Emotional Education

Abstract

Abstract Soviet cinema’s ‘affective turn’ in the 1930s took shape in the context of far-ranging scientific debates about emotion and perceptual management. The Soviet film industry’s attention to emotional appeal and push to develop its genre repertoire at the end of the 1920s were closely linked, this chapter shows, to a broader re-evaluation of emotional life in Soviet psychology, as well as to a new scientific interest in the effects of cultural production on audiences. At the end of the 1920s, psychologists including Lev Vygotsky and Aleksandr Luria began to discredit the physiological reading of emotion that had held sway over the human sciences. Alongside its integration into the processes of the mind by the 1930s, emotion was rendered inextricable from the social environment and thereby amenable to cultivation and direction. The setting forth of ‘emotional education’ as a crucial cultural agenda spurred a wave of enquiries into the emotional impact of Soviet cinema. I explore how these sociological and psycho-physiological investigations not only re-conceptualized film viewing as predominantly an emotional experience, but established a correlation between the spectator’s emotional engagement and a film’s use of familiar narrative structures and clear genre markers. The chapter concludes by discussing Stalinist cinema’s commitment to increasing genre variety as both the corollary of an increased audience mindedness, and a symptom of its desire to better manage and guide audience response.