Fighting Transworld: The 1980s Martial Arts Video Screens and Soviet Boevik Cultures

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics III: Fight Club of the Forgotten Future: Second and Third World Solidarity and Struggle on Screen

Abstract

In his travelogue Video Night in Kathmandu (1989), Pico Iyer traces the 1980s rise of home video as a vehicle for the unprecedented global projection of Hollywood action films and, particularly, the transformation of their muscular stars into new ‘deities’ to cherish and imitate across South and East Asia. Revealing the video-mediated similarities in viewing experiences among the audiences from the Second and Third Worlds, popular narratives equally place the US action spectacle at the center of the story of videocassettes in the Eastern bloc. A closer look at the 1980s video screens remixing the Cold War cultural divides, however, exposes another powerful site of emerging world action cultures: martial arts cinema. A privileged object of cult film fandom in the First World, martial arts movies formed the core of mundane video consumption in the Third World and, moreover, a popular horizon for social liberation and Third World alliances, as discussed by Vijay Prashad, Bhaskar Sarkar, Sylvia Shin Chong, among many others. Paradoxically, as this paper stresses, the importance of martial arts cinema for the Second World video-boom era remains obscured. It is especially true for the scarce and US-centric debates on Soviet video and action media increasingly known since the 1980s under the umbrella term boevik (from the Slavic ‘fight’). Revisiting the 1980s Soviet boevik cultures, this paper foregrounds the particular patterns of video distribution and reception of, as well as attributing cultural worth to, martial arts dramas starring such key global action heroes as Bruce Lee and Mithun Chakraborty. The paper simultaneously demonstrates how martial arts aesthetics with ‘Asia’ as a geocultural orienteer at the heart was widely incorporated into local big- and small-screen boevik production, including the USSR-North Korean The Shore of Salvation (1990), a film that, according to Soviet Buryat filmmaker Aria Dashiev, was supposed to offer the Soviets an alternative to “American supermen” on the territory of video. In doing so, the paper addresses two principal questions: What do the Soviet video histories, particularly those associated with martial arts films, tell us about the shifts in screen economies and pleasures under late socialism? And what do these histories help us understand about the fading and continuities of the once dynamic Second—Third World cultural exchanges, attachments, and emancipatory struggles?

Author

• Iuliia Glushneva, McGill U (Canada)