Romanian and Chinese Cinemas: Socialist Affect and Cultural Politics from Maoism to the New Waves

Drawing on what used to be the erstwhile internationalist cultural space of Communist Eurasia, the author reads socialist—era and postsocialist films made in Romania and China as promoting a common aesthetics predicated on the miserabilism of Third Cinema. The book argues that, despite indictments that socialist cultures were saturated with the oppressing ideology of socialist realism in the 1950s and various forms of indoctrination thereafter, in practice, film directors had the leverage t...