Cinema of the Soviet Union
Most prolific in their republican films, after the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, were Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, and, to a lesser degree, Lithuania, Belarus and Moldavia.
From the outset, the leaders of this new state held that film would be the most ideal propaganda tool for the Soviet Union because of its widespread popularity among the established citizenry of the new land.
Additionally, many of the performers, producers, directors and other artists of pre-Soviet Russia had fled the country or were moving ahead of Red Army forces as they pushed further and further south into what remained of the Russian Empire.
[citation needed] Its rapid success, using old Russian and imported feature films, jumpstarted the industry significantly, especially insofar as the government did not heavily or directly regulate what was shown, and by 1923 an additional 89 cinemas had opened.
In this context, the directors and writers who were in support of the objectives of communism assumed quick dominance in the industry, as they were the ones who could most reliably and convincingly turn out films that would satisfy government censors.
New talent joined the experienced remainder, and an artistic community assembled with the goal of defining "Soviet film" as something distinct and better from the output of "decadent capitalism".
In 1924 Nikolai Lebedev [ru] wrote a book on the history of film he says is "the first Soviet attempt at systematization of the meager available sources [on cinema] for the general reader".
[3] Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin was released to wide acclaim in 1925; the film was heavily fictionalized and also propagandistic, giving the party line about the virtues of the proletariat.
The comedies of Grigori Aleksandrov such as Circus, Volga-Volga, and Tanya as well as The Rich Bride by Ivan Pyryev and By the Bluest of Seas by Boris Barnet focus on the psychology of the common person, enthusiasm for work and intolerance for remnants of the past.
Many films focused on national heroes, including Alexander Nevsky by Sergei Eisenstein, Minin and Pozharsky by Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Bogdan Khmelnitsky by Igor Savchenko.
[citation needed] During the late 1920s and early 1930s the Stalin wing of the Communist Party consolidated its authority and set about transforming the Soviet Union on both the economic and cultural fronts.
Soyuzkino consisted of an extended bureaucracy of economic planners and policy specialists who were charged to formulate annual production plans for the studios and then to monitor the distribution and exhibition of finished films.
Veteran directors experienced precipitous career declines under this system of control; whereas Eisenstein was able to make four features between 1924 and 1929, he completed only one film, Alexander Nevsky (1938) during the entire decade of the 1930s.
His planned adaptation of the Ivan Turgenev story Bezhin Meadow (1935–37) was halted during production in 1937 and officially banned, one of many promising film projects that fell victim to an exacting censorship system.
Two Soviet scientists, Alexander Shorin in Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg) and Pavel Tager in Moscow, conducted research through the late 1920s on complementary sound systems, which were ready for use by 1930.
And in Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein collaborated with the composer Sergei Prokofiev on an "operatic" film style that elegantly coordinated the musical score and the image track.
As Soviet cinema made the transition to sound and central planning in the early 1930s, it was also put under a mandate to adopt a uniform film style, commonly identified as "socialist realism".
The director of Soyuzkino and, later, GUKF, Boris Shumyatsky (1886–1938), served as chief executive of the Soviet film industry from 1931 to 1938, and was a harsh critic of the montage aesthetic.
Various other strictures were then added to the doctrine: positive heroes to act as role models for viewers; lessons in good citizenship for spectators to embrace; and support for reigning policy decisions of the Communist Party.
Based on the life of a martyred Red Army commander, the film was touted as a model of socialist realism, in that Chapayev and his followers battled heroically for the revolutionary cause.
These qualities endeared him to the viewing public: spectators reported seeing the film multiple times during its first run in 1934, and Chapaev was periodically re-released for subsequent generations of audiences.
The fantasy element of their films, with lively musical numbers reviving the montage aesthetic, sometimes stretched the boundaries of socialist realism, but the genre could also allude to contemporary affairs.
In Aleksandrov's 1940 musical Tanya, Orlova plays a humble servant girl who rises through the ranks of the Soviet industrial leadership after developing clever labour-saving work methods.
On top of dealing with the severe physical and monetary losses of the war, Stalin's regime tightened social control and censorship to manage the effects recent exposure to the West had on the people.
The strict limitations on content and complex, centralized process for approval drove many screenwriters away, and studios had much difficulty producing any of the quality films mandated by the 1948 resolution.
[9] Movie theaters in the postwar period faced the problem of satisfying the growing appetites of Soviet audiences for films while dealing with the shortage of newly produced works from studios.
Kultura i zhizn published a supposed survey compiled of readers' letters to the editor in March 1947 which criticize the film for being idealess, low brow, and even harmful.
Films such as His Butler's Sister, The Thief of Bagdad, Waterloo Bridge and Sun Valley Serenade, although not technically trophies as they had been purchased legally during the wartime alliance with America, were highly popular with Soviet audiences.
[16] With the start of the Cold War, writers, still considered the primary auteurs, were all the more reluctant to take up script writing, and the early 1950s saw only a handful of feature films completed during any year.
This latter event gave filmmakers the margin of comfort they needed to move away from the narrow stories of socialist realism, expand its boundaries, and begin work on a wider range of entertaining and artistic Soviet films.
