UC Press Blog

Masha Salazkina is Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of two recent UC Press books, including Romancing Yesenia: How a Mexican Melodrama Shaped Global Popular Culture and World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War. She is also coeditor of Teaching Migration in Literature, Film and Media, Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures and Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema, and the author of In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein's Mexico.

Romancing Yesenia follows the production, transnational circulation, and reception of the highest grossing film in the history of Soviet exhibition, the 1971 Mexican romance Yesenia. The film adaptation of a telenovela based on a wildly popular graphic novel set during the Second Franco-Mexican War became a surprise hit in the USSR, selling more than ninety million tickets in the first year of its Soviet release alone. Drawing on years of archival research, renowned film scholar Masha Salazkina takes Yesenia’s unprecedented popularity as an entry point into a wide-ranging exploration of the cultures of Mexico and the Soviet Union in the 1970s and of the ways in which popular culture circulated globally. Paying particular attention to the shifting landscape of sexual politics, Romancing "Yesenia" argues for the enduring importance and ideological ambiguities of melodramatic forms in global popular media.

What motivated you to write a book on Yesenia? Why is it an important film for us to study?

Over the years, I came across many books on the history of Soviet cinema that mentioned a curious fact—that the highest grossing movie in the history of Soviet film exhibition was a 70s Mexican melodrama. And because I have always worked on both Mexico and the Soviet Union, I have been asked about it over the years. It seems like such a strange thing that a socialist country—one that produced so many famous films—would be crazy about a Mexican melodrama that most people had never heard of.  

Then a few years ago, the film website MUBI contacted me about a podcast on movies with weird international exhibition histories, including ones that were inexplicably more popular abroad than in their home countries. I decided that this was my chance to get to the bottom of the story. 

As I looked into the reception of the film, I was amazed by what a moral panic its success triggered in the Soviet press, and how ardently audiences defended it against the critics’ attacks. There are so many issues in this story that still resonate today: our false assumptions about what could and could not be popular in any given place; the rift between the scholars of cinema and the regular viewers over what touches them; and what is considered “progressive” or “backwards” politically at any given moment. 

What lessons does your book provide about popular culture on a global scale?

One of the key lessons is that the media world was much more interconnected before globalization than we tend to assume. But I think the more interesting aspect is that these connections often defy our assumptions, about the primacy of American media or the importance of the art festival circuits, for example. 

There is a whole world to explore once we step away from the conventional film historical narratives and canons, and our own aesthetic and political prejudices.

You did years of archival research for the book. What was that research process like? What surprising or unexpected insights came to light?

Most of the research on the Soviet side of the story I could do with digitized materials, which I had collected over the years. But to reconstruct the Mexican context of the film production, I made several research trips to read various Mexican magazines of the time. The most exciting discovery for me were all the women’s magazines of the late 1960s—early 1970s, even before the arrival of Cosmopolitan (or its more feminist versions). This immersed me in the world of fashion, specifically the “ethnic” or “Boho” styles of that period, and revealed many of the connections in the movies that I wouldn’t have otherwise perceived. At the same time, I came across women authors writing for these seemingly totally vacuous magazines, who either already were or would become really important and “serious” artists and intellectuals. So it also gave me a different perspective on the relationship between the representation of women’s culture and its inner-workings. 

Your other recent book, World Socialist Cinema, has earned honors from The Chronicle of Higher Education, the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, and Association for Slavic Studies, East European and Eurasian Studies. Is there a throughline or connection between these two books? 

There is definitely a connection. Both books center on the history of film circulation between the Socialist World and what at the time would have been called the Third World. But as an aperture into this process, one focuses on the history of a festival with thousands of films screened—many of which are now recognized classics of political cinema—and the other focuses on just one movie that most cinephiles would avoid watching at all costs (a 1970s popular historical melodrama from Mexico by a minor director). The first was the largest showcase of cinemas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America of the Cold War era. The second was a film adored by literally billions of viewers in China and the Soviet Union. And both books beg the question: how come scholars and teachers of world cinema knew nothing of either one?   

What is the enduring importance of Yesenia today? What is the main message you hope readers take from your book?

I hope readers see how much there is still to learn about film and media history—about how and where films, television programs traveled, and what impact they had around the world. This is especially true for popular culture globally. The more I research, the more surprising the connections are that I’m finding. There is a whole world to explore once we step away from the conventional film historical narratives and canons, and our own aesthetic and political prejudices.