Explore the vast range of titles available.

Stalin-era cinema was designed to promote emotional and affective education. The filmmakers of the period were called to help forge the emotions and affects that befitted the New Soviet Person - ranging from happiness and victorious laughter, to hatred for enemies. 'Feeling Revolution' shows how the Soviet film industry's efforts to find an emotionally resonant language that could speak to a mass audience came to centre on the development of a distinctively 'Soviet' cinema. Its case studies of specific film genres, including production films, comedies, thrillers, and melodramas, explore how the genre rules established by Western and prerevolutionary Russian cinema were reoriented to new emotional settings. 'Sovietising' audience emotions did not prove to be an easy feat. The tensions, frustrations, and missteps of this process are outlined in Feeling Revolution, with reference to a wide variety of primary sources, including the artistic council discussions of the Mosfil'm and Lenfil'm studios and the Ministry of Cinematography. Bringing the limitations of the Stalinist ideological project to light, Anna Toropova reveals cinema's capacity to contest the very emotional norms that it was entrusted with crafting.

Stalin's Final Films explores a neglected period in the history of Soviet cinema, breathing new life into a body of films long considered moribund as the pinnacle of Stalinism. While film censorship reached its apogee in this period and fewer films were made, film attendance also peaked as Soviet audiences voted with their seats and distinguished a clearly popular postwar cinema. Claire Knight examines the tensions between official ideology and audience engagement, and between education and entertainment, inherent in these popular films, as well as the financial considerations that shaped and constrained them. She explores how the Soviet regime used films to address the major challenges faced by the USSR after the Great Patriotic War (World War II), showing how war dramas, spy thrillers, Stalin epics, and rural comedies alike were mobilized to consolidate an official narrative of the war, reestablish Stalinist orthodoxy, and dramatize the rebuilding of socialist society. Yet, Knight also highlights how these same films were used by filmmakers more experimentally, exploring a diverse range of responses to the ideological crisis that lay at the heart of Soviet postwar culture, as a victorious people were denied the fruits of their sacrificial labor. After the war, new heroes were demanded by both the regime and Soviet audiences, and filmmakers sought to provide them, with at times surprising results. Stalin's Final Films mines Soviet cinema as an invaluable resource for understanding the unique character of postwar Stalinism and the cinema of the most repressive era in Soviet history.

This text explores how Soviet film worked with time, the past, and memory. It looks at Stalinist cinema and its role in the production of history, the conversion of the present and experience into history, mechanisms of transfer, and what it located between history and the past.

InNot According to Plan, Maria Belodubrovskaya reveals the limits on the power of even the most repressive totalitarian regimes to create and control propaganda. Belodubrovskaya's revisionist account of Soviet filmmaking between 1930 and 1953 highlights the extent to which the Soviet film industry remained stubbornly artisanal in its methods, especially in contrast to the more industrial approach of the Hollywood studio system. Not According to Plan shows that even though Josef Stalin recognized cinema as a \"mighty instrument of mass agitation and propaganda\" and strove to harness the Soviet film industry to serve the state, directors such as Eisenstein, Alexandrov, and Pudovkin had far more creative control than did party-appointed executives and censors. The Stalinist party-state, despite explicit intent and grandiose plans to build a \"Soviet Hollywood\" that would release a thousand features per year, failed to construct even a modest mass propaganda cinema. Belodubrovskaya's wealth of evidence shows that the regime's desire to disseminate propaganda on a vast scale was consistently at odds with its compulsion to control quality and with Stalin's intolerance of imperfection.Not According to Planis a landmark in Soviet cultural history and the global history of cinema.

In 1917 the Bolsheviks proclaimed a world remade. The task of the new regime, and of the media that served it, was to reshape the old world in revolutionary form, to transform the vast, \"ungraspable\" space of the Russian Empire into the mapped territory of the Soviet Union. This book shows how Soviet cinema encouraged popular support for state initiatives in the years between the revolution and the Second World War, helping to create a new Russian identity and territory-an \"imaginary geography\" of Sovietness.Drawing on a vast range of little-known texts, Emma Widdis offers a unique cultural history of the early Soviet period. In particular, she shows how films projected the new Soviet map onto the great shared screen of the popular imagination.

This article explores the relationship of Soviet cinema and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. The article focuses on three separate components of Moscow's cinematic operations vis-à-vis the Spanish imbroglio: (1) the distribution of Soviet-made feature films in the Loyalist zone, (2) the production of Soviet propaganda newsreels on Spanish subjects intended for distribution within the Soviet Union, and (3) the significance of the Spanish war for Soviet cinema throughout the balance of the Bolshevik period. The narrative and conclusions herein are supported by new research from archives in both Spain and the Russian Federation, as well as analyses of films rarely if ever discussed in the scholarly literature, either within film studies or twentieth century European history.

How do museums and cinema shape the image of the Communist past in today’s Central and Eastern Europe? This volume is the first systematic analysis of how visual techniques are used to understand and put into context the former regimes.

This wide-ranging cultural history explores the expression of Bolshevik Party ideology through the lens of landscape, or, more broadly, space. Portrayed in visual images and words, the landscape played a vital role in expressing and promoting ideology in the former Soviet Union during the Stalin years, especially in the 1930s. At the time, the iconoclasm of the immediate postrevolutionary years had given way to nation building and a conscious attempt to create a new Soviet culture. In painting, architecture, literature, cinema, and song, images of landscape were enlisted to help mold the masses into joyful, hardworking citizens of a state with a radiant, utopian future -- all under the fatherly guidance of Joseph Stalin. From backgrounds in history, art history, literary studies, and philosophy, the contributors show how Soviet space was sanctified, coded, and sold as an ideological product. They explore the ways in which producers of various art forms used space to express what Katerina Clark calls a cartography of power -- an organization of the entire country into a hierarchy of spheres of relative sacredness, with Moscow at the center. The theme of center versus periphery figures prominently in many of the essays, and the periphery is shown often to be paradoxically central. Examining representations of space in objects as diverse as postage stamps, a hikers magazine, advertisements, and the Soviet musical, the authors show how cultural producers attempted to naturalize ideological space, to make it an unquestioned part of the worldview. Whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination. Not all features of Soviet space were entirely novel, and several of the essayists assert continuities with the prerevolutionary past. One example is the importance of the mother image in mass songs of the Stalin period; another is the \"boundless longing\" inspired in the Russian character by the burden of living amid vast empty spaces. But whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination.

In the charged atmosphere of post-revolution, artistic and political forces often join in the effort to reimagine a new national space for a liberated people. Joshua Malitsky examines nonfiction film and nation building to better understand documentary film as a tool used by the state to create powerful historical and political narratives. Drawing on newsreels and documentaries produced in the aftermath of the Russian revolution of 1917 and the Cuban revolution of 1959, Malitsky demonstrates the ability of nonfiction film to help shape the new citizen and unify, edify, and modernize society as a whole. Post-Revolution Nonfiction Film not only presents a critical historical view of the politics, rhetoric, and aesthetics shaping post-revolution Soviet and Cuban culture but also provides a framework for understanding the larger political and cultural implications of documentary and nonfiction film.