Spectator as worker: the production film of Soviet Georgia in Mikhail Kalatozov’s Salt for Svaneti and A Nail in the Boot

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that Mikhail Kalatozov’s Salt for Svaneti and A Nail in the Boot serve as examples of the production film and chart the evolving relationship of early Georgian cinema to Soviet (film) production. The term ‘production film’ here delineates a category of early Soviet films that focus predominantly on the production process. I provide a framework for reading Kalatozov’s films as production films within the history of the Georgian Film Studio, tracing the influence of Sergei Tret’iakov and his writings on the production screenplay, as well as within contemporary research on industrial film as a genre, which has tended to overlook Soviet cinema. On a formal level, I interpret scenes of the production process as organised according to the worker’s gaze in the discussed films. The worker’s gaze functions as a device to entice the spectator, imagined as a worker, to participate in and reflect on socialist construction. Reading Kalatozov’s Salt for Svaneti and A Nail in the Boot as production films complicates the centre-periphery model and the standpoint of national cinema in the context of Georgian cinema’s emergence as a significant force in Soviet film production.