Dilemmas of Definition and “Belonging”

It is a truism of film criticism that political and financial considerations affect the reception of any national cinema abroad. Accordingly, whatever interest people in the United States evinced in Soviet and Eastern European films during the Cold War era—prompted chiefly by the desire to gauge the fluctuating attitudes toward the West of “the other superpower” and the Soviet-controlled Eastern bloc—evaporated after the demise of the Soviet Union. For Americans, the fascination and challenge of the Soviet empire died upon the latter's disintegration into a mélange of disparate, embattled states and its satellites' consequent independence. Indeed, America's subsequent triumphalism rested on its self-identity as the politically validated, unassailable citadel of democracy and the sole remaining superpower in the world. That perceived superiority shaped its responses to European and perhaps especially Slavic culture, including film, even as the post-1989 financial chaos that wracked Russia and Eastern Europe threatened the very survival of their national film industries. Today, while contemporary public discourse indefatigably trumpets globalization, cinema audiences in the United States, with the exception of a minuscule minority, demonstrate an unambiguous preference for Hollywood fare and an indifference to films from Europe—a fortiori from the ideologically dispossessed Slavic world.