Lucie Cesalkova - Böcker

After WWII, cinema was everywhere: in movie theatres, public squares, factories, schools, trial courts, trains, museums, and political meetings. Seen today, documentaries and newsreels, as well as the amateur production, show the kaleidoscopic portrait of a changing Europe. How did these cinematic images contribute to shaping the new societies emerging from the ashes of war, both in the Western and in the Eastern bloc? Why were they so crucial in framing and regulating new places and practices, political systems, economic dynamics, educational frameworks, and memory communities? This edited volume explores the multiple ways nonfiction cinema reconfigured public spaces, collective participation, democratisation, and governmentality between 1944 and 1956. Looking back at it through a transnational perspective and the critical category of spatiality, nonfiction cinema appears in a new light: simultaneously as a specifically situated and as a highly mobile medium, it was a fundamental agent in reshaping Europe’s shared identity and culture in a defining decade.

Useful Cinema in State Socialist Europe offers a ground-breaking exploration of “useful” film production across Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the wider socialist world from the postwar period to the late Cold War. Moving beyond economically driven models of commissioned filmmaking dominant in the West, it shows how socialist cinema was shaped instead by the ideological power of representation and self-representation, positioning film at the heart of political and cultural governance.Rejecting any notion of a unified socialist cinema, the chapters reveal a diverse field of practices - educational, instructional, research, safety, promotional, and amateur films - produced within complex institutional and party frameworks. Drawing on internationally significant and topical case studies from both well-known and underexplored national contexts, the book demonstrates how these films simultaneously served centralized political agendas and developed distinct regional and national dynamics. With its interdisciplinary approach and extensive engagement with archival and audiovisual sources, this book makes a major intervention in Film and Media Studies it brings marginal, functional, and non-fiction film forms into the centre of scholarly debate.A major intervention in Film and Media Studies, this book will appeal to researchers in the field as well as and Communication, Archival and Audiovisual Heritage Studies, International and Political Studies, Slavic and East European Studies.