Journal Connexe

 

Call for papers

 

War Spoliations and Cultural Transfers: The Case Study of Soviet Cinema (1939-1949)

Guest editor: Éric Aunoble (University of Geneva)

 

The research program CINESOV, sponsored by the french National agency for research (ANR), focuses on soviet cinema during the Second world war. In this frame was already organized an international conference about Soviet Film Industry the Second World War (Moscow, june 2014) and several scientific events are planned in the near future, about the Holocaust filmed by the Soviets (Paris, january 2015) and about Soviet War Propaganda on the Movie Screen (Toulouse, march 2015).

 

It is also necessarry to set the history of Soviet cinema during the Second World War in the frame of European history and to highlight the issues of transfers and seizures, better known when concerning other objects. This is the aim of a special issue of the journal Connexe.

 

The question of seizures by the Soviets can be approached in a variety of cases: Baltics and Poland (1939 and 1944), Germany from May 1945, Manchuria in September 1945 (seizure of Japanese films).

 

The seizure and transfer of movies are related to the distribution policy on Soviet and German screens until 1949 (decisions about releases, cut-offs, subtitles or dubbing...). We will also study the influence of foreign movies (American and German in the USSR, Soviet in Germany) on the public at the end of the war, in a context of domestic production shortage. One can also wonder how American movies reached in the USSR, some being seized, others lend-leased by Hollywood majors in the frame of their commercial strategy in Eastern Europe. Seizures of equipment is another aspect on which historiography didn't focus yet, especially in Germany, with the dismantling of the UFA. We would like to assess the importance of seizures,

to know how it was allocated between Soviet studios and understand the consequences of that process for restarting production in occupied Germany.

All of these informations would be an important contribution to the developing historiography of war spoliation while highlighting an unknown aspect of cultural exchanges in Europe during the Second World War.

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Proposed contributions (title, name, institutional affiliation, one page summary and bibliography) should be sent to [log in to unmask] before 15 january 2015.

In french or in english, the selected articles must be submitted by 15 june 2015.

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Connexe: around the post-communist space. The journal published by the Institute for Sociology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Global Studies Institute of the Université de Genève aims to connect associated disciplines and research objectives, to merge interconnected fields, to capture simultaneously the deviant and the common, the singular and the whole, the present and the future, the regional and the transnational.