"They're here already! You're next! You're next! You're next!"

The Cold War Cinema team returns to discuss the 1956 sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Something is off in the sleepy little town of Santa Mira, California. As residents begin worrying that their family and friends no longer seem to be who they say they are, Dr. Miles Bennell and his former flame Becky Driscoll slowly uncover an alien plot to replace every person on earth with otherworldly duplicates. Directed by Don Siegel (Riot on Cell Block 11, Dirty Harry, Escape from Alcatraz) and written by Daneil Mainwaring (Out of the Past), and with uncredited work by blacklisted screenwriter Richard Collins (Song of Russia), Invasion explores myriad maladies in midcentury American culture.  

 Join hosts Jason Christian, Tony Ballas, and Paul T. Klein as we discuss: 

• The many complicated—and often contradictory—political allegories often read into the film from both the left and the right, including anti-communist and anti-conformist messages.

• The political and discursive handwringing done by Invasion's creative team to distance themselves and the film from its most potent politics.

• Invasion's other formal and narrative critiques of psychoanalysis, middle-class nuclear family values, professional expertise, and the Hollywood studio system.

• Why movies are not riddles to be solved.

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We love to give book or film recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode: 

Paul recommends Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982, Tommy Lee Wallace).

Tony recommends, The Burbs (1989, Joe Dante).

Jason recommends No Down Payment (1957, Martin Ritt).

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema. 

For more from your hosts:

• Follow Jason on Bluesky at @JasonChristian.bsky.social, on X at @JasonAChristian, or on Letterboxed at @exilemagic. 

• Follow Anthony on Bluesky at @tonyjballas.bsky.social, on X at @tonyjballas.

• Follow Paul on Bluesky at @ptklein.com, or on Letterboxed at @ptklein. Paul also writes about movies at www.howotreadmovies.com 

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Logo by Jason Christian 

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt). 

Happy listening!

This week on Cold War Cinema, we look at Boris Barnet's Poet (sometimes refered to as The Poet), a 1956 feature about the role of art and literature in war and revolution. 

Join hosts Jason Christian, Tony Ballas, and Paul T. Klein for a broad-ranging conversation about the film and the politics of form and style. Throughout, we consider:

• The challenges of context-dependent domestic filmmaking and international spectatorship

• How film narrative and aesthetic modes like Socialist Realism participate in the construction of national myths, imaginaries, and ideologies

• Barnet's dynamic use of framing, blocking, color, and light to advance Poet's plot and politics

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We love to give book or film recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode: 

Paul recommends A History of Russian Cinema by Birgit Beumers.

Tony recommends, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of Haitian Revolution by Julius S. Scott. Tony emphatically does not recommend Literature and Revolution by Leon Trotsky. 

Jason recommends Miklós Janscó's 1967 Hungarian war film, The Red and the White. 

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema. 

For more from your hosts:

• Follow Jason on Bluesky at @JasonChristian.bsky.social, on X at @JasonAChristian, or on Letterboxed at @exilemagic. 

• Follow Anthony on Bluesky at @tonyjballas.bsky.social, on X at @tonyjballas.

• Follow Paul on Bluesky at @ptklein.com, or on Letterboxed at @ptklein. Paul also writes about movies at www.howotreadmovies.com 

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Logo by Jason Christian 

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt). 

Happy listening!

Join hosts Jason and Paul for a discussion of William A. Wellman's 1948 spy thriller The Iron Curtain, starring Dana Andrews and Jean Tierney. Regarded as an anti-communist propaganda film, The Iron Curtain was the first major Hollywood studio production to engage directly with the Cold War. The story is based on the memoirs of the Russian spy Igor Gouzenko, who stole documents from the Soviet embasy in Ottawa, where he worked, and defected to Canada. This act of espionage led to the dismantling of a Soviet "atomic spy ring," and the arrests or numerous people both in Canada and the United States.

At a time of relative peace post-WWII, the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther considered The Iron Curtain "a highly inflamatory film" and a dangerous provocation. "Hollywood fired its first shot in the 'cold war' against Russia yesterday," Crowther writtes in his review, "just when a faint hope was glimmering that maybe moderation in fact might be achieved." 

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We love to give book or film recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode: 

Paul recommends the pro-Soviet Hollywood propaganda film Mission to Moscow (1943; dir. Michael Curtiz) 

Jason recommends the 2000 book The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters by Frances Stonor Saunders 

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Please subscribe to the podcast, and don't forget to leave a review!

Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonAChristian and Anthony at @tonyjballas (same handles on  BlueSky). Follow Paul on BlueSky at @ptklein.com. Paul writes about movies at www.howtoreadmovies.com. Paul's handle on Letterboxd is https://letterboxd.com/ptklein/; Jason's is https://letterboxd.com/exilemagic/. 

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Logo by Jason Christian 

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt). 

Please drop us a line anytime at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

Happy listening!

Join hosts Jason, Tony, and our new co-host, Paul, on Episode One of Season Two! On this episode we discuss Sergei Eisenstein's epic two-part Soviet masterpiece Ivan the Terrible, released in 1945 and 1958 respectively. The films were commissioned by Joseph Stalin in 1941 as a means to rehabilitate Ivan the Terrible's image for a contemporary Soviet audience. Stalin celebrated Part 1, but the state banned Part 2. A third part had been in the works, but was abandoned by Eisenstein after the suppression of the second part. Our discussion touches on this history and many other topics, including Soviet montage, dialectical art construction, Eisenstein's queerness, his fraught relationship with Stalin, and more. 

This is the first episode of a new format in which we take book or movie recommendations from each of us, which are found below: 

Tony's book recommendations:

1. Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict by Ronald Bergan (2016)
2. Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, edited by Philip Rosen (1986)
3. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory by Sergei Eisenstein (1949)

Paul's book and film recommendations:

1. This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Stalinist Russia by Joan Neuberger (2019)
2. Ivan the Terrible by Joan Neuberger 
3. Battleship Potemkin (1925; dir. Sergei Eisenstein)

Jason's movie recommendations:

1. Come and See (1985; dir. Elem Klimov)
2.  The Ascent (1977; dir. Larisa Shepitko) 
3. Wings (1966; dir. Larisa Shepitko) 

Please subscribe to the podcast, and don't forget to leave a review!

Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonAChristian and Anthony at @tonyjballas; follow Paul on BlueSky at @ptklein.com. Paul writes about movies at www.howtoreadmovies.com. Paul's handle on Letterboxd is https://letterboxd.com/ptklein/; Jason's is https://letterboxd.com/exilemagic/. 

Our logo is by Jason Christian 

The theme music for this episode and all forthcoming episodes is by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt). 

Please drop us a line anytime at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

Happy listening!

Join hosts Jason and Tony, as well as a new guest, Felicia Maroni, for the finale of Season One. On this episode we discuss Zoltán Korda's 1951 drama Cry, the Beloved Country, a film shot on location in South Africa, starring Canada Lee and Sidney Poitier, which aimed to critique the brutal apartheid system just three years after it was codified into law. The film was based on a novel of the same name by Alan Paton, a white South African, and adapted to the screen by Paton and the blacklisted writer John Howard Lawson, who went uncredited. 

Felicia is the host of the wondeful film podcast Seeing Faces in the Movies, which focuses on either a director or cinemtagrapher and how their aesthetic approach changes (or doesn't) across their ouevre. You can follow Felicia on social media at these sites: 

As always, please suscribe to the podcast, and don't forget to leave a review! And follow Jason on Twitter (X) at @JasonAChristian and Anthony at @tonyjballas (same handles at Bluesky). Jason's handle on Letterboxd is https://letterboxd.com/exilemagic/.

Our logo is by Jason Christian 

Theme music is by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt)

Please drop us a line at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

Happy listening!

Grab your sandals and sword and get philosophical with Jason, Tony, and our guest Paul Klein, as we unpack the wonders of Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960). The film was adapted from Howard Fast's novel of the same title by Dalton Trumbo, and it is considered a major step in the end of the notorious Hollywood blacklist. The film is also read as an allegory for civil rights stuggles, the HUAC hearings, and "Third World" struggles. All of this and more is discussed in the episode. 

Books and articles mentioned:

• Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders
• The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten by Gerald Horne
• Aesthetic Theory by Theodor Adorno
• "Fascinating Fascism" by Susan Sontag

As always, please suscribe to the podcast, and don't forget to leave a review! And follow Jason on Twitter (X) at @JasonAChristian, Anthony at @tonyjballas, and Paul at @ptklein, and the same handles at BlueSky. Paul's handle on Letterboxd is https://letterboxd.com/ptklein/; Jason's is https://letterboxd.com/exilemagic/.

Our logo is by Jason Christian 

The theme music for this episode and all forthcoming episodes is by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt). 

Please drop us a line at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

Happy listening!

Join hosts Jason Christian and Anthony Ballas, as well as a new guest, Paul Klein, as they discuss the iconic actor and director Charlie Chaplin and his late talkie masterpiece Monsieur Verdoux (1947). Paul is a film scholar who writes at the intersection of film and history. His research focuses on the cultural, political, and technological aspects of Hollywood and American filmgoing practices. He also write about how and why movies matter at Reading Movies (howtoreadmovies.com)

As for Chaplin, he hardly needs an introduction, but many people don't realize that he was a victim of Red Scare harrassment from the media and feds and was eventually exiled from the United States. Monsieur Verdoux is a bold film in that it asks a viewer, just two years after the end of WWII, to consider state-sponsored mass murder (e.g. war) and what Engels calls "social murder" (murder by deprivation), as opposed to individual crimes, which are easier to identify and denounce.  It's also a Chaplin film full of his signiture gags. The combination of these two registers, deadly serious and comical, makes for a fascinating but jarring cinematic experience. 

As always, please suscribe to the podcast, and don't forget to leave us a review!

Follow Jason on Twitter (X) at @JasonAChristian, Anthony at @tonyjballas, and Paul at @ptklein, the latter two are also on BlueSky. 

Please drop us a line anytime at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

Happy listening!

Join hosts Jason Christian, Anthony Ballas, and Tim Jones as they discuss the celebrated socially conscious Hollywood director, Martin Ritt (1914–1990). Ritt is known for a number of critically aclaimed movies, among them Paris Blues (1961), Hud (1963), and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965). In this episode, we focus on four of Ritt's explicitly pro-worker films: The Molly Maguires (1970), Sounder (1972), The Front (1976), and Norma Rae (1979). Ritt was never brought before HUAC, but he nevertheless blacklisted after his name was mentioned in the right-wing anticommunist newsletter Counterattack, along with 150 of other Hollywood workers. These experiences were satirized in The Front, the first film that confronts the blacklist era directly. 

Sally Field, the star of Norma Rae, once wrote of Ritt that "he felt it was important to stand for something, to have a moral point of view—especially if you work in the arts." That committment to justice is present all through Ritt's work. He boldly tackled labor issues and racism in a number of films, going as far as critiquing the all-white suburbian "utopias" in the overlooked gem No Down Payment (1957). 

As always, please suscribe to the podcast, and don't forget to leave us a review! Drop us a line at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com Happy listening!

Join us for our first ever interview with the Australian writer and scholar, Andrew Nette, who, along with the film historian Samm Deighan, co-edited the new book Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960–1990, published by PM Press. 

Nette is an author of fiction and nonfiction. He is coeditor of three previous books for PM Press, Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980; Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980; and Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985. His writing on film, books, and culture has appeared in a variety of print and online publications. He has also contributed video and print essays and commentaries to a number of DVD/Blu-ray releases. He writes a regular newsletter under his name on Substack. Follow him on Twitter (X), Instagram, and Bluesky: @pulpcurry. Nette is also on Letterboxd, and he made a list of all 353 films mentioned in Revolution in 35mm. 

As always please subscribe to the podcast, and don't forget to leave us a review! Send us tips or ideas or anything else at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com. We hope you enjoy!

Join hosts Jason Christian, Anthony Ballas, and Tim Jones as they discuss Herbert J. Biberman's iconic independent masterpiece Salt of the Earth (1954). The film is based on the real-life Empire Zinc strike in 1951 in Grant County, New Mexico, and was self-financed and made entirely outside the studio system using mostly non-professional actors, many of them actual miners playing versions of themselves. Jason compares the the film to Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 masterpiece The Battle of Algiers in terms of its scrappy production, dialectical sctructure, and Marxist themes. (You can hear him gush about that film on another podcast, linked here.) Biberman was one of the Hollywood Ten and he was blacklisted, as were the screenwriter, Michael Wilson, and the producer, Paul Jarrico. The Hollywood apparatus and law enforcement attempted to sabotage the production of Salt of the Earth on numerous occasions, going as far as getting the lead actress, Rosaura Revueltas, deported to Mexico on trumped up charges. Although she was from a prominent family of artists and writers, she was blacklisted and never acted in another Mexican film. 

As always please suscribe to the podcast if you like what you hear, and don't forget to leave us a review! Happy listening!

Join hosts Jason Christian, Anthony Ballas, and Tim Jones as they discuss Irving Pichel's 1950 crime thriller Quicksand, starring Mickey Rooney, Peter Lorre, Jeanne Cagney, and Barbara Bates. The film's plot revolves around Rooney's character making one bad decision after another, shattering his moral compass along the way. The implicit message, heavy-handed in its delivery, is that poverty breeds crime. Pichel was one of the so-called "unfriendly nineteen" brought before HUAC hearings in 1947. That group was whittled down to ten and later dubbed the Hollywood Ten. Pichel was  blacklisted along with the others who refused to testify. 

We hope you enjoy this episode. Please subscribe and rate the show if you feel so inclined. And if you have any comments, recomendations, or questions, feel free to email them to us at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com. Happy listening!

Join hosts Jason Christian, Anthony Ballas, and Tim Jones as they discuss Michael Gordon's 1951 drama I Can Get It for You Wholesale, a film that explores the cutthroat fashion industry in New York City's garment district. It was written by Abraham Polonsky and Vera Caspary and stars Susan Hayward, Dan Dailey, and George Sanders. Gordon and Polonsky were blacklisted during the infamous HUAC anti-communist hearings. After the blacklist lifted, Gordon returned to Hollywood to direct several light-hearted comedies. We hope you enjoy this episode and, as always, please subscribe and rate the show if you feel so inclined!

"Are you waving the flag at me?"

The Cold War Cinema team returns to look at Samuel Fuller's 1954 noir masterpiece, Pickup on South Street, with special guest Stephen Gillespie, film critic and cohost of The STACKS and I'm Thinking of Spoiling Things. When small-time thief Skip McCoy picks the wrong pocket on a busy subway car, he quickly becomes the most popular lowlife in town, trailed by crooked cops, the feds, and a Communist spy ring. 

Join Stephen and hosts Jason Christian and Paul T. Klein as they discuss:

• Why J. Edgar Hoover hated this movie.

• How the film makes sense of Cold War paranoia through its critique of American ideological systems 

• Pickup on South Street's depiction of the down-and-out and three-time losers that populate America's urban landscapes, and how the film suggests they got there.

• Writer-director Samuel Fuller's provocative and ultimately idealist politics

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Each episode features book and film recommendations for further exploration. On this episode: 

• Stephen recommends Samuel Fuller's film Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1972) and Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret (2011).

• Paul recommends Samuel Fuller's film I Shot Jesse James (1949) and Peter Brooks' book The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess.

• Jason recommends Samuel Fuller's film Shock Corridor (1963) and J. Hoberman's book An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War.

Check out Stephen Gillespie's two podcasts, I'm Thinking of Spoiling Things and The STACKS, and read his reviews of films and video games at Step Printed (stepprinted.com). Find him on Letterboxd at https://letterboxd.com/stephenage/.

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema. 

For more from your hosts:

• Follow Jason on Bluesky at @JasonChristian.bsky.social, on X at @JasonAChristian, or on Letterboxed at @exilemagic. 

• Follow Anthony on Bluesky at @tonyjballas.bsky.social, on X at @tonyjballas.

• Follow Paul on Bluesky at @ptklein.com, or on Letterboxed at @ptklein. Paul also writes about movies at www.howotreadmovies.com 

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Logo by Jason Christian 

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt). 

Happy listening!

This episode is a slight departure for this season—and we had fun with it. Rather than taking on a film directed by a blacklisted director, as usual, we're discussing a groundbreaking video essay about blacklisted directors. Thom Andersen's Red Hollywood (1996) discusses several of the directors and films we've discuss so far on the podcast. Andersen's goal in the film is to curate a list of overlooked films and demonstrate the bold themes that many of these directors were attempting to inject into some of them, much of which was later used as evidence against them in future HUAC hearings. The film features interviews with Abraham Polonsky, Ring Larnder, Jr., Paul Jarrico, and Alfred Levitt. Andersen (b. 1943) is the originator of the term "film gris," or socially conscious crime pictures from 1947 to 1952. He is perhaps most renowned for his experimental video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003).   

*Fact checking ourselves:

—Tim implies that Kafka (yes, Kafka) is Germany, but in fact he only wrote in German. He was from Prague of course. 

—Jason says that he lived in communes for 15 years, but actually it was about ten (oops). 

We hope you enjoy!

Join hosts Jason Christian, Anthony Ballas, and Tim Jones as they discuss Abraham Polonsky's debut film Force of Evil, a 1948 crime picture starring John Garfield, Beatrice Pearson, and Thomas Gomez. Force of Evil is one of thirteen movies the critic and filmmaker Thom Andersen identifies as film gris, or socially conscious crime cinema made from 1947 to 1951, during the height of the notorious House Un-American Activities hearings. In 1951, Polonsky refused to testify before his own HUAC hearing, and was subsequently blacklisted. He only directed two other films, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969) and Romance of a Horsethief (1971), and remained a committed marxist all his life. We hope you enjoy this episode!

Join hosts Jason, Anthony, and Tim as they discuss Robert Rossen's Body and Soul, a 1947 boxing film that critic Thom Andersen categorizes as film gris, or socially conscious crime cinema during the film noir years (1940s through the 1950s). Rossen testified at a HUAC hearing in 1951, pleaded the Fifth Amendment, and was blacklisted. Two years later, he testified again and this time he named 57 names and was given his career back in Hollywood. Rossen went on to direct several more features, including the celebrated pool epic The Hustler (1961) and Lilith (1964), starring Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg. We hope you enjoy!

Join hosts Jason, Anthony, and Tim as they discuss John Berry's He Ran All the Way, a 1951 crime drama in the film noir and film gris traditions. The film stars John Garfield, who was shortly thereafter blacklisted and died of a heart attack at age 39. The screenplay is written by Hugo Butler and Dalton Trumbo, both blacklisted, as was the director, John Berry. 

We also discuss Berry's short documentary The Hollywood Ten (1950), a fundarising agitprop documentary about the ten Hollywood personnel jailed in federal prison for contempt of congress in 1050. Here are their names: 

• Alvah Bessie, screenwriter
• Herbert Biberman, screenwriter and director
• Lester Cole, screenwriter
• Edward Dmytryk, director
• Ring Lardner Jr., screenwriter
• John Howard Lawson, screenwriter
• Albert Maltz, screenwriter
• Samuel Ornitz, screenwriter
• Adrian Scott, producer and screenwriter
• Dalton Trumbo, screenwriter

For more inormation on the 1945 "Black Friday" Hollywood strike that Tony references in the episode, check out this article he co-wrote with Gerald Horne! 

We hope you enjoy!

Join hosts Jason, Anthony, and Tim as they discuss Bernard Vorhaus's So Young, So Bad, a 1950 drama about a girls' reform school. The film dares to imagine therapy instead of punishment as a tool to "cure" antisocial behavior. Vorhaus was blacklisted in 1951 after his name was mentioned during the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings. He subsequently relocated to England, where he lived the rest of his life. The opening clip was taken from a fascinating interview of Vorhaus by Ira Gellen in which Vorhaus reflects on his life and career. We hope you enjoy!

Join hosts Jason, Anthony, and Tim as they discuss Cy Endfield's Try and Get Me!, also know as The Sound of Fury, a 1950 crime film that critic Thom Andersen includes on his list of film gris movies, or socially conscious crime cinema during the film noir years (1940s through the 1950s). Endfield was blacklisted in 1951 after his name was mentioned during the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings. He subsequently relocated to London, where he went on to make a number of celebrated films, including Hell Drivers (1957) and Zulu (1964). In this episode we cite an essay by the Chicago critic Jonathan Rosenbaum that is included in his excellent 1997 book Movies as Politics. We hope you enjoy!

Join hosts Jason, Anthony, and Tim as they discuss Jules Dassin's 1950 crime film Night and the City, a celebrated film noir picture (and film gris) shot on location in London. Like all of the directors discussed this season, Dassin was blacklisted during the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings. The director subsequently relocated to Paris, where he made his groundbreaking heist film Rififi (1955), and later settled in Greece, where he lived the rest of his life. Dassin remained embittered about the blacklist and the Second Red Scare and never shied from speaking publicly about it. This history and a thorough analysis of the film are discussed at length in this episode. For further reading about Dassin, and especially his film Rififi, co-host Jason Christian wrote an essay, and it's found here. 

We hope you enjoy it! 

Join hosts Jason, Anthony, and Tim as they discuss Joseph Losey's 1950 crime film The Lawless, an underseen and somewhat uneven example of what the filmmaker and critic Thom Andersen calls film gris, or socially conscious crime cinema during the film noir years (1940s through the 1950s). Losey was blacklisted in 1952, after his name was mentioned during the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings. He subsequently relocated to London, where he had a second (and admittedly more artistically accomplished) life as a film director, collaborating, mostly notably, with the Nobel Prize–winning playwright and screenwriter, Harold Pinter.

In this bonus episode, cohost Jason Christian interviews the independent filmmaker Christopher Jason Bell. Besides being a filmmaker, Bell is a board of director of the streaming co-op MeansTV. Bell's archival doc series about George W. Bush's presidency, Miss Me Yet, can be watched on MeansTV and received praise from numerous outlets such as The Baffler, AV Club, and Filmmaker magazine. His third feature Failed State premiered at Torino Film Festival and is continuing to screen across the world. His newest documentary short, Attention Shoppers, features Abby Martin and can be viewed on MeansTV. His latest narrative short, The Confection, is now playing the festival circuit.

In the episode, Christopher elaborates on his filmmaking process, especially making Miss Me Yet and Attention Shoppers, and how he used footage from the YouTube channel Vampire Robot to make the latter. Further, Christpher and Jason reflect on the political climate during the Bush years and today, and the similarities and differences between each era. 

If you subscribe to MeansTV, and use the promo code CHRISBELL, you'll get 10% off!

On this episode: 

• Christopher recommends Scott Noble's documentary The Power Principle: Corporate Empire and the Rise of the National Security State (2012), Ian Bell's 2025 documentary WTO/99, Tyler Rubenfeld's short horror film Another Sinking Sun (2023), and the book The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood, by Kristen Martin. 

• Jason recommends the podcast Blowback, particular Season One about the Iraq War. 

Follow Christopher Jason Christopher Bell on X (formerly Twitter): @UpdateTheGrids.  Follow Jason Christian on X (formerly Twitter): @JasonAChristian. 

Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema. 

This week on Cold War Cinema, we discuss the 1953 Soviet science-fiction drama, Silvery Dust, directed by Abram Room and Pavel Armand, a film once again set in the United States. The film concerns an American scientist who has developed a powerful new weapon of mass destruction designed to wipe out populations within a large area while leaving no harmful radioactive residues or traces. In the film, the scientist colludes with a Nazi colleague and various private interests, who all conspire with the government to use innocent Black men as test subjects, without their knowledge or consent. 

Join hosts Jason Christian, Anthony Ballas, and Paul T. Klein as we consider:

• The historical legacy of Operation Paperclip, a secret government program in which the US brought some 1,600 scientists, engineers, and technicians from former Nazi Germany to the US for government employment after the end of World War II. 

• The numerous government experiments conducted on minorities without their knowledge or consent, such as the Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee (1932-1972)

• The contradiction, in the film, of critiquing racism in America while using white Russian actors in "black face."

• Comparisons between American and Soviet propanda styles in the 1950s. 

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We love to give book or film recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode: 

Paul recommends the book, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom by Wendy Kline

Tony recommends the book, The Selected Works of Ho Chi Hinh by Ho Chi Minh

Jason recommends the book, Deterring Democracy by Noam Chomsky.

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema. 

"Normal people want the basic human rights that accompany citizenship in any sovereign nation. I don't… I don't live anywhere; I'm not a citizen at all. I don't need my human rights."

The Cold War Cinema team is back with special guest Matthew Ellis, a researcher, artist, and cohost of the Pacific Northwest Insurance Corporation Movie Film Podcast, for a special bonus episode covering Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme. Recently released on home video and streaming, the film follows the cunning, reprobate industrialist Zsa-zsa Korda (Bencio Del Toro) as he swindles his way into a massive infrastructure deal in the country of Upper Independent Phoenicia. 

 Join Matthew Ellis and hosts Jason Christian, Tony Ballas, and Paul T. Klein as they discuss:

• The Phoenician Scheme's connections to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-backed cultural operation from 1950 that weaponized writers, artists, and other thinkers for intelligence operations.

• How Anderson's film reveals the Cold War origins of the contemporary world in its critiques of capitalism and the neoliberal project. 

• The ways that The Phoenician Scheme breaks Anderson's hermetically sealed aesthetics and alludes to its formal limitations.

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Each episode features book and film recommendations for further exploration. On this episode: 

• Matthew recommends Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later.

• Paul recommends Matt Zoller Seitz's The Wes Anderson Collection and Louis Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation."

• Tony recommends Carpenter's Gothic by William Gaddis.

• Jason recommends The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World by Vijay Prashad.

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema. 

For more from your hosts:

• Follow Jason on Bluesky at @JasonChristian.bsky.social, on X at @JasonAChristian, or on Letterboxed at @exilemagic. 

• Follow Anthony on Bluesky at @tonyjballas.bsky.social, on X at @tonyjballas.

• Follow Paul on Bluesky at @ptklein.com, or on Letterboxed at @ptklein. Paul also writes about movies at www.howotreadmovies.com 

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Logo by Jason Christian 

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt). 

Happy listening!

This week on Cold War Cinema, we discuss Robert Stevenson's 1949 drama, I Married a Communist, also known as Woman on Pier 13. This Hollywood production is one of the most storied—and notorious—anti-communist films of the early Cold War era. The movie revolves around a San Francisco shipping executive who worked his way up from the docks, as a stevedore, only to find himself embroiled in a Communist plot to sabotage a labor contract. 

Join hosts Jason Christian, Tony Ballas, and Paul T. Klein as we consider:

• How Hollywood colluded with the government to portray Communists as nihilistic, intellectual, unfeeling and yet effeminate organized criminals. 

• The condescension at the heart of anti-Communist propaganda in the US that implies that ordinary Americans are too "dumb" to recognize when they are being duped. 

• The paradoxical role of unions in New Deal liberal ideology as a potential bulwark against Communists. 

• The perennial recycled anti-Communist tropes in American political rhetoric to this day.

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We love to give book or film recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode: 

Paul recommends Foster Hirsh's 2023 book Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher—Television.

Tony recommends Gerald Horne's 2011 book, Fighting in Paradise: Labor Unions, Racism, and Communists in the Making of Modern Hawai'i.

Jason recommends Rebecca Prime's 2013 book, Hollywood Exiles in Europe: The Blacklist and Cold War Film Culture.

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema. 

"I used to think there was one America, but there are two. There's no place for me in McPherson's and Hearst's America, but there is in Lincoln's and Roosevelts!" 

This week on Cold War Cinema, we discuss Mikhaill Romm's 1948 drama, The Russian Question. In this Soviet production, winner of the 1948 Stalin Prize and based on a play of the same name by Konstantin Siminov, a mendacious newspaper editor sends columnist Harry Smith to the Soviet Union to write a book critical of socialism. But when the principled columnist returns to the United States, he quickly realizes that the American press intends to turn the Russian question—whether the Russians want war—into a statement with dangerous geopolitical ramifications. 

Join hosts Jason Christian, Tony Ballas, and Paul T. Klein as we consider:

• The role of editing or montage in the construction of political critiques in aesthetic form

• Why the President of the Motion Picture Association called this a "sneering, lying attack on the United States" and an "open bid to stir contempt and hatred for America on the part of the Russian audiences," and why he got it all wrong

• How a Soviet film about a sensationalist American news media helps us understand our current political moment

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We love to give book or film recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode: 

Paul recommends Clarence Brown's 1949 drama Intruder in the Dust.

Tony recommends Langston Hughes 1961 collection, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz.

Jason recommends Mikhail Romm's 1961 drama Nine Days in One Year.

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema. 

In this crossover episode with Rakeem Shabazz of Wise the Dome TV, Cold War Cinema co-host Anthony Ballas discusses the recent documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d'État (dir. Johan Grimonprez 2024). The documentary explores the weaponization of jazz music during the Cold War, the contradictions of using Black art to mask American imperialism, and the legacy of artists like Louis Armstrong, Max Roach, and Nina Simone. Ballas breaks down how the film links Cold War coups and cultural propaganda to present-day resource extraction in the Congo, and why the documentary's archival style is itself a radical political act. Ballas also discusses his recent piece on the film (co-authored with Gerald Horne), "Antidote to Soft Power: Johan Grimonprez's Soundtrack to a Coup d'État" for Scalawag Magazine. 

Please subscribe to the podcast, and don't forget to leave a review!

Also, make sure you check out and subscribe to Wise the Dome TV.

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Logo by Jason Christian 

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt). 

Please drop us a line anytime at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

Happy listening!

This is a crossover episode with The Socialist Shelf podcast. Our co-host Jason and his wife, Ankita, were invited on the Socialist Shelf to dicuss a radical cinema educational project they run in Atlanta called Resistance Cinema, as well as the role that radical cinema plays in social movemets. Ankita is a Bollywood expert and the co-host of the The Desi Gaze, a podcast about overlooked Hindi cinema. We hope you enjoy this show! Don't forget to subscribe to The Socialist Shelf and The Desi Gaze, and leave us a review!

Jason's article referenced in the podcast is a review of the book Revolution in 35mm, co-edited by Andrew Nette and Samm Deighan. Jacob, from The Socialist Shelf, has written a novel, and you can pre-order it here. Music for The Socialist Shelf by Solo Monk (@SoloMonk256 on Twitter).

In this bonus episode of Cold War Cinema, Jason Christian is joined by the independent filmmakers Eric Marsh and Christopher Jason Bell, to discuss the films and legacy of the British filmmaker and media theorist Peter Watkins, who died on October 30, 2025, one day after his nintieth birthday. Watkins stands apart in film history for his bold cinematic vision, his innovations of the pseudo-documentary, and for his unflinching cinematic attacks on the mass media and authoritarian states. For these reasons and others, he has never been given his due in the academy or in popular culture. We discuss why this radical filmmaker is so important to us personally, and why his legacy should—and probably will—continue to grow. 

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We love to give book or film recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode: 

Eric recommends the film Bisbee '17 (2018, Robert Greene).

Christopher recommends the film Revolution Selfie (2017, Steven de Castro).

Jason recommends the book Future Revolutions: New Perspectives on Peter Watkins (2018, various authors).

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Find Eric Marsh's films here. 

Find Christopher Jason Bell's work here.

Find our previous interview with Christopher Jason Bell here. 

Jason's essay on Punishment Park (1971) is found here. And his short piece on Privilege (1967) is here. (Scroll down.)

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema. 

And for more from your hosts:

• Follow Jason on Bluesky at @JasonChristian.bsky.social, on X at @JasonAChristian, or on Letterboxed at @exilemagic. 

• Follow Anthony on Bluesky at @tonyjballas.bsky.social, on X at @tonyjballas.

• Follow Paul on Bluesky at @ptklein.com, or on Letterboxed at @ptklein. Paul also writes about movies at www.howotreadmovies.com 

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Logo by Jason Christian 

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt). 

Happy listening!

The Cold War Cinema team returns to discuss Grigory Chukhray's 1959 war drama Ballad of a Soldier. 

Alyhosha is 19-years-old private on the Eastern Front during the Great Patriotic War (A.K.A. World War II). After destroying two German tanks, Alyosha, played by Vladimir Ivashov, is rewarded with a short leave to return home to see his mother and repair her roof. Over the next six days, the young soldier travels home across the countryside, often crossing paths with his countrymen in both mundane and profound ways: A one-legged soldier running from his wife, the wife of another private, found living with another man, and a tender vagabond girl, Shura (Zhanna Prokhorenko), who he meets while hiding out in a rail car. Throughout his quiet picaresque, Alyhosha learns about the sacrifices and tenderness of a nation torn apart by war.

Join hosts Jason Christian, Tony Ballas, and Paul T. Klein as we discuss: 

• The film's treatment of individualism versus collective responsibility. 

• The train as a metaphor in both the Soviet and US contexts. 

• The Soviet romance versus Hollywood romances. 

• The Soviet treatment of nature and rural spaces in this film and others. 

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We love to give book or film recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode: 

Paul recommends the film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William A. Wyler) and the book The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens 1946–1973 by Tony Balio.

Tony recommends the book Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Jason recommends the film The Forty-First (1956, Grigory Chukhray).

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema. 

For more from your hosts:

• Follow Jason on Bluesky at @JasonChristian.bsky.social, on X at @JasonAChristian, or on Letterboxed at @exilemagic. 

• Follow Anthony on Bluesky at @tonyjballas.bsky.social, on X at @tonyjballas.

• Follow Paul on Bluesky at @ptklein.com, or on Letterboxed at @ptklein. Paul also writes about movies at www.howotreadmovies.com 

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Logo by Jason Christian 

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt). 

Happy listening!

The Cold War Cinema team returns with special guest Aspen Ballas to discuss John Ford's 1956 western The Searchers. Aspen is a PhD student of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research primarily focuses on aesthetics of race and class, and the relation between genre, medium, and politics.

Synopsis of the film: Texas, 1868. A lone figure approaches a windswept homestead, against a dusty blue sky and flaming red buttes and cathedral-like mesas. Returning from the fight for the Confederacy, Ethan Edwards arrives home to his brother Aaron, Aaron's wife Martha, and to their children Ben, Lucy, little Debbie, and their adopted son Martin Pawley. But this is rough country, and a Comanche raid leaves the Edwards family torn asunder–Aaron, Martha, and Ben dead, and Lucy and Debbie taken captive. For seven years, Ethan and Martin search the vast wilderness, motivated not only by family bonds, but in Ethan's case, bloodlust and wild, racist hatred–a search not only to find Lucy and Debbie, but to enforce racial and sexual purity and to define Americanness itself…

On this episode we discuss:

• The American mythmaking in The Searchers and in westerns generally. 
• John Ford's attempt to critique anti-Indigenous racism, and the limitations of such a critique in the context of Hollywood filmmaking of this era. 
• Militant Liberty, a top-secret psychological warfare program created by the Pentagon to promote anti-communist themes in Hollywood movies during the Cold War. John Ford was an eager participant in the program.
• The broader US imperialist context of the film's release and the historical background of the setting. 

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We love to give book or film recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode: 

Aspen: The Face on Film by Noa Steimatsky; Raoul Peck's docuseries Exterminate all the Brutes (2021)

Paul: The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel 

Tony: Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land by Felicity Amaya Schaeffer

Jason: Versions of  Hollywood Crime Cinema: Studies in Ford, Wilder, Coppola, Scorsese, and Others by Carl Freedman

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema. 

 For more from your hosts and guest:

• Follow Aspen on Letterboxed at @aspenballas.
• Follow Jason on Bluesky at @JasonAChristian.bsky.social, on X at @JasonAChristian, or on Letterboxed at @exilemagic.
• Follow Anthony on Bluesky at @tonyjballas.bsky.social, on X at @tonyjballas, or on Letterboxed at @tonyjballas.
• Follow Paul on Bluesky at @ptklein.com, or on Letterboxed at @ptklein. Paul also writes about movies at www.howotreadmovies.com 

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Logo by Jason Christian 

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt). 

Happy listening!

The Cold War Cinema team, Jason Christian, Anthony Ballas, and Paul T. Klein, return to discuss Mikhail Kalatozov's 1959 drama Letter Never Sent. 

Synopsis of the film: Four geologists descend on the Siberian Taiga. Over the course of a backbreaking summer sifting minerals in the icy, rushing waters of boreal rivers, the group–the experienced guide, Konstantin, a young couple, Andrei and Tanya, and the brooding Sergei–search for diamond deposits to enrich themselves and their country. Throughout, Konstanin writes an extended letter home to his wife Vera. Sergei, too, writes a letter, though never meant to be read, expressing his jealousy and Andrei and love for Tanya. When a massive forest fire breaks out, however, the group must work together to survive, not only the blaze, but the ravages of the elements and the fast-approaching and deadly Siberian winter…

On this episode we discuss:

• The unbelievable production of a film shot on location in the USSR taiga. 
• How the film reflects the tenents of socialist realism in complex and creative ways. 
• How the film shares many of the sensibilites of the western genre and pairs nicely with John Ford's The Searchers in this regard. 
• The basic theoretical aspects of scientific socialism and how the filmmaker uses them to shape the film's narrative and themes. 
• The allegorical use of a diamond in the Soviet context versus the same in the capitalist West. 

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We love to give book or film recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode: 

Paul: Two "Northwesterns": Bend of the River (Anthony Mann, 1952) and River of No Return (Otto Preminger, 1954)

Tony: Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War by Vincent Brown

Jason: Nail in the Boot (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1931) and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels

Also, check out this fascinating interview on the Actually Existing Socialism podcast with the scholar Sardana Nikolaeva, who studies the Indigenous peoples of the northern regions of the Soviet Union (and present-day Russia) and their connection to the diamond mines that are imagined in the film. 

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema. 

 For more from your hosts and guest:

• Follow Aspen on Letterboxed at @aspenballas.
• Follow Jason on Bluesky at @JasonAChristian.bsky.social, on X at @JasonAChristian, or on Letterboxed at @exilemagic.
• Follow Anthony on Bluesky at @tonyjballas.bsky.social, on X at @tonyjballas, or on Letterboxed at @tonyjballas.
• Follow Paul on Bluesky at @ptklein.com, or on Letterboxed at @ptklein. Paul also writes about movies at www.howotreadmovies.com 

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Logo by Jason Christian 

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt). 

Happy listening!

On this episode, the Cold War Cinema crew is joined by director, writer, and producer Adam McKay to discuss John Frankenheimer's paranoid, psychological thriller Seconds (1966). McKay has written and directed many celebrated feature films such as Anchorman (2004), Talladega Nights (2006), Step Brothers (2008), The Big Short (2015), Vice (2018), Don't Look Up (2021), and numerous others. Prior to this, McKay was a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade in the early 1990s, and head writer for Saturday Night Live from 1995 to 2001. In 2019, McKay founded Hyperobject Industries, and has served as the executive producer of HBO's Succession (2019–2023), Game Theory with Bomani Jones (2022–2023), and, most recently, The Chair Company (2025) starring Tim Robinson. 

Synopsis of the film: Middle-aged banker Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) feels trapped in a life that has calcified into routine and regret. When he receives a phone call from an old friend who he thought was long dead, and a shadowy organization known simply as "the Company" offers him the ultimate second chance, he fakes his death, and undergoes radical surgery to assume a new identity. Reborn as artist Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson), he's given youth, wealth, and access to a new bohemian lifestyle on a seaside in Malibu. While his transformation at first feels intoxicating, the promise of freedom begins to fray and ultimately fracture. As Tony struggles to inhabit his new self, paranoia creeps in and the illusion of choice gives way to something far more unsettling.

Shot in stark black-and-white with disorienting lenses and claustrophobic compositions, Seconds is less a sci-fi fantasy than an existential nightmare—an unsettling meditation on identity, conformity, and the seductive lie that starting over can save us from who we are.

On this episode we discuss: McKay's work as a comedian, comedy writer, and filmmaker, his political and cinematic influences, the paranoid style of filmmaking in the 1960s, satire, the looming specter of climate apocalypse, why the world needs a Ho Chi Minh biopic, and much more.

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We love to give book or film recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode: 

Adam: Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident (2025) and Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan (2014) 

Paul: A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer

Anthony Ballas: The Black Race by Ho Chi Minh by Dai Trang Nguyen and "Ho Chi Minh and Black Liberation" by Gerald Horne and Anthony Ballas.

Jason: John Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May (1964). 

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema. 

For more from your hosts and guest:

Follow Adam on Instagram @mr.ghostpanther, or on Bluesky @ghostpanther.bsky.social,

Follow Jason on Bluesky @JasonAChristian.bsky.social, or on Letterboxed at @exilemagic.

Follow Anthony on Bluesky @tonyjballas.bsky.social, on X @tonyjballas, or on Letterboxed @tonyjballas.

Follow Paul on Bluesky @ptklein.com, or on Letterboxed @ptklein. Paul also writes about movies at www.howotreadmovies.com 

Logo by Jason Christian 

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt). 

Happy listening!

In this bonus episode, cohosts Jason Christian and Paul T. Klein interview the film historian Dr. Alice Lovejoy about her scholarship and her new book,  Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War. The book examines the long and storied histories of the film manufacturing giants Kodak and Agfa and provides a materailst analysis of their involved in US and Germany imperialism around the world. 

Alice Lovejoy is a media and cultural historian and comparatist whose research examines governmental and institutional media, and media technologies, in transnational perspective. Her book Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War (University of California Press, August 2025) is a history of film and the factories where it was made. Shifting focus between the United States, Germany, the Belgian Congo, and the Soviet Union, the book considers the military, colonial, and environmental implications of film's entanglement with the chemical industry.

Lovejoy's first book, Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military (Indiana University Press, 2015), was named co-winner of the Modern Language Association's 2018 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures. It was also awarded Honorable Mention for the 2016 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies (ASEEES) and the 2017 Czechoslovak Studies Association Book Prize, and longlisted for the 2016 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. This book traces the emergence of an experimental film culture in the Czechoslovak Army's film studio (1929-1969), and includes a DVD of thirteen short films produced by the Czechoslovak Ministry of Defense. Lovejoy is also at work on a project studying the intertwined histories of postwar children's television and film institutions—among them, Yugoslavia's "Film and Child" Commission, Iran's Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon), East Germany's National Center for Children's Film and Television, Czechoslovakia's Center for Films for Children and Youth, and UNESCO's International Centre for Films for Children and Young People. With Mari Pajala, she co-edited Remapping Cold War Media: Institutions, Infrastructures, Translations (Indiana University Press, 2022), and she has published widely on East European, particularly Czech and Slovak, film and literature.

Lovejoy has worked as a film critic, curator, and filmmaker, including as an editor at Film Comment magazine. 
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We love to give recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode: 

• Alice recommends the Norwegian television series Occupied (2015–2020), created by Jo Nesbø
• Paul recommends the 2016 documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time, directed by Bill Morrison
• Jason recommends Walter Rodney's 1972 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema. 

For more from your hosts and guest:

Follow Alice on Instagram @alice__lovejoy, or on Bluesky @alicelovejoy.bsky.social,

Follow Jason on Bluesky @JasonAChristian.bsky.social, or on Letterboxed at @exilemagic.

Follow Anthony on Bluesky @tonyjballas.bsky.social, on X @tonyjballas, or on Letterboxed @tonyjballas.

Follow Paul on Bluesky @ptklein.com, or on Letterboxed @ptklein. Paul also writes about movies at www.howotreadmovies.com 

Logo by Jason Christian 

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt). 

Happy listening!

In this bonus episode, cohosts Jason Christian and Anthony Ballas speak with the literary critic Ryan Ruby about New German Cinema, particularly the directors Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Alexander Kluge, and the film movement's fascination with the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion) A.K.A. the Baader–Meinhof Gang, an ultra-left militant group in West Germany that existed in various forms from 1970 to 1998. 

Ryan Ruby is the author of Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry (Seven Stories Press, 2024) and The Zero and the One: A Novel (Twelve Books, 2017). For his essays and reviews, which have recently appeared in such venues as Harper's, Bookforum, and the New Left Review, he has received the Silvers Prize in Literary Criticism. He lives in Berlin, where he is working on a book of creative nonfiction about the city's mass transit system, tentatively titled Ringbahn: On Berlin Time, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in late 2027.

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• Ryan Ruby's forthcoming book on the cultural history of Berlin, with particular interest in the music scene and cinema of the 1970s
• The films Germany in Autumn (1978) and The Third Generation (1979) 
• The Red Army Faction and 1960s/'70s militancy
• The political climate in Berlin today
• V.I. Lenin's critique of "adventurism"  

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We love to give recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode: 

1.       Tony recommends the two-volume book The Magic of Robert-Houdin An Artist's Life The Watchmaker, Mechanician and Conjurer by Christian Fechner
2.       Ryan recommends the books Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. by Stefan Aust and Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman
3.       Jason recommends Bruce LaBruce's 2004 satirical RAF film The Raspberry Reich. [Warning: the film contains explicit sex scenes]

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Find past guest Andrew Nette's Letterboxd list of films inspired by or about the Red Army Faction here. Check out our interview with Nette here.

Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema. 

For more from your hosts and guest:

Find Ryan Ruby's work at www.ryanruby.info

Follow Jason on Bluesky @JasonAChristian.bsky.social, on X @jasonachristian, or on Letterboxed at @exilemagic. Jason also writes an occasional newsletter called Notes on Radical Cinema. 

Follow Anthony on Bluesky @tonyjballas.bsky.social, on X @tonyjballas, or on Letterboxed @tonyjballas.

Follow Paul on Bluesky @ptklein.com, or on Letterboxed @ptklein. Paul also writes about movies at www.howotreadmovies.com 

Logo by Jason Christian 

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt). 

Happy listening!

"I want to underline my own belief that art must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition to it—otherwise life would become impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence."

― Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (1986)

The Cold War Cinema team is joined by guest Taylor R. Genovese to discuss Andrei Tarkovsky's debut feature film, Ivan's Childhood (1962), a Soviet masterpiece about the Great Patriotic War and prime example of Thaw–era cinema.

Taylor R. Genovese is an assistant professor of philosophy at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, New York. He has also been a filmmaker and photographer for over a decade. His multimodal and transdisciplinary research focuses on Marxism, historical memory, and borderlands. He is also an editor and board member at Iskra Books, a nonprofit scholarly publisher that releases original works of revolutionary theory, history, ecology, and art. 

In this episode we discuss: 

• Andrei Tarkovsky's life and career
• The historical and political context of Ivan's Childhood
• Tarkovsky's aesthetic vision and theological concerns
• How the concept of "toska" shapes the sensibilities of the literary and cinematic arts in the Slavic world, including in Tarkovsky's films.
• The moving image representation of trauma and transcendence in Ivan's Childhood.
• The poetry of Andrei's father, Arseny Tarkovsky, and its influence on the filmmaker.
• The Soviet astethetics of Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928), as articulated in his book Art and the Working Class, which Genovese translated from the Russian in 2022. To purchase the book (or download a free PDF), click this link.  

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We love to give book or film recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode: 

Taylor recommends the films Come and See (1985, dir. Elem Klimov) and Dead Man's Letters (1986, dir. Konstantin Lopushanskiy).

Paul recommends a film and a record: Sergei Eisenstein's Strike (1925) and U2's War (1983).

Tony recommends the book Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, by Valentin Voloshinov, and the new essay "The Enchanted Biopolitics of Dark Cosmism" by our guest Taylor R. Genovese.

Jason recommends the film Kes (1969, dir. Ken Loach)

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema. 

For more from your hosts:

• Follow Taylor uses the handle @trgenovese on X, Instagram, and Letterboxd. Information on his scholarship and visual art can be found on his website at taylorgenovese.com.
• Follow Jason on Bluesky at @JasonChristian.bsky.social, on X at @JasonAChristian, or on Letterboxed at @exilemagic. 
• Follow Anthony on Bluesky at @tonyjballas.bsky.social, on X at @tonyjballas.
• Follow Paul on Bluesky at @ptklein.com, or on Letterboxed at @ptklein. Paul also writes about movies at www.howotreadmovies.com 

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Logo by Jason Christian 

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt). 

Happy listening!