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Speakers): Masha Salazkina (Concordia University)

This paper will consider the question of how to assess the legacy of Soviet cultural and cinematic engagement with Asia, Africa, and Latin America—such as the history of the Tashkent film festival, Sergei Paradjanov's orientalist aesthetic appropriations, or the popularity of Latin American telenovelas—in light of more contemporary postcolonial and decolonial theories, from Walter Mignolo and Mladina Tlostanova's critique of a "twin project of Soviet and Western modernities" to Kuan-Hsing Chen's call for Asia as Method.
Masha Salazkina is the Concordia University Research Chair in Transnational Media Arts and Cultures (Montreal, Canada). Her work incorporates transnational approaches to film theory and cultural history, Marxism and Third-Worldism. She is the author of In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein's Mexico (2009) and co-editor of Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema (2014) and Global Perspectives on Amateur Film History and Culture (forthcoming).
Salazkina’s work has been published in Cinema Journal, October, Screen, Film History, Slavic Review, Framework, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, KinoKultura, and several edited volumes. Her new book project traces a trajectory of the development of materialist film theory through the discourses of early Soviet cinema to institutional film cultures of the 1930s-1950s Italy, and critical debates surrounding the emergence of New Latin American Cinemas. She is also leading a collaborative research project investigating a global history of international festivals of Asian, African, and Latin American cinemas in the 1960s-70s.