Feeling Revolution: Cinema, Genre, and the Politics of Affect under Stalin
Anna Toropova
Abstract
Stalin-era cinema was a technology of emotional and affective education. The filmmakers of the period were called on 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: Cinema, Genre, and the Politics of Affectunder Stalin 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’ genre system. Its case studies of specific film genres, including the production ... More
Stalin-era cinema was a technology of emotional and affective education. The filmmakers of the period were called on 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: Cinema, Genre, and the Politics of Affectunder Stalin 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’ genre system. Its case studies of specific film genres, including the production film, comedy, thriller, and melodrama, explore how the ‘genre rules’ established by Western and pre-revolutionary Russian cinema were rewritten in the context of new emotional settings. ‘Sovietizing’ audience emotions did not prove to be an easy task. The tensions, frustrations, and missteps of this process are outlined in this book 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, Feeling Revolution reveals cinema’s capacity to contest the very emotional norms that it was entrusted with crafting.
Keywords:
Soviet cinema,
emotion,
feeling,
genre,
affect,
Stalinism,
Soviet culture
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198831099 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2020 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198831099.001.0001 |
