Abstract

The dissertation "Cinematic Solidarities: Cinema Amidst Global Vistas of Struggle" investigates how has cinema contributed to establishing transnational solidarities in the wake of the uprisings that traversed the globe throughout the 2010s. From the Arab World, across the Balkans, to Latin America, numerous participants in these struggles signaled the necessity of establishing alliances across national borders in order to confront formidable enemies—state oppression and racialized operations of capital. I trace how filmmakers, film festival organizers, programmers, and archival film researchers aligned their work and shaped their practice in response to the urgency of this political call. Three projects are at the center of this dissertation: the Subversive Film Festival, initiated in 2008 in Zagreb, Croatia, which through distinct programming strategy, focused on diverse traditions of political cinema, generated a meeting platform for regional and global leftists; "Luta ca caba inda," the project shaped around efforts to re-animate audio-visual materials from the Guinea-Bissau's Liberation War (1963-1974); and Subversive Film's still ongoing investigation and exhibition of the global reach of Palestinian Militant Cinema (1968-1982). By paying attention to the geography and movement of films and people in these projects, I explore how people behind them mobilized film cultural infrastructures at their hand toward creating new and reviving old solidarities. The transformative capacities of film cultural and filmmaking projects in these instances manifest themselves in two important ways. First, the projects established connections bringing together distant sites and various actors coming from different political and cultural backgrounds. Second, these projects not only changed the participant's perspectives and conceptions about the world. They were instrumental in the creation of new geopolitical imaginaries. In tracing and conceptualizing this transformative dimension of cinematic solidarities, the dissertation demonstrates cinema's potentiality to operate as a repository of tactics and strategies for myriad struggles to come.