Global Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities and Solidarities in the Global Cold War

Salazkina’s talk focuses on the history of the Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa and Latin America which took place in Tashkent, Soviet Union in the 1960s-1980s. It identifies a specific configuration of world cinema that emerges from the intersection of the entangled cinematic geographies and histories of internationalist solidarities and of trans-racial affinities, of personal bonds and institutional connections, and of multi-faceted artistic expressions and political commitments, which formed the festival’s history. Irreducible to North-South, East-West, Orientalist or Cold War binaries, the cinematic networks that formed the festival both borrowed and transformed epistemological and aesthetic models across its various divides, offering a unique historic cinematic formation through which to explore the cultural and political dynamics of its era.  As such, it reproduces not only a different geography or cinema but also a different geography of knowledge; one that resists both, our Anglo-Atlantic Eurocentric canon of film history and the compartmentalization Area studies. The talk offers an overview of the festival’s programming and the unique culture it created.