Was there experimental cinema behind the Iron Curtain? What forms did experiments with film take in state-socialist Eastern Europe? Who conducted them, where, how, and why? These are the questions answered in this volume, the first of its kind in any language. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines, the book offers case studies from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, former East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and former Yugoslavia. Together, these contributions demonstrate th...

Why were Hollywood producers eager to film on the other side of the Iron Curtain? How did Western computer games become popular in socialist Czechoslovakia's youth paramilitary clubs? What did Finnish commercial television hope to gain from broadcasting Soviet drama?Cold War media cultures are typically remembered in terms of an East-West binary, emphasizing conflict and propaganda. Remapping Cold War Media, however, offers a different perspective on the p...

Warsaw- and London-based filmmakers Franciszka and Stefan Themerson are often recognized internationally as pioneers of the 1930s Polish avant-garde. Yet, from the turn of the century to the end of the 1920s, Poland's literary and art scenes were also producing a rich array of criticism and early experiments with the moving image that set the stage for later developments in the avant-garde. In this comprehensive and accessible study, Kamila Kuc draws on myriad undiscovered archival sources...

In the American imagination, the Soviet Union was a drab cultural wasteland, a place where playful creative work and individualism was heavily regulated and censored. Yet despite state control, some cultural industries flourished in the Soviet era, including animation. Drawing the Iron Curtain tells the story of the golden age of Soviet animation and the Jewish artists who enabled it to thrive.Art historian Maya Balakirsky Katz reveals how the state-run animation studio So...

How did communities come to terms with the collapse of communism? In order to guide the wider narrative, many former communist countries constructed museums dedicated to chronicling their experiences. Museums of Communism explores the complicated intersection of history, commemoration, and victimization made evident in these museums constructed after 1991. While contributors from a diverse range of fields explore various museums and include nearly 90 photographs, a common denomina...

Most histories of Soviet cinema portray the 1970s as a period of stagnation with the gradual decline of the film industry. This book, however, examines Soviet film and television of the era as mature industries articulating diverse cultural values via new genre models. During the 1970s, Soviet cinema and television developed a parallel system of genres where television texts celebrated conservative consensus while films manifested symptoms of ideological and social crises. The book examine...

A history of the Czechoslovakian military's connection to some of the nation's most innovative and subversive cinema.During the 1968 Prague Spring and the Soviet-led invasion and occupation that followed, Czechoslovakia's Army Film studio was responsible for some of the most politically subversive and aesthetically innovative films of the period. Although the studio is remembered primarily as a producer of propaganda and training films, some notable New Wave directo...

This is the first book to survey the entire career of Joris Ivens, a prolific documentary filmmaker who worked on every continent over the course of seven decades. More than a biography of a leftist committed to changing the world through film, The Conscience of Cinema is also a microcosmic history of the documentary and its form, culture, and place within twentieth-century world cinema. Ivens worked in almost every genre, including the essay, compilation, hybrid dramatization, socialist r...

Russia's New Fin de Siècle brings together a range of texts on contemporary Russian culture – literary, cinematic and popular – as artists and writers try to situate themselves within the traditional frameworks of past and present, East and West, but also challenge established markers of identity. Investigating Russian culture at the turn of the 21st century, scholars from Britain, Sweden, Russia and the United States explore aspects of culture with regards to one overarching ques...

This innovative volume challenges the ways we look at both cinema and cultural history by shifting the focus from the centrality of the visual and the literary toward the recognition of acoustic culture as formative of the Soviet and post-Soviet experience. Leading experts and emerging scholars from film studies, musicology, music theory, history, and cultural studies examine the importance of sound in Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet cinema from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspecti...

In TV Socialism, Anikó Imre provides an innovative history of television in socialist Europe during and after the Cold War. Rather than uniform propaganda programming, Imre finds rich evidence of hybrid aesthetic and economic practices, including frequent exchanges within the region and with Western media, a steady production of varied genre entertainment, elements of European public service broadcasting, and transcultural, multi-lingual reception practices. These televisual pract...

This edited volume offers an original exploration into the ways in which Soviet culture and experience of time were unique, examining the temporalities expressed in the world of socialist things: from the objects of everyday life to urban architecture.Grounding the analysis of Soviet temporalities in their material incarnations not only lends concreteness to discussions of temporal culture, but also draws out ways in which the specificities of Soviet things—and their planning, desi...