<p>This dissertation examines the visual production of capital in socialist realist images during the Maoist era (1949-1976). By deconstructing the pseudo-opposition between capitalism and socialism, my research demonstrates that, although the country was subject to the unchallenged rules of capital and its accumulation in both domestic and international spheres, Maoist visual culture was intended to veil China's state capitalism and construct its socialist persona. This historical analysis illustrates the ways in which the Maoist regime recoded and resolved the versatile contradictions of capital in an imaginary socialist utopia. Under these conditions, a wide spectrum of Maoist images played a key role in shaping the public perception of socialism as a reality in everyday lives. Here the aesthetic protocols of socialist realism functioned to create for the imagined socialist world a new currency that converted economic values, which followed the universal laws of capital, into the fetish of socialism. Such a collective "cognitive mapping" in Fredric Jameson's words - which situated people in the non-capitalist, socialist world and inserted them into the flow of socialist time - rendered imperceptible a mutated capitalism on the terrain of the People's Republic of China under Mao. This research aims to build a conversation between the real, material space subordinated to the laws of capital and the visual production of imaginary capital in the landscapes of socialist realism, for the purpose of mapping out how uneven geographical development contributed to activating, dispersing, and intensifying the global movement of Soviet and Chinese capital in the cultural form of socialist realism. This study also illustrates how, via the image-making process, socialist realist and Maoist images influenced by Mao's romantic vision of the countryside were meant to neutralize this uneven development in China and mask its on-going internal colonialism. Through this analysis, I argue that, in the interesting juncture where art for art's sake and art for politics intersected, Maoist visual culture ended up reproducing the hegemony of capital as a means of creating national wealth.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation examines the development of Chinese art film in the 1990s. It explores the mechanisms that were conducive to the emergence of this art wave and its representative cinematic styles. Art film was a historically underdeveloped film practice in China, especially under the mass line-dominated Socialist film system. I argue that Chinese art cinema was fundamentally defined by the second art wave, which was flanked by the first art wave (the Fifth Generation Cinema) of the 1980s, and the full capitalization of the film industry in the new millennium. The key to understanding the second art wave was the paradoxical industrial process of the Socialist film system reform of the 1990s. The controlled top-down reform made the emergence of independent production possible while at the same time denying its legitimacy. As the result, the Chinese art film production breathed new life but was pushed from the mainstream to the realm of the alternative. In alliance with other youth subculture phenomena of the time, such as rock music and avant-garde art, art film came to be defined as a distinctive position in the field of Chinese film production in terms of the mode of production (mostly independent), distribution (international film festivals), and film style. Three styles are examined in detail in this dissertation: the documentary-inspired new realist style represented by films of Jia Zhangke, the modernistic expressionist style represented by films of He Jianjun, Zhang Ming, and others, and the style that falls in-between the new realist and expressionist style represented by early films of Zhang Yuan, Lou Ye, and Wang Xiaoshuai. / text

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This thesis constitutes the first comparative study of the phenomenon of alternative art galleries functioning during the 1970s in two neighbouring state socialist regimes, namely, the German Democratic Republic and the People's Republic of Poland. Firmly contextualised in the cultural-political climate of Honecker's and Gierek's quasi-liberalisation, it examines the socio-cultural function of non-conformist exhibition spaces and focuses, specifically, on two case studies: Galerie Arkade in East Berlin and Galeria/Repassage in Warsaw. By looking at a wide variety of practices produced in those spaces, this thesis investigates the commonalities and differences in how the galleries operated and how they related to the divergent post-Stalinist conditions. For instance, due to more repressive cultural-politics in the GDR, it proved more difficult to accommodate experimental practices in Arkade, since even exhibiting abstract art was problematic for the East German officials. Conversely, in Poland Gierek's liberalisation resulted in the state's limited acceptance of radical artistic practices such as performance and conceptual art but only in the marginal spaces of artist-run galleries. Despite their alternative status, the galleries were, to a certain degree, dependent administratively and financially on these socialist institutions and were at the same time exposed to surveillance by the state security services. These aspects of galleries' activities are often neglected and so to remedy this lack this thesis offers new perspectives on and insights into various aspects of the functioning of alternative culture in this region. The originality of this research lies also in its references to new archival material which has not been published, nor interpreted before. The interpretation of these rich primary sources makes use of a new theoretical framework that combines Michel Foucault's theory of heterotopia in a macro-level analysis and Henri Lefebvre's ideas on the social production of space in a micro-level analysis. In particular, the galleries' histories are seen in this thesis as intertwined with the advancing process of disintegration of state socialism in the Eastern Bloc as this was perceptible to varying degree in different socialist states. Accordingly, it argues that the galleries were symptomatic of and, simultaneously, contributed through various practices to the 'post-socialist condition'.

The thesis focuses on the staging of Soviet operettas in Czechoslovakia between 1946 and 1987. The import of the Soviet repertoire to Czechoslovak operetta theaters was linked to the cultural and political transformations at the outset of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. The so-called Soviet socialist operetta would soon have been established as a model for new Czechoslovak operettas. As such, it became an important part of the repertoire which was influenced by the official polical system. The thesis surveys the progressing intensity of the import and the developing operetta genre in the Soviet Union. On the examples of Isaac Dunayevsky's operettas Free Wind and, more intensively, White Acacia, in comparison with the original versions of these operettas, it shows the tendencies of interpretation of Soviet operettas in Czechoslovakia, in the changing cultural and political context. The thesis also concerns the topic of critical perception in both cultural environments and, overall, it aspires to capture the examined topics in the widest possible contextual horizon.

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