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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 January 2021
This article focusses on the American reception of a British–Romanian documentary about the black market for VHS Hollywood films in 1980s Romania. The film uses two different registers of nostalgia. On the one hand, it functions as an ostalgic media product that engages Eastern European viewers by building upon a sense of continuity with the socialist past. On the other hand, its surprising success in the American conservative blogosphere reveals the endurance of Cold War exceptionalist tropes. My analysis expands current discussions of post-socialist nostalgia, arguing for the relevance of the concept of ostalgia for the field of American studies.
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31 Jackson Diehl, “VCRs on Fast Forward in Eastern Europe,” Washington Post, 17 April 1988, at www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/04/17/vcrs-on-fast-forward-in-eastern-europe/001ecc3b-8645-4472-a86d-1a3b02904072/?tid=ss_mail.
32 Bayles, Through a Screen Darkly, 63. For more on the relationship between the military and film production also see Suid, Lawrence H., Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Alford, Reel Power, 9–15.
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