Almost as good as Soviet cinema: Reception of Italian neorealism in Poland: 1946–56

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-384
Author(s):  
Konrad Klejsa ◽  
Anna Miller-Klejsa
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Soviet Cinema ◽  
Important Exception ◽  
The Cold War

With the onset of the Cold War, the cinema culture in the People’s Republic of Poland underwent rigorous transformation. One of its aspects was the new film import schema: most of the international sources dried up to be replaced, for the most part, by films from the Communist Bloc. However, Italian films constituted an important exception. This article investigates the critical reception of Italian neorealist films in Poland in the first decade after the war, focusing mainly on reviews published in Film, the most relevant Polish magazine dedicated to cinema culture. The first part of the article outlines critical debates on differences and similarities between neorealism and socialist realism. The latter part of the article focuses on the critical reception of Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) and Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan), as evaluations of the Italian director’s cinema fluctuated during the Stalinist period and after the thaw.

Becoming Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Bogić
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Socialist Society ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Construction Of Nature ◽  
Important Exception ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Cold War

Simone de Beauvoir’s famous dictum (“One is not born, but rather becomes, woman”) and The Second Sex appeared in Serbo-Croatian translation (Drugi pol translated by Zorica Milosavljević and Mirjana Vukmirović) in 1982 in Yugoslavia. Socialist Yugoslavia and Yugoslav feminists at the time were an important exception to the trends and ideologies of both the Cold War East and West. In Yugoslav socialism, the meaning of “woman” was shaped by the Yugoslav government’s pursuit of the “women’s emancipation” project assigning women the triple role of mother, worker, and comrade. Despite this socialist project, Beauvoir’s Drugi pol was welcomed by Yugoslav feminists who denounced the continued patriarchal treatment of women under Yugoslav socialism. For these Yugoslav feminists, Beauvoir’s writing exposed the social construction of “nature” as the foundation for women’s subordination. The shifting meaning of “woman” and renewed women’s subordination in a post-socialist society only served to confirm the continued relevance of Beauvoir’s dictum.

Góórecki's Scontri and Avant-Garde Music in Cold War Poland

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Jakelski
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Artistic Freedom ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract Poland's post-1956 cultural liberalizations sat uneasily in the midst of a Cold War binary that equated avant-gardism with artistic freedom and socialist realism with aesthetic coercion. During 1960––61, Polish composers and critics debated the seeming paradox of official support in Poland for avant-garde aesthetics. Their disputes arose after the premiere of Henryk Mikołłaj Góórecki's Scontri (Collisions) for Orchestra, op. 17, at the 1960 Warsaw Autumn Festival; disrupted the General Assembly of the Polish Composers' Union in December 1960; and persisted in the journal Ruch Muzyczny (Musical Movement) during the early months of 1961. Taken together, the successive stages of debate show how defenses of Polish avant-garde music intersected with competing cultural imperatives of the Cold War. Maneuvers by composers and critics formed a musical corollary to the ““Polish road to socialism”” that Włładysłław Gomułłka had engineered with the Soviet Union, an agreement by which expanded internal freedoms would be tolerated as long as no serious steps were taken to abandon state socialism in Poland. The amenability of music to such critical moves, paired with the growing international prestige of Polish avant-garde composers and the Warsaw Autumn Festival, suggests why music was spared the reimposition of restrictive governmental oversight as Poland's Thaw came to a close.

scholarly journals Cold War Sport, Film, and Propaganda: A Comparative Analysis of the Superpowers

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Shaw ◽  
Denise J. Youngblood
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Cinema ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Hearts And Minds ◽  
Sports Films ◽  
East West

Films and sports played central roles in Cold War popular culture. Each helped set ideological agendas domestically and internationally while serving as powerful substitutes for direct superpower conflict. This article brings film and sport together by offering the first comparative analysis of how U.S. and Soviet cinema used sport as an instrument of propaganda during the Cold War. The article explores the different propaganda styles that U.S. and Soviet sports films adopted and pinpoints the political functions they performed. It considers what Cold War sports cinema can tell us about political culture in the United States and the Soviet Union after 1945 and about the complex battle for hearts and minds that was so important to the East-West conflict.

scholarly journals Women in noir style: the soviet version

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Soviet Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Personality Cult ◽  
Soviet Cinema ◽  
Soviet Literature ◽  
The Cold War

The paper is devoted to a comparative analysis of the popular culture of the Cold War in the United States and in the USSR, namely, to the genres, which were stimulated by the public moods of the Cold War (noir, spy detective, etc.). It is argued that despite the refusal of Soviet critics to use Western terminology, the genres of noir and spy detective existed in the Soviet literature and cinema, but had their own national and cultural content. In particular, the images of “fatal women” and “female adventurers”, who were central in the noir poetics, were not typical in the Soviet popular culture, excluding works devoted to the life abroad (in particular, novels by A. Tolstoy “Emigrants”, “Hyperboloid of engineer Garin”, etc.), however, noir motifs have appeared in the Soviet literature and cinema since the mid-1950s, when the official optimism of the Soviet public culture has been replaced by emotions of disappointment and tragic past (after J. Stalin’s death and denunciation of his personality cult). The novels of the little-studied writers L. Ovalov (“The Copper Button”) and H.-M. Muguev (“Doll of Mrs. Bark”, “The Quiet City”, “Fire Paw”) were analyzed in the context of the biographies of their authors, gender politics of the novels and the Soviet concepts of “freedom” and the opposition of “friend” and “enemy”. It is proved that the images of “adventurers” and style in the spy novels by Ovalov and Muguev reproduce the poetics of “noir” in the Soviet literature, which looked as authentic view in depicting war, emigration, espionage, captivity, conspiracies, and other existential situations. It was argued that the noir motifs in the late Soviet cinema were used in depicting the bipolar and hostile world in the spy genre (“The Secret Agent’s Blunder”, “17 Moments of Spring”), and also in depicting the postwar period of Soviet culture, losses of ideals and destroying a large number of people’ destinies. It was argued that the “Soviet project” was not separated from the cultural mainstream of the 20th century, it experienced the influences of Western popular culture and its values.

scholarly journals The Lyrical Subversions of Socialist Realism in Đặng Nhật Minh’s New Wave Cinema

2020 ◽  
pp. 541-565
Author(s):  
Dana Healy
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
New Wave ◽  
The Core ◽  
New Wave Cinema ◽  
The Cold War

This article looks at the career and work of a prominent Vietnamese film director, Đặng Nhật Minh. By taking a closer look at his film When the Tenth Month Comes, this article challenges the Cold War perception of communist art as a mere servant to politics and ideology, with little aesthetic ambition beyond its didactic and propagandist duty. It explores Minh’s use of lyricism as an effective tool of subversion and means to assert his autonomy as a communist artist. It is through the lyrical that the film director reaches back to the core of Vietnamese cultural identity and ancient traditions to provide a poetic affirmation of the resilience of his nation’s culture, while mobilizing a sense of belonging and loyalty to the communist project.

Cuba in Soviet and American Cold War cinema. Comparative analysis

2021 ◽  
pp. 92
Author(s):  
Lyudmila Kleshchenko
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Geographical Proximity ◽  
American Imperialism ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
American Films ◽  
Soviet Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Made In

The article presents the results of a study of Cuba's cinema images in Soviet and American cold war cinema. The study aimed to compare the ways of representing Cuba in the Soviet and American cinema of this period. Materials for the study were Soviet and American films made in the period 1945-1991. It is shown that in the American cinema of the cold war, Cuba can be positioned as an enemy, as an arena of confrontation in the struggle of two superpowers, or as a victim of this struggle. In Soviet cinema, accordingly, Cuba is positioned as a fraternal country, or as a victim of American imperialism. There is a similarity in the representation of Cuba in Soviet and American cinema: images of Cuba are involved in constructing the image of the enemy to strengthen the threat emanating from it and perform a mobilization function. Besides, the image of Cuba in distress serves to legitimize the fight against the invaders, Soviet or American. The feminization of Cuba is used as an ideological device for constructing the image of the enemy. At the same time, the images of Cuba in American cinema are more diverse, due to the long history of relations between the two countries based on geographical proximity.

scholarly journals ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA IN THE SOVIET FEATURE CINEMA AT THE FIRST STAGE OF THE COLD WAR (1946–1953)

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (73) (2) ◽  
pp. 130-141
Author(s):  
E. V. Prosolova
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
American Film ◽  
Soviet Leadership ◽  
Soviet Cinema ◽  
Ideological Struggle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
And Control

This article examines the history of the ideological struggle in the Soviet cinema in the period from 1946 to 1953. A particular attention is paid to the study of the era of «malokartinye» as a stage in the history of Soviet cinema, which influenced the further formation of the organization and control system over the release of film propaganda products. It analyze post-war cinema as a phenomenon that contains several interrelated elements and due to this is one of the most effective means of influence on the population in order to form the image of the enemy. The main tasks of creating anti-American film propaganda in 1946–1953 are determined in accordance with the foreign policy situation and the goals facing the Soviet leadership in this period. The conducted research allows the author to draw the conclusion on the formation at the indicated stage of a structured film narrative containing the image of the «American enemy».

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