Elena Razlogova

This article uses Sino-Soviet film festival diplomacy to show how anticolonialism played a crucial role in the cinematic Cold War. First, it analyzes the Sino-Soviet cinematic cooperation at the Asian Film Week in Beijing in 1957 and the First Afro-Asian Film Festival (AAFF) in Tashkent in 1958. Second, it examines the breakdown of Sino-Soviet cinematic ties at the Third AAFF in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1964, and via the trenchant Chinese critique of Grigorii Chukhrai’s films. The Chinese retreat from Soviet cinema paralleled the deterioration of political relations between Mao’s China and Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. Immediate diplomatic needs informed ideological clashes at festivals and brutal film criticism. But cinematic encounters exceeded state directives. They redefined revolutionary film aesthetics and the role of cinema in liberation struggles in ways that inspired the militant «Third Cinema» movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

The expansion of global air travel in the Cold War era fueled diverse forms of state-sponsored internationalism, including international writers’ congresses, concert tours, and especially art and film festivals. Film festivals served as a key stage for cultural competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as the main way for decolonized Asian and African states to showcase their new national cinemas. The Soviet state airline, Aeroflot, shaped international participation at the Moscow International Film Festival (1959-) and Global South participation at the Tashkent Festival for Asian, African, and Latin American Cinema in Uzbekistan, USSR (1968-1988, included Latin America from 1976).  As an infrastructure for cinematic internationalism, Aeroflot shaped “world cinema maps” that emerged at Moscow and Tashkent. For example, it delayed Tashkent festival’s expansion to Latin America, where the airline had few inroads. For local publics, films brought in airplane luggage at the last minute provided uncensored transnational cinematic experiences. Filmmakers from the Global South, whose travel was covered by their Soviet hosts, forged alliances at Moscow and Tashkent that often bypassed, contradicted, or exceeded Soviet diplomatic goals. More broadly, I argue that Soviet official internationalism—its technologies, bureaucracies, and expenditures—should be analyzed as an infrastructure that enabled multiple internationalist projects, some conceived elsewhere and working toward goals tangential or inimical to Soviet state purposes.

This chapter analyzes the Afro-Asian Film Festival—born at the Asian Film Week in Beijing in 1957, and continued at Tashkent in 1958, Cairo in 1960, and Jakarta in 1964—as a “site of contest” for envisioning anticolonial cinema in the early Cold War. The festival matters as a cinematic thread in Bandung-era networks of organizations and conferences; as the earliest articulation of “cinematic Third Worldism,” a term usually used to describe militant anti-imperialist cinema of the 1960s and 1970s; and as a rise and fall of cinematic diplomacy unique to the Cold War era. While the Afro-Asian film circuit emerged from the state-initiated nonaligned movement, by the 1968 rebooted Tashkent Festival for Asian and African Cinema filmmakers transformed it from a ritualized sphere of high diplomacy to a transnational cinematic event addressing multiple publics, where militant cinema had a voice and a captive audience.

When new Global South cinemas entered transnational circulation in the decolonization era, film translation became a weapon of liberation. In reconstructing this key role, this essay seeks to temper the current tendency in film studies to celebrate untranslatabilty in Global South cinemas. It focuses on the Festival of Asian, African, and Latin American Cinema in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, a biannual event that hosted hundreds of films and filmmakers from dozens of Global South countries between 1968 and 1988.

Focusing on early experiments with algorithms and music streaming at WFMU, the longest-running US freeform radio station, and the Free Music Archive (FMA), a curated open music website, this article shows how commercial streaming services have been indebted to independent, open music infrastructures but have then erased and denied that history. The article 'provincializes' music streaming platforms such as Spotify by focusing not on their commercial aims but instead on the 'convivial', collaborative practices and spaces that their software engineers and users inhabited. I analyse an experimental national telephone broadcasting service at WFMU in 1989, an algorithmic WFMU radio stream 'The Flaming Robot of Love' during the Republican National Convention in 2004 and the 'Free Music Archive Radio App' that recommended tracks on the FMA website from 2011 to 2016. The app worked with an application programming interface (API) from Echo Nest. Echo Nests' algorithmic recommendation engine also powers most commercial streaming services today. When Spotify purchased Echo Nest in 2014 and took the start-up's open API offline in 2016, it engaged in 'primitive accumu-lation' of open-access knowledge and resources for commercial purposes. The FMA closed in 2019 and now only exists as a static site. As social institutions, however, WFMU and FMA 'recomposed'-adapted to a new medium and a new political context-collaborative engineering practices of the early broadcasting era. The article argues that moments of oppositional 'conviviality' in media culture such as the FMA should be analysed as elements of a continuous struggle.

This article traces informal world cinema networks at Soviet film festivals. It argues that the cultural diplomacy approach, where state objectives determine the value of cultural exchange, fails to account for the full range of connections made at Soviet film festivals during the Cold War. Personal ties have been crucial to the development of film festivals and the cinematic movements they engendered. The Soviet state aimed to position Soviet cinema as a better alternative to decadent European and commercial Hollywood cinemas, and as a model for film cultures in socialist Eastern Europe and decolonization-era Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This article first demonstrates how the Moscow International Film Festival (1959-present) and the Tashkent Festival of Asian, African, and Latin American Cinema (1968–1988; Latin America included from 1976) constructed a more inclusive map of world cinema than major European film festivals at Cannes, Venice, and Berlin. It then shows how African, Cuban, and Vietnamese delegations forged informal alliances around the emergent Third Cinema (militant Third World cinema) movement at the 1967 Moscow festival. Strong unofficial connections formed by international festival guests transcended and contradicted the aims of Soviet cultural diplomacy.