Films of the Printed Page: Transmedial Books for Early Soviet Children

Abstract

This essay examines the representation of film production and reception in Soviet children's books from the 1920s and early 1930s. These publications function both as instructional manuals for teaching children about cinema and as attempts to depict film elements in a different medium. In relation to the institutional development of the Soviet film industry, the publication of children's books about cinema coincides with the mobilization of films for propaganda and educational purposes. At this time there were also increasing warnings about the effect of cinema on children as well as calls for ideologically appropriate film programming for young viewers. The visual language of these publications indicates how writers and artists of Soviet children's books engaged with cinema and adapted cinematic techniques to the printed page. The authors represented cinema's illusion of immediacy, spectator engagement, and principles of narration through the succession of images. Moreover, Soviet children's books about cinema appropriate film techniques and cinematic forms as part of their claim to the realism and authenticity ascribed to cinematic representation. Such translation of elements across media turned Soviet children's books into transmedial objects that allowed readers to enter and engage the media system developing around them.