Remapping Cold War Media: Institutions, Infrastructures, Translations

by Alice Lovejoy (Editor), Mari Pajala (Editor), Katie Trumpener (Contribution by), Rosamund Johnston (Contribution by), Anu Koivunen (Contribution by)

Overview

Why were Hollywood producers eager to film on the other side of the Iron Curtain? How did Western computer games become popular in socialist Czechoslovakia's youth paramilitary clubs? What did Finnish commercial television hope to gain from broadcasting Soviet drama?

Cold War media cultures are typically remembered in terms of an East-West binary, emphasizing conflict and propaganda. Remapping Cold War Media, however, offers a different perspective on the period, illuminating the extensive connections between media industries and cultures in Europe's Cold War East and their counterparts in the West and Global South. These connections were forged by pragmatic, technological, economic, political, and aesthetic forces; they had multiple, at times conflicting, functions and meanings. And they helped shape the ways in which media circulates today—from film festivals, to satellite networks, to coproductions.

Considering film, literature, radio, photography, computer games, and television, Remapping Cold War Media offers a transnational history of postwar media that spans Eastern and Western Europe, the Nordic countries, Cuba, the United States, and beyond. Contributors draw on extensive archival research to reveal how media traveled across geopolitical boundaries; the processes of translation, interpretation, and reception on which these travels depended; and the significance of media form, content, industries, and infrastructures then and now.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253062208
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	06/21/2022
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Alice Lovejoy is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. She is author of Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military.Mari Pajala is Senior Lecturer of Media Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. Her work is published in Media History, Television & New Media, and International Journal of Cultural Studies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Note on Translation and Transliteration
1. Introduction, by Alice Lovejoy and Mari Pajala
Part I: Mobile Forms
2. Stalin Boulevard: Panoramic Vistas and Urban Planning in Eastern European Photobooks, by Katie Trumpener
3. The Peace Train: Anticosmopolitanism, Internationalism, and Jazz on Czechoslovak Radio during Stalinism, by Rosamund Johnston
4. Soviet Drama with Commercial Breaks: Living the Cold War in 1970s Finnish Television, by Anu Koivunen
Part II: Distribution, Adaptation, Reception
5. Soviet Cinema in 1960s Cuba: Between Cold War Logics and Thirdworldist Affinities, by Masha Salazkina
6. From the Antechamber to the International Stage: Early-Career Directors from Hungary at the Mannheim Film Festival in the Late 1970s, by Sonja Simonyi
7. Manic Miners of the World, Unite! How the British Hit Computer Game Got a Second Life in Czechoslovakia, by Jaroslav Švelch
8. Between Scripts: Radio Berlin International (RBI) and Its Swedish Audience in November 1989, by Marie Cronqvist
Part III: Translation
9. On Soviet Spoken Cinema, by Elena Razlogova
10. A GDR Writer in America: Christa Wolf's Visit to Oberlin and the Circulation of Her Writing as World Literature, by Brangwen Stone
11. Translating Cold War Internationalism: Allegoresis in Ryszard Kapusìcinìski's Literary Reportage, by Marla Zubel
12. Traveling with the President: Finnish-Soviet State Visits and 1970s Television Diplomacy, by Laura Saarenmaa
Part IV: Infrastructure and Production
13. Hollywood Going East: State-Socialist Studios' Opportunistic Business with American Producers, by Petr Szczepanik
14. Envisioning the Revolutionary South: The Soviet-Italian Coproduction Life is Beautiful (1979), by Stefano Pisu
15. Dividing the Cosmos? INTELSAT, Intersputnik, and the Development of Transnational Satellite Communications Infrastructures during the Cold War, by Christine Evans and Lars Lundgren
16. Spy from the Cloud: From Big Brother to Big Data, by Anikó Imre
Index

What People are Saying About This

Patryk Babiracki

In some ways, the volume reminds me of a thoughtfully organized musical album in that it tells a story with a beginning, middle and an end. Despite having multiple authors, the story develops logically from one chapter to the next—quite an accomplishment.

Editorial Reviews

"In some ways, the volume reminds me of a thoughtfully organized musical album in that it tells a story with a beginning, middle and an end. Despite having multiple authors, the story develops logically from one chapter to the next—quite an accomplishment."—Patryk Babiracki, author of Soviet Soft Power in Poland: Culture and the Making of Stalin's New Empire, 1943–1957

"Wide-ranging in its Cold War geography, rigorously internationalist, and focused on the concept of media over a variety of forms and methods, Lovejoy and Pajala's volume will set the standard for any future scholarship on the topic."—Rossen Djagalov, author of From Internationalism to Postcolonialism

"Ballasted by primary sources in all relevant languages, together these meticulously researched essays complicate, through the fluid logic of media, the conventional epochal and geopolitical fault lines of post-WWII cultures. An indispensable volume."—Nataša Ďurovičová, coeditor of World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives

From the Publisher

In some ways, the volume reminds me of a thoughtfully organized musical album in that it tells a story with a beginning, middle and an end. Despite having multiple authors, the story develops logically from one chapter to the next—quite an accomplishment.

Patryk Babiracki

Ballasted by primary sources in all relevant languages, together these meticulously researched essays complicate, through the fluid logic of media, the conventional epochal and geopolitical fault lines of post-WWII cultures. An indispensable volume.

Nataša Ďurovičová

Wide-ranging in its Cold War geography, rigorously internationalist, and focused on the concept of media over a variety of forms and methods, Lovejoy and Pajala's volume will set the standard for any future scholarship on the topic.

Rossen Djagalov