In 1947, the Cold War came to Hollywood. Over nine tumultuous days in October, the House Un-American Activities Committee held a notorious round of hearings into alleged Communist subversion in the movie industry. The blowback was profound: the major studios pledged to never again employ a known Communist or unrepentant fellow traveler. The declaration marked the onset of the blacklist era, a time when political allegiances, real or suspected, determined employment opportunities in the entertainment industry. Hundreds of artists were shown the door—or had it shut in their faces. In Show Trial, Thomas Doherty takes us behind the scenes at the first full-on media-political spectacle of the postwar era. He details the theatrical elements of a proceeding that bridged the realms of entertainment and politics, a courtroom drama starring glamorous actors, colorful moguls, on-the-make congressmen, high-priced lawyers, single-minded investigators, and recalcitrant screenwriters, all recorded by newsreel cameras and broadcast over radio. Doherty tells the story of the Hollywood Ten and the other witnesses, friendly and unfriendly, who testified, and chronicles the implementation of the postwar blacklist. Show Trial is a rich, character-driven inquiry into how the HUAC hearings ignited the anti-Communist crackdown in Hollywood, providing a gripping cultural history of one of the most transformative events of the postwar era.

Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. Are these demands as irreconcilable as the pejorative term “show trials” suggests? After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging the era’s great trials as shows. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the Auschwitz trials were all performed multiple times, first in courts and then in theaters. Does justice require both courtrooms and stages? In Staged, Minou Arjomand draws on a rich archive of postwar German and American rehearsals and performances to reveal how theater can become a place for forms of storytelling and judgment that are inadmissible in a court of law but indispensable for public life. She unveils the affinities between dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Weiss and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, showing how they responded to the rise of fascism with a new politics of performance. Linking performance with theories of aesthetics, history, and politics, Arjomand argues that it is not subject matter that makes theater political but rather the act of judging a performance in the company of others. Staged weaves together theater history and political philosophy into a powerful and timely case for the importance of theaters as public institutions.

A Life at Stake is the first serious biography of the legendary Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Physically imposing, crude, a sexual adventurer and ex-convict, Mayakovsky rose to fame between 1912 and 1917 as a Futurist agitator and the author of radical poems and plays. He embraced the Russian Revolution and became one of its most passionate propagandists, then at the age of thirty-six took his own life, disappointed in the course of Soviet society and ravaged by private conflicts. Mayakovsky s poems are as exhilarating today as when he declaimed them for friends in smoky flats in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, and New York. In Bengt Jangfeldt s propulsive biography, Mayakovsky s life, too, is compelling: a story of constant, passionate upheaval against the background of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, Stalin s terror, and cycles of anti-Semitism. Mayakovsky emerges from this biography a highly vulnerable figure, more a dreamer than a revolutionary, more a political romantic than a hardened Communist."

There is something terribly wrong with CCTV, China

Addressing the relationship between law and the visual, this book examines the importance of photography in Central, East, and Southeast European show trials. The dispensation of justice during communist rule in Albania, East Germany, and Poland was reliant on legal propaganda, making the visual a fundamental part of the legitimacy of the law. Analysing photographs of trials, this book examines how this message was conveyed to audiences watching and participating in the spectacle of show trials. The book traces how this use of the visual was exported from the Soviet Union and imposed upon its satellite states in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It shows how the legal actors and political authorities embraced new photographic technologies to advance their legal propaganda and legal photography. Drawing on contemporary theoretical work in the area, the book then challenges straightforward accounts of the relationship between law and the visual, critically engaging entrenched legal historical narratives, in relation to three different protagonists, to offer the possibility of reclaiming and rewriting past accounts. As its analysis demonstrates, the power of images can also be subversive; and, as such, the cases it addresses contribute to the discourse on visual epistemology and open onto contemporary questions about law and its inherent performativity. This original and insightful engagement with the relationship between law and the visual will appeal to legal and cultural theorists, as well as those with more specific interests in Stalinism, and in Central, East, and Southeast European history.

Show Trials combines first-hand knowledge with hitherto unpublished, confidential material, to offer a penetrating and candid account of the Stalinist purges that occurred in Albanian, East German, Bulgarian, and Rumanian purges, as well as in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. George Hodos shows how these trials played a pivotal role in consolidating Soviet domination over the satellite countries during Stalin's lifetime. As an important addition to our understanding of these events and times, Show Trials is essential for historians of Eastern Europe and absorbing reading for anyone interested in world affairs.

Test films, pilots, trial series, limited runs, summer tryouts--by whatever name, televison networks have produced thousands of experimental shows that never made it into the regular line-up. Some were actually shown, but failed to gain an audience; many others never even made it on the air. This work includes more than 3,000 experimental television programs, both aired and unaired, that almost became a series. Entries include length, network, air date (if appropriate), a fact-filled plot synopsis, cast, guest stars, producer, director, writer, and music coordinator. Fully indexed.

Soviet Russia will conquer all the millions of problems that stand in its way, on one condition: as long as the cause of the political education of the broad masses of the people continually advances. We have nothing to be afraid of, if our people fully learns to distinguish who are its friends and who are its enemies. The trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries must and shall be a great step forward in the cause of the political instruction of the very broadest masses in town and country. (Grigorii Zinov'ev, Pravda and Krasnaia gazeta, 20 June 1922) For my part, I considered this trial to be unnecessary: the Socialist Revolu tionaries had been beaten and represented no visible danger at all. (Charles Rappoport, Ma vie, Paris 1926-1927, Vol. 2, p. 80) The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in October 1917 by staging a coup d'etat, and then established a dictatorship. The new rulers sup pressed all armed resistance in a bloody civil war, after which they made every effort to uproot and exterminate even peaceful political opposition of all kinds. Even now it is impossible in the Soviet Union to subject these developments to critical historical study. The political opponents of the Soviet regime of the time are still regarded by official Soviet his toriography as counter-revolutionaries and the measures taken against them are seen as completely justified.