorough attention. Allow us to briefly sketch out a tentative map of prospective research areas. While we are positively sure that this is not complete, we think of it more as a wish list of what we would like to explore. Technology, and its impact on production, circulation, and consumption, is included within this volume. However, it is certainly an area that could produce significant further findings, for many reasons.11 Firstly, the degree of technological advancement deeply affected media overall. Within the same areas of influence, levels of know-­how, production, and R&D greatly varied, according to past achievements, quality of higher education, industrialisation, investments, and material culture. Secondly, available technologies determined huge gaps between blocs, areas, or even within the same bloc – just think of the uneven development of TV broadcasting within the Soviet bloc. Finally, when we look through the lens of media archaeology at the multiplicity of available technologies, such impressive heterogeneity and its history of great achievements and no less grandiose failures provides researchers with a more comprehensive picture of the life of media before globalisation fully came about.12 Intermedia and intertextual dynamics can contribute to describing the exchange across different blocs, within respective regions, or in a single country. Adaptations, parodies, vernacularisations, or remakes illustrate how works, genres, or subjects transited across the blocs and globe. Moreover, the circulation of cinematic works via different media outlets – notably, the TV – can shed light on international exchange and chronological permanence within a media diet. Speaking of different outlets, we would like to hint at an area barely mentioned in this volume, that is, non-­t heatrical distribution. However, and even more so during the Cold War, this form of circulation and consumption played a non-­negligible role in the release and consumption of films that for various reasons could not make it into cinemas. National cultural institutes abroad, learned societies, institutions of higher education, film clubs, but also labour

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or political organisations actively (or forcibly) became more or less improvised platforms for watching, discussing, and appreciating film works that could not be experienced in proper cinemas. A closer look at these initiatives and occasions could help us to penetrate the locations and occasions of exchanging and experiencing cinema. In fact, meeting places had a function of paramount importance at a time when traveling was in many ways limited or hindered. Film festivals and retrospectives, conferences, work and political meetings, awards ceremonies, and film schools became hubs for sharing projects, ideas, initiatives, and hopes. As recent research concerning film festivals and cultural diplomacy has demonstrated, such occasions were crucial for experiencing and designing cinema, building taste, and, in some cases, creating a world cinematic culture that did not entirely overlap with global commercial exchange, but was rather rooted in cultural and political sharing. I Am Cuba, as previously mentioned, initially met an unfortunate fate: the USA severed any relation with Cuba, so that the film did not have a chance of being released on the American market, while Soviet and Cuban decision-­ makers found that it did not match their respective political agendas and ultimately discarded it. However, after the end of the Cold War, the film was included in the selection of the Telluride Film Festival and met with posthumous fame. Apparently, thanks to the support of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, the film was restored, circulated both at film festivals and in film clubs, and through home video, and turned into a cornerstone of cinephilia and cinematic propaganda. While Kalatozov, after that unlucky episode, carried on directing huge, inventive co-­productions, such as the fascinating Italian–Soviet co-­production Krasnaya palatka/La tenda rossa (The Red Tent, 1969),13 his earlier work was rediscovered thanks to archival research, film festival and cinephile networks, and media outlets. We hope that this volume contributes to raising awareness of such rediscoveries and paves the way for future steps to shed light on a period that is often considered bleak and monolithic, but that is incredibly rich in ways that still demand a full account. In ‘Encounter’, a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who epitomised the Thaw in the 1950s and co-­wrote I Am Cuba, the narrator sits in the elegant Copenhagen airport. At some point, an imposing figure cuts through the crowd, goes to the bar, rejects a Pernod and a vermouth, and orders a vodka. Someone half in jest tells the writer that the stranger resembles Ernest Hemingway. The narrator agrees and concludes the poem with the words: Later I learned it was, indeed, Hemingway!

Meeting points, casual encounters, mutual representations, and late discoveries: this is what our endeavour was about. This is what still needs to be done.



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Stefano Pisu is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Cagliari. Previously an International Fellow at Oxford University’s Research Center in the Humanities, his work considers the history of international cultural relations through cinema. His publications include Il XX secolo sul red carpet: Politica, economia e cultura nei festival internazionali del cinema, 1932–1976 (Franco Angeli, 2016) and La cortina di celluloide: Il cinema italo-sovietico nella Guerra Fredda (Mimesis, 2019). Francesco Pitassio is Professor of Film Studies at the Università di Udine. He edited, with Dorota Ostrowska and Zsuzsanna Varga, Popular Cinemas in East Central Europe (2017). Among his books are Ombre silenziose (2002), Maschere e marionette: Il cinema ceco e dintorni (2002), Attore/ Divo (2003), and Neorealist Film Culture (2019). He was the Italian Principal Investigator of the EU HERA project VICTOR-E: Visual Culture of Trauma, Obliteration and Reconstruction in Post-WW II Europe (2019–2022). He has been Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Notre Dame (2015). His research interests focus on film acting and stardom, Italian and Central-­ Eastern European film history, and documentary cinema. Maurizio Zinni is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at Sapienza University in Rome. His research interests are focused on the relation between politics and culture in the twentieth century, particularly media industries and their impact on the political, cultural and social evolution of their time. He is the author of Fascisti di celluloide: La memoria del ventennio nel cinema italiano 1945–2000 (2010); Schermi radioattivi: L’America, Hollywood e l’incubo nucleare da Hiroshima alla crisi di Cuba (2013); Il leone, il giudice e il capestro: Storia e immagini della repressione italiana in Cirenaica (with Alessandro Volterra, 2021); and Visioni d’Africa: Cinema, politica, immaginari (2023).

Notes   1. Oukaderova, ‘I am Cuba and the Space of Revolution’.   2. Turner, ‘The Astonishing Images of I Am Cuba’.   3. On the core ideas of entangled history and cultural transfer and their relevance for integrated media-­historical perspectives, see Cronqvist and Hilgert, ‘Entangled Media Histories’. See also Mikkonen and Koivunen, Beyond the Divide.   4. Since the 1990s, studies on global history and its relationship to world history have increased considerably. Within this vast production, see Mazlish and Buultjens, Conceptualizing Global History; Bentley, Shapes of World History; Manning, Navigating World History; Stuchtey and Fuchs, Writing World History 1800–2000.

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Recently, the release of Guldi and Armitage’s The History Manifesto has once again sparked the debate on the importance of a global approach to historical research and its narration. As regards film studies, beyond the thriving discussion around world/ global/transnational cinema, see MacKenzie, Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures.   5. It is worth mentioning that during the Second World War (1943–1944) the aforementioned Kalatozov was sent as a delegate of the Soviet film industry to the USA and was put under surveillance by the FBI for the duration of his stay. See Golovskoi, ‘M. Kalatozov’.   6. For a seminal introduction to the entanglements between cultural memory and popular cinema, see Grainge, Memory and Popular Film. For an overview on cultural memory and a take on its connection to media, see Erll, Memory in Culture.   7. Regarding the concept of cultural transfer, see Espagne, Les Transferts culturels francoallemands; Espagne and Werner, Transferts. In addition to the studies already mentioned in the introduction on cultural circulation across the blocs during the Cold War, see Frank, Diplomaties et transferts culturels au XXe siècle. A more recent research field concerning transnational artistic, cultural, and professional circulations is that of film schools. In this regard, it is important to mention the three-­year cycle of trilateral research conferences Le scuole di cinema nel XX secolo: Circolazioni artistiche, sociabilità politiche e reti professionali established by Villa Vigoni–Centro italo-­tedesco per il dialogo europeo, with the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (6–7  July 2021; 10–13  May 2022; 9–12  May 2023). For a specific take on cinema, see Stokes and Maltby, Hollywood Abroad.   8. Among recent contributions to this burgeoning field, see Belton, Audiences and Fans; Biltereyst, Maltby, and Meers, Cinema, Audiences and Modernity; Christie, Audiences; Jancovich, Faire, and Stubbings, The Place of the Audience; Maltby, Biltereyst, and Meyers, Explorations in New Cinema History; Reinhard and Olson, Making Sense of Cinema; Stafford, Understanding Audiences and the Film Industry. See also pioneering research concerning our field: Pavlov and Khanova, ‘Cult in Everything but Name?’; Rajagopalan, Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas; Ramos Arenas, ‘Film Clubs and the Politics of Film Culture in Spain and the GDR around 1960’; Ramos Arenas, ‘From Stalinism to Cinephilia’.   9. For Italy, see Treveri Gennari et al., Italian Cinema Audiences. 10. As regards the still under-­researched European area, see Dyer and Vincendeau, Popular European Cinema; Ostrowska, Pitassio, and Varga, Popular Cinemas in East Central Europe. 11. On the role of technological diplomacy and exchange in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Balbi and Fickers, History of the International Telecommunication Union. 12. On media archaeology in film history, see Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology. More generally on methodological issues in researching media archaeology, see Erkki and Parikka, Media Archaeology. 13. See Corsi, ‘Italian Film Producers and The Challenge of Soviet Coproductions’; Pisu, La cortina di celluloide, 79–104.



Conclusion 265

Bibliography Balbi, Gabriele and Andreas Fickers (eds). History of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU): Transnational Techno-Diplomacy from the Telegraph to the Internet. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. Belton, John (ed.). Special Issue: Audiences and Fans. Film History 6(4) (1994). Bentley, Jerry H. Shapes of World History in Twentieth-Century Scholarship. Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1995. Biltereyst, Daniël, Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers (eds). Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Christie, Ian (ed.). Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012. Corsi, Barbara. ‘Italian Film Producers and The Challenge of Soviet Coproductions: Franco Cristaldi and The Case of The RED TENT’. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 40(1) 2020, 84–107. Cronqvist, Marie and Cristoph Hilgert. ‘Entangled Media Histories: The Value of Transnational and Transmedial Approaches in Media Historiography’. Media History 23(1) (2017), 130–41. Dyer, Richard and Ginette Vincendeau (eds). Popular European Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Elsaesser, Thomas. Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Espagne, Michel. Les Transferts culturels francoallemands. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. Espagne, Michel and Michael Werner (eds). Transferts: Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (XVIIIe-XIXe siècles). Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1988. Frank, Robert (ed.). Special Issue: Diplomaties et transferts culturels au XXe siècle. Relations Internationales 115–116 (2003). Golovskoi, Valerii. ‘M. Kalatozov: poltora goda v Gollivude’. Kinovedcheskie zapiski 77 (2006), 271–98. Grainge, Paul (ed.). Memory and Popular Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Guldi, Jo and Robert Armitage. The History Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Huhtamo, Erkki and Jussi Parikka (eds). Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011. Jancovich, Mark, Lucy Faire and Sarah Stubbings. The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption. London: British Film Institute, 2003. MacKenzie, Scott (ed.). Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014. Maltby, Richard, Daniël Biltereyst and Philippe Meyers (eds). Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Manning, Patrick. Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Mazlish, Bruce and Ralph Buultjens (eds). Conceptualizing Global History. Westview, CO: Boulder, 1993.

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Mikkonen, Simo and Pia Koivunen (eds). Beyond the Divide: Entangled Histories of Cold War Europe. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2015. Ostrowska, Dorota, Francesco Pitassio and Zsuzsanna Varga (eds). Popular Cinemas in East Central Europe: Film Cultures and Histories. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017. Oukaderova, Lida. ‘I am Cuba and the Space of Revolution’. Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal 44(2) (2014), 4–21. Pavlov, Alexander and Polina Khanova. ‘Cult in Everything but Name? Transnational Experiences of (Western) Cult Cinema in Late Soviet and Early Post-Soviet Russia’. Transnational Cinemas 8(1) (2017), 49–64. Pisu, Stefano. La cortina di celluloide: Il cinema italo-sovietico nella Guerra fredda. Milan: Mimesis, 2019. Rajagopalan, Sudha. Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas: The Culture of Movie-Going after Stalin. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. Ramos Arenas, Fernando. ‘Film Clubs and the Politics of Film Culture in Spain and the GDR around 1960.’ Communication and Society 30(1) (2017), 1–15. ———. ‘From Stalinism to Cinephilia: The Emergence of East German Film Culture in the 1950s’. Historical Journal of Film, Radio, Television (39)2 (2019), 271–89. Reinhard, CarrieLynn D. and Christopher J. Olson (eds). Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Stafford, Roy. Understanding Audiences and the Film Industry. London: British Film Institute, 2007. Stokes, Melvyn and Richard Maltby (eds). Hollywood Abroad: Audiences and Cultural Exchange. London: British Film Institute, 2004. Stuchtey, Benedikt and Eckhardt Fuchs (eds). Writing World History 1800–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Treveri Gennari, Daniela and Catherine O’Rawe, Danielle Hipkins, Silvia Dibeltulo and Sarah Culhane. Italian Cinema Audiences: Histories and Memories of Cinema-going in Post-war Italy. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Turner, George E. ‘The Astonishing Images of I Am Cuba’. American Cinematographer (17 May 2019). https://theasc.com/articles/flashback-soy-cuba (accessed 4 April 2024). Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, ‘Encounter’, in Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008).

Filmography

À Valparaiso (Valparaiso, Joris Ivens, 1963), 237 Actas de Marusia (Letters from Marusia, Miguel Littín, 1975) 167–68, 172–73 Addio zio Tom (Goodbye Uncle Tom, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, 1971), 211n5 Airport (George Seaton, 1970), 211n5 Aleksandr Nevsky (Alexander Nevsky, Sergei Eisenstein, 1938), 74, 138 Aleksandr Popov (Herbert Rappaport and Viktor Eisymont, 1949), 202 Ali-baba i sorok razboinikov (Ali Baba and Forty Bandits, Grigory Lomidze, 1959), 129n39 Andremo in città (We’ll Go to the City, Nelo Risi, 1966), 150 Antarctic Whaling (S. Kogan, 1950), 74 Aquellos años (Those Years, Felipe Cazals, 1973), 162 Arena smelykh (The Arena of the Brave, Sergei Gurov and Yuri Ozerov, 1953), 129n39 Aventures de Till l’Espiègle, Les (Bold Adventures, Gérard Philipe and Joris Ivens, 1956), 4, 218 Avitsenna (Ibn Sina, Kamil Yarmatov, 1957), 104 Ba bai (The Eight Hundred, Guan Hu, 2019), 194n6 Bái máo nu (The White-Haired Girl, Sang Hu, 1972), 196n28 Balada o soldate (Ballad of a Soldier, Grigory Chukhrai, 1959), 107, 138 Bankett für Achilles (Banquet for Achilles, Roland Gräf, 1975), 219 Battle Wreckage (1944), 48 Beleet parus odinokii (The Lonely White Sail, Vladimir Legoshin, 1937), 72 Bilyi Ptakh z Chornoyu Oznakoyu (The White Bird Marked with Black, Yuri Ilyenko, 1971), 198 Birth of the B-29 (1945), 48 Bitka na Neretvi (Battle of Neretva, Veliko Bulajić, 1969), 150 Blue Bird, The (George Cukor, 1976), 206, 208–9 Bobby (Raj Kapoor, 1973), 205 Bridge on the River Kwai, The (David Lean, 1957), 123, 211n7 Brotherhood of Man (Robert Cannon, 1946), 39 Caccia tragica (Tragic Hunt, Giuseppe De Santis, 1947), 81n43 Cananea (Marcela Fernández Violante, 1976), 172 Casa del sur, La (The House in the South, Sergio Olhovich, 1975), 172 Case of the Fishermen, The (1947), 42–44, 47 Cesta duga godinu dana (The Road a Year Long, Giuseppe De Santis, 1958), 152 Chapaev (Georgy and Sergei Vasilev, 1934), 75

268

F ilmography

Charro negro, El (The Black Charro, Raúl de Anda, 1940), 164 Chelovek vernulsya iz kosmosa (A Man Came Back from Space, Ekaterina Vermisheva, 1961), 123 Chelovek vyshel v kosmos (The Man Went out in Space, Grigory Kosenko, 1965), 137 Chronique des Années de Braise (Chronicle of the Years of Fire, Mohammed LakhdarHamina, 1975), 196 Cleveland Committee, The (Michael Martini, 1939), 38 Combat America (1945), 48 Comedians, The (Peter Glenville, 1967), 211n5 Compañero presidente (Comrade President, Miguel Littín, 1971), 237 Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della Repubblica (Confessions of a Police Captain, Damiano Damiani, 1971), 247–48, 255n15 Count Us In (1948), 44 Cu mâinile curate (With Clean Hands, Sergiu Nicolaescu, 1972), 255n17 Day of the Dolphin, The (Mike Nichols, 1977), 205 Deadline for Action (Carl Marzani, 1946), 37, 41, 43 Dekle iz solin (Sand, Love, and Salt, František Čáp, 1957), 152 Den pobedivshei strany (A Day in the Victorious Country, Ilya Kopalin and Irina Setkina, 1947), 88 Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, 1975), 211n8 Derzhis za oblaka (Kapaszkodj a fellegekbe!/Hold onto the Clouds, Péter Szász and Boris Grigorev, 1971), 209 Devochka ishchet otsa (A Girl Searches for Her Father, Lev Golub, 1959), 123 Djamilia (Jamilya, Irina Poplavskaya and Sergei Yutkevich, 1969), 137 Dicen que soy comunista (They Say I Am a Communist, Alejandro Galindo, 1951), 165 Dikaya sobaka Dingo (The Wild Dog Dingo, Yuly Karasik, 1962), 136 Distinto amanecer (Another Dawn, Julio Bracho, 1943), 164 Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style, Pietro Germi, 1961), 201 Doroga k zvezdam (The Way to Stars, Pavel Klushantsev, 1957), 123 Doverie (Trust, Edvin Laine and Viktor Tregubovich, 1972), 207 En la palma de tu mano (In the Palm of Your Hand, Roberto Gavaldón, 1951), 164 Enamorada (In Love, Emilio Fernández, 1946), 164 Fatima (Vladimir Valiev, 1958), 138 Fight for Sole Collective Bargaining (Michael Martini, 1939), 38 Five (Arch Oboler, 1951), 149 Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970), 211n5 Françoise ou La vie conjugale (Anatomy of a Marriage: My Days with Jean-Marc, André Cayatte, 1964), 211n5 Freedom for Ghana (Sean Graham, 1957), 104 French Connection, The (William Friedkin, 1971), 211n5 Giorno della civetta, Il (The Day of the Owl, Damiano Damiani, 1968), 247 Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000), 157n29 Godfather, The (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), 211n5 Golpe blanco, El (The White Coup, Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann, 1975), 222 Gorille vous salue bien, Le (The Mask of the Gorilla, Bernard Borderie, 1958), 141 Grand Blond avec une chaussure noire, Le (The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe, Yves Robert, 1972), 220 Great Swindle, The (1948), 44



F ilmography 269

Guerra alla guerra (War to War, Romolo Marcellini and Giorgio Simonelli, 1948), 61 Hell Bent for Election (Chuck Jones, 1944), 38 Holubice (The White Dove, František Vláčil, 1960), 156 Hóngsè Niángzǐjūn (The Red Detachment of Women, Xie Jin, 1961), 106 Hóngsè Niángzǐjūn (The Red Detachment of Women, Fu Jie and Wenzhan Pan, 1970), 190 Horrors of the Black Museum (Arthur Crabtree, 1960), 141 Hostess (Rolf Römer, 1976), 219 Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein (I Was, I Am, I Shall Be, Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann, 1974), 222, 224–26 Ila Ayn? (Where To?, George Nasser, 1957), 104 Ilya Muromets (The Sword and the Dragon, Aleksandr Ptushko, 1956), 122 India Matri Bhumi (Roberto Rossellini, 1959), 232 India vista da Rossellini, L’ (India through the Eyes of Rossellini, Roberto Rossellini, 1959), 232 Industry’s Disinherited (Max Glandbard, 1949), 44–45, 48 Intervista a Salvador Allende: la forza e la ragione (Interview with Salvador Allende: Power and Reason, Emidio Greco and Helvio Soto, 1971), 222 Istoriya odnogo koltsa (The History of a Ring, Boris Dolin, 1948) 72 Ivan Groznyi (Ivan the Terrible, Sergei Eisenstein, 1944), 138 Ivanovo detstvo (Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962), 136 Jinete sin cabeza, El (The Headless Horseman, Chano Urueta, 1956), 164 Kamennyi tsvetok (The Stone Flower, Aleksandr Ptushko, 1946), 72 Kapò (Kapo, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1960), 150 Kavaler zolotoi zvezdy (The Knight of the Golden Star, Yuli Raizman, 1951), 74 Khochu vse znat (I Want to Know Everything, Children Educational Film Magazine produced since 1957), 137 Klyatva (The Vow, Mikhail Chiaureli, 1946), 72, 85 Komsomolsk (City of Youth, Sergei Gerasimov, 1938), 84 Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon (Late August at the Hotel Ozone, Pavel Juráček, 1967), 149 Krasnaya palatka/La tenda rossa (The Red Tent, Mikhail Kalatozov, 1969), 262 Krieg der Mumien, Der (The War of the Mummies, Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann, 1974), 222 Kubanskie kazaki (Cossacks of the Kuban, Ivan Pyrev, 1950), 74 Lachende Mann, Der – Bekenntnisse eines Mörders (The Laughing Man – Confessions of a Murderer, Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann, 1965), 221 Lan Lan he Dong Dong (Lan Lan and Dong Dong, Yang Xiaozhong, 1958), 104 Lebedinoe ozero (Swan Lake, Zoya Tulubyeva, 1957), 122 Leblebici Horhor Aga (Lord Horhor the Nutroaster, Muhsin Ertuğrul, 1933), 197n33 Legende von Paul und Paula, Die (The Legend of Paul and Paula, Heiner Carow, 1973), 216 Leili i Medzhnun (Leili and Majnun, Tatjana Berezantseva and Gafur Valamat-Zade, 1959), 129n39 Lenin v 1918 godu (Lenin in 1918, Mikhail Romm, 1939), 141 Letyat zhuravli (The Cranes Are Flying, Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957), 122, 137, 260 Life with Knowledge (Michael Martini, 1940), 38 Los hermanos del Hierro (My Son, the Hero, Ismael Rodríguez, 1961), 164 Lotte in Weimar (Lotte in Weimar, Egon Günther, 1975), 217 Mackenna’s Gold (Jack Lee Thompson, 1969), 248

270

F ilmography

Magnificent Seven, The (John Sturges, 1960), 141 Malchik is Neapolya (A Boy from Naples, Ivan Aksenchuk, 1958), 122 María Candelaria (Portrait of Maria, Emilio Fernández, 1944), 164 Mat (The Mother, Mark Donskoy, 1955), 121 Mina, vientos de libertad (Mina, Winds of Freedom, Antonio Eceiza, 1976), 176n30 Minute Dunkel macht uns nicht blind, Eine (A Minute of Darkness Doesn’t Blind Us, Walter Heynowski, Gerhard Scheumann and Peter Hellmich, 1976), 223 Mínzhǔ qīngnián yóuxíng (The March of Democratic Youth, Wang Yi, 1950), 92 Mir pobedit voinu (Peace Will Defeat War, Sergei Gerasimov, 1949), 83 Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, Vittorio De Sica, 1951), 155 Molodaia gvardiia (The Young Guard, Sergei Gerasimov, 1948), 72, 83–84 Moskovskii stadion Dinamo (Moscow Dinamo Stadium, Dmitry Bogolepov, 1952), 73 My iz Kronshtadta (The Sailors of Kronstadt, Efim Dzigan, 1936), 138 Na beregakh plenitelnykh Nevy (On the Neva’s Captivating Banks, Ilya Averbakh, 1983), 207 Native Land (Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand, 1942), 37 Noche avanza, La (Night Falls, Roberto Gavaldón, 1952), 164 Nülan wuhao (Woman Basketball Player No. 5, Xie Jin, 1957), 103 Nuovo mondo, Il (The New World, Jean-Luc Godard, 1962), 149 o.k. (Michael Verhoeven, 1970), 195n15 On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959), 149 Ona zashchishchaet rodinu (She Defends the Motherland, Fridrikh Ermler, 1943), 72 Oni vidyat vnov (They Can See again, Nikolai Grachev, 1950), 72 Osvobozhdennyi Kitai/Jiefang le de Zhongguo (Liberated China/The New China, Sergei Gerasimov and Eduard Volk, 1950), 73, 83 Otra, La (The Other, Roberto Gavaldón, 1946), 164 Our Daily Bread (King Vidor, 1934), 49n10 Padeniye Berlina (The Fall of Berlin, Mikhail Chiaureli, 1949), 74 Paisà (Paisan, Roberto Rossellini, 1946), 77, 81n43 Pardesi/Khozhdenie za tri morya (Journey Beyond Three Seas, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and Vasily Pronin, 1958), 121 Passaic Textile Strike, The (Samuel Russak, 1926), 37 Pastor Angelicus (Romolo Marcellini, 1942), 57, 59 People’s Congressman (1948), 44 People’s Convention, A (1948), 44 Peppermint Frappé (Carlos Saura, 1967), 195n14 Pervyi reis k zvezdam (First Flight to Stars, Dmitry Bogolepov, Ilya Kopalin, Grigory Kosenko, 1961), 123 Po Sovetskomu Soyuzu (Around the Soviet Union, Newsreels produced from 1961 to 1988), 137 Pobeda kitaiskogo naroda (Victory of Chinese People, Leonid Varlamov, 1950), 73, 91 Popiół i diament (Ashes and Diamonds, Andrzej Wajda, 1958), 139 Potomok Chingis-Khana (Storm over Asia, Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1928), 134 Pratidwandi (The Adversary, Satyajit Ray, 1970), 197n36 Premiya (The Bonus, Sergei Mikaelyan, 1974), 213n59 Primer año, El (The First Year, Patricio Guzmán, 1972), 237 Prolog (Prologue, Efim Dzigan, 1956), 121 Przhevalsky (Sergei Yutkevich, 1952), 95n63



F ilmography 271

Pueblerina (Small Town Girl, Emilio Fernández, 1948), 164 Pylayushchy ostrov (The Blazing Island, Roman Karmen, 1961), 140 Qismati Sho’ir (The Lot of the Poet, Bension Kimiagarov, 1959), 138 ¿Qué hacer? (What Is to Be Done?, Saul Landau, Raúl Ruiz and Nina Serrano, 1970), 237 Raba lyubvi (A Slave of Love, Nikita Mikhalkov, 1976), 211n8 Rabouilleuse, La-Arrivistes, Les (The Opportunists, Louis Daquin, 1959) 218 Rat (Atomic War Bride, Veliko Bulajić, 1960), 10, 147 Razum protiv bezumiya (Reason against Madness, Aleksandr Medvedkin, 1960), 140 Recurso del método, El (Reasons of State, Miguel Littín, 1977), 176n30 Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, Luchino Visconti, 1960), 156 RoGoPaG (Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ugo Gregoretti, 1962), 149 Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City, Roberto Rossellini, 1945), 81n43 Romeo and Juliet (Franco Zeffirelli, 1968), 248 Russkii vopros (The Russian Question, Mikhail Romm, 1948), 73, 85 Salt of the Earth (Herbert J. Biberman, 1954), 37 San Babila ore 20: un delitto inutile (San Babila–8 PM, Carlo Lizzani, 1976), 246 Sandpit Generals, The (Hall Bartlett, 1971), 211n5 Santi-Vina (Thavi Na Bangchang, 1954), 104 Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), 157n29 Selskaya uchitelnitsa (The Village Teacher, Mark Donskoy, 1947), 72 Semero smelykh (Seven Brave Men, Sergei Gerasimov, 1936), 84 Semnadtsat’ mgnoveniy (Seventeen Moments of Spring, Tatyana Lioznova, 1973, TV series), 252 Sentner Story, The (Carl Marzani, 1953), 37, 45, 47 Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa, 1954), 139 Six Hundred Million with You (Joris Ivens, 1958), 105 Smelye lyudi (Brave People, Konstantin Yudin, 1950), 72 Soldatesse, Le (The Camp Followers, Valerio Zurlini, 1965), 150 Sole sorge ancora, Il (Outcry, Aldo Vergano, 1946), 81n43 Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba, Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964), 259 Sorcières de Salem, Les (The Crucible, Raymond Rouleau, 1957) 218 Sorok pervyi (The Forty-First, Grigory Chukhrai, 1956), 107, 121 Sovremennyi Kolkhoz (Modern Kolchoz, Elizaveta Tylybeva, 1951), 74 Sportivnyi obzor (Sport Review, 1947), 72 Stalingrad (Leonid Varlamov, 1943), 72 Strange Victory (Leo Hurwitz, 1948), 37 Sudba cheloveka (The Destiny of a Man, Sergei Bondarchuk, 1959), 122, 138 Sweet Charity (Bob Fosse, 1969), 211n5 Turang (Bachtiar Siagian, 1957), 104 Uchitel (The New Teacher, Sergei Gerasimov, 1939), 84 Ukhodya-ukhodi (Go Away, Viktor Tregubovich, 1979), 207 Ultimul cartuș (The Last Bullet, Sergiu Nicolaescu, 1973), 255n17 Homme et une femme, Un (A Man and a Woman, Claude Lelouch, 1966), 201 United Action Means Victory (Michael Martini, 1939), 38 Universidad comprometida (Committed University, Carlos Ortiz Tejeda, 1972), 166 Uski Roti (Our Daily Bread, Mani Kaul, 1970), 191 Vassa Zheleznova (The Mistress, Leonid Lukov, 1953), 121

272

F ilmography

Vavilon XX (Babylon XX, Ivan Mikolaychuk, 1979), 197n32 Velikaya Otechestvennaya (The 20th Anniversary of the Victory over Fascism, Roman Karmen, Irina Venzher, Irina Setkina, 1965), 137 Velikii perelom (The Turning Point, Fridrikh Ermler, 1945), 73 Velikii voin Albanii Skanderbeg (The Great Warrior Skanderbeg, Sergei Yutkevich, 1953), 121 Veselye rebyata (Jazz Comedy, Grigory Aleksandrov, 1934), 203 Vivre en paix – RDA 1974 (To Live in Peace – GDR 1974, Daniel Karlin, 1974), 220 Vpervye zamuzhem (Married for the First Time, Iosif Kheifits, 1979), 207 Vstrecha na Elbe (Encounter at the Elbe, Grigory Aleksandrov, 1949), 85 Vyborgskaya storona (The Vyborg Side, Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, 1939), 78 War Department Report (Oliver Lundquist, 1943), 40 With Our Hands (Jack Arnold, 1950), 44 World Population, The (Roberto Rossellini, 1974), 233 Yesenia (Alfredo B. Crevenna, 1971), 205 Yi miao zhong (One Second, Zhang Yimou, 2019), 194n6 Yu guang qu (Song of the Fishermen, Cai Chusheng, 1935), 102 Zakon podlosti (Law of Baseness, Aleksander Medvedkin, 1962), 106 Zanzibar People March Forward (1964), 106 Zhila-byla devochka (Once There Was a Girl, Viktor Eisymont, 1944), 72 Zigmund Kolosovsky (The Man with Five Faces, Boris Dmochovsky and Sigizmund Navrotsky, 1946), 72 Zvigenis kbili (The Shark Tooth, Shalva Gedevanishvili, 1959), 138

Index

agriculture, 40, 243, 264n Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad, 120–21 Abt, John, 40 AC/DC, 251–52, 256n31 Acharya, Amitav, 113 Akhmatova, Anna, 94n27 Addes, George F., 49n8 African-Soviet relations, 9–10, 103–06, 108, 132–42, 198n40 Aga Rossi, Elena, 81 Aksenchuk, Ivan, 122 Aleksandrov, Grigory, 1, 85, 203 Alexander, William, 51 Allan, William, 51 Allende, Salvador, 11, 166–67, 169, 222–23, 225, 231–32, 234–41 Allied Forces, 34 ACC (Allied Control Commission), 8, 24–27, 29–32, 25–26, 29, 31 AFHQ (Allied Force Head Quarter), 27 AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories), 25 OSS (Office of Strategic Services), 40, 44 PWB (Psychological Warfare Branch), 8, 24–32, 27, 25–26, 29 Álvarez, Carlos, 173 Álvarez, Santiago, 173 Amaral de Aguiar, Carolina, 176 Andreotti, Giulio, 62–63 Andrew, Dudley, 6 Anthony, Crawford, 136

anti-communism, 25, 28, 38, 40–41, 50n36, 60, 62, 78, 85, 104, 126, 137, 162–65, 220, 226 anti-fascist campaign, 28, 251–54 Aprà, Adriano, 233 Arinbasarova, Natalia, 137 Aristarco, Guido, 152 Arkus, Lyubov, 213n49 Asian-African Conference, Bandung, 3, 103–06, 134, 232 Association des Échanges FrancoAllemands, 217 atomic bomb, 148–49, 154 auteur cinema, 3, 11, 181–82, 186–87, 189, 191–93, 235 Autio-Sarasmo, Sari, 5 Avakian, Artin, 137 Averbakh, Ilya, 207 Ayala Blanco, Jorge, 168 Balio, Tino, 158n47 Balsam, Martin, 247 BNC (Banco Nacional Cinematográfico), 165, 168, 171–72, 174 Bandera, Stepan, 245–46, 252, 254 Baran, Paul A., 232 Barbaro, Umberto, 81n48 Barbijeri, Frane, 152–53 Barinov, A.F., 204 Barnes, Russel, 35n37 Bartlett, Hall, 211n5, 248 Batista, Fulgencio, 258 Battaglia, Francesco, 35n44 Bazan, Julio, 225

274

Bazin, Jérôme, 5 Belousov, V.P., 208 Bene, Carmelo, 187 Benediktov, Ivan A., 122 Benegal, Shyam, 197n37 Berezantseva, Tatjana, 129n39 Berger, Manfred, 222 Berti, Giuseppe, 74, 77 Beyzaie, Behram, 197n37 Biagi, Enzo, 231 Biancoli, Oreste, 28 Biberman, Herbert J., 37 Billard, Pierre, 196 Birri, Fernando, 153 Bogolepov, Dmitry, 73, 123 Bolshakov, Ivan, 68, 75 Bondarchuk, Sergei, 122, 138 Bonnet, Georges, 73 Bonomi, Ivanoe, 26–27, 34nn22–23 Borderie, Bernard, 141 Böttcher, Jürgen, 227 Bracho, Julio, 164 Brandt, Willy, 217 Brecht, Bertolt, 218 Brezhnev, Leonid, 10–11, 201, 213n59 Brody, Alexander, 44–45 Brosio, Manlio, 78, 81n50 Brunet, Jacques, 187 Brunetta, Gian Piero, 195n12, 196nn18 and 27, 197nn33 and 36 Bubrik, Samuil, 87 Bukovsky, Vladimir, 256n25 Bulajić, Veliko, 147, 149–50, 152–55 Buñuel, Luis, 167 Calzatti, Alexandr, 258 Caminati, Luca, 233 Cannon, Robert, 39 Čáp, František, 152 Captan, Omar, 137 Carow, Heiner, 216 Carpentier, Alejo, 187 Casiraghi, Ugo, 77 Castro, Fidel, 166, 169, 172 Catholicism, 4, 8, 47, 54–66 CCC (Catholic Cinematographic Centre), 57–59, 62

Index

Christian Democrat Party, 61–63, 70, 74, 79, 234–35 Comitati Civici (Civic Committees), 61 Italian Catholic Action, 58, 61–2 National Legion of Decency, 55–56 OCIC (Office Catholique International du Cinéma), 58 Vatican, 8, 54–66 Caute, David, 120 Cavani, Liliana, 195n12 Cayatte, André, 211n5 Cazals, Felipe, 162 Chan, Jessica Ka Yee Chaplin, Charlie (Charles Spencer), 149, 203 Chaplin, Geraldine, 195n14 Chappel, James, 62 Guevara, Ernesto, 169, 235, 242n16 Chiaureli, Mikhail, 71, 74, 85 Chorava, Akaki, 1 Chukhrai, Grigory, 101, 103, 107, 121, 138, 209 Chusheng, Cai, 102 Cineclub de Viña del Mar, 237 Cinema Cuban cinema, 153, 163, 166, 169–72, 174, 175n13, 187, 258–59 East-German cinema, 11, 194n10, 206–07, 216–30 Italian cinema, 8–11, 23–36, 54–66, 77–8, 149–53, 204–05, 245–57 Mexican cinema, 10, 162–78 Neorealism, 7, 28, 147–61 New Chilean cinema, 10, 163, 166–73, 175n13, 231–44 New Latin American cinema, 109, 167, 169, 173–74, 237 New German cinema, 185, 195n15, 217, 227 Cissé, Souleymane, 5, 142 Clark, Thomas Campbell, 43 Clash (The), 250, 256n21 colonialism, 121, 133–34, 138, 141–42, 143n11, 144n24, 168, 172, 175n13, 196n18, 210, 213n60, 236 Communist Party Chinese Communist Party, 90 Cominform, 77, 148, 151



French Communist Party, 2, 4, 218, 220, 224 Komsomol (Vsesoyuznyi leninskii kommunisticheskii soyuz molodyozhi), 84, 91, 250–54, 256n23 Italian Communist Party, 71, 75, 77–9, 80nn3 and 13, 81n46, 149, 152 League of Communists of Yugoslavia, 151 Mexican Communist Party, 171 Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 68, 84, 105, 118, 134 Communist Party of the United States of America, 38, 40, 43–46 Cooper, Gary, 12 Coppola, Francis Ford, 211n5, 262 Costa-Gavras, Constantin, 173 Cowie, Peter, 185 Crabtree, Arthur, 141 Crevenna, Alfredo B., 205 Cuban Missile Crisis, 125, 260 Cukor, George, 208 cultural diplomacy, 2, 7, 9, 83–98, 117, 127, 149–51, 182–87, 190, 194n8, 195n15, 260, 262 Damiani, Damiano, 247–49, 255nn10 and 15 Daquin, Louis, 218 Darde, Jean-Noël, 226 de Anda, Raul, 164 de Antonio, Emile, 48 De Berardinis, Giovanni, 30, 71 De Castro, Josuè, 232, 234 decolonisation, 5, 7, 9, 102–03, 109, 127–28, 132–46, 259 de Funès, Louis, 220 De Gasperi, Alcide, 62 de Hadeln, Moritz, 188, 190 De Santis, Giuseppe, 152 De Sica, Vittorio, 61, 153, 155 de Valck, Marijke, 187 de Wolf, Francis Colt, 34n24, 35n34 Deleau, Pierre-Henri, 188 Delibašić, Predrag, 153 Demchenko, Vladimir, 256n22 Dennis, Gene, 40

Index 275

Denysenko, Volodymir, 197n32 Di Chiara, Francesco, 150 Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo, 169 Die, Hu, 102 Dolinin, Dmitry, 208 Donskoy, Mark, 121 Dovey, Lindiwe, 196n18 Dubourg Glatigny, Pascal, 5 Dzigan, Efim, 121, 138 Eceiza, Antonio, 172, 176n30 Echeverría, Luis, 10, 167, 169, 172–74 Echeverría, Rodolfo, 170 Edman, George W., 35n37 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 94n28 Eisenschitz, Bernard, 220 Eisenstein, Sergei, 74, 102, 138, 141 Eisymont, Viktor, 202 Emspak, Julius, 39, 41 Enlai, Zhou, 3–4, 90, 104 Ermash, Filipp, 205, 208 Ermler, Fridrikh, 73, 258 Ertuğrul, Muhsin, 197n33 Fadeev, Aleksandr, 84–85, 88–89, 92, 94n16 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 227 Federal Security Directorate (Mexico), 171 Fediala, Mamadou Keita, 136 Fedoseiev, O., 253 Fellini, Federico, 205 Fernández Violante, Marcela, 172 Fernández, Emilio, 164, 167, 172 Ferreri, Marco, 195n12 Fielden, Lionel, 26, 28, 34nn25–26 film censorship at film festivals, 187 in Africa, 134 in GDR, 227 in India, 121 in Italy, 8, 29–30, 34n17, 58, 62, 67, 70–71, 73, 79, 80n15 in Mexico, 170–71 film distribution American Motion Picture Export Company Africa, 141 Catholic, 58, 60

276

Index

Comacico (Trade and Film Moroccan Company), 139–41, 144n43 foreign films in the USSR, 107, 201, 205, 211n5 MPEA (Motion Pictures Export Association), 119, 126, 139, 141 non-theatrical, 38, 42, 68–71, 75–76, 89, 108, 261 Secma (African film exhibition company), 139–41 Soiuzintorgkino, 68, 71 Sovexportfilm, 9, 71, 74–5, 87, 89, 91, 107, 118, 126, 135–37, 139–42 theatrical, 8–10, 13n1, 25, 29–31, 79, 119–22, 126–27, 133, 135–38, 140, 142, 191–92, 211, 216, 219, 224, 226, 237 Unifrance Film, 219 film festivals Afro-Asian Film Festival (AAFF), 9, 102–09 Asian Film Festival (AFF), 102, 104 Asian Film Week (AFW), 103–05 Berlin International Film Festival, 6, 11, 102, 181–82, 184–85, 187–90, 194n6, 195nn14–15, 196n18, 197n34 Cannes Film Festival, 1–2, 6, 11, 15n31, 91, 102, 104, 107, 121, 139, 168, 181–82, 184–85, 187–89, 195nn14–15 and 18, 196n23, 197n34, 203, 216, 260 Cinéma du Réel Festival, 227 Ibadan International Film Festival, 139 International African Film Festival in Mogadishu, 139 International Short Film and Documentary Film Festival, Grenoble, 224 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, 102, 150, 192, 198n39 La Rochelle International Film Festival, 227 Mariánské Lázně Film Festival, 150 Moscow International Film Festival, 15n31, 102, 108, 139, 192, 197n34, 198nn39–40, 201, 245–46, 248

Pesaro Film Festival (Mostra del Nuovo Cinema), 168, 174, 198n39 San Francisco Film Festival, 107 Soviet film festivals/weeks abroad, 75, 117–18, 122–27 Venice International Film Festival, 6, 11, 15n31, 67, 73, 75, 81n48, 102, 104, 136, 139, 143n23, 156, 181–82, 184–91, 195n12 and 15, 197nn33–34, 223 film industry Bollywood/Indian film industry, 108, 118–19, 124, 127, 141 British film industry, 30, 118–19, 124, 141 Chilean film industry, 166, 240–41 Cuban film industry, 171 French film industry, 139 GDR film industry, 216 Hollywood, 6, 8–10, 12, 23–24, 26–27, 31–32, 34n16, 48, 55–58, 60, 62–63, 68, 87, 106, 116–19, 127, 129n22, 149–52, 163–65, 204–5, 218, 235, 249 Italian film industry, 8, 24–9, 31 Mexican film industry, 163–178 film market African film market, 10, 132–46 Indian film market, 9, 116–31 Italian film market, 8–9, 23, 29, 32, 62 Yugoslav film market, 151 film production/producers Babelsberg Studios, 5, 217–18 Camera DDR, 220–21, 227 CPC (Centro de Producción de Cortometrajes), 161, 172 DEFA (Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft), 4, 206–07, 216–21, 224, 227 GOSKINO (State Committee for Cinematography of the Council of Ministers of the USSR), 201, 204–10, 212n27, 213n51 ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte y Industria Cinematográficos), 166, 169–72, 175n13 Jadran Film, 149, 154–55



Index 277

Lenfilm, 203, 205–9, 212n26, 212n33, 213n51 Les Films Ariane, 4 Mosfilm, 205–6, 209, 211n5, 213n39, 258 MPAA (Motion Pictures Association of America), 119 MPPDA (Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America), 26, 27, 29, 35n34, 119 Orizzonte 2000, 231, 234–35, 242n13 Studio H&S, 221–27 UniCiTé, 220–21, 223 Union Films, 37–53 film schools CSC – Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Rome film academy), 5, 152 FAMU – Filmová Akademie muzických umění (Prague film school), 5 IDHEC – Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (French film school), 5 VGIK – Vsesoyuznyi gosudarstvennyi institut kinematografii (All Union State Institute of Cinematography), 5, 84 film technology, 5, 7, 11, 151, 201–15, 260–61 First Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, Belgrade, 103, 150, 232 Fitzgerald, Albert, 40–41 Forman, Miloš, 195n14 Fosse, Bob, 211n5 Frank, Robert, 3 Friedkin, William, 211n5 Friedman, Jeremy, 102 Fromm, Erich, 232 Fulchignoni, Enrico, 232 Gaál, István, 153 Gaeth, Arthur, 40 Gagarin, Yuri, 123, 137 Galindo, Alejandro, 165 Gandhi, Indira, 126 García Espinosa, Julio, 153, 169–70, 173, 236

García Márquez, Gabriel, 241 Gavaldón, Roberto, 164 Gedda, Luigi, 57–61 Gedevanishvili, Shalva, 138 Gerasimov, Aleksandr, 85 Gerasimov, Sergei, 9, 72–73, 83–86, 88–92, 94n21 Germi, Pietro, 61, 201 Getino, Octavio, 108–09, 110n16, 235–36 Gewandt, Heinrich, 225 Ghatak, Ritwik, 197n37 Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C.E., 14n6 Gilburd, Eleonory, 212n27 Girometti, Roberto, 231 Girotti, Massimo, 152 Glandbard, Max, 43–44 Glenville, Peter, 211n5 Godard, Jean-Luc, 108, 149 Goedde, Petra, 148 Goerg, Odile, 134, 144n24 Goldman, Tanya, 49n17 Golovskoi, Valerii, 264n5 Golub, Lev, 123 Gómez, Manuel Octavio, 187 Gopalakrishnan, Adoor, 197n37 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 9 Gorky, Maksim, 121 Gozzini, Giovanni, 80n16 Grachev, Nikolai, 72 Gräf, Roland, 219 Graham, Sean, 104 Grainge, Paul, 264n6 Grant, Matthew, 149 Gray, Ros, 143n11 Greco, Emidio, 222, 231 Gregor, Erika, 188 Gregor, Ulrich, 188–89 Gregoretti, Ugo, 195n12 Grigorev, Boris, 209 Grimmer, Vera, 157n29 Grossberg, Lawrence, 147 Guangnian, Zhang, 107, 111n55 Guevara, Alfredo, 169–70, 235, 242n16 Guldi, Jo, 264n4 Gundle, Stephen, 80n3, 81n46 Günther, Egon, 217 Gurgenov, Vyacheslav, 128n1

278

Gurov, Sergei, 129n39 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, 153 Guttuso, Renato, 148 Guzmán, Patricio, 237, 239 Gyöngyössy, Imre, 196n30 Hall, James, 43 Hannerz, Ulf, 7 Harris, Don, 46 Hays, William, 26 Hebblethwaite, Peter, 56 Hellmich, Peter, 222–23 Hemingway, Ernest, 262 Hennebelle, Guy, 108 Hepburn, Audrey, 12 Herberg, Miguel, 222, 226 Heynowski, Walter, 221–26 Higbee, Will, 7 Hilger, Andreas, 263n3, 265 Hillman, Sidney, 50n31 history conjunctural history, 147–48 cultural history, 2–3, 14n6, 132 diplomatic history, 2, 32, 56, 68, 71, 83–98, 101–112, 116–131, 165 entangled history, 259, 263n3 global history, 259, 263n4 international history, 2–3, 14n6 Hitler, Adolf, 226, 245, 252 Hoveyda, Fereydoun, 232 Hrabal, Bohumil, 12 Hu, Guan, 194n6 Hu, Sang, 196n28 Huangfu, Jenny, 111n55 Hubley, John, 39 Hughes, Howard, 247 Hui-min, Ssutu, 106 Hull, Cordell, 26 Hurwitz, Leo, 37 Ibarra Aguirre, Eduardo, 171 Icher, Bruno, 187 Ilyenko, Yuri, 197n32, 198n40 Inshakov, V., 256n23 Internationalism anti-communist, 25, 28, 38, 40–41, 50n36, 60, 62, 78, 85, 104, 126, 137, 164–65, 220, 226

Index

cinematic, 6, 83–98, 102, 147–61, 162–78 cultural, 6 socialist, 5–6, 83–98, 102, 125, 127 Third Worldism, 9–10, 101–15, 127, 162–78, 181, 183, 231–44 Iordanova, Dina, 11, 14n20, 194n1, 196n23 Ioshin, O.I., 207 Iron Maiden, 252 Ivangora, O., 256n31 Ivchenko, Boris, 197n32 Ivens, Joris, 4, 11, 49, 105, 149, 218, 237 Izzi Benedetti, Gabriella, 242n17 Jackson May, Andrew, 40 Jacob, Gilles, 196 Jacobsen, Wolfgang, 194n7, 195n15, 196n18 Jacopetti, Gualtiero, 211n5 Jacquin, Maurice, 144n43 Jakubowska, Wanda, 149 Jalili, Abdolfazl, 197n37 Jancovich, Mark, 264n8 Jancsó, Miklós, 187, 196n30 Jie, Fu, 190 Jin, Xie, 103, 106 Johnson, Rachel, 194n2 Johnston, Eric, 119, 141 Jones, Chuck, 38 Juárez, Benito, 162 Jungen, Christian, 188, 190, 195n16, 196n28 Juráček, Pavel, 149 Kalatozov, Mikhail, 122, 137, 258, 260, 262, 264n5 Kapoor, Raj, 120, 205 Karasik, Yuli, 136, 143n23 Karl, Lars, 14n, 17, 112 Karlin, Daniel, 220–21 Karmen, Roman, 137, 140 Karpenkina, Yanina, 93 Karpova, Yulia, 93 Kaul, Mani, 191, 197n36 Kawakita, Kashiko, 197n38 Keaton, Buster, 203



Keita, Modibo, 136 Keivan, Igor, 251–53 Kelly, Catriona, 11 Kenez, Peter, 80n7 Kennedy, Joseph F., 107 Khaneev, O.P., 212n33 Khanova, Polina, 264n8 Khanti, S.R., 123 Kheifits, Iosif, 207 Khmara, L., 91 Khrushchev, Nikita, 4, 101, 103, 105, 107, 132, 134–35, 138, 155, 203, 260 Kimiagarov, Bension, 138 Kirasirova, Masha, 110n12 Kirk, Alexander, 29 Kirov, Sergei, 202, 211n10 Kislenko, Aleksei Pavlovich, 31 Kiss, 251–52 Kissinger, Henry, 239 Kitaeva, Yana, 93 Klein, Herbert Arthur, 43 Klushantsev, Pavel, 123 Kogan, S., 74 Koivunen, Pia, 2, 6, 160, 263n3 Konchalovsky, Andrei, 205, 211n8 Konyukhova, Tatyana, 107 Kopalin, Ilya, 88–89, 123 Korda, Alexander, 212n25 Kosenko, Grigory, 123, 137 Kosicki, Piotr H., 56, 62, 64n3 Kötzing, Andreas, 14n, 17, 110n11 Kovács, Andràs, 196n30 Kozintsev, Grigory, 78 Kozovoi, Andrei, 110n13 Kramer, Stanley, 149 Kristensen, Lars, 236 Kroll, Jack, 42, 50n31 Krzyżewska, Ewa, 155 Kukulin, Ilya, 214n60 Kurosawa, Akira, 139, 211n8 Kusturica, Emir, 5 labour organisation, 8, 37–53, 261–62 CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), 38–42, 44–45, 47, 49nn10–15, 50n31 IFAWA (International Fishermen and Allied Workers of America), 42

Index 279

ILGWU (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union), 44 UAW (United Automobile, Aircraft & Agricultural Implement Workers of America), 37–41, 47–49, 49n10 UE (United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America), 37–42, 44–48, 49nn10–18 UMWA (United Mine Workers of America), 46 Lachize, Samuel, 224 Lafont, Bernadette, 187 Laine, Edvin, 207 Lakhdar-Hamina, Mohammed, 196n18 Landau, Saul, 237 Lardner, Ring Jr., 39 Latil, Loredana, 194n7, 196 Laval, Pierre, 134 Lawrence (Captain), 34n17 Lawson, John Howard, 86 Lean, David, 123, 211n7 Ledit, Father Joseph, 59 Lee, Sangjoon, 15n39, 110n12, 194n7, 195n16 Legoshin, Vladimir, 72 Lelouch, Claude, 201 Lenin, Vladimir, 79, 90, 202, 207, 211n10 Levi, Carlo, 235 Leyda, Jay, 107 Li, Jie, 108 Liamina, A., 256n25 Libonati, Francesco, 29 Lim, Song Hwee, 7 Lioznova, Tatyana, 252 Littín, Miguel, 167–69, 173–74, 176n30, 237 Litvinenko, Ekaterina, 1 Lizzani, Carlo, 246, 248, 252–53 Lomidze, Grigory, 129n39 London Memorandum, 150 López Mateos, Adolfo, 165, 169 López Portillo, José, 174 Lovejoy, Alice, 7 Luchko, Klara, 1 Luketić, Željko, 157n29 Lukov, Leonid, 121

280

Lumumba, Patrice, 106 Lundquist, Oliver, 40 Lustig, Branko, 152, 157n29 Macdonald, Dwight, 85, 94n17 MacKenzie, Scott, 264n4 McGarr, Paul, 117, 127 McKee Irwin, Robert, 175n4 McKee, Burtt F., 106 McMahon, Robert J., 132 Maetzig, Kurt, 218 mafia, 245, 247–49, 253–54, 255n15 Magnúsdóttir, Rosa, 94n28 Maier, Charles, 33n11 Major, Patrick, 3 Makarova, Tamara, 89 Makavejev, Dušan, 188, 196n23 Makk, Károly, 196n30 Maltby, Richard, 15n, 17, 264nn7–8 Mann, Geoff, 50n33 Manning, Patrick, 263n4 Mao Zedong, 89–90, 95n51, 103, 108, 233 Marcantonio, Vito, 41, 44 Marconi, Guglielmo, 202 Marcuse, Herbert, 232 Martí, José, 170 Martinelli, Renzo, 80n16 Martínez de Hoyos, Jorge, 162 Martinez, Alba, 171 Martínez Verdugo, Arnoldo, 171 Martini, Michael, 38, 49nn8–9 Marx, Karl, 154, 232, 236, 238, 240 Maryamov, E.M., 87 Marzani, Carl, 8, 37, 40–45, 47–49, 50nn21–38 Maslova, Aleksandra, 93 materialism, 56, 62–63, 238 Mathieu, François, 220 Matles, James J., 41 Matteotti, Matteo, 233 Matusevich Maxim, 143n18 Mavhunga, Clapperton Chakanetsa, 110n13 Mazierska, Ewa, 236 Mazlish, Bruce, 263n4 Mazzarella, Carlo, 195n12 Medveczky, Diourka, 187

Index

Medvedkin, Aleksandr, 106, 140 Meers, Philippe, 264n8 Menon, V.K. Krishna, 121 Meskhiev, Dmitry, 207 Mestman, Mariano, 110n14, 112n70, 235 Mészáros, Márta, 187, 196n30 Meyers, Philippe, 264n8 Mihelj, Sabina, 151 Mikaelyan, Sergei, 213n59 Mikhalkov, Nikita, 197n34, 211n8 Mikkonen, Simo, 2, 6, 18, 160, 263n3 Miklóssy, Katalin, 5 Mikolaychuk, Ivan, 197n32 Milestone, Lewis, 85 Miller, Arthur, 85 Miller, James E., 33n1 Milliken, Carl E., 35n34 Mitter, Rana, 3 Mocaër, Albert, 144n43 Modi, K.K., 124 Moine, Caroline, 110n, 113, 194n7 Morley, Karen, 49n10 Moro, Margherita, 11 Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, 5, 9–10, 101, 147–58, 165, 173, 232, 235, 259 Müller, Kongo, 221 Murray, Philip, 40, 42 Musser, Charles, 8, 50n21 Na Bangchang, Tavi, 104 Naderi, Amir, 197n37 Nasser, George, 104 nationalism, 125, 134, 136, 163, 168–69, 172, 239, 245–46, 252, 254 Navaux, Anne, 3–4 Navrotsky, Sigizmund, 72 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 126, 234 neo-fascism, 11, 245–54 Nero, Franco, 247 Neruda, Pablo, 237 Nicholas II (Tsar Nicholas Romanov), 211n10 Nicolaescu, Sergiu, 255n17 Nikitin, Afanasy, 121 Nono, Luigi, 235 Noto, Paolo, 34n28, 36



Oboler, Arch, 149, 268 Olhovich, Sergio, 172 ONU (United Nations), 148, 233–34, 239 FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), 234 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 148, 232, 234 Oparin, Alexander, 94n18 Orlova, Lyubov, 1 Oroz, Silva, 175n5, 177 Ortiz Tejeda, Carlos, 166 Ōshima, Nagisa, 187 OSPAAAL (Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America), 235 Ost, Milton, 48 Ostashevskaya, V.P., 212n33 Ostrowska, Dorota, 194n7, 264n10 Osyka, Leonid, 197n32 Ozerov, Yuri, 107–8, 129n39 pacifism, 10, 83–9, 101, 147–56 International Peace Prize, 149 Partisans of Peace, 148 peaceful coexistence, 4, 101, 103, 105, 116 Stockholm Appeal, 4, 148 World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace, 2 World Peace Council, 4, 148 Pajala, Mari, 7 Paladini, Aldo, 147, 153, 157nn39–42 Palma, Paola, 14n16 Pampanini, Silvana, 152 Pan, Wenzhan, 190 Panfilov, Gleb, 190 Papatakis, Michel, 142 Parikka, Jussi, 264n12 Partasarti, 122 Paskaljević, Goran, 5 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 195n12 Patalas, Enno, 188 Paulus VI (Giovanni Battista Montini), 61–2 Pavičić, Jurica, 151 Pavlenko, Pyotr, 85

Index 281

Pavlenok, Boris, 206, 213n51 Pavlov, Alexander, 264n8 Péteri, György, 5 Philipe, Gérard, 4, 218 Picasso, Pablo, 1, 90, 148 Pidgaetskii, Vitalii, 255n18 Pink Floyd, 250 Pinochet, Augusto, 167, 222–23, 225–26, 238–39, 241 Pissarev, Pavel, 190 Pisu, Stefano, 8, 14n11, 69, 72, 79n3, 93, 194n7, 195n16 Pitassio, Francesco, 10, 264n10 Pius XI (Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti), 55–6, 64n2 Pius XII (Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Pacelli), 54–8, 61, 63 Plastun, Aleksandr, 251–53 Polanski, Roman, 195n14 Polito, Saverio, 70 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 150, 195n12 Poplavskaya, Irina, 137 popular culture, 3, 151, 250, 245–56 Pozner, Valérie, 14n16 Presidency of the Council of Ministers of Italy, 62, 78 Pressman, Lee, 40, 43 Prognon, Nicolas, 223 Pronin, Vasily, 121 propaganda, 8–9, 40, 42, 56, 61–3, 71, 73, 76–8, 87–8, 92, 102, 117, 120, 125–27, 134, 138–39, 231, 247, 253, 262 Prosperi, Franco, 211n5 Provotorov, Ivan, 206 Provotorov, Vitaly, 207 Ptushko, Aleksandr, 72, 122 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 77, 102, 134 punk, 11, 245, 249–54, 256n23, 256n25 Pyrev, Ivan, 74 Radchenko, Sergey, 110n5 Radosevich, Anton, 45–6 Rafelson, Bob, 211n5 Raizman, Yuli, 74 Rajagopalan, Sudha, 117, 264n8 Ramachandran, T.M., 191 Ramos Arenas, Fernando, 264n8

282

Rao, Krishna, 122 Rappaport, Herbert, 202 Ray, Satyajit, 197n36 Rayner, John, 34n26 Razlogova, Elena, 9, 110n15, 194n7 Reid, Susan E., 211n15 Reinhard, CarrieLynn D., 264n8 Reuther, Victor G., 39 Reuther, Walter, 38–9, 41, 49n15 Reyes Espíndola, Patricia, 173 Rhyne, Ragan, 15n20 Richard, Pierre, 220 Ripa di Meana, Carlo, 196n30 Risi, Nelo, 150 Rissient, Pierre, 188, 196n23 Rivera, Diego, 148 Roberts, Geoffrey, 88 Robeson, Paul, 44, 49, 148 Rocha, Glauber, 173, 236 Rodenberg, Hans, 219 Rodríguez, Ismael, 164 Rodríguez, Israel, 10 Romanov, Aleksei, 209, 212n25 Römer, Rolf, 219 Romm, Mikhail, 73, 85, 141 Rondi, Gian Luigi, 196n28 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 26, 38, 40, 211n10 Rossanda, Rossana, 74–5 Rossellini, Renzo, 222, 232, 234–36, 238, 242n1 Rossellini, Roberto, 11, 81n43, 222, 231–41 Rossi Drago, Eleonora, 152 Roth-Ey, Kristin, 129n28 Rouleau, Raymond, 218 Rozhansky, Ivan, 94n18 Rozovsky, Eduard, 207 Rudaki, 138 Ruiz, Raùl, 237 Ruozzi, Federico, 64n12 Rusinova, Elena, 213n51 Russak, Samuel, 37 Sadoul, Georges, 218 Salazkina, Masha, 6 Samoilova, Tatyana, 137 Samsonova, Marina, 213n42

Index

Sanjinés, Jorge, 173 Sára, Sándor, 196n30 Sarana, Nadezhda A., 251, 256n25 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 148 Saura, Carlos, 195n14 Scelba, Mario, 70 Scheumann, Gerhard, 221–26 Schlegel, Hans-Joachim, 188 Skopal, Pavel, 15n36 Scorsese, Martin, 262 Scott, Ridley, 157n29 Scott-Smith, Giles, 14n11, 15n35 Sembené, Ousmane, 5, 142 Semenov, Yulian, 252 Sen, Mrinal, 108 Sentner, Tonie, 45–6 Sentner, William, 45–7, 50n41 Sereni, Emilio, 77 Serrano, Nina, 237 Setkina, Irina, 88, 137 Sex Pistols, 250, 252 Shapiro, Roman, 109n1 Shapley, Harlow, 94n14 Shaw, Tony, 102 Shipunov, Konstantin, 252 Shkalnikov, 190 Shmeliov, Vadim, 251 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 94n16 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 84–8, 92, 94n14, 94n16–7, 94n21 Shukhevych, Roman, 245–46 Siagian, Bachtiar, 104 Siefert, Marsha, 6, 9, 150 Siegelbaum, Lewis H., 211n9 Signoret, Simone, 218 Simonov, Konstantin, 85, 87–9, 91, 94n28 Sino-Soviet relations, 4, 9, 90–3, 101–19, 121–25 Sino-Indian conflict, 118, 125–27 Sino-Soviet cinematic cooperation, 9, 84–93, 101–9 Sino-Soviet split, 9, 101, 105–9 Sizov, Nikolai, 205, 211n5 Skalenakis, Giorgos, 5 Smirnov, Viktor, 91 Smith, Jessica, 94n16 Sokolsky, Lev, 212n27



Solanas, Fernando, 108–9, 110n16, 115, 235–36 Solás, Humberto, 187 Soldati, Mario, 61 Soto, Helvio, 222, 231 Spataro, Giuseppe, 28, 34n22 Spielberg, Steven, 157n Stafford, Roy, 264n8 Stalin, Iosif, 2, 9, 68, 73–4, 85, 87, 90–1, 94n27, 134, 148, 150, 202, 211n10, 260 Stewart, Michael, 35n32 Stites, Richard, 256n28 Stokes, Melvyn, 264n7 Stone, Ellery, 26, 28–9, 31, 34n26 Stowe, Leland, 40 Strand, Paul, 37 Strizhenov, Oleg, 121 Stubbings, Sarah, 264n8 Sturges, John, 141 Subini, Tomaso, 64n1 Suvorov, Mikhail, 255n15, 256n23 Svilova, Elizaveta, 87 Swann, Paul, 33n13 Sweezy, Paul M., 232 Szász, Péter, 209 Szemere, Anna, 256n22 Tarelin, Andrei, 132, 136 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 136, 143n23 Tatarsky, Evgeny, 206 Teksoy, Rekin, 197n33 television, 119, 195n12, 217, 219, 222, 231, 233, 237, 239–40 Temporary Film Board, 29–30, 35n32 Thaw, 2, 101, 121, 150, 260, 262 Thomas, Roland Jay, 38, 40–1 Thompson, Jack Lee, 248 Tikhonov, Nikolai Semenovich, 87–8, 94n27 Tikhonov, Vyacheslav, 252 Timofeychev, Aleksei, 211n10 Tisse, Eduard, 202 Tito (Josip Broz), 9, 148, 150–1 Tobia, Simona, 33n12 Tosi, Virgilio, 76, 147, 153 Toubiana, Serge, 196n18, 224 Touré, Sékou, 135, 138

Index 283

transnational cinema, 1–7, 10, 103, 147–56, 181–193, 216–27, 258–62, 264n4 culture, 4–5, 116–128, 181–193, 258–262 Trauberg, Leonid, 78 Tregubovich, Viktor, 207 Trelles, Danilo, 235 Treveri Gennari, Daniela, 62 Truffaut, François, 184 Truman, Harry, 38, 43–4, 50n36 Trumbo, Dalton, 86 Tulubyeva, Zoya, 122 Turner, William, 41 Tyerman, Edward, 95n51 Tylybeva, Elizaveta, 74 Uffelmann, Dirk, 214n60 Unidad Popular, 11, 235, 237–8, 240 USA CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 85, 225 Embassy in Rome, 8, 24–5, 29–30, 32, 35n32, 35n34 Government, 25, 30, 34n27, 40–8, 50n36, 109n1, 139, 163 Office of Inter-American Affairs, 163 State Department, 8, 24–5, 27, 29–30, 32, 33n13, 35n34, 119, 128n1, 134, 138–39, 143n17, 163–4, 208 Urueta, Chano, 164 Urusevsky, Sergei, 107, 258 USSR GKKS (State Committee for Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries), 118 KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti), 11–12, 128n1, 245–54, 255n2, 255n16, 256n23, 256n25, 256n28 ISCUS (Indo-Soviet Cultural Society), 117 Italy-USSR cultural association, 67–8, 70–1, 74–6, 78, 149 Soviet Ministry of Cinematography, 87, 94n25 SSOD (Union of Soviet Societies of Friendship), 118

284

TASS (Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union), 250 VOKS (All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Abroad), 68, 75–7, 94n14, 94n18, 94n21 Vadimov, Andrey, 255n15 Valamat-Zade, Gafur, 129n39 Valiev, Vladimir, 138 Varlamov, Leonid, 72–3, 91 Vasey, Ruth, 34n16 Vasilev, Sergei, 75 Vega, Pastor, 170 Venzher, Irina, 137 Vergano, Aldo, 81n43 Verhoeven, Michael, 195n15 Vermisheva, Ekaterina, 123 Veronese, Vittorino, 61 Vertov, Dziga, 102 Viazzi, Glauco, 77 Vích, Václav, 152 Vidor, King, 49n10 Viganò, Dario E., 64n1 Vincendeau, Ginette, 264n10 Visconti, Luchino, 156 Vláčil, František, 156 Volk, Eduard, 73, 83 Vrhovec, Ivo, 154–55 Vyshinsky, Andrei, 90 Wajda, Andrzej, 139, 155 Ward, Elizabeth, 194n10

Index

Ward, Harold, 46 Werner, Michael, 264n7 Westad, Odd Arne, 14n5 Wolf, Konrad, 227 World Federation of Democratic Youth, 148 Wyler, William, 85 Xiaozhong, Yang, 104 Yi, Wang, 92 Yan, Wang, 105, 109n1 Yarmatov, Kamil, 104 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 262 Yimou, Zhang, 194n6 Youngblood, Denise J., 14n3, 102 Yudin, Konstantin, 72 Yurizditzky, Sergei, 208 Yutkevich, Sergei, 1, 103, 121, 137 Zanussi, Krzysztof, 195n14 Zaslavsky, Viktor, 80n13 Zavattini, Cesare, 10, 147–49, 152–55, 157n32, 195n12 Zeffirelli, Franco, 248 Zeller, Jack, 39 Zhuk, Sergei, 12 Ziemann, Benjamin, 149 Zimina, Mariia, 93 Zinni, Maurizio, 8–9 Zurlini, Valerio, 150