Useful Cinema in State Socialist Europe

Useful Cinema in State Socialist Europe offers a ground-breaking exploration of “useful” film production across Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the wider socialist world from the postwar period to the late Cold War. Moving beyond economically driven models of commissioned filmmaking dominant in the West, it shows how socialist cinema was shaped instead by the ideological power of representation and self-representation, positioning film at the heart of political and cultural governance.

Rejecting any notion of a unified socialist cinema, the chapters reveal a diverse field of practices - educational, instructional, research, safety, promotional, and amateur films - produced within complex institutional and party frameworks. Drawing on internationally significant and topical case studies from both well-known and underexplored national contexts, the book demonstrates how these films simultaneously served centralized political agendas and developed distinct regional and national dynamics. With its interdisciplinary approach and extensive engagement with archival and audiovisual sources, this book makes a major intervention in Film and Media Studies it brings marginal, functional, and non-fiction film forms into the centre of scholarly debate.

A major intervention in Film and Media Studies, this book will appeal to researchers in the field as well as and Communication, Archival and Audiovisual Heritage Studies, International and Political Studies, Slavic and East European Studies.

Lucie Česálková is Associate Professor at the Department of Film Studies, Charles University, Czech Republic. In her research, she focuses on the history of nonfiction cinema and the history of non-commercial film exhibition and moviegoing. She co-edited, with Johannes Praetorius-Rhein, Perrine Val and Paolo Villa, a volume Non-Fiction Cinema in Postwar Europe. Visual Culture and the Reconstruction of Public Space (2024).

Christian Ferencz-Flatz is a philosopher and media scholar, working as lecturer at the National University of Theatre and Film, Romania. His research concerns phenomenology, critical theory, state socialist history of ideas, film and media philosophy. He published the monograph Critical Theory and Phenomenology. Polemics, Appropriations, Perspectives (2023).

Ana Szel is an archivist, curator, and PhD candidate at the National University of Theatre and Film, Romania. Her research focuses on useful cinema and marginal film practices, with a particular interest in early cinema and film as an
interdisciplinary field. She published Atheist Education and Popular Science Film in Socialist Romania (2025).