Three Rashomons

In early 1952 a group of cinephiles at the second Punta del Este film festival on Uruguay’s south coast sat down to watch the latest film by the little-known Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, the cryptically titled Rashomon (1950). Much like the narrative ‘effect’ with which it would become associated, Kurosawa’s film would itself go on to mean many different things to different people as it gained admission to an emerging canon of post-World War Two global cinema. It seems fitting, then, that Rashomon appears in very different guises in all three books under consideration here.

As Rielle Navitski suggests in her book Transatlantic Cinephilia: Film Culture Between Latin America and France, 1945–1965 (2023), many of the audience members at that Punta del Este screening likely struggled to either identify the cultural specificities of Kurosawa’s film or follow its philosophical complexities. Organisational problems meant that Rashomon, together with Punta del Este’s entire Japanese selection, was shown unsubtitled with many viewers unable to access printed programmes containing plot summaries, and some sessions were disrupted by drunken viewers insulting the screenings. It did receive suitable critical acclaim, as might be expected of a picture that had won the Golden Lion at Venice the previous year. But its very presence at the festival was also a matter of contention. The Punta del Este organisers hoped to balance out their various aims to ‘present Uruguayan audiences and critics on the international stage as sophisticated consumers’ (Navitski 2023: 148), to earn their salt as a new, intellectually ambitious but geographically peripheral festival by playing by the international rulebook, and to promote tourism to the seaside resort. But they had both broken the festival’s own rules by screening pictures already released at festivals elsewhere, and acceded to the demands by the Fédération Internationale des Associations de Producteurs de Films (FIAPF) that the festival should be non-competitive (only Cannes and Venice were allowed that distinction). For some observers, Navitski reports, by programming but also failing to judge movies such as Rashomon and Cannes prizewinner Fröken Julie (Miss Julie, Alf Sjöberg, Sweden, 1951), Punta del Este revealed ‘the hidden face of festivals’, in one critic’s words, ‘where, behind the display in favor of film art and culture, one finds the traffic in films and other interests foreign to cinema’ (cited in Navitski 2023: 154). That is, the decision to screen Rashomon was to be censured for apparently obeying factors that were more political than cinematic.

Kurosawa’s film appears again seven years later when the British Film Institute (BFI) listed Rashomon in its film catalogue Orient: A Survey of Films Produced in Countries of Arab and Asian Culture, published at the behest of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) (Holmes 1959). By that time Rashomon was widely considered a masterpiece in Western film-critical circles. In the words of Miia Huttunen in her book-length study of the catalogue, Politicised Cinema: Post-War Film, Cultural Diplomacy and UNESCO (Huttunen 2022), Orient was a ‘multilateral cinematic cultural diplomacy initiative’ that in turn formed part of UNESCO’s wide-ranging Major Project on the Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Cultural Values (which ran from 1957 to 1966). More than encouraging truly mutual appreciation, though, Orient’s focus was rather one-way, conceived as a tool with which Western film programmers might find appropriate content with which to illuminate viewers’ knowledge of an often-misunderstood region of the world. In the catalogue’s authors’ words, the work sought to ‘stimulate the presentation of films which might give audiences in the West a fuller and more informed idea of the ways of life of Eastern peoples’ (Huttunen 2022: 3). Here Rashomon was no longer a site of struggle between cinephile distinction, the construction of global cultural capital and the whims of unruly audiences, as it appears in Navitski’s book. It was, rather, a salutary example of how film programmers in the West might render the inscrutable Orient – or in this case ‘Cool Japan’, as the burgeoning postwar nation repackaged itself (Huttunen 2022: 58) – intelligible to viewers in Europe and the Anglosphere. Kurosawa’s film stands here as an example of the film medium’s ‘highly-charged emotive’ nature that gave its spectators, in the catalogue editor’s words, ‘a fresh vision, a new experience, sharp and imprinted on the mind and sense for all time’ (Holmes 1959: n.p.). Largely stripped bare of its underlying philosophical complexity and its local political specificity,² Rashomon was now asked to signify a vaguely universal ‘underlying … struggle for truth’ that was supposedly applicable to both Eastern and Western societies alike (Huttunen 2022: 132) – a message of reconciliation and intercultural understanding that ‘strangeness is superficial rather than fundamental’ (Huttunen 2022: 143).

Kurosawa’s international breakthrough movie features once more in Masha Salazkina’s monograph World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War (Salazkina 2023). Here it appears in relation to the festival circuit of the Eastern bloc, but now for its relatively marginal status rather than its importance. Salazkina points out that for socialist film culture of the same era, Kurosawa’s work (including Rashomon), while not entirely absent and in fact deeply appreciated in some quarters, weighed less heavily than that of other Japanese filmmakers who were relatively unsung in the West, such as the independent communist filmmakers Tadashi Imai, Kaneto Shindo, Kozaburo Yoshimura and Satsuo Yamamoto. She notes (along similar lines to Huttunen) that Rashomon ‘made Japanese cinema “legible” to the (Western) European cinematic establishment’ that misread or simplified the film as a vindication of ‘the subjectivity of the individual artistic vision, therefore easily subsuming it into the discourse of freedom of expression as a key value of the “Free World”’ (2023: 59–60). At the same time, critics sidelined the political engagement of Kurosawa and other Japanese filmmakers of the period who were unhappy about US ideological control of the postwar Japanese film industry. While socialist critics did not share their Western counterparts’ rapturous response to Rashomon, the film’s Western success was not negligible across the Iron Curtain. Its healthy financial returns opened doors to international film markets both for the studio system that wished to sell anticommunist fare in Asian commercial markets, and for progressive and communist filmmakers such as Yamamoto, who went on to deepen their participation in tricontinental anti-imperialist solidarity networks (Salazkina 2023: 61). Here Rashomon stands as a staging point of sorts, a globally successful and consumable foil that opened doors of possibility to multiple forms of film culture, either more or less aligned with socialist internationalism.

Taken together, these three Rashomons are a token of the potential – but also the limitations – of cinema as a tool of intercultural dialogue in an increasingly networked global media environment from the mid-twentieth century onwards. They are also testament to the wealth of information and depth of research in evidence in the three recent monographs mentioned above by film historians Rielle Navitski and Masha Salazkina, and International Relations scholar Miia Huttunen who, each in her own way, all delve into the rich historical archive of cinema’s circulation across borders during that era.

Competing internationalisms: propaganda or diplomacy?

Much scholarship in recent decades looks to the adjectives ‘transnational’, ‘global’, and/or (not least in the case of Salazkina herself in her book’s title) ‘world’ to frame cinema’s historical and present status as a travelling medium that exceeds, transcends or seeps through boundaries rather than simply crossing them (Hsaio-Peng Lu 1997; López 2023 [1998]; Marks 2000; Paranaguá 2003; Ďurovičová and Newman 2009; Newman 2010; Galt and Schoonover 2010; Giovacchini and Sklar 2011; Rawle 2018). This field of study took on a particular protagonism since the global became increasingly a site of contestation and struggle following the 2007–2008 financial crisis. All three authors considered in the present essay, though, while admittedly drawing (whether implicitly or explicitly) on much of that scholarship, invest strongly in the terms ‘international’ and ‘internationalist’ to describe the phenomena they analyse as they played out via film culture across Asia, Africa and Latin America in complex and sometimes contradictory configurations, and variously mediated the Cold War, decolonisation, the Non-Aligned Movement and Third Worldism. While perhaps less fashionable today than ‘transnational’, this focus on the international is historically accurate and consistent with their various objects of study, which respond variously to the ‘two rival universalisms and their internationalisms’ (Kott 2017: 361) that loomed large in twentieth-century geopolitics – that is, liberal capitalism and communism, both originating in the European Enlightenment. Such scholarship reminds us that cinema was a key site on the ‘busy spectrum of thought and practice across the twentieth century’ on which internationalism lay (Sluga and Clavin 2017: 12). The focus on internationalism is also a matter of some urgency today, given the moment of danger faced by the international system that we often take for granted at the hands of the global far-right.

One key contribution that these three books collectively make is to outline the multiplicity of these internationalisms and the various ways in which diverse actors in the related cultural and political fields used cinema to persuade or to coerce. Huttunen’s study does so by analysing a parafilmic document that is directly a product of UNESCO’s post-World War Two liberal, multilateral and idealist ‘cultural internationalism’, whose stated objective of ‘building the foundations of peace in the minds of men’ was, she observes, founded on the humanist philosophical foundations of Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte and Jan Amos Comenius (2022: 27–31). Navitski for her part, looks at the circulation of film culture between France and Latin America (but particularly from France towards Latin America) during the two decades following World War Two. She likewise frames her study in the context of a ‘liberal-democratic internationalism, albeit on unequal terms’. This cosmopolitan internationalism – another adjective that Navitski uses widely, drawing on Paranaguá (2003) among others – ‘espoused a supposedly apolitical dedication to transcendent values like global peace and human progress’ that, while allowing space for work by communist artists, tended to frame it in terms of humanism and aesthetics (Navitski 2023: 6–7). Meanwhile, Salazkina sets her eyes on what she calls the ‘cinematic socialist internationalism’ of the 1960s and 1970s, mainly through her case study of the Tashkent Festival of Cinema of Africa and Asia held in Uzbekistan from 1968 until the dissolution of the USSR. The Tashkent Festival was rooted in the broader, Marxist current of communist internationalism mentioned above but more specifically located in Soviet Cold War geopolitics in response to events including the Sino-Soviet Split (from the early 1960s); the Cuban Missile Crisis (1961); wars and conflicts centred around Vietnam, India-Pakistan, Palestine-Israel, and Indonesia, as well as liberation struggles in several African countries; the celebration of the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in January 1966; and the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana the following month (Salazkina 2023: 7, 38–40). While the three books evidently speak to a motion-picture world space that is transnational, border-crossing and interconnected, by maintaining their focus on internationalism their authors make clear the primacy of understanding the centrality and specificity of the various, overlapping, and often unquestioned national political and cultural entities that framed cinema during those years.

In the pursuit and execution of these variegated internationalisms, the cultural actors and institutions under study in all three books are strongly invested in the specific power of the cinematic medium and its agents to act as a tool of persuasion, a means of education, a facilitator of disruption and/or a cultural diplomat. Many of the government bureaucrats, cultural administrators and intellectuals who protagonise all three books maintained a deep faith in cinema’s power to hold sway over its audiences – not least in the dark shadow of fascism’s effective use of the medium before and during World War Two.³ Accordingly, the three books collectively offer a hugely valuable appraisal of the ways in which an array of political and cultural agents asked cinema (mostly but not exclusively fiction features) to perform certain roles or to behave in certain ways according to their own interests, such as the promotion of collective political agendas or the accumulation of cultural capital. Huttunen is sanguine about describing the work of liberal institutions such as the BFI and UNESCO as ‘propaganda’, arguing that despite a general turn away from the term following the defeat of Nazi Germany, the power-laden work of mass persuasion that is inherent to propaganda also formed part of UNESCO’s postwar cultural diplomacy project. She thus uses the term ‘peace propaganda’ to describe ‘the conscious, coherent process of employing techniques of persuasion by any media available in order to unite people behind the ideal of peace’ (Huttunen 2022: 38). The phrase might appear paradoxical, but not if we bear in mind propaganda’s etymological sense of spreading or propagating a message (originally, the Catholic faith).

Salazkina, though, prefers to avoid the term. She critiques simplistic post-Cold War interpretations of Soviet or socialist cultural production, which are typically discredited as ‘either propaganda or, should it have any artistic value, as implicit or explicit dissent’ (2023: 9), wishing instead to tease out its tensions and complexities. She thus frames the Tashkent festival as a ‘cultural space and a contact zone’ that served as an instrument of Soviet Cold War soft power, using Uzbekistan’s geopolitically strategic location to forge and consolidate a community of Asian, Arab, African and (from 1976) Latin American film industries and makers, and projecting internationally a model of cinematic ‘world-making’ (2023: 11; 24) that emerged from a socialist form of collectivist modernisation. It also acted as a site at which to forge a sense of anti-Western community – for instance the shots fired over the Iron Curtain by Soviet film critic Liudmila Budiak, who claimed that her French counterparts’ location within the ‘bourgeois press’ rendered them unable to truly comprehend movies such as Chorus (Mrinal Sen, India, 1974) or Waqa’i’ Sanawat al-Jamr (Chronicle of the Years of Ember, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, Algeria, 1975), since the French writers foregrounded high formalism over such films’ social, revolutionary or anticolonial underpinnings (Salazkina 2023: 133–134).

Some two decades earlier, French cultural agents also feature strongly in Navitski’s account of cinephilia in midcentury Latin America: a field in which ideas about cinema as a salutary high art appeared as a bulwark against the dangers of harmful propaganda. Here it is the French themselves, along with their Latin American surrogates, who are projecting soft power through cinema, castigating their Latin American counterparts for failing to comply with received (Eurocentric) notions of film culture. As Navitski notes, a France much debilitated following World War Two invested heavily in projecting global cultural power in the absence of military might, often in direct confrontation with Hollywood. The links that French state and private institutions forged with sites of film culture in Latin America were instrumental in creating and perpetuating culturally colonial and Eurocentric (particularly Franco-centric) canons and modes of cultural distinction that proved hugely influential in the emergence and growth of those institutions across the continent. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the words of Marcel L’Herbier, the filmmaker and president of the French Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC). When L’Herbier enthusiastically welcomed a plethora of young Latin Americans to study at the school in the postwar years, he explicitly envisioned them as ‘indirect ambassadors – to represent in distant lands, as at home, our culture, our taste, and above all, radiate through our cinematic knowledge, the purest French quality’ (cited in Navitski 2023: 187), even as the IDHEC implemented measures to encourage them to return home after their studies rather than remaining in France. At the same time, Latin American cinephiles wore on their sleeves their engrained afrancesado cinematic taste. This is patent in a letter written (in French) by Colombian cineclubista Luis Vicens to the French-Bulgarian journalist Amy Bakaloff Courvoisier in 1952. Vicens complained vociferously that the Cine Club de Colombia had found it impossible to discipline its relatively unruly audience into acting in accordance with what they saw as appropriate film-society conduct, since they were ‘at the mercy of a mob that does not even know what a cine-club is and that very easily slips from praise to the most ferocious criticism’ (cited in Navitski 2023: 80). Fine details such as these reveal the intricacies of the everyday interactions that both constituted and contested the work of persuasion formed in cinematic pedagogies of liberal internationalism.

Unruly realities

For the cultural agents whose work is analysed by Navitski, Salazkina and Huttunen, what seems to matter most is not so much the (often richly complex) films themselves, but rather what the films are perceived to embody for a given audience, or the complex of social conducts, political machinations and ideological codes surrounding their circulation and consumption. Whether cinema was conceived as out-and-out propaganda or a vehicle of diplomacy, this begs the question: what became of the agendas they promoted through cinema when implemented on the ground?

In this context Miia Huttunen uses the term politicised cinema to describe the way in which the BFI/UNESCO publication Orient performs an ‘“opening … as political” … of seemingly apolitical films through their inclusion, interpretation, and repurposing in the catalogue’ (citing K. Palonen), whose users were ‘guided and directed to achieve the organisation’s [UNESCO’s] cultural diplomatic aims’ (2022: 8). To paint a corpus of 139 fiction features and 209 documentary and short films from 21 Asian countries – many of them deeply socially engaged – as ‘seemingly apolitical’ seems a tad disingenuous. Her point, though, is broadly a reasonable one: by committing such a cinematic wealth to the functional, and often rather woolly cause of ‘peace propaganda’ mentioned above (2022: 38), Orient seems to perform an ideological pirouette by imposing ready-made meanings on a set of highly polyvalent films in the name of freedom and understanding. This is perhaps an inevitable pitfall of this sort of instrumentalisation of culture for diplomatic ends – a process whose complexities Huttunen interrogates through her productive confrontation of International Relations (IR) theory with Film History and theories of culture. She identifies cinema – and specifically the Orient catalogue – as a key location of one of IR theory’s metanarratives: the discourse of international society. She asks how cinema works to produce that metanarrative not through intergovernmental powerplay but at the level of civil society, ‘shifting the focus of cultural diplomacy towards the part ordinary people can play outside the more formal, traditional sites of politics’ (2022: 15). Since her interest lies in the production of discourses rather than their circulation and effects, she focuses on a close reading of the catalogue itself via discourse analyses of Orient’s plot summaries. This means that the question of how far and in what ways movies such as the epic musical melodrama Mother India (Mehboob Khan, India, 1957), the Kazakh realist film Birches in the Steppe (Iurii Pobedonostsev, USSR, 1956), the arthouse classic Aparajito (Satyajit Ray, India, 1956) or the landmark experimental documentary Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, UK, 1934) actually did allow themselves to be ‘politicised’ is often unclear.

The books by Navitski and Salazkina are rich and wide-ranging in demonstrating the unruly realities of cinematic diplomacy. In Navitski’s study, the anecdote outlined above about Luis Vicens is a case in point. Another is that of Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, a towering figure in the Brazilian cinematic field who, as a film student, archivist, film society organiser and festival curator, straddles all four areas of film culture analysed in her book. Salles Gomes’ deep connections with France and across Latin America made him a prime agent of both transatlantic and continental film culture. He often went to great lengths to secure legitimation for Brazilian and other Latin American institutions (in particular the Filmoteca at the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo, which he directed) via Eurocentric instruments such as the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF). But Salles Gomes’ quarrel with Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française from 1954 anticipated other Latin American film archivists’ increasing suspicion of what they saw as Langlois’ self-serving diplomatic machinations in stimulating the growth of the Latin American film-archival field. For instance, Danilo Trelles of Uruguay’s Servicio Oficial de Difusión Radio Eléctrica (SODRE) complained in 1960 that Langlois had a ‘peculiar policy of creating spheres of influence and treating problems related to Latin American film archives as if they were colonial possessions that he manages according to his desires and whims’ (cited in Navitski 2023: 117). The region’s archives would go on to create an explicitly anti-imperialist and autonomous Latin American film archiving movement under the Unión de Cinematecas de América Latina (UCAL) that operated for two decades from 1965.⁴

For her part Salazkina makes clear that although the Tashkent film festival was both a global showcase for the USSR and the foremost hub of ‘world Socialist cinema’, it by no means acted as a pure and transparent implement of Soviet policy. We see this, for instance, in her discussion of Soviet critic and filmmaker Georgii Chukhrai’s interventions in Tashkent and in socialist film culture more broadly on onscreen sexuality. Chukhrai, Salazkina shows, was an upstanding member of the Soviet film establishment but also, on occasion, something of a loose cannon. On the one hand, Chukhrai argued forcefully against facile, dehumanising onscreen eroticism, in line with the morality of official censorship that saw scenes snipped even from political dramas such as La viuda de Montiel (Montiel’s Widow, Miguel Littín, Mexico/Colombia, 1980) since, as Salazkina puts it, ‘whether in its commodified commercialized form or in its antisystemic, anti-institutional anarchic and libertarian construction, sexuality on the screen falls outside social and political forms that are traditionally constitutive of socialist collectivity. The sexual autonomy of a cinematic subject (whether liberal or radical) appears as antithetical to organized collective action’ (2023: 140). This placed the likes of Chukhrai at odds with the consistently enthusiastic reception by Tashkent audiences of ‘anything even mildly erotic on the screen’ (2023: 138). On the other hand, Chukhrai promoted films frowned upon by the Soviet authorities for similar reasons, such as Otto e mezzo (8 1/2, Federico Fellini, Italy, 1963). Fine detail such as this consistently suggests the extent to which, however much actors in the cinematic field tried to rein in cinema’s ‘disruptive powers’, to borrow Huttunen’s words (2022: 2), its capacity for disruption nestled in the folds of hard-nosed Soviet film-cultural diplomacy.

Salazkina’s and Navitski’s books are impressive firstly for the sheer breadth and depth of the historical research that each author gathers from a huge array of archives, libraries and cinémathèques, as well as the vast secondary literatures and (particularly in Salazkina’s case) filmographies they mobilise, in many different countries and languages. It is perhaps an obvious point but it is worth pausing for a moment to take stock of the considerable logistical, cultural and linguistic challenges posed by a research enterprise of this nature, perhaps tracing those faced by the builders of international(list) film culture who are the respective authors’ objects of study.⁵ Both books are populated by figures – some of them well-known, many of them largely forgotten to history – who, whether motivated by ambition or solidarity, ego or beneficence, personal fulfilment or a paternalistic desire to enlighten (likely often a combination of some or all of these), negotiated complex cultural sites at the crossroads of distinct but also enmeshed (geo)political entities, institutional bureaucracies and aesthetic traditions. Some of these characters appear recurrently as key agents who shape events, flows, and discourses, such as the Mauritanian-French filmmaker Med Hondo in Salazkina’s case or the Mexican film culture promoter Manuel González Casanova in Navitski’s book. Even so, both authors are decidedly opposed to a ‘great men of history’ (or, for that matter, a ‘great women of history’) approach to film history, since phenomena such as those that they analyse are about networks far more than individuals. The mere fact of tracing and beginning to disentangle and piece together these stories is already a noteworthy achievement, and both authors are skilful in marshalling and narrating their findings in such ways as to ensure that their respective contributions to international film history will be long-lasting.

Salazkina’s ostensible object of study is specific: the Tashkent festival itself from the late 1960s to the late 1980s: ‘a node within a network of the multifaceted geopolitical alliances between the Soviet Union and the decolonial world’ that, in turn, was shot through with a set of ‘affective affinities and ambiguities, contradictions, and erasures’ (2023: 4–5). The book, though, quickly balloons outwards in time and in space, so that far from being a simple monographic study of a single institution, it ends up providing a thorough grounding in the ‘unique cultural formation’ (2023: 9) she names ‘world Socialist cinema’. The book’s vast scope, combined with a corpus that is probably largely unknown to most English-language readers, sometimes disorients and hinders the emergence of a clear argument; but by the same measure it rewards deep reading that will surely stimulate much further research on the topic. For a Western readership perhaps accustomed to a monolithic view of authoritarian Soviet realpolitik, ‘world Socialist cinema’ is a field surprisingly full of difference, disagreement and debate – not for any latent or covert liberalism on the part of the politicians or Apparatchiks who enabled the festival, but rather because of the messiness of the criss-crossing networks that did not just enable but which itself seems to be constitutive of ‘world Socialist cinema’. After setting this complex stage forged out of films, filmmakers, film festivals, government policies, and distribution and exhibition networks across three continents, the second half of the book brings a number of key topics into sharper focus. The first is the disputed terrain of socialist women’s emancipation (as distinct from ‘bourgeois’ Western feminism) as it played out in and beyond Tashkent, mediated variously by matters of religious, cultural and ideological difference. Secondly, Salazkina tackles the dialectics of socialist industrial modernity and cultural heritage as played out via the festival, in which ‘socialist heritage cinema’ and ‘the cinema of socialist industrial modernity’ were both constituted as objects of revolutionary visual pleasure. She finds that the former ‘endow[ed] the latter with a “usable past”, ultimately serving the same goal of advancing the ideology of socialist development’ (2023: 208). I will return to the topic of the final chapter, on debates around peace and revolutionary violence in the socialist cinema of solidarity, in the closing paragraphs of this essay.

Navitski’s book takes a rather different approach, focusing on the broad phenomenon of transatlantic film culture rather than a specific site, although in her study that phenomenon is neatly divided into four sets of sites of cultural diplomacy between France and Latin America that developed during the first two decades following World War Two. Those are: cineclubs, film archives, film festivals and film schools, each spanning several Latin American nations including the region’s three major film-producing nations, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, but also paying close attention to other nations including Colombia, Chile and Cuba. Like Salazkina’s book, it is exhaustively documented with archival sources and as such appears as a historical study more than a theoretical one.⁶ However, as Hagener has argued, ‘film theory’ itself is materially and historically situated rather than abstract and isolated (2014: 10); and it is precisely at historical sites such as those studied by Navitski (as well as, we might add, in these very books by Navitski and Salazkina) that we can find whole traditions of original theoretical thinking about cinema beyond the usual, Eurocentric film-theoretical canons. Her book gives us a clearly framed glimpse into some of those debates, including the sometimes contradictory reflections by film society organisers on how best to discipline but also to enlighten and activate their attendees’ ‘distinction’, following Bourdieu; and the push and pull between imitation and institutional autonomy that characterised the relations between the French and Latin American film-archiving fields. She further narrates the struggles to establish Latin American film festivals as vanguard sites of high film criticism in the face of residual European exoticism and an often self-belittling Latin American Francophilia, and the paradoxical combination between white, male-dominated, upper-class elitism and a push towards democratisation and autonomy in 1960s film pedagogies. This is particularly notorious at the CUEC film school in Mexico’s National University, where students arraigned the ‘bad taste of a large part of the public’ even as their mentor, Manuel González Casanova, held out hope for cinema’s use as a vehicle of understanding: ‘The artificial barriers which have been erected throughout history will tumble when direct contact is established with the most intimate realities of life in the rest of the world’ (González Casanova in Navitski 2023: 225).

In each chapter of Navitski’s book a pattern emerges in which paternalistic French film culture is received with interest, admiration and, increasingly, infuriation by Latin American agents of cinephilia, themselves increasingly emboldened and professionalised. Salles Gomes is again well worth citing for a comment he made along these lines in 1963, in response to Henri Langlois’ interest in creating a South American bloc of film archives, that ‘This idea of Latin America or of “South American Archives” … is a European abstraction or an act of wishful thinking on the part of Brazilians, Uruguayans, Argentines when random encounters create optimistic desires to act as a single community where the only reality is geography’ (Navitski 2023: 113). Salles Gomes’ point (which was also made by others in similar contexts) can stand as a salutary corrective to the perhaps overheated aspirations to an idealised international togetherness that sometimes underpinned the internationalist projects such as those analysed in these books, particularly on the part of cultural actors who occupied socially privileged positions with access to networks of global mobility that was unusual for most.

In this sense, one valuable aspect of Huttunen’s book is its gesture not simply to use ‘cultural diplomacy’ as a binding concept, but to interrogate it using the tools of her IR background. She points out that cultural diplomacy is a contested and nebulous term that comes down to an attempt to ‘mediate otherness’ (Huttunen 2022: 26, citing J. Der Derian) – that is, to construct a relationship of understanding and power in which cultural difference is at once acknowledged, overcome and instrumentalised. Digging further into the notion of culture itself, she proposes that we look into the deep history of the term, finding UNESCO’s understanding of culture as projected in the Orient catalogue to be a sort of composite between the French Enlightenment concept of civilisation and German Kultur, which saw cultural products as ‘already existing raw material comprising the essence of a nation’ (Huttunen 2022: 109). Read alongside the books by Salazkina and Navitski, this raises the intriguing question of what we might conclude if we were to study the cultural-diplomatic machinations of, say, the Tashkent Film Festival or the Cinémathèque Française through a similar lens. We might ask, for instance, how the very concept of cultural diplomacy meant different things to different individuals and institutions. This might involve questioning both the diplomatic operations of such institutions on the level of how political actors interact with one another on a level of geopolitical powerplay, and the philosophical underpinnings of their respective understandings of culture.

Huttunen’s contribution is a useful one at this level, and is also worthy in its bringing to the fore of the Orient catalogue a little-known artefact from the crossroads of film history and global cultural geopolitics. As we might expect, she finds that the catalogue commits all manner of simplifications and strategic misreadings, in particular its vague homogenisation of the ‘East’. Even so, her refusal to categorise the work as ‘Orientalist’ (citing Said) expresses a valuable desire to find agency in the Asian nations that contributed to it – many of them undergoing decolonisation. The book’s narrow focus on Orient is understandable, but one cannot help feeling that it is perhaps too narrow. In terms of coverage, only passing mention is made of the catalogue’s place in the broader and significant mass media project that UNESCO embarked on from its foundation in 1945 in which films were identified, distributed, exhibited, adapted, critiqued, produced and discussed on a vast scale worldwide, and in which the very process of cataloguing and categorising previously existing motion pictures was a huge, collaborative, and international exercise.⁷ Methodologically, as noted above, Huttunen substantiates her arguments about cinema’s function as a tool of border-crossing cultural diplomacy through an analysis of the published plot summaries of the catalogued films and, in some cases, the film themselves on a level of narrative. Meanwhile, elements of film form that tend to operate on a more sensory or embodied level such as music, song and dance are downplayed as ‘merely minor stylistic details’ (2022: 141). Film scholars might find this approach reductive, since it overlooks the complexities of the cross-cultural experiences that cinema throws up, which in turn affect its efficacy as a tool of cultural diplomacy.⁸ A closer attention to these historical and formal considerations might have produced a more profound critique of how the Orient catalogue (and the major ten-year UNESCO project of which it formed a part) figured in an extensively theorised and evolving set of ideas that UNESCO began to articulate from the 1940s.

Interrogating the call to peace

If cinema was mobilised during the decades following World War Two as a tool for promoting peace, mutual understanding and common causes, the books by Huttunen, Salazkina and Navitski collectively draw out some of the complexities of those terms and the cultural, political and ideological wrangling that often underpinned them. Huttunen, for her part, acknowledges the critical juncture at which UNESCO and the United Nations system sat during the 1950s and 1960s. During this crucial period, the bodies comprising the international system were at a crossroads between Western liberalism, communism and post-Bandung Third Worldism (Huttunen 2022: 78–81), and Huttunen usefully signals some ways in which the catalogue itself brushed under the carpet any cultural or ideological tensions that the listed films might have raised. Even so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that her somewhat tame critique of the UNESCO project – which she deems ‘full of good intentions but often fuzzy and imprecise’ (2022: 17) – rather lets the architecture of the entire postwar system of international relations off the hook. Moreover, her analysis might have been significantly enriched by a more thorough analysis of how that play of underlying complexity and discursive simplification was constituent of the catalogue, and also, potentially, of the whole Major Project of which it formed part, which produced a whole raft of outputs beside the BFI catalogue, including textbooks, journal issues, scholarly exchanges, institution-building and radio broadcasts (Wong 2008). Such an approach might have produced a more searching critique of Orient as a site of deep cultural and ideological dissonance and cultural-geopolitical reconfiguration.

Navitski similarly alludes to the builders of post-World War Two Latin American film culture, who ‘espoused a supposedly apolitical dedication to transcendent values like global peace and human progress that resonated deeply after the war’ (2023: 6). She is clear, though, that cinephiles’ discursive separation of aesthetics from politics was a false one, rooted as the entire field was in the politics of the Cold War, the tensions of a waning imperial power still in the process of decolonisation (France), and an increasingly assertive anti-colonialism on the part of many Latin American participants in the field. Further work in this area might dig still deeper into the racial politics that often underpinned such exchanges. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, although the post-World War Two order was discursively constructed in opposition to the militarily defeated wartime Fascisms, many of the victorious Allied powers (for instance, the France of which Navitski writes) were still imperial and/or colonial formations that in many ways were ideologically continuous with or adjacent to Fascism (Arendt 2017). Navitski’s and Huttunen’s books reveal a wealth of imperious, paternalistic and sometimes racist attitudes displayed by European bureaucrats and cultural agents towards the countries of the so-called ‘underdeveloped’ world in French-led transatlantic cinephilia and the UNESCO cultural project in these years. These postwar projects clearly rejected the defeated Fascism of the Axis powers, but the imperial mindset that underpinned them was not fully acknowledged or dismantled. Zoë Druick for one has argued that the ostensibly humanist outlook of the United Nations system obscured an underlying ‘governmental’ and ‘technobiological’ approach to its subjects that aimed to manage modern citizens as ‘docile and conservative’ (Druick 2020: 65–66), ultimately producing ‘an apolitical response to [wartime] fascism’ (2020: 76). Fascism, then, apparently vanquished, still lurks – generally unspoken – in the background of the modernising, globalising and peace-building postwar system.⁹

The spectre of Fascism is not a central topic in Salazkina’s study of socialist world cinema, although it does arise in passing in the form of an anti-Fascist film festival held in Volgograd (former Stalingrad) in 1975 in which pride of place was given to the work of Chilean filmmakers following the 1973 Pinochet coup. Salazkina does, though, place some perspective on the postwar appeal to peace by referring to the strong presence at Tashkent in the 1960s and 1970s of a strand of militant cinema that explicitly advocated revolutionary violence in the face of continued colonial and imperial subjugation in the Third World, which she terms ‘world Socialist cinema of armed struggle’ (2023: 242). Salazkina identifies a clear anti-pacifism in productions such as the war documentary Stop Genocide (Zahir Raihan, 1971) on the Liberation War of Bangladesh – a film that articulates an explicit critique of the United Nations’ fecklessness in the face of US war crimes in the region, which rebuffs ‘the liberal notion of a linear historical progress toward individual freedoms guaranteed by liberal institutions, even international ones like the UN’ (Salazkina 2023: 264). A further example that is only mentioned in passing but which is the central object of study of another recent book (Filippi and Mestman 2022) is I dannati della terra (Valentino Orsini, Italy, 1968): a revolutionary internationalist Third Worldist film inspired by Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre (1961) that wove together violent revolutionary and anti-fascist struggles in Guinea-Bissau, Congo, Cuba, Vietnam and Italy. In I dannati, Orsini and screenwriter Filippi dismissed humanism and pacifism as ingenuous. Following Marx, and in line with other militant Third Worldist films of its time, they argued that, since bourgeois social relations are always violent, the dilemma was not between ‘war and peace, between manifest and evident violence and pacified and hidden violence’, but rather ‘between the violence of the system and the revolution that we have invoked and not yet achieved’ (Filippi and Mestman 2022: 366). The violence that Orsini and Filippi advocated recalls Raymond Williams’ discussion of the term, who notes that violence can denote ‘physical assault’ but also ‘unruly behaviour’ that might cause a ‘threat to some existing arrangement’ (1983: 233–234).

But this was not to say that the term ‘peace’ was rejected out of hand in global socialist cinema. Salazkina finds that the cinema of oppositional revolutionary violence coexisted with a distinct but related phenomenon: a cinema that celebrated the ‘foundational role of war for the history of the modern (socialist) nation-state’ (2023: 244). Certain filmmakers clearly felt that a degree of unruliness was called for. She notes in this respect that ‘peace was as much a catchword for the socialist and socialist-aligned bloc as freedom or liberty was for the other side’ (2023: 246, original italics), but this ‘peace’ was not a call for pacifism but rather ‘a metonym for communism itself … peace was a cause that required a fighting spirit’ (2023: 246, citing Miriam Dobson). All of this is to say that ‘peace’, like ‘internationalism’ or ‘freedom’, is a contested and ideologically situated term, by no means a moral absolute.

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This is an insight that is worth taking on board in asking what is at stake in scholarship of this sort for the present moment. It casts valuable historical context onto Huttunen’s entreaty that, at the present moment, ‘UNESCO does indeed hold the capacity to cultivate the foundations of peace directly in the minds of men, and even to reimagine what those foundations could be through something so innocuous as cinema’ (2022: 155). Cinema, though, is not as innocuous as all that, as Navitski makes clear in her own concluding lines, reflecting that Latin American and French cinephiles’ urge to ‘train critically inclined viewers and encourage intercultural understanding’ was not entirely disinterested, but rather ‘inextricably intertwined with self-interested national agendas and desires for prestige’ (2023: 230). Navitski rightly notes the present-day fragility and insufficiency of the international order of which those film enthusiasts were agents more than half a century ago, in the light of today’s online media-driven misinformation and extremism, ‘climate emergency, rising authoritarianism worldwide, and Russian invasion in Ukraine’ (2023: 230). Revising this essay in October 2025, we might now add Israel’s ongoing genocide and ecocide in Gaza. She calls for new forms of cinephilia capable of stimulating a ‘truly planetary consciousness, generating affective connections and solidarities that may help us to imagine other possible worlds’ (2023: 230), although the question of just what form that might take lies, understandably, beyond the bounds of her book. Salazkina for her part turns to the archival and scholarly implications of research such as her own, which she sees as a contribution to ongoing efforts to ‘undo the epistemic regime of the Cold War, whose political rhetoric is still predominant within both former superpowers and whose effects impact the rest of the world daily’ (2023: 273). For Salazkina, the close study of unusual, broadly neglected and easily misunderstood film-historical artefacts such as those she studies forces us to think beyond old geopolitical blind alleys and – in line with Navitski – to use scholarship ‘to seek new alliances, affinities, and solidarities of the global present’ (2023: 273).

Questions such as these are key points on the agenda as scholars work towards a thorough re-evaluation of cinema’s role in constructing and disputing diverse forms of internationalism at a key period in the twentieth century. The three scholars I have looked at here are committed to digging into the historical archives of film-internationalism as a way to think up new, global, international or planetary ways of understanding the world’s present predicament. Their books, at heart, seem to beg the questions: if the world is at a moment of danger and crisis at which old structures are at risk of falling apart, precisely how were those structures constituted and how might scholarship contribute to correcting the mistakes we might have made in defining them? Can looking at the past teach us what mistakes were made and how to correct them, or are there fundamental flaws in the entire architecture? If filmmakers and cultural agents nearly eighty years ago were asking questions about forging peace and mutual understanding through cinema that resonate awkwardly today, what can we learn from the ways in which those historic appeals to internationalism or globalism panned out? Where is (film-)internationalism today? Do we need it, and if so, in what form? As Navitski suggests, mid-twentieth century film-internationalism can be seen as a forerunner of sorts to the contemporary networked media environment that is so deeply embedded in present-day political forms. So, how might the historical backstories that such research provides, with all of their unruliness, discrepancies and contradictions, help us to re-imagine where, how and why those media emerged as they did, and how a better understanding of them might help us act politically in the present?

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Lee Grieveson, Sonia García López and two anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Funding Information

This work was funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee, grant reference EP/Y015088/1.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.