Comrade Consumer: Shopping, Style, and Desire on Socialist Screens

To many casual viewers, socialist cinema from Central Europe and the Soviet Union rarely evokes images of beauty parlors, leisurely shopping, or browsing exotic groceries—let alone consumer abundance and hired domestic help. Yet throughout the relatively “liberal” 1960s, the murky 1970s, and the tentative promise of the 1980s, nationalized film and television studios in the Polish People’s Republic, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR frequently returned to shopping as pastime, leisure, and aspiration, constructing surprisingly layered images of consumption under socialism.

Programme Comrade Consumer

Online and offline (CEFRES, Prague)

Roundtable: Consumer Cultures and Screen Imaginaries under State Socialism in Polish, Czechoslovak, and Soviet Cinema of the “long seventies” 

In English. Offline at CEFRES (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1) with online participation:

us02web.zoom.us/j/81812702079?pwd=OciToC0613RPdYya5zuGbyCALSZfXP.1

Speakers and topics:

• Lucie Česálková (PhD, Department of Film Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University; Editor-in-Chief, Iluminace): Fragmenting the Female Body in Czechoslovak Socialist Advertising
• Justyna Jaworska (PhD, Associate Professor, Section of Film and Visual Culture, Faculty of Polish Studies, University of Warsaw): How to eat spaghetti? Consumerism in Polish cinema of early 1970s
• Jonathan Owen (PhD, author: Avant-Garde to New Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties): Ecce Homo Consumens: from New Wave to Normalisation with Jaroslav Papoušek’s Homolka Trilogy
• Dimitri Filimonov (PhD, Associate Researcher, UMR CIRICE): Between Ideology and Desire: Consumer Imaginaries in Soviet Cinema of the Long 1970s
• Anastasia Mamaeva (Associate Researcher, UMIFRE CEFRES; PhD candidate, Sorbonne University): The Mirage of Developed Socialism: Architecture and Urban Luxury in Late-1970s Onscreen Prague