Masha Salazkina — Global Socialist Cinema of Armed Struggle
The opening ceremony of the First International Film Festival of Asian and African and Latin American Countries in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 1968 (SPUTNIK)
This presentation argues for exploring the war topoi in socialist cinemas across the Soviet bloc and the Global South in relation to each other, and in their shared international contexts of production and circulation. Socialist cinema of armed struggle extended to a great number of sites and institutional contexts of production, circulation and exhibition, both national and international – including, on the one end of the spectrum the film production of the military itself, and on the other, informal clandestine filmmaking that have come to be associated with militant Third Cinema, and numerous cinematic forms in-between. Here, I will take the Tashkent festival of cinemas of Asia, Africa and Latin America from 1968 to the early 80s as a privileged site for the international exhibition of such cinema. Constituting perhaps the largest portion of the festival selections, these were both fiction and non-fiction films, dealing with the war, insurgent violence, military aggression (including state violence) and armed resistance in a variety of historical and contemporary contexts.
While many of these films represented different positions within their contemporary polemical struggles over the aesthetics and politics of leftist cinema (reflective of the combative, high-stakes environments in which they were rooted), together they are part of a larger, more complex story of war as the organizational principle of global socialism as manifested through cinema. Considered together, I argue, this body of work and its exhibition history reveals more than its strategic geopolitical employment by the Soviet bloc. Cinematic representation of armed struggle became a true arena for the complex performances of affinities, alliances, and solidarities across the Socialist and Third Worlds – while also revealing their internal contradictions and divergences.
BIO
Masha Salazkina is a Professor of Film Studies and Concordia University Research Chair in Transnational Media Arts and Cultures. Her first book In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein's Mexico (University of Chicago Press, 2009) positions Eisenstein's unfinished Mexican project and theoretical writings within the wider context of post-revolutionary Mexico and global cultures of modernity. She co-edited the collections Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema and Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures (both from Indiana University Press). Dr. Salazkina has published essays in Cinema Journal, Film History, October, Screen, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, KinoKultura, and many edited collections on topics such as geopolitics of film and media theory; theorizations of World Cinema. Her current research centers on the shared cinematic cultures of global socialisms in the 20th century.