6. Constructing The Screen Image Of An Ideal Partner

Abstract

Cinema combines mass media, art and industry. Its inception at the turn of the twentieth century, cinema also has been cosmopolitan. This chapter focuses on feature films celebrating Soviet-Japanese rapprochement, including Ten Thousand Boys, The Little Fugitive, Moscow, My Love and The Melody of the White Night . It examines the changes in representing the Soviet-Japanese partnership and argues that the films, taken together, provide a certain historical mapping of Soviet-Japanese mutual perceptions, symbolically represented by culturally and politically sanctioned narratives and visual images. The Soviet-Japanese joint production films constitute a unique source to analyse interactions between political events and strategies of media representation. A major motif in the Soviet-Japanese co-productions involved interaction in the sphere of arts. The ideal partner was a performer. Representation of hero-mediators as people of artistic professions gave them an ambiguous high status and marginality, but also stressed their social function to perform and to represent . Keywords: cinema; hero-mediators; ideal partner; Soviet-Japanese partnership; visual images