"World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities and Solidarities reconstructs the trajectories of international film circulation between the Soviet Bloc and the countries of the Global South in the mid- to late Twentieth Century. The book takes as its focal point the Tashkent International Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa and Latin America that took place in Uzbekistan (USSR) throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Centering on the vast body of cinematic work from the three continents screened at the festival and paying particular attention to the internal tensions and gender dynamics within it, the book proposes world socialist cinema as a distinct formation, providing an alternative to Euro-centric and/or national and regional narratives of film history: an international socialist cinema as seen from the vantage point of the Global South"--

During the 1920s and ’30s, Mexico attracted an international roster of artists and intellectuals—including Orson Welles, Katherine Anne Porter, and Leon Trotsky—who were drawn to the heady tumult engendered by battling cultural ideologies in an emerging center for the avant-garde. Against the backdrop of this cosmopolitan milieu, In Excess reconstructs the years that the renowned Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein spent in the country to work on his controversial film ¡Que Viva Mexico! Illuminating the inextricability of Eisenstein’s oeuvre from the global cultures of modernity and film, Masha Salazkina situates this unfinished project within the twin contexts of postrevolutionary Mexico and the ideas of such contemporaneous thinkers as Walter Benjamin. In doing so, Salazkina explains how Eisenstein’s engagement with Mexican mythology, politics, and art deeply influenced his ideas, particularly about sexuality. She also uncovers the role Eisenstein’s bisexuality played in his creative thinking and identifies his use of the baroque as an important turn toward excess and hybrid forms. Beautifully illustrated with rare photographs, In Excess provides the most complete genealogy available of major shifts in this modern master’s theories and aesthetics.

“Widdis’s rich and fascinating book has opened a new perspective from which to think about the Soviet cinema.” —Kritika This major reimagining of the history of Soviet film and its cultural impact explores the fundamental transformations in how film, through the senses, remade the Soviet self in the 1920s and 1930s. Following the Russian Revolution, there was a shared ambition for a ‘sensory revolution’ to accompany political and social change: Soviet men and women were to be reborn into a revitalized relationship with the material world. Cinema was seen as a privileged site for the creation of this sensory revolution: Film could both discover the world anew, and model a way of inhabiting it. Drawing upon an extraordinary array of films, noted scholar Emma Widdis shows how Soviet cinema, as it evolved from the revolutionary avant-garde to Socialist Realism, gradually shifted its materialist agenda from emphasizing the external senses to instilling the appropriate internal senses (consciousness, emotions) in the new Soviet subject.

Examines the political cinema of 1968 in relation to global events.

The director and cowriter of some of the world's most iconic films—including Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment—Billy Wilder earned acclaim as American cinema's greatest social satirist. Though an influential fixture in Hollywood, Wilder always saw himself as an outsider. His worldview was shaped by his background in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and work as a journalist in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power, and his perspective as a Jewish refugee from Nazism lent his films a sense of the peril that could engulf any society. In this critical study, Joseph McBride offers new ways to understand Wilder's work, stretching from his days as a reporter and screenwriter in Europe to his distinguished as well as forgotten films as a Hollywood writer and his celebrated work as a writer-director. In contrast to the widespread view of Wilder as a hardened cynic, McBride reveals him to be a disappointed romantic. Wilder's experiences as an exile led him to mask his sensitivity beneath a veneer of wisecracking that made him a celebrated caustic wit. Amid the satirical barbs and exposure of social hypocrisies, Wilder’s films are marked by intense compassion and a profound understanding of the human condition. Mixing biographical insight with in-depth analysis of films from throughout Wilder's career as a screenwriter and director of comedy and drama, and drawing on McBride's interviews with the director and his collaborators, this book casts new light on the full range of Wilder's rich, complex, and distinctive vision.

This volume examines how numerous international transfers, circulations, and exchanges shaped the world of socialism during the Cold War. Over the course of half a century, the Soviets shaped politics, values and material culture throughout the vast space of Eurasia, and foreign forces in turn often influenced Soviet policies and society. The result was the distinct and interconnected world of socialism, or the Socialist Second World. Drawing on previously unavailable archival sources and cutting-edge insights from “New Cold War” and transnational histories, the twelve contributors to this volume focus on diverse cultural and social forms of this global socialist exchange: the cults of communist leaders, literature, cinema, television, music, architecture, youth festivals, and cultural diplomacy. The book’s contributors seek to understand the forces that enabled and impeded the cultural consolidation of the Socialist Second World. The efforts of those who created this world, and the limitations on what they could do, remain key to understanding both the outcomes of the Cold War and a recent legacy that continues to shape lives, cultures and policies in post-communist states today.

Engaging with fiction films devoted to heroic tales from the decade and a half between 1949 and 1966, this book reconceives state propaganda as aesthetic experiments that not only radically transformed acting, cinematography and screenwriting in socialist China, but also articulated a new socialist film theory and criticism. Rooted in the interwar avant-garde and commercial cinema, Chinese revolutionary cinema, as a state cinema for the newly established People's Republic, adapted Chinese literature for the screen, incorporated Hollywood narration, appropriated Soviet montage theory and orchestrated a new, glamorous, socialist star culture. In the wake of decolonisation, Chinese film journals were quick to project and disseminate the country's redefined self-image to Asia, Africa and Latin America as they helped to create an alternative vision of modernity and internationalism. Revealing the historical contingency of the term 'propaganda', Chan uncovers the visual, aural, kinaesthetic, sexual and ideological dynamics that gave rise to a new aesthetic of revolutionary heroism in world cinema. Based on extensive archival research, this book's focus on the distinctive rhetoric of post-war socialist China will be of value to East Asian Cinema scholars, Chinese Studies academics and those interested in the history of twentieth-century socialist culture.