Abstract
The paper argues for the enduring significance of the popular register of socialist East European film and television cultures, which has received little attention so far. More specifically, it tracks Westerns, the most popular film genre on socialist screens, to explore the complex and often contradictory functions that media entertainment performed for and within socialist nationalisms. It looks at a large body of imported and domestically produced Westerns and Western-type adventure films and TV series from the 1960s onwards to demonstrate that media entertainment in general and the Western genre in particular, while intended to support top-down, nationalistic pedagogies of the state, often gave expression to officially unspeakable or illegitimate gendered and racialized identifications. Furthermore, rather than art films, which have been confined to and confirmed the ‘national cinema’ approach in studies of East European film, Westerns map extensive cross-border routes of production, distribution and aesthetic expression, which necessitate a thorough revision of cold war historiographies of film and television.
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