Cinematic Cold War: the American and Soviet struggle for hearts and minds

Abstract

The Cold War was as much a battle of ideas as a series of military and diplomatic confrontations, and movies were a prime battleground for this cultural combat. Tony Shaw and Denise Youngblood show Hollywood sought to export American ideals in movies like Rambo, and the Soviet film industry fought back by showcasing Communist ideals in a positive light, primarily for their own citizens. The two camps traded cinematic blows over four decades. The first book-length comparative survey of cinema's vital role in disseminating Cold War ideologies, Shaw and Youngblood's study focuses on ten films, five American and five Soviet, that in both obvious and subtle ways provided a crucial outlet for the global "debate" between democratic and communist ideologies. For each nation, the authors outline industry leaders, structure, audiences, politics, and international reach and explore varied relationships linking each film industry to its respective government. They then present five comparative case studies, each pairing an American with a Soviet film: Man on a Tightrope with The Meeting on the Elbe; Roman Holiday with Spring on Zarechnaya Street; Fail-Safe with Nine Days in One Year; Bananas with Officers; Rambo: First Blood Part II with Incident at Map Grid 36-80. Collectively, their commentaries track the Cold War in its entirety, from its formative phase through periods of thaw and self-doubt to the resurgence of mutual animosity during the Reagan years and enable readers to identify competing core propaganda themes such as decadence versus morality, technology versus humanity, and freedom versus authority. They show such themes blurred notions regarding "propaganda" and "entertainment," terms that were often interchangeable and mutually reinforcing during the Cold War. Cinematic Cold War offers a shrewd analysis of how the silver screen functioned on both sides of the Iron Curtain

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