[ecrea] Moscow conference Sept 2014

Conference: The Cold War on Film: Then and Now

An international conference on ‘The Cold War on Film: Then and Now’ will 
be held at the German Historical Institute in Moscow, Russia, on 19-20 
September 2014. The conference is supported by the Wilson Center in 
Washington, DC, the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, and the 
German Historical Institute in Moscow.

A focus on culture has been one of the major innovations in the study of 
the Cold War over the past decade. This has helped historians and the 
general public to view the Cold War as a conflict of ideas and images as 
well as bullets and bombs. Film is thought to have played a particularly 
important role throughout the Cold War. Scholars now recognise that 
cinema was a powerful vehicle of entertainment and propaganda, one that, 
among other things, showed audiences the ‘reality’ of what was for many 
people a peculiarly abstract conflict. Few courses about the Cold War 
taught in schools and universities today would be complete without clips 
from movies like Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Second World War drama Meeting 
on the Elbe (1949) or Stanley Kubrick’s anti-nuclear farce Dr 
Strangelove (1963).

Up to now, most work on the relationship between the Cold War and cinema 
has focused on Hollywood. This is understandable given the headlines 
that the witch-hunt of leftists in Hollywood attracted during the 
McCarthy era and the global reach of the American film industry. 
Nonetheless, this American-centric approach has tended to skew the 
picture overall, leaving some with the impression that Hollywood was 
subjected to unique political pressures during the Cold War and that the 
American film industry won the cinematic Cold War almost by default.

This conference seeks, first of all, to take stock of what we now know 
about the role played by the American film industry during the conflict. 
Secondly, it aims to put Hollywood’s ‘performance’ in an international, 
comparative context. The conference will look beyond Hollywood and 
explore how cinemas from different areas of the world - East, West, 
North and South - treated and were affected by the Cold War. Among the 
questions papers might address are: Can we identify a range of important 
players in the cinematic Cold War? What are the similarities and 
differences between the ways that national film industries framed the 
Cold War? Which film industries gained from the Cold War and which lost? 
What was distinctive about cinema’s contribution to the Cold War? What 
does a comparative analysis of Cold War cinema tell us about the uses of 
propaganda during the conflict and about the cultural Cold War more 
generally?

The conference has a third major aim. As well as looking at cinema 
during the Cold War, it also wishes to explore how filmmakers have dealt 
with the subject since the conflict ended. A lot has been written about 
how filmmakers ‘remade’ the Second World War in the 1950s and 1960s and 
how that might have influenced wider beliefs about that conflict. We now 
need to look at whether and if so how filmmakers have done the same with 
the Cold War. We need to begin to map out how cinema (and popular 
culture generally) has replayed or refought the Cold War over the past 
quarter of a century, and to consider its potential impact on 
perceptions of the Cold War. Among the questions papers might address in 
this regard are: How prominent a subject has the Cold War been on cinema 
screens since 1989? Which national cinemas have paid the Cold War most 
attention, how and why? Which cinemas have effectively airbrushed the 
Cold War? What roles have governments or other organisations played in 
reworking the Cold War on the big screen?

Our approach is interdisciplinary, and we welcome proposals for papers 
from scholars of all fields, including history, film studies, 
literature, cultural studies, and the social sciences. The languages of 
the conference will be English and Russian. Proposals of 500 words, 
together with a brief CV, should be sent to Professor Tony Shaw at 
(a.t.shaw /at/ herts.ac.uk)<mailto:(a.t.shaw /at/ herts.ac.uk)> by 31 December 2013. 
Invitations to the conference will be issued by 31 January 2014. Papers 
(up to 25 pages in length) should be distributed to all participants one 
month before the event. All lodging and meals for the duration of the 
conference will be covered. A limited number of grants will be given to 
contributors to cover their travel costs.

Tony Shaw, University of Hertfordshire 
(a.t.shaw /at/ herts.ac).ukmailto:(a.t.shaw /at/ herts.ac.uk)
Sergey Kudryashov, German Historical Institute, Moscow 
Sergey.Kudryashov@dhi-moskau.orgmailto:(Sergey.Kudryashov /at/ dhi-moskau.org)


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