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UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

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Screening Sino-Soviet Friendship

16 October 2023, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm

Poster for the film 'Poster for V edinom stroiu'

Cinematic Collaboration and the Ghosts of Empire in the Socialist World. A SSEES Russian Cinema Research Group seminar with Edward Tyerman (University of California)

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

SSEES

Location

Masaryk room
UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies
16 Taviton street
London
WC1H 0BW

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)

About the Speaker

Edward Tyerman

University of California, Berkeley at Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Edward Tyerman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on cultural connections and exchanges between Russia and China from the early 20th century to the present, within the broader historical contexts of socialist internationalism and postsocialism. His first book, Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture (Columbia University Press, 2021), rediscovers the intensive engagement with China in 1920s Soviet culture. Current research projects explore Sino-Soviet cultural collaboration in the 1950s and the social imaginary of the Russia-China relationship in the postsocialist period.