2024-2025
Agora project: From ‘Crypto-Communism’ to ‘Pornography’ : Challenging the Narratives about the Locarno Film Festival
Swiss National Science Foundation
2020-2022
Postdoctoral project: For a Political History of the Locarno Film Festival (1946-1981): emergence and development of a transnational cinematographic hub
Early Postdoc Mobility (Swiss National Science Foundation)
Research institutions: Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut (Freie Universität, Berlin)
Centre des sciences historiques de la culture (Université Versailles Saint-Quentin)
Summary:
Today, the Locarno International Film Festival, founded in 1946, is part of Switzerland’s cultural heritage. However, to truly become an international platform for cinematographical exchanges, it had to fight for a place during the Cold War.
The history of the Locarno Film Festival has been marked by numerous political polemics, which this research project aims to analyze by asking the following question: why has it had so much difficulty in establishing itself as the major film event in Switzerland, even though it has rapidly become recognized internationally as one of the most important film events in the world?
Keywords: Films; Diplomacy; Cinephilia; Propaganda; Tourism; Politics; Networks; Surveillance; Festival; Cinema; Transnational
2015-2019
Research project: Sino-Swiss relations during the Cold War: an unbreakable link (1949-1989) – Prof. Dr. Claude Hauser
Research institutions: University of Fribourg (Switzerland)
Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po (Paris)
Summary: My PhD dissertation, which focused on cultural and political relations between Switzerland and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) during the Cold War, offers an in-depth examination of a central notion of Chinese propaganda: ‘friendship between the people’. Assuming that this rhetorical formula disguises a clientelistic system of international scope, it deconstructs the concept of “friendship” in three stages, emphasizing its alternative dimension, its political nature, and its canonical character.
Through these three axes of reflection, this research demonstrates how Beijing developed its influence and prestige abroad thanks to political organisations created on the fringe of official institutions, and from which it demanded absolute loyalty. Through the Swiss case, it proposes a new look at the strategies of Chinese soft power during the Cold War.
Keywords: International relations; Chinese and Asian studies; Global Cold War; Comparative history; Swiss foreign policy; Cultural networks
Cyril Cordoba 