scholarly journals Inscribing Interiority and Ideology: Representing the Visually Elusive in the American Petroleum Institute’s Cold War Films

MediaTropes ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Ila Tyagi
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Crude Oil ◽  
Oil Industry ◽  
Underground Space ◽  
War Films ◽  
Oil Reserves ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Concrete Form ◽  
The Cold War

Films sponsored by the American oil industry during the Cold War often pit communism and capitalism against each other, arguing for the latter’s ideological superiority. Since abstract ideologies are difficult to represent visually, the battle takes concrete form via depictions of layers of underground rock in films like The Last Ten Feet (1949) and Destination Earth (1956), which demonstrate how the American oil industry’s engineering ingenuity locates and extracts the precious crude oil reserves found therein. In this essay, I argue that by harnessing moving images’ power to visualize the optically elusive, films sponsored by the oil industry show it to have technological access to customarily inaccessible underground space, thus making the industry seem a more potent foil for the Red menace.Image Credit: Screenshot from Destination Earth (1956).

“Hiding in Plain Sight”

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Megan Kelley
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Racial Passing ◽  
War Films ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Way

This chapter focuses on political passing, in which the specter of passing was utilized in Hollywood films produced in the context of the Cold War. Films about political passing called into question who was who and the nature of identity. The notion that somebody could pass politically mirrored fears about racial passing, complicated by postwar obsessions with Communism. The chapter examines how anti-Communist films such as My Son John and Woman on Pier 13 tackle the “enemy within” and portray Communists as caricatures, either gangster-like or hyperintellectual, thus making visible what was supposed to be an invisible threat. It also considers the way anti-Communism in Hollywood exploited anxieties that were linked to postwar ideas about identity.

Henry R. Luce and the Security Ethos

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
William O. Walker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Society ◽  
Free World ◽  
Good Samaritan ◽  
American Century ◽  
Concrete Form ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

The introduction shows how Henry R. Luce in his 1941 essay, “The American Century,” gave concrete form to the security ethos: the belief that, for its own safety, the United States should provide political and economic leadership and act as the indispensable Good Samaritan around the world. For Luce, longstanding fear of foreigners was unacceptable. The United States should heed a providential calling to serve as a beacon of hope for peoples everywhere. In practical terms, especially after 1945 as the Cold War took hold, U.S. officials acted to create a broadly-based free-world society in which modernization was possible. Success in this undertaking depended on whether they could establish credibility with those Washington presumed to lead.

5. The blacklist and the Cold War

2015 ◽  
pp. 70-84
Author(s):  
Peter Decherney
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
First Amendment ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
War Films ◽  
House Committee ◽  
The Cold War

Hollywood’s foray into politics during World War II had major repercussions in the postwar period. It led to standoffs with conservative factions in Congress, it fractured the Hollywood community, and prompted the studios to take extreme actions to win back American moviegoers. ‘The blacklist and the Cold War’ considers the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which rode a wave of anti-communism and renewed the offensive against Hollywood. The Hollywood Ten, a group of unfriendly witnesses who stood up for their First Amendment rights and refused to incriminate others, were blacklisted and lost the opportunity to work in Hollywood. The Cold War films from 1942–1953 about the “red menace” of communism are also discussed.

Strategies of Decolonization: Economic Sovereignty and National Security in Libyan–US Relations, 1949–1971

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Christopher R. W. Dietrich
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
International Law ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Oil Industry ◽  
Deep Foundations ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Arab League ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract This article examines Libyan–US relations through the historical lenses of decolonization, international law, the Cold War, and the international political economy. The Libyan government exercised its newfound sovereignty in the postwar era through the negotiation of ‘base rights’ for the US government and ‘oil rights’ for corporations owned by US nationals. They did so in conjunction with other petrostates and through international organizations such as the United Nations, the Arab League, and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Libyan leaders’ strategy of using sovereignty to promote corporate competition relied on connections with similarly situated nations, and it was through global circuits of knowledge that they pressed the outer limits of economic sovereignty. At the same time, the US government consistently accommodated Libyan policies through Cold War arguments that linked the alliance with Libya to US national security. Those deep foundations of sovereignty and security created the conditions for the transformation of the global oil industry after Libya’s 1969 revolution.

“I’ve Got a Hunch We’re Going Around in Circles”: Exceptions to American Exceptionalism in Hollywood Korean War Films

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-82
Author(s):  
Junghyun Hwang
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Korean War ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
War Films ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The Cold War

Hollywood Korean War films primarily aimed at integrating American citizenry into national narratives of cohesion and teleology by displacing contradictions onto the exteriority of American identity. The films dismiss the Korean War as not worth fighting for, yet simultaneously propose that fighting is the only viable option to cope with the futility of war. This paper argues that this closed rationality of we-fight-simply-because-we-fight is a symptom of cold war liberalism. And the cold war subject, caught in the circular movement of finding-while-missing the meaning, prefigures a postmodern subject of drive that transcends the fundamental lack in the process of subjectivization and finds satisfaction in the endless circular movement with no destination. Crucially, American exceptionalism functions as the state fantasy in this process of denying/displacing inconsistencies inherent to the imagined national identity. This circular rationality, which constitutes the paradigmatic subject-position of latecapitalist American culture, was constructed in the early years of the cold war, and its cultural manifestations can be traced in Hollywood films about the Korean War.

scholarly journals Five Kurosawas and a (de)construction of the Orient

Politics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-294
Author(s):  
Miia Huttunen
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Intervention ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Concrete Form ◽  
Eastern Cultures ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Realities

In 1959, UNESCO published a catalogue of Eastern films suitable for Western audiences, titled ‘Orient. A Survey of Films Produced in Countries of Arab and Asian Culture’. The aim of the catalogue was to familiarise Western audiences with Eastern cultures through cinema. The catalogue lists seven general characteristics of Eastern cinema to distinguish it from its Western counterpart and to provide ready-made interpretations of the essential characteristics of the Eastern world. Of the 139 feature films listed in the catalogue, five were directed by Kurosawa Akira – the biggest number of films by a single director. This article provides an analysis of the five Kurosawa films within the frame provided by the characterisations in the catalogue in the political framework of World War II and its aftermath. Reading the cultural differences listed in the catalogue as a means of constructing the East in Western eyes, the article suggests UNESCO’s world was defined neither in terms of the contemporaneous geopolitical polarisation of the Cold War nor the ongoing decolonisation process. Instead, the catalogue served the purpose of proposing a cultural intervention in geopolitics, providing a reimagining of political realities constructed on a cultural basis and given a concrete form through cinema.

scholarly journals Decolonization in, of and through the archival “moving images” of artistic practice

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 131-152
Author(s):  
Ana Balona de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Migrant Communities ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
Colonial Archives ◽  
The Cold War

This essay investigates the ways in which contemporary artistic practices have been working towards an epistemic and ethico-political decolonization of the present by means of critical examinations of several sorts of colonial archives, whether public or private, familial or anonymous. Through the lens of specific artworks by the artists Ângela Ferreira, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Délio Jasse, Daniel Barroca and Raquel Schefer, this essay examines the extent to which the aesthetics of these video, photographic and sculptural practices puts forth a politics and ethics of history and memory relevant to thinking critically about the colonial amnesias and imperial nostalgias which still pervade a post-colonial condition marked by neo-colonial patterns of globalization and by uneasy relationships with diasporic and migrant communities. Attention will be paid to the histories and memories of the Portuguese dictatorship and colonial empire, the liberation wars / the “colonial” war fought in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau between 1961 and 1974, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974, the independence of Portugal’s former colonies between 1973 and 1975, and the mass “return” of Portuguese settlers from Angola and Mozambique in 1975, without losing sight of apartheid South Africa and the ways in which the Cold War played out on the African continent.

The Cold War and the Middle East

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salim Yaqub
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Oil Reserves ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Decisive Advantage

This chapter, which examines the history of the Cold War in the Middle East. It explains that the Cold War in the Middle East was never a contest between equals and explains that Western powers always enjoyed a decisive advantage. Despite this, they were not able to retain outright control over the oil reserves and strategic positions of the region, and only succeeded in maintaining access to them through cooperative local regimes. This chapter also describes how the Cold War accentuated existing patterns in Middle Eastern geopolitics and how the great powers enhanced the ability of local actors to pursue rivalries.

The Making of Malaya

2019 ◽  
pp. 90-111
Author(s):  
Wai-Siam Hee
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
National Archives ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Colonial Government

The third chapter examines the MFU, a film organisation affiliated with the post-war British colonial government, and its multilingual colonial films. The MFU produced a large number of historical and geographical documentaries in support of the British colonial regime and the Singaporean and Malayan autonomous governments. The film unit also directed the production and filming of many propaganda films and feature films accompanied by recordings and commentaries in different languages and Chinese topolects. These films vigorously promoted Cold War ideology to the Malayan people, and all theatres in Malaya were compelled to screen these films. The ultimate goal of the MFU was to interpellate a Malayan identity in order to eradicate the threat posed by communist ideology. This chapter considers films made by the MFU alongside Cold War archival materials gathered from The British Film Institute, The UK National Archives, Imperial War Museums, The British Library, National Archives of Singapore, the National Film Department of Malaysia, and 1950s–1960s reportage on the MFU in US, UK, and local newspapers in Chinese and English. It will explore how Chinese New Village settlers and Malayan communists were represented in semi-realistic/semi-fictional moving images during the Cold War period. This chapter aims to reconsider the question of whether the aim of the MFU really was to hasten the end of empire, or if it was an extension of the imperialist machinery of state in S.E. Asia.

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