Coda

In the twentieth-century Arabic-speaking world, communism animated anticolonial revolutions, workers’ organizations, guerrilla movements, and international solidarity. The communist dream was cut short by Arab governments, deals with global superpowers, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and historical bad luck. But recently a remarkable number of Arab filmmakers have turned their attention to the history of the radical Left. Filmmakers from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have been urgently seeking models for grassroots politics in the labor movements, communist parties, and secular armed resistance of earlier generations. This coda explores two strata of communist audiovisual praxis: the radical cinema that supported labor movements and guerrilla actions from the 1950s to the 1980s, and recent films that draw on that earlier movement. The coda argues that the Arab audiovisual archive holds flashes of communism that have been neither fulfilled nor entirely extinguished. The new films release their unspent energy into the present, diagnosing earlier failures of Arab communism and making plans for new forms of solidarity.

Komunistki

This article argues for the importance of preserving the visual memory of female communist agency in today’s Poland, at the time when the nation’s relationship to its communist past is being forcefully rearticulated with the help of the controversial Decommunization Act, which affects the public space of the commons. The wholesale criminalization of communism by the ruling conservative forces spurred a wave of historical and symbolic revisions that undermine the legacy of the communist women’s movement, contributing to the continued erosion of women’s rights in Poland. By looking at recent cinema and its treatment of female communists as well as the newly published accounts of the communist women’s movement provided by feminist historians and sociologists, the project sheds light on current cultural debates that address the status of women in postcommunist Poland and the role of leftist legacy in such debates.

Esfir Shub’s K.Sh.E. (1932) and the Movement of Energy

This article contributes to the volume’s effort to understand the history of communist visual cultures by exploring the work of the pioneering Soviet woman documentary filmmaker Esfir Shub’s cultural contribution to the First Five-Year Plan for economic development. Shub’s K.Sh.E. (1932) focuses on the production and circulation of energy both inside and outside human bodies. Her first sound film, K.Sh.E., turns to synchronized and nondiegetic sound to make the invisible transfer of energy and the location of latent energy sensible. The article situates Shub’s work both in relation to earlier visual cultural projects’ use of energetics and contemporary photomontage practices. The period of the Plan was one when forms of nonfiction narration were highly contested; locating Shub’s film and the discourse surrounding it within this terrain allows us to see the range of allowable documentary abstraction at a time when efforts were being made to consolidate aesthetic practice more broadly.

Introduction

The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures expands and enriches the field of Visual Culture Studies primarily through its global scope—a result of the project’s focus on communist visual cultures, which brings together disparate and broadly understood visual texts, produced in different places and moments in time—nevertheless, texts connected by the mobilization of looking employed in processes of social transformation and political action. Interdisciplinary in method, the book allows the reader to think about visual culture beyond representation, as something embedded in everyday life, a rich fabric of visual communication with specific, collective and individual, sites of meaning. Ultimately, the coming together of different fields of visual culture in this book will facilitate a rethinking of the visual within particular disciplines, lifting the conceptual restrictions imposed by ideas related to taste, function, visibility, dissemination, and appropriation, which are used to stake out disciplinary boundaries.

Lenin in Los Angeles

Opening with a discussion of the Gao Brothers’ sculpture Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin’s Head, which appeared in a public space in Los Angeles in 2011, this article provides a meditation on the various post–Cold War disappearances and reappearances of statues of Lenin in Eastern Europe, a space still haunted by its communist past. The analysis is focused on the representation of several of these monumental sculptures evoking their installation, removal, and reconfiguration—in a cluster of films and public statue “performances” across the former Eastern Bloc. It also explores the different hermeneutic registers encircling the statues, registers that often mix experiences of trauma with ludic contestation. The vignettes that serve to organize the article demonstrate how these sculptures have the potential to prompt counter-memories, often becoming triggers that enable the excavation of private or communal remembrance. To clarify this process, each vignette offers an instance of revisionist storytelling, disclosing the unstable relationship between monumental sculpture and memory, and tapping into counter-histories, or histories that demand to be remembered and vindicated.

Brothers at War

In January 1979, Vietnamese troops triumphantly entered Phnom Penh, the capital of Democratic Kampuchea ruled by the Khmer Rouge. The images they produced to justify their military offensive dwelled on the horror of the atrocities committed by the overthrown Pol Pot regime in the former torture center code-named S-21. In the framework of a split within the communist Bloc between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, this article discusses three strategies put forward by the Vietnamese propaganda machinery in which the visual imagery of the former prison played a crucial role: an intense documentary production, the atrocity-themed museum constructed on the site of S-21, and the trial for genocide held in absentia against Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. These visual strategies aimed to deprive the Khmer Rouge of their communist status by associating them with Nazis and their crimes.

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

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.

The Time Lag of Defa-Futurum

On April 23, 1975, at Karl Marx University in Leipzig, the East German filmmaker Joachim Hellwig (1932–2014) and scriptwriter Claus Ritter (1929–1995), both initiators and authors of the artistic working group defa-futurum, defended their collectively written practice-based PhD on the “artistic forms for imagining a socialist future by the means of film under specific consideration of the experiences of the working group defa-futurum.” Strongly influenced by Hellwig’s antifascist projects and nonfictional documentary practice, defa-futurum demonstrates a specific concern for a Marxist cybernetics with regard to creative thinking, labor, love, and political work. The latter is elaborated in greater detail by engaging with the forgotten writings of the philosopher Franz Loeser. Defa-futurum allowed the idea of film-as-theory to endorse the GDR as a sovereign state—promoting also an East German socialist internationalism—under the conditions of the global Cold War by the means of cinema. By using methods from visual culture and cultural studies to facilitate a decolonizing analysis of defa-futurum’s films, Stasi files, archival material, and original writings, the article aims to argue that decolonizing socialism is necessary in order to break through the Cold War’s binary limits for understanding technopolitics, art, and social realities in the post-1989 world.

The Visitation of the Idea

This article discusses the life and work of the French philosopher Alain Badiou in the context of a broader meditation on the relationship between film, philosophy, and communism. It draws in large part from the author’s own experiences codirecting and coproducing a feature-length documentary film about this octogenarian communist philosopher. It further juxtaposes this film with several other films on communism, as well as their analyses by Badiou himself and other leftist critics. Ultimately, by foregrounding the historical intersection between film, communism, and critical thought, the article argues that in the process of making the documentary Badiou, the author became an ambivalent participant in the production of late-communist visual culture.

Two Worlds

This article analyzes the political cartoons of Boris Efimov, one of the most significant Soviet propagandists, and how they helped to construct a Soviet way of seeing the world. Published in major newspapers and journals, Efimov’s caricatures, along with those of his fellow political cartoonists, attempted to create a sense of belonging by fostering an “emotional truth,” one conveyed through key symbols and concepts that would be repeated across the Soviet century. Efimov’s rendering of “two worlds”—one safe, strong, and masculine; one decrepit, weak, and scheming—served as a powerful means to construct Soviet sensibilities and Soviet truths.