World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War

Of the many new works that have begun to uncover the cultural history of the Cold War from the vantage point of critical peripheries, Masha Salazkina's new book is perhaps one of the most comprehensive and accessible to cover the movement of ideas through Soviet spaces of Afro-Asian exchange. It examines a key strategy of internationalist solidarity, that of creating cultural affinities and intimacies, between different parts of what Salazkina calls the “socialist world,” through the use of cinema.The main focus of the work is the Tashkent Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the many cinematic universes that came into contact through its participants. It is organized around two major objectives: describing the evolution of the festival, its early selections and accomplishments, and taking a look at key themes that emerged both intellectually and politically through festival programs. One chapter carefully explores women's and gender issues, another takes on questions of socialist models of industrialization, and an excellent concluding chapter assesses the role of armed struggle, both on-screen and off, in various open conflicts to which festival attendees would be vitally connected or otherwise encouraged to see as relevant to their own struggles.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. One example is the particularly revealing story of Sonia Amelio, a Mexican folkloric dancer invited to tour the Soviet Union. Salazkina uses this example to highlight gender tensions in the experience of performers traveling through Moscow and on their way to more remote cities, hearing criticisms of the “star system” and observing the celebration of the “progressive” films that documented the lives of working women (pp. 156–57). She examines gendered discourse in the reception of artists like Amelio not only by her hosts but also by delegations that interpreted her “risqué” act through their own perceptions of what socialist liberation might mean for women (p. 156).The book fills a critical gap in scholarship of this period in attempting to uncover the way that central Asia under Soviet rule participated in the crafting of internationalist, nonaligned, and tricontinental forms of resistance. It demonstrates that not only did filmmakers and their interlocutors find ways to join their comrades in anticapitalist struggle, but they also held space for critical dialogue over the emergence of a global hegemony of two superpower states. As these figures met under a Soviet microscope in what is now the capital city of Uzbekistan, a site not as well trafficked as major sites in the socialist and decolonizing world such as Havana or Algiers, they encountered a very controlled environment in which to be asked to consider revolutionary propositions. Salazkina discusses the preparations made and the events planned for these guests, but she also details the many ways that the Tashkent festival allowed participants a degree of freedom to observe and critique the surveillance and posturing of the state. This view of the Taskhent festival as a site of resistance to even Soviet power, to an extent, illustrates the power of international solidarity movements to succeed in shaping political imaginaries despite their relative lack of material agency. Importantly, the work offers an alternative vision of development for internationally oriented national film industries with socialist rather than capitalist market orientation.One of the most illuminating arguments of the book involves the reception of Vietnamese and Palestinian filmmaking at the festival. In both highlighting the praise for cinema coming from these struggles and registering the intense debate that these films engendered, the book demonstrates the power of film to foster discussion on ideological approaches to militancy without falling into the trap of being seen as propaganda or necessarily as in direct support of violence. Salazkina is able to illuminate the intense debates taking place through the social spaces of cinema and to show how critical networks of South-South support could be nurtured through solidarity filmmaking. She uses these fairly well-known cases to set up a further example, that of Bangladeshi cinema. The conflicts of the Bangladesh Liberation War are often studied in isolation from these other movements. Salazkina, however, does a remarkable job reconstructing a history of interconnectedness and conversation between South Asian filmmakers working to raise awareness about Bangladesh and their counterparts in Afro-Asian solidarity organizing elsewhere.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. Salazkina explores documents, archives, and geographies of an unprecedented variety in order to provide a comprehensive picture of what took place in Tashkent. This book should be mandatory reading for students of methodology across the many disciplines of cinema studies.

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