Film Studio as an Institution for War Memory? “Authoritative Viewers” and the Soviet Production of Cultural Trauma (1960–1980s)

Abstract

The institutional approach in memory studies implies the study of stable organizational structures responsible for the production of cultural memory. Addressing the problem of late-Soviet institutions of memory of the Great Patriotic War in the 1960s-1980s, the author considers the film studio, using “Lenfilm” as an example, as a special institution of memory and cultural trauma of the war. Based on institutional sources (script files, artistic councils, etc.), the author proposes to study the production of Soviet films about the war as the interaction of a complex system of conflicting “authoritative viewers” who had (relative) autonomy, functions, and a different type of authority in judging the past – the “power of memory». The author substantiates a typology of such “memory power” (“author power”, “studio power”, “power of the cultural bureaucracy”, “party power”, “military power”, “corporate power”, and “media power”) and summarizes the main properties inherent in the system of cultural production that influenced the film memory of the war in the “long 1970s” – its stability, “institutional opacity”, “constant bargaining”, overlapping party-bureaucratic control, contestation and defense of the “autonomy of the author”.