Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and MindsTonyShaw and Denise J.Youngblood. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010.

Abstract

Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010.The Cold involved much more than guns and nuclear warheads. Cinematic Cold insightfully explores how the United States and the Soviet Union waged this global struggle on the movie screens. In this first comparative study of Soviet and American film during the Cold War (4), Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood elucidate the changing representations of enemy and ally by dissecting a select body of filmic narratives. The coverage includes familiar and obscure films-all of them provocative and fascinating.The authors begin with a brief historical overview of the US and Soviet film industries. Following this is a study of films from the early Cold era. This darkest period (65) of bipolar conflict gave rise to a body of hard-line (18) that mounted hostile portraits of the enemy. Therefore, Soviet films like The Meeting on the Elbe presented American soldiers as drunk and corrupt, while Hollywood's Man on a Tightrope treated communism in Eastern Europe as an oppressive force. The 1950s came with soft-core, (18) that boasted the best aspects of society. The US celebrated individual freedom and material affluence with Roman Holiday, the Soviets beautified industrial work and crossclass interactions by way of Spring of Zarechnaya Street.Clear-cut binaries of positive and negative diminished in the ensuing two decades. Mikhail Romm's visually elegant Nine Days in One Year etched a bleak portrait of Soviet nuclear science as a trio of atomic physicists suffers from torn private lives and decaying physical health. Americans critiqued the nuclear arms race through Fail Safe, which advanced a doomsday scenario stemming from a small technical glitch in the safeguard system. In Bananas, Woody Allen mocked the US national security establishment (as well as freewheeling youth protesters) and its tendency to align with Latin American dictatorships.Black-and-white portraits of friend and foe returned to the screens in the 1980s as part of the New Cold War. The Russians catapulted negative propaganda such as Incident at Map Grid 36-80, which not only dignified the men in uniform-as did Brezhnev-era films like Officers-but also caricatured the American navy as incompetent and even out of control. Americans played offense with Rambo: First Blood Part II, which showcased Sylvester Stallone's lone crusade in Vietnam against a united North Vietnamese-Russian front. …