An Unruly Diplomat: Film-Internationalism in Recent Scholarship

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This review essay considers the contributions to scholarship on film and internationalism made by three recent monographs: Rielle Navitski’s Transatlantic Cinephilia: Film Culture Between Latin America and France, 1945-1965 (2023), Miia Huttunen’s Politicised Cinema: Post-War Film, Cultural Diplomacy and UNESCO (2022), and Masha Salazkina’s World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War (2023). Taken together, these books help further our understanding of how cinema was used and mobilised as a tool of cultural diplomacy and peace-building by nation-states, international bodies, and nongovernmental organisations including film festivals and film archives, during the decades following World War Two. The authors bring a particular focus on the ways in which motion-pictures mediated the construction of international networks of mutual understanding in the so-called ‘underdeveloped’ world in complex cultural dynamics inflected by the Cold War and decolonisation: namely, between France and Latin America, in Navitski’s case; between Britain and Asia, in Huttunen’s book, and between the USSR and the ‘Third World’, for Salazkina. The essay interrogates some of the complexities inherent in both the liberal-internationalist and the socialist-internationalist calls for peace articulated through the film and media projects analysed in the three books, and asks what is at stake in the present day given the ongoing crisis in the post-World War Two international system.