ABSTRACT
The emergence of the Eastern Bloc significantly affected how postwar reconstruction was conceived and portrayed in the early Cold War years. The East European film industries became a new battleground, with postwar reconstruction requiring political assessment of personnel and film themes. This chapter discusses Soviet films coproduced between 1948 and 1950 with Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany and awarded Stalin Prizes, along with the first of many collective Eastern European films by Joris Ivens. This chapter has two aims: first, to explore how Soviet and socialist-linked filmmakers formed arrangements to visualize postwar reconstruction as socialist construction in Eastern Europe and second, to articulate how Soviet film partnerships were used to enlist sympathetic film personnel in the transformation of domestic film industries.
