World Socialist Cinema - (Cinema Cultures in Contact) by Masha Salazkina (Paperback)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

One of the Best Scholarly Books of 2023, The Chronicle of Higher Education

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

In this capacious transnational film history, renowned scholar Masha Salazkina proposes a groundbreaking new framework for understanding the cinematic cultures of twentieth-century socialism. Taking as a point of departure the vast body of work screened at the Tashkent International Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, World Socialist Cinema maps the circulation of films between the Soviet Bloc and the countries of the Global South in the mid- to late twentieth century, illustrating the distribution networks, festival circuits, and informal channels that facilitated this international network of artistic and intellectual exchange. Building on decades of meticulous archival work, this long-anticipated film history unsettles familiar stories to provide an alternative to Eurocentric, national, and regional narratives, rooted outside of the capitalist West.

From the Back Cover

"World Socialist Cinema narrates a film history beyond received canons, explicitly decentering and dewesternizing the way that we approach cinema's past. Masha Salazkina's scholarship is breathtaking, using hitherto unexplored archives and primary sources to complicate what we understand by terms like 'world cinema, ' 'global cinema, ' or 'cinemas of solidarity.' I know of nothing comparable."--Peter Limbrick, author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi

"Through the prism of the Tashkent Film Festival, this extraordinary study offers a kaleidoscopic view of what Salazkina terms 'world socialist cinema.' Deftly tessellating a dazzling array of institutions, films, languages, and geopolitical, formal, and theoretical questions, World Socialist Cinema is a field-changing book, and a model for future scholarship."--Alice Lovejoy, author of Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military

Review Quotes

"Salazkina has an incredible talent for storytelling, offering a glimpse into fascinating personalities and remarkable events that shaped the encounters of African and Asian, and later Latin American, cineasts through the 1960s and 1970s. . . Beyond its major contributions to the study of transnational cinema, solidarity movements, and socialist cultural forms, this work offers an impressive model of cinema scholarship."-- "Hispanic American Historical Review"

"World Socialist Cinema is an important and timely reminder that it is worth excavating and examining the legacy of Soviet culture in all its contradictions and complexity. In revealing its ways of building solidarity and alliances beyond neoliberal capitalism and its cultural production, Salazkina's book shows the Tashkent festival to be a worthy place to start."-- "Film Quarterly"

About the Author

Masha Salazkina is Concordia Research Chair in Transnational Media Arts and Cultures at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein's Mexico and a coeditor of Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema and Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures.