Cinema Cultures in Contact – serie

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.In the post–World War I American climate of isolationism, nativism, democratic expansion of civic rights, and consumerism, Italian-born star Rodolfo Valentino and Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini became surprising paragons of authoritarian male power and mass appeal. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States and Italy, Giorgio Bertellini’s work shows how their popularity, both political and erotic, largely depended on the efforts of public opinion managers, including publicists, journalists, and even ambassadors. Beyond the democratic celebrations of the Jazz Age, the promotion of their charismatic masculinity through spectacle and press coverage inaugurated the now-familiar convergence of popular celebrity and political authority.This is the first volume in the new Cinema Cultures in Contact series, coedited by Giorgio Bertellini, Richard Abel, and Matthew Solomon.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org.

Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran investigates how the cultural translation of cinema has been shaped by the physical translation of its ephemera. Kaveh Askari examines film circulation and its effect on Iranian film culture in the period before foreign studios established official distribution channels and Iran became a notable site of world cinema. This transcultural history draws on cross-archival comparison of films, distributor memos, licensing contracts, advertising schemes, and audio recordings. Askari meticulously tracks the fragile and sometimes forgotten material of film as it circulated through the Middle East into Iran and shows how this material was rerouted, reengineered, and reimagined in the process.

Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran investigates how the cultural translation of cinema has been shaped by the physical translation of its ephemera. Kaveh Askari examines film circulation and its effect on Iranian film culture in the period before foreign studios established official distribution channels and Iran became a notable site of world cinema. This transcultural history draws on cross-archival comparison of films, distributor memos, licensing contracts, advertising schemes, and audio recordings. Askari meticulously tracks the fragile and sometimes forgotten material of film as it circulated through the Middle East into Iran and shows how this material was rerouted, reengineered, and reimagined in the process.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.By the 1960s, Hindi-language films from Bombay were in high demand not only for domestic and diasporic audiences but also for sizable non-diasporic audiences across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean world. Often confounding critics who painted the song-dance films as noisy and nonsensical if not dangerously seductive and utterly vulgar, Bombay films attracted fervent worldwide viewers precisely for their elements of romance, music, and spectacle. In this richly documented history of Hindi cinema during the long 1960s, Samhita Sunya historicizes the emergence of world cinema as a category of cinematic diplomacy that formed in the crucible of the Cold War. Interwoven with this history is an account of the prolific transnational circuits of popular Hindi films alongside the efflorescence of European art cinema and Cold War–era forays of Hollywood abroad. By following archival leads and threads of argumentation within commercial Hindi films that seem to be odd cases—flops, remakes, low-budget comedies, and prestige productions—this book offers a novel map for excavating the historical and ethical stakes of world cinema and world-making via Bombay.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.At the forefront of the entertainment industries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were singular actors: Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, and Mistinguett. Talented and formidable women with global ambitions, these performers forged connections with audiences across the world while pioneering the use of film and theatrics to gain international renown. Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema traces how these women emerged from the Parisian periphery to become world-famous stars. Building upon extensive archival research in France, England, and the United States, Victoria Duckett argues that, through intrepid business prowess and the use of early multimedia to cultivate their celebrity image, these three artists strengthened ties between countries, continents, and cultures during pivotal years of change.

In the two decades after World War II, a vibrant cultural infrastructure of cineclubs, archives, festivals, and film schools took shape in Latin America through the labor of film enthusiasts who often worked in concert with French and France-based organizations. In promoting the emerging concept and practice of art cinema, these film-related institutions advanced geopolitical and class interests simultaneously in a polarized Cold War climate. Seeking to sharpen viewers' critical faculties as a safeguard against ideological extremes, institutions of film culture lent prestige to Latin America's growing middle classes and capitalized on official and unofficial efforts to boost the circulation of French cinema, enhancing the nation's soft power in the wake of military defeat and occupation. As the first book-length, transnational analysis of postwar Latin American film culture, Transatlantic Cinephilia deepens our understanding of how institutional networks have nurtured alternative and nontheatrical cinemas.

In the two decades after World War II, a vibrant cultural infrastructure of cineclubs, archives, festivals, and film schools took shape in Latin America through the labor of film enthusiasts who often worked in concert with French and France-based organizations. In promoting the emerging concept and practice of art cinema, these film-related institutions advanced geopolitical and class interests simultaneously in a polarized Cold War climate. Seeking to sharpen viewers' critical faculties as a safeguard against ideological extremes, institutions of film culture lent prestige to Latin America's growing middle classes and capitalized on official and unofficial efforts to boost the circulation of French cinema, enhancing the nation's soft power in the wake of military defeat and occupation. As the first book-length, transnational analysis of postwar Latin American film culture, Transatlantic Cinephilia deepens our understanding of how institutional networks have nurtured alternative and nontheatrical cinemas.

One of the Best Scholarly Books of 2023, The Chronicle of Higher EducationA free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.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.

After the 1973 coup that put an end to the socialist government of Salvador Allende, most Chilean filmmakers went into exile. Dispersed all over the world, they made more than two hundred fiction films, documentaries, animations, videos, and works for television. José Miguel Palacios builds upon extensive archival research to trace a transnational history of this radical cinema, beginning with its emergence out of global solidarity networks in the 1970s. Chronicling the dangerous efforts to smuggle film reels out of Chile, the discourses of political cinema these films inspired as they traveled between film festivals, and the prints’ unfinished process of return to Chilean archives and museums over the past two decades, Transnational Cinema Solidarity offers a politicized understanding of world and transnational cinema that emphasizes geopolitical relations and cinematic alliances based on solidarity.

After the 1973 coup that put an end to the socialist government of Salvador Allende, most Chilean filmmakers went into exile. Dispersed all over the world, they made more than two hundred fiction films, documentaries, animations, videos, and works for television. José Miguel Palacios builds upon extensive archival research to trace a transnational history of this radical cinema, beginning with its emergence out of global solidarity networks in the 1970s. Chronicling the dangerous efforts to smuggle film reels out of Chile, the discourses of political cinema these films inspired as they traveled between film festivals, and the prints’ unfinished process of return to Chilean archives and museums over the past two decades, Transnational Cinema Solidarity offers a politicized understanding of world and transnational cinema that emphasizes geopolitical relations and cinematic alliances based on solidarity.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.This is the first book in any language to examine the animated works of the Manchukuo Film Association, known as Manying in Chinese, a studio established by Japanese authorities during the occupation of Manchuria. Long thought lost to the war, Manying’s films were rediscovered in 1989—yet, in contrast to the studio’s newsreels, documentaries, and live-action feature films, its animated works have largely gone ignored. In this book, Daisy Yan Du draws on research in multiple languages and rarely accessed archives to reveal that Manying made animation central to its mission, even harboring ambitions of building an animation empire across China and beyond. This unrealized dream did not simply vanish with the end of the war, however: its specter lingered, playing a previously untold role in the development of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean animation industries. Filling a critical gap in our understanding of the development of East Asian and world animation, this groundbreaking work tells the story of the surprising lives, deaths, and afterlives of Manying animation.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.This is the first book in any language to examine the animated works of the Manchukuo Film Association, known as Manying in Chinese, a studio established by Japanese authorities during the occupation of Manchuria. Long thought lost to the war, Manying’s films were rediscovered in 1989—yet, in contrast to the studio’s newsreels, documentaries, and live-action feature films, its animated works have largely gone ignored. In this book, Daisy Yan Du draws on research in multiple languages and rarely accessed archives to reveal that Manying made animation central to its mission, even harboring ambitions of building an animation empire across China and beyond. This unrealized dream did not simply vanish with the end of the war, however: its specter lingered, playing a previously untold role in the development of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean animation industries. Filling a critical gap in our understanding of the development of East Asian and world animation, this groundbreaking work tells the story of the surprising lives, deaths, and afterlives of Manying animation.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. This wide-ranging intellectual and media history traces China’s emergence as a modern state in which boundaries blur between art and design, education and psychological conditioning. Tracking the parallel development of set design and social engineering from the 1920s to the 1960s, Background Matters examines the concept of huanjing (environment), a neologism introduced at the turn of the twentieth century that evoked heated intellectual debates and inspired frenzied aesthetic experimentation. Weihong Bao shows how efforts to reshape the mind consolidated the idea and art of environment by advancing a new theoretical notion of set design: both as aesthetic organization across film, theater, radio, and television and as social experimentation in worldmaking across geopolitical and transnational contexts. Inventive and breathtaking in scope, this book radically rethinks environment not as an external object but as the nexus of mind, medium, and society.