World Socialist Cinema by Masha Salazkina

Author:Masha Salazkina
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520393769
Publisher: University of California Press

INDUSTRIAL DOCUMENTARY: EAST AND WEST, NORTH AND SOUTH

That predictability was certainly not unique to the socialist world—as highly generic patterns are prevalent in nonfiction films, generally, and institutional media, in particular. And just as socialist technocratic rationality converges with that of capitalism, these films share many rhetorical figures and imagery with their capitalist counterparts. These extend to the tropes of the conflict of humans and nature (with man emerging triumphant), the future horizon of universal well-being, and the image of nature as a boundless resource to be used by human beings.16 Corporate media throughout the twentieth century propagandized for multinational industry and commerce. State media, as well, celebrated its industrial projects as expressions of national progress in the name of well-being of its citizens. While the capitalist industrial media created its vision of a “free-market” world (of multinational corporations with their variously positioned ­stakeholders and geographies of surveying and prospecting), its state socialist counterpart visualized the world of internationalist solidarities and centrally planned development.

As Hediger and Vonderau argue in their influential volume, such industrial media are “best understood as interfaces between discourses and forms of social and industrial organization. More often than not, industrial films are supposed to directly translate discourse into social practice (including political action).”17 In the case of global socialist cinematic production, this translation was assumed even when actual development was flimsy or fictitious. Timothy Nunan describes the dynamic in Afghanistan: “During the Cold War, even the best-informed experts could imagine an Afghan economy and state out of only a few conversations, or a walk around the right couple of blocks of Kabul. Frequently, ‘development’ meant less building a state or economy than injecting meaning into fragments of both. Seen in isolation, however, and preferably with the interlocution of native informants, experts could read into a factory, a canal, a gas pipeline, a spreadsheet, or sawmill a functioning but in reality barely existent Afghan state.”18

Along the lines of the “experts” Nunan describes, these films frequently conjured images of state industrial development where there was none, doing so in competition with the West’s own world-building (which was also not averse to fantasizing the development of its client-states). The logic of instrumentalization that, as Hediger and Vonderau, as well as Haidee Wasson and Charles Acland, argue is crucial to “useful cinema,” tasked the cinematic apparatus in the socialist bloc and Third World with producing compelling models of development as alternatives to the imaginaries of both colonial media and contemporary capitalism. Thus socialist films needed to clearly reframe it as belonging to and serving the interests of the working class, not capital, and as profoundly national yet also internationalist. At the same time, socialism’s internationalist world-making had to be distinct from either multinational corporate or liberal international (such as UN or UNESCO’s) articulations.

The industrial documentary by the 1960s was a well-established genre in the West, and it evolved, indeed, in seamless continuity with colonial—especially ­British—media’s emphasis on development as part of the colonial project. State institutions (such as the Canadian

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