The UW Slavic Department presents a lecture “Third Cinema in the Second World: Images of Anti-colonialism in the Polish People’s Republic” by Dr. Marla Zubel.

This talk locates key elements of the politics and aesthetics of Latin American Third Cinema in anti-colonial reportage films made in Poland in the 1960s and 1970s. The point is not to posit an alternative origin of a form of militant cinema first conceptualized by Argentinian filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in the late 1960s, but to draw attention to the shared ideological and material conditions, as well as points of influence, that allowed it to develop simultaneously in different corners of the world struggling for the right to national self-determination. I argue that, when seen from standpoint of the “satellite state,” the Eastern Bloc’s support for anti-imperialism abroad was frequently in contradiction with it practices at home. This contradiction was the basis on which of a more thoroughly anti-imperialist socialist politics could have, and occasionally did, emerge during the Cold War—in aesthetic form if not often in political practice.

Dr. Zubel is an Assistant Professor at the Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, KY. Her research focuses on world literature and cinema, Eastern European literature and film, postcolonial studies, translation studies, critical theory. Dr. Zubel studies and teaches twentieth century literature and film in a global context. Her current research examines a neglected archive of Eastern European cultural encounters with the Third World. She is particularly interested in the ways writers and filmmakers of the former Socialist Bloc turned to documentary, and other non-fiction genres and forms, in order to represent the relationship between the local and the global at the height of the Cold War.

This lecture is free and open to the public. Zoom link: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92453723595

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