ABSTRACT
The international exchange of films between East and West continued for political and symbolic reasons even during the Cold War. However, the circulation of documentary films and the role of the Western European communist parties in this process remain under-researched. This chapter focuses on the media tactics of the Italian, French and Czechoslovak communist parties in the early 1950s, when Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, played an important role as an unexpected media centre, organising radio and television broadcasts to France and Italy but also mediating the visibility of documentaries about the oppression of Western European workers through the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. Introducing the concept of regimes of (in)visibility into the field of film and media studies, it analyses the negotiation about the distribution of films banned or censored in France and Italy in Eastern Europe as a specific set of media tactics aimed at promoting or displacing certain ideas or narratives in/from public discourse within East and West entanglements.
