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In his survey of post-revolutionary and Stalinist cinema, Peter Kenez goes as far as to suggest that the Soviet authorities in fact placed too much faith in the power of propaganda, a situation which left them in a seemingly constant state of frustration at the unwillingness of the Soviet people to swallow their messages and reform their behaviour to conform with a more properly 'socialist' model of humanity. If we accept that the films under discussion here articulated a utopian vision in an attempt to secure the active consent of Soviet citizens to the Stalinist regime, then it follows that the parameters of this utopian vision - if it was indeed to exercise a broad appeal across a range of expectations and aspirations over the vast 'sixth of the world' under Stalin's aegis - could not be the same at all times and in all places. This book offers a thematic discussion of the debates surrounding the Soviet film industry during the years of Cultural Revolution up to and including the introduction of socialist realism as the 'single method' for all art and criticism. Drawing on the discourse theory of Bakhtin, the author's fits a number of key decisions regarding the future of Soviet cinema squarely into a marked tendency of contemporary Soviet culture and society, towards a radical centralisation and masculinisation of Stalinist discourse.
deliver their message using classic techniques of crowd manipulation. From this disastrous beginning, however, the Soviet film industry soon began to produce one of the most acclaimed bodies of work in the history of world cinema. A national production company, Sovkino, was established in 1925 and new studios were set up in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Odessa; thirteen were functioning across the nation by 1928 producing 123 films in that year, each reaching an average audience of 21/2 million people. Virtually all the films were made to serve the State. Battleship
to a scenario for a silent picture. The arrival of 'talkies' was a shock to the Soviet film industry, which had neither anticipated it in their 19 2 8 conference, nor budgeted for it in the economic reforms of the Five Year Plan. However, in the same article, Mayakovsky seems to predict the way in which the Soviet Union would soon be rushing to catch up with her American rivals when he asks: 'what are we going to do about new inventions in cinema? How much will you pay in the end to other countries for this inventiveness?' The actual debate on sound cinema kicked
, and imparted such a strong ideological slant to it that the authors withdrew their names from the film credits in protest'. 4 3 This almost remarkable turnaround in attitude may be explained with reference both to contemporary debates within the Soviet film industry including, of course, the establishment of a social purpose to all genres of cinema - and perhaps also to Aleksandrov's own instinct for self-preservation following the slating of his former associate Eisenstein at the 19 3 5 cinema conference. 44 Such behaviour may have guaranteed success for
cinematic conflict in history, namely that between the US and the Soviet film industries. As recent studies revealed, Hollywood entered the dispute for profit and propaganda reasons. Moreover, Hollywood–State relationships were far more consensual than those between filmmakers and government in the communist regimes, simply because their owners and employees shared Washington’s ideological world view. While, in some instances, the Washington propaganda agencies merely assisted in making or trimming movies, other times the FBI, CIA, and USIA financed, produced, and
States. Cultural performances and narratives about race were of great interest in the new Soviet republic. In 1932, Langston Hughes and a group of twenty-one young Black Americans, led by Black activist Louise Thompson, came to Russia to participate in a film titled Black and White , that would depict racism and resistance in the United States. The film was never made, but progressive and socially conscious directors like Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov, in the then nascent Soviet film industry
cheaper, populist game shows’.40 Even with the backing of a major television company behind them, Sutherland and Craddock had to find ways of economising to keep their budget down. This meant shooting on location in Ukraine. This was only two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the infrastructure of the Soviet film industry was still largely intact. Sharpe reportedly used props and costumes from Sergei Bondarchuk’s Napoleonic epics War and Peace (1967) and Waterloo (1970).41 On location the programme makers had to contend with the presence of the local
debates surrounding the Soviet film industry during the years of Cultural Revolution up to and including the introduction of socialist realism as the 'single method' for all art and criticism. This discussion is largely structured around the open polemics between the old guard of radical directors of the 1920s, who championed the Formalist dream of developing a 'film language', and the more commercii1-llyminded proletarian school and critics, who dismissed the work of their forebears as 'unintelligible'. Drawing on the discourse theory of Bakhtin, my argument fits a
Despite the fact that, behind the scenes, the film industry of the USSR was being squeezed more and more tightly by restrictions on form and content, with both manpower and technical equipment in woefully short supply, and creative freedom subjected to increasingly dangerous and hysterical levels of censorship and praise, audiences were indeed flocking to the cinemas to see the Vasil'ev brothers' greatest ever success, and only a year later the head of the Soviet film industry Boris Shumiatskii went so far as to label the film 'the real summit of Soviet film art'. 12
were thus scattered throughout the Soviet Union, with Mosfilm and Lenfilm being transplanted to Alma-Ata and the Kiev studio to Ashkhabad and Tashkent. From such outposts, the Soviet film industry continued to pour out films that agitated and organized the masses. The war was presented as a conflict between two ideologies. The brutality of the Nazi invaders was never avoided; indeed, the hellish reality of war was a distinctive feature of Soviet wartime cinema, particularly in the feature-length documentaries, and Soviet film makers, unlike their western counterparts