An Air Map for World Cinema: Aeroflot as an Infrastructure for Cinematic Internationalism

Abstract

The expansion of global air travel in the Cold War era fueled diverse forms of state‐sponsored internationalism, including international writers' congresses, concert tours, and especially art and film festivals. Film festivals served as a key stage for cultural competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as the main way for decolonized Asian and African states to showcase their new national cinemas. The Soviet state airline, Aeroflot, shaped international participation at the Moscow International Film Festival (1959‐) and Global South participation at the Tashkent Festival for Asian, African, and Latin American Cinema in Uzbekistan (1968‐). This article analyzes Aeroflot as an infrastructure for cinematic internationalism. The socialist economics of air travel shaped “world cinema maps” that emerged at Moscow and Tashkent. Aeroflot enabled Soviet cinematic diplomacy, but also constrained it: it delayed Tashkent festival's expansion to Latin America, where the airline had few inroads. For local publics, films brought in airplane luggage at the last minute provided uncensored transnational cinematic experiences that occasionally elided not just Soviet, but also Syrian or American diplomatic control. Aeroflot's inefficiencies put foreign delegates face‐to‐face with Soviet everyday life and reproduced global inequalities: filmmakers from the Global South, whose travel was covered by their Soviet hosts, were at the mercy of Aeroflot's delays, while festival guests from Western Europe and the United States could count on their own national airlines for transportation. Free Aeroflot tickets ensured nearly comprehensive participation of Global South nations, in order to promote Soviet filmmaking as the model for emergent Asian and African cinemas. Yet Third Worldist alliances forged at Moscow and Tashkent—among African organizers of the Pan‐African Federation of Filmmakers, or between Cuban and Vietnamese militant cineastes—often bypassed, contradicted, or exceeded Soviet diplomatic goals. More broadly, I argue that Soviet official internationalism—its technologies, bureaucracies, and expenditures—should be analyzed as an infrastructure that enabled multiple internationalist projects, some conceived elsewhere and working toward goals tangential or inimical to Soviet state purposes. Much existing work on Soviet internationalism zeros in on the state's attempts to win the “hearts and minds” of Soviet or foreign citizens. Conversely, the infrastructural approach focuses on informal transnational alliances and personal ties built on Soviet terrain, while also accounting for Soviet institutional, economic, and technological power that shaped the “contact zones” where these encounters took place.