Screening Sino-Soviet Friendship

The Sino-Soviet “honeymoon” of the 1950s was brief, and the three decades of Sino-Soviet Split that followed have tended to obscure the scale and stakes of this earlier period of Sino-Soviet alliance. At a moment of renewed yet unpredictable Sino-Russian alliance, this talk looks back at the aspirations and limits of Sino-Soviet friendship through the lens of cinematic collaboration. Cultural transfer took place across the arts, but cinema offered a collaborative mode of cultural production that was both feasible and ideologically charged. Cinematic collaboration combined practical goals—technology transfer for the Chinese, market access for the Soviets—with the ideological aspiration of creating a common socialist culture equally legible to Soviet and Chinese audiences.

This talk draws on archival materials to reconstruct the production dynamics and aesthetic expressions of collaboration in three key coproductions: Przhevalsky (1952, dir. Sergei Yutkevich), Under Ancient Desert Skies (Chinese title Almaty—Lanzhou, 1958, dir. Vladimir Shneiderov and Qin Zhen), and Side by Side (Chinese title Wind from the East, 1959, dir. Efim Dzigan and Gan Xuewei). Strikingly, all three films are set in Manchuria or Xinjiang, historically contested spaces between the Russian and Chinese states. At stake in these films is the possibility of identifying a shared “usable past” that can negotiate divergent understandings of two intertwined imperial pasts.

Image credit: Poster for V edinom stroiu (Side by Side; Chinese title Wind from the East, 1959, dir. Efim Dzigan and Gan Xuewei 1959)