World Socialist Cinema

In this capacious transnational film history, renowned scholar Masha Salazkina proposes a groundbreaking new framework for understanding the cinematic cultures of twentieth-century socialism. Taking as a point of departure the vast body of work screened at the Tashkent International Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, World Socialist Cinema maps the circulation of films between the Soviet Bloc and the countries of the Global South in the mid- to late twentieth century, illustrating the distribution networks, festival circuits, and informal channels that facilitated this international network of artistic and intellectual exchange. Building on decades of meticulous archival work, this long-anticipated film history unsettles familiar stories to provide an alternative to Eurocentric, national, and regional narratives, rooted outside of the capitalist West.

“Deftly tessellating a dazzling array of institutions, films, languages, and geopolitical, formal, and theoretical questions, World Socialist Cinema is a field-changing book, and a model for future scholarship.” — ALICE LOVEJOY, author of Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military

“Masha Salazkina’s scholarship is breathtaking, using hitherto unexplored archives and primary sources to complicate what we understand by terms like ‘world cinema,’ ‘global cinema,’ or ‘cinemas of solidarity.’ I know of nothing comparable.” — PETER LIMBRICK, author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi

MASHA SALAZKINA is Concordia Research Chair in Transnational Media Arts and Cultures at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico and coeditor of Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema and Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures.