Soviet Filmmakers Research Articles

The Capital Diaries: A New Selection

Abstract Almost fifty years after the first publication of Sergei Eisenstein's “Notes for a Film of Capital” in the pages of October, “The Capital Diaries: A New Selection” presents extensive new extracts from the Soviet filmmaker's notebooks from 1927 and 1928, drawing from over five hundred pages of notes, images, press clippings, drawings, and diagrams in which Eisenstein puzzles over his (unrealized) film based on Karl Marx's Das Kapital. This new selection emphasizes the experimental, diaristic, and proto-cinematic character of the material to present both a fuller sense of Eisenstein's work on the film and the central use of images to the process. What emerges is an autotheoretical experiment involving psychoanalysis (including the filmmaker's own), “intellectual attractions,” typage (non-professional actors), the film October, and the many ways in which James Joyce's Ulysses, especially the “inner monologue,” served as creative resources and experimental instruments for the Capital project.

The Skull of the Syntax: On Translating Eisenstein's Capital Diaries

Abstract The author discusses his translation of Sergei Eisenstein's Capital Diaries, focusing on such topics as Eisenstein's reflections on his own writing, the context of literary modernism in which he wrote, and the strains on psyche and syntax that the diaries reveal. It discusses the range of literary sources that Eisenstein made use of in the diaries, in particular the works of James Joyce and Velimir Khlebnikov. Also discussed are the challenges of translating the diaries, which constitute, all at once, a record of daily life, a series of cultural and political critiques, and a compendium of material the Soviet filmmaker planned to use in his (ultimately unrealized) film based on Karl Marx's Das Kapital. The diaries served as a workshop for refining various concepts and methods such as montage and dialectical thinking, and this too is addressed.

Christian motives in Soviet cinema

The paper highlights the history of emergence and development of Christian motives in Soviet cinema, from the times of persecution against the Church in 1920–1930 up to the era of Perestroika. There is a difference in the perception of Christianity as the basis of traditional ethno-cultural identity and as the basis of universal moral values, which in both cases contributed to the gradual legitimization of Christian subjects in Soviet culture in spite of the multilevel system of ideological censorship. This paper analyzes the deep ideological trends in the evolution of Soviet culture, which allowed, on the one hand, the atheistic authorities themselves and, on the other hand, the experimenting filmmakers to address the topic of religion in general, Christianity in particular and specifically the Russian Orthodox Church in different ways in different periods of Soviet history. The illustrative examples of using various Christian symbols, Biblical quotations, events of religious history, the representation of the image of a Christian priest and a believer as such in Soviet films, as well as the increasingly noticeable appeal of Soviet filmmakers to Christian associations and allusions are also shown here. The author pays special attention to contradictory ideological trends during the three basic periods of Soviet history in the second half of the twentieth century: The Khrushchev Thaw, the Era of Stagnation and Perestroika. All three contributed to the legitimization of religious themes in Soviet cinema and determined the specifics of the attitude to religion in the late Soviet period. The films by such directors as Mikhail Romm, Marlen Khutsiev, Andrei Tarkovsky, Michael Kalik, Andrei Konchalovsky, Nikita Mikhalkov, Gleb Panfilov and others are considered in the paper as the most significant precedents. Hypotheses are put forward about further ideological strategies of the Soviet state regarding Orthodox Christianity, if the Communist Party had been able to retain its power.

Creating the Polish enemy on the Soviet screen, 1925-1939

ABSTRACT This article examines the presentation of Polish characters in Soviet cinema from 1925 to 1939. It argues that the many films made on the so-called ‘Polish theme’ in these years reveal a persistent Soviet anxiety towards Poland, which appears as a potential aggressor representing a military and ideological threat to the USSR in its western borderlands. Through close analysis of selected films from the corpus, the article demonstrates how Soviet cinema processed the perceived threat from Poland by means of gendered characterisations of Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians. Most commonly, these characterisations take the form of depictions of sexual violence committed by male Poles against female Ukrainians and Belarusians, a repeated narrative feature designed to convey to Soviet audiences the danger posed by Poland to Eastern Slavs on either side of the Polish-Soviet border. Likewise, though, the films seek to alleviate spectatorial concerns by portraying a corrupted patriarchal hierarchy among Polish protagonists that represents a parodied inversion of heteronormative gender standards. By conveying the Polish danger to Soviet nationalities and simultaneously disavowing it through insinuations of Polish societal weakness, Soviet filmmakers aimed to strike a balance between communicating and assuaging spectatorial anxieties towards their western neighbour.

The waning of the young sincere hero in Averbakh and Maslennikov’s The Private Life of Kuziaev Valentin

ABSTRACT The article discusses the 1967 film The Private Life of Kuziaev Valentin, directed by Il’ia Averbakh and Igor’ Maslennikov. The film belongs to the Thaw period of Soviet filmmaking, defined by cineastes’ pledge to sincerity. This idea aligned with the cultural transformations launched by the Khrushchev administration at the end of the 1950s, which encompassed radical changes in the attitudes and behaviour of the Soviet youth. Sensitive to the current political climate, Soviet filmmakers populated their narratives with the new, honest and self-reflective young heroes. Our detailed analysis of The Private Life of Kuziaev Valentin demonstrates how it critically interrogates and destabilises the popular sincerity discourse of the time. Engaging in a complex dialogue with Marlen Khutsiev’s iconic 1962 production Ilyich’s Gate, the film also foreshadows the imminent appearance, on the Soviet screen, of a radically different character. In the 1970s, the introspective flaneurs of the Thaw are slowly replaced by their cynical and shallow, two-dimensional copies. Remarkably, this evolution of the contemporary protagonist coincided with similar tendencies in French and British cinema.

There's No Place Like Home(land) in American and Soviet Fantasy Cinema of 1939: The Wizard of Oz and Vasilisa the Beautiful

There's No Place Like Home(land) in American and Soviet Fantasy Cinema of 1939: <i>The Wizard of Oz</i> and <i>Vasilisa the Beautiful</i>

Visions of Disrupted Chronologies: Sergei Eisenstein and Hedwig Fechheimer’s Cubist Egypt

By juxtaposing two ostensibly divergent characters, the Jewish art historian and Egyptologist Hedwig Fechheimer (1871–1942) and Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), this paper investigates how both approaches folded time, creating Cubist chronologies. Fechheimer adapted the philological focus of her Berlin School contemporaries to create an ahistorical, anti-teleological grammar of ancient Egyptian art which espoused an artistic affinity between the Egyptians and the Cubist movement. Eisenstein, who held a copy of one of Fechheimer’s books in his personal library, took a similar approach in the development of his critiques of historical allegory. This paper looks specifically at two shots of a sphinx during the bridge sequence in the 1927 film October to demonstrate how they correspond to Fechheimer’s views on Egyptian art and also function peculiarly within the film. Ultimately, I aim to demonstrate how the interpellations of the sphinx demonstrate a particular critique of historicity that Eisenstein later expands upon in his Ivan the Terrible films.

The montage cinema and the narrative structure, strengths for the story progression.

The film montage has been and continues to be one of the pillars on which the audiovisual story, like the theoretical foundations have allowed the development and deepening of a cinematographic language grammar. Although, the classic storytelling inaugurated by D.W. Griffith emphasized the invisible nature of montage; Soviet filmmakers, in particular S. Eisenstein pointed to the possibilities that film montage could offer as a communication tool through the association of images and concepts. Nowadays, both design strategies for stories are still valid and are present in all the various forms and formats of audiovisual storytelling. This paper, intend to address the particular case of the feature film Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (Angela Robinson, 2017) whose narrative proposal offers a daring combination of resources. This combination causes the structure and assembly to become fully visible, extremely evident. At the same time, the narrative is strengthened, allowing the storytelling to progress, resorting to film montage strategies to make the audiovisual more effective and attractive to viewers. Therefore, understanding the resources of editing in the chosen feature film and the different effects of meaning, that it manages to achieve are, as a whole, the main objective of this paper.

«Taezhnye leningradki»: povsednevnaya zhizn' zhenshchin Angarska v 1950-h — 1960-h gg.

The authors analyze the history of the everyday life of the inhabitants of the Soviet Angarsk, built in the 1950s-1960s in Eastern Siberia according to the project of Leningrad architects as an exemplary city. Analyzing the history of the creation of the sociocultural environment of the city, landscaping and landscaping, they show the ways of forming a new urban environment in which the daily life of the workers of the Soviet petrochemical industry unfolded, the features of everyday life in the new city in terms of work, leisure, raising children. Particular emphasis is placed on the reflections of Soviet filmmakers, who chose Angarsk as a typical city of post-war Siberia, preserved on film the details of women’s everyday life in the new city, as well as on the perception of the “American threat” during the “Cold War”. The conducted research confirmed the hypothesis that the everyday life of Angarsk residents was part of the Soviet gender project.

Genre cinema and cinema Sui Generis: Adrian Piotrovsky and cinema taxonomy

ABSTRACT Although ‘Towards a Theory of Cine-Genres’ announces his interest in connecting film genre to the formal properties of the medium, Adrian Piotrovsky’s thinking as a whole is marked by a fundamental ambivalence to genre. Placing this better-known essay within the overall development of his thinking on cinema reveals how Piotrovsky grappled with taxonomizing cinema and refined a vision for a Soviet filmmaking that moved beyond the limitations of genre.

Научные поиски в советской кинематографии 1920-х–1930-х годов. (Метод «параллельной кинозасъемки» Анатолия Терского)

In this paper, we consider a unique period in the development of Soviet cinema, from 1928 to 1932, when the Geographical and Ethnographic Cinema-Atlas project was underway. It implied the making of a series of cultural films about the peoples and cultures of the USSR and, therefore, involved the search for scientific grounds for advancing cinematic art. In the second half of the 1920s, some Soviet filmmakers even worked out specific methods, based on real scientific research, which could be applied in the field of documentary. For example, one of the key trends in the theory and methodology of Soviet cinema in the 1920s–1930s was the study of the audience’s perception through decoding—with the help of psychology (reflexology)—of the recorded mimic reactions of viewers. We have analyzed the method of “parallel filming” of the audience, which was introduced by the Soviet film director and ethnographer Anatoly Terskoy within the scientific, cinematic, and ideological contexts. We believe that this overlooked concept is a valuable material for today’s documentary filmmakers. On the one hand, Terskoy’s works highlight the creative paradigms in which cinematographers were making their ethnographic and anti-religious films in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s. On the other hand, it was such scientific and creative searches that later became the theoretical basis for large-scale projects on the cinematic representation of different parts of the USSR on screen.

Осмысляя «красный смех»: англоязычные исследования о советской кинокомедии

In this article, I address foreign English-language works on Soviet film comedy, tracing the waves of researchers’ interest to it, and identifying the time periods as well as film directors attracting scholars most often. The first surge of interest in Soviet film comedy came in the first half of the 1990s and was largely associated with the fall of the Iron Curtain. The major subject of research during those years were Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, musical comedies of the 1930s, and films of the Perestroika period. The second wave came in the 2010s with the emigration of a large number of Russian scholars who had personally witnessed the Soviet Union. Thanks to them, the range of the studied material has significantly expanded through the analysis of film comedies of the 1960s and 1970s. The main thematic directions and topics in the study of the comedy genre are structured in accordance with the history of film timeline. Soviet comedies of the 1920s–1930s are of specific interest to foreign researchers in terms of the ideological regulation of art, as well as in terms of how the mythology of the new socialist society was formed, and how Soviet filmmakers adapted or rejected Western standards. In the comedies of the 1960s and 1970s, scholars analyze the discordance between declared and unspoken humor and study the Aesopian language of famous comedy film directors (Ryazanov and Gaidai above all). Finally, in late-Soviet films, researchers note the growth of absurdist motifs as a sign of a complete and no longer hidden disillusionment with communist ideals.

Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi by Peter Limbrick

Reviewed by: Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi by Peter Limbrick Terri Ginsberg (bio) Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi by Peter Limbrick. University of California Press. 2020. 302 pages. $90.00 hardcover; $34.95 paper; also available in e-book. Pressure has been placed on Arab film scholars to "delink" from Western and Eurocentric frames of intelligibility in the name of decolonial epistemologies. The ensuing debate is not new in academic circles, but it is undergoing a contemporary reconditioning as postcolonial states in the Middle East region turn to hybrid forms of nationalism fostered by neoliberal investment imperatives dominated by the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia in collaboration with the United States and Israel.1 The contemporary call to break with the West claims a different structural base than a similar call issued over thirty years ago by Egyptian political scientist Samir Amin, for whom "delinking" from the West was a revolutionary matter of transitioning from capitalism to socialism and carried no rejectionist position vis-à-vis European theory, in particular Marxism.2 For Amin, dismantling neocolonialism would require a radical internationalism, not today's reactionary isolationism whose interests lie in consolidating local and regional entities into competitive blocs within the global capitalist system. [End Page 214] The importance of Peter Limbrick's Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi becomes evident within this context. Limbrick focuses his text on the overlooked Moroccan independent filmmaker Moumen Smihi, whose entire cinematic oeuvre and artistic life stands as a counter to contemporary currents. Smihi was born in Tangier, attended a French lycée, and frequented local ciné-clubs before pursuing higher education and cinematic training in France. There he was exposed to existentialist philosophy and poststructuralist theory, including works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and Roland Barthes, and to the revolutionary writings of Karl Marx. Smihi interpreted the significance of these works in the context of twentiethcentury Nahda (Arab Awakening) intellectuals such as Taha Hussein, considered by many the founder of Pharaonism, and Tawfiq al-Hakim, both giants of modern Egyptian literary culture, and in light of medieval philosophers of Islamic classical thought, such as the ninth-century theologian Al-Jahiz, who theorized evolution from the perspective of anti-sectarian rationalism, and the twelfth-century philosopher and novelist Ibn Tufayl, who argued for the interrelationship of religious and rational thought. Smihi went on to make films almost completely outside of the commercial structures and neocolonial state funding and distribution networks that continue to overdetermine the political aesthetics of Arab cinema. He has thus been able to formulate a cinematic intertext that integrates European modernist modalities—the neorealism of Roberto Rossellini, the ciné-ethnography of Jean Rouch, and the poetic realism of Pier Paolo Pasolini—while emphasizing their Arab influences and articulations. These include the Egyptian new realism of Salah Abu Seif and, especially, the literary arabesque. Through what amounts to a deconstruction of European modernism, Smihi's films enable what Limbrick calls a radicalization of Arab subjectivity: a renewed sense of Nahda founded upon an uncanny illumination of the proverbial Western civilizational narrative as it bypasses Islamic classicism and dissimulates its European scholastic appropriation—a tack now being followed on its obverse by the reactionary calls for delinking. Limbrick reading Smihi advances this "new Nahda" as against contemporary irredentism as a means of restoring European modernism to its historical moment—the intellectual legacy of Islamic rational philosophy. In turn, modernism and its profoundly transnational character are redeemed for Arab, not only Moroccan or Egyptian, cinema. Smihi's deconstructionism appears most saliently at the formal register of his films. For Limbrick, Smihi's films reconfigure Alexandre Astruc's caméra-stylo for the purpose of reconciling modernist ciné-écriture with the Defeat-conscious realism famously advocated by Tunisian cinéaste Nouri Bouzid as a remedy to the Arab world's cultural colonization.3 Such reconciliation is facilitated by intellectual montage, noncausal digressions, and a cinematography that resists omniscience and moral absolutism, recalling both early Soviet filmmaking and a certain immanentism attributable to some forms of Islamic textuality—for example, those related to Sufism. In this [End Page 215] way, Smihi's...

An Air Map for World Cinema: Aeroflot as an Infrastructure for Cinematic Internationalism

The expansion of global air travel in the Cold War era fueled diverse forms of state‐sponsored internationalism, including international writers' congresses, concert tours, and especially art and film festivals. Film festivals served as a key stage for cultural competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as the main way for decolonized Asian and African states to showcase their new national cinemas. The Soviet state airline, Aeroflot, shaped international participation at the Moscow International Film Festival (1959‐) and Global South participation at the Tashkent Festival for Asian, African, and Latin American Cinema in Uzbekistan (1968‐). This article analyzes Aeroflot as an infrastructure for cinematic internationalism. The socialist economics of air travel shaped “world cinema maps” that emerged at Moscow and Tashkent. Aeroflot enabled Soviet cinematic diplomacy, but also constrained it: it delayed Tashkent festival's expansion to Latin America, where the airline had few inroads. For local publics, films brought in airplane luggage at the last minute provided uncensored transnational cinematic experiences that occasionally elided not just Soviet, but also Syrian or American diplomatic control. Aeroflot's inefficiencies put foreign delegates face‐to‐face with Soviet everyday life and reproduced global inequalities: filmmakers from the Global South, whose travel was covered by their Soviet hosts, were at the mercy of Aeroflot's delays, while festival guests from Western Europe and the United States could count on their own national airlines for transportation. Free Aeroflot tickets ensured nearly comprehensive participation of Global South nations, in order to promote Soviet filmmaking as the model for emergent Asian and African cinemas. Yet Third Worldist alliances forged at Moscow and Tashkent—among African organizers of the Pan‐African Federation of Filmmakers, or between Cuban and Vietnamese militant cineastes—often bypassed, contradicted, or exceeded Soviet diplomatic goals. More broadly, I argue that Soviet official internationalism—its technologies, bureaucracies, and expenditures—should be analyzed as an infrastructure that enabled multiple internationalist projects, some conceived elsewhere and working toward goals tangential or inimical to Soviet state purposes. Much existing work on Soviet internationalism zeros in on the state's attempts to win the “hearts and minds” of Soviet or foreign citizens. Conversely, the infrastructural approach focuses on informal transnational alliances and personal ties built on Soviet terrain, while also accounting for Soviet institutional, economic, and technological power that shaped the “contact zones” where these encounters took place.

New perspectives on the Parajanov affair: The role of Italian activism in the transnational campaign for his release

This article seeks to reconstruct the 1974-1977 transnational solidarity campaign in support of the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, who was arrested in Kiev in late 1973 on charges of homosexual relations and sentenced to five years in prison. The mobilization for Parajanov’s release raises various research questions that one can summarize as follows: Why and how was that campaign able to mobilize Western players coming from different milieux and countries? The author argues that the “Parajanov affair” may allow us to understand the extent to which the topic of homosexuality in the USSR in the 1970s represented a strand of a broader transnational framework in which sexual identity, human rights, artistic expression and even Italian political issues intersected. The author investigates the role played by some Italian actors in this campaign and in the process leading to Parajanov’s release. More generally, the Parajanov affair embodies the struggle for the freedom of artistic creativity, political thinking and sexual identity, all elements of the broader activism of the period.

The Communist Walküre: Eisenstein’s Vision for Marrying German Wagnerism with Soviet Communism

ABSTRACT Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was commissioned to produce Wagner’s Die Walküre in 1940, after the signing of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, to demonstrate Soviet loyalty to Germany during a time of hostile relations. This would be the last Ring performance in the Soviet Union before it was banished for thirty bitter years, but the politico-ideological underpinnings of this fascinating historic production have been largely overlooked. This article provides a close reading of Eisenstein’s political intentions for this production and posits that he promoted Wagner as the representative ideology of Germany, pairing it with Soviet communism in order to depict a Soviet-German union without endorsing German politics.

Dziga Vertov: Life and Work (Volume 1: 1896–1921) by MacKay John (review)

REVIEWS 571 and Vostrá, and brilliant productions of Czech and international works by E. F. Burian, Jiří Frejka, Jan Grossman and others discussed here. Day does not, however,typicallyhighlightthemanyworksthatareunequivocallymoralizing, didactic and self-righteous, serve rather than subvert political programmes, advocate conformity or are simply shallow; moreover, important figures (for example, Karel Sabina, Vítězslav Nezval and Pavel Kohout) seem to fade in and out depending on how far they fit the narrative. Day’s almost nostalgic perspective derives from her close personal acquaintance with Czech theatre from the extraordinary variety and energy of the 1960s liberalization, through the years of dissent, to the central role played by theatre people and spaces as Communism fell. This connection manifests itself in the dominance in her book of not only this period and its political values over any other, but also a breathless, encyclopaedic focus on people, frequently brought to life through short, amusing or touching anecdotes. The textual aspect of theatre is subordinate here to the lived world of directors, actors, designers, scholars and audiences interacting with one another and the world outside. Trial by Theatre reflects its author’s long-standing work as an advocate for Czech theatre through translation, writing and teaching and as an ally of proponents of Czech civil society before and after 1989. It is attractively presented in large-size paperback with numerous photographs and images and includes a useful select bibliography of both English-language and Czech sources, and a ‘dramatis personae’ of the key figures in Czech theatrical history and plays mentioned. It leaves to others, however, the task of updating not only the story of Czech theatre, but also the interpretative frames through which its most creative periods are understood. University of Oxford Rajendra A. Chitnis MacKay, John. Dziga Vertov: Life and Work (Volume 1: 1896–1921). Film and Media Studies. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2018. xcvi + 372 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Archives consulted. Filmography. Bibliography. Index. $129.00: £123.00; $35.00: £29.95. Dziga Vertov (1896–1954), one of the most influential Soviet filmmakers of his generation, is best known in the West as the director of Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1929), arguably the greatest documentary film ever made. He was also a vociferous theorist, who rejected fiction cinema and advocated nonfiction filmmaking as the best vehicle for representing the revolutionary new Soviet world. Much has been written about Vertov, but John MacKay’s book — volume one of his much anticipated three-volume study — SEER, 98, 3, JULY 2020 572 is the first English-language biography devoted to him. MacKay describes it as a ‘critical-biographical study’ (p. xxxiii), but this unassuming designation does not do justice to his work’s extraordinary scope and range of reference. MacKay’s lengthy introduction (which refers not only to the present volume, but also to the forthcoming volumes two and three) provides a critical overview of the most important waves of Vertov reception since his death in 1954. A tour de force of summary, synthesis and clarity, MacKay’s survey ranges widely across scholarship published in Russian, English, French and German, demonstrating how it has been inflected by shifting historical, ideological and cultural contexts, and guiding the reader through the numerous ‘textual labyrinth[s]’ (p. lxii) that have developed around key Vertovian concepts, such as Kino-Pravda (Film-Truth) and Kino-Glaz (Kino-Eye). The book’s main body covers the first twenty-five years of the filmmaker’s life, from his birth, as David Abelevich Kaufman, on 15 January 1896 to the end of 1921. By this time, he had changed his name twice (first to Denis Arkad´evich Kaufman, then to Dziga Vertov) and embarked on a career in the nascent Soviet cinema industry. He had not yet made any of his major films, however, or written any of his most significant theoretical texts. MacKay’s purposes in focusing on the early period of the filmmaker’s life are to uncover ‘the “beginnings of the historical object” called Vertov’ (p. 2), to trace the trajectory of his cinematic and theoretical practice, and to assess the influence on his filmmaking of the various contexts — familial, social, cultural, ideological...

Образ фантомной угрозы для детей со стороны США в советском историческом кинематографе периода холодной войны

The presented study is devoted to studying the practice of constructing the image of a phantom threat to children from the side of an external enemy through historical discourse in the cinema of the USSR and the USA during the Cold War. The aim of this work is to identify common and specific features in the approaches of filmmakers of the two countries to the formation of the image of a phantom threat for children from the side of an external enemy. The research methodology is built on the basis of a combination of historical genetic, comparative and descriptive, as well as content analysis. The author comes to the conclusion that in American films the historical texture in the framework of creating the image of the “Soviet threat” was used only occasionally. For the most part, the relevant plots were included in the cinematic description of actual military conflicts (for example, the war in Afghanistan), the futurological conflict of America and the USSR, or their confrontation in line with an alternative history. Soviet filmmakers were limited in terms of positioning the "American threat" by a series of unspoken rules. For example, the violent behavior of American characters toward children was described primarily verbally. Filmmakers from the United States had more freedom in terms of visualizing violence against children and adolescents. In addition, Americans could more freely and widely disclose the topic of “crimes” attributed to the Soviet side in the context of actual military conflicts. The presence of the indicated restrictions forced Soviet filmmakers to actively turn to historical subjects. However, the specifics of the origin of the basis of the corresponding narrative, which was played by foreign fiction, largely leveled its effectiveness from a political point of view. The literary sources of Soviet films were originally created by American writers for US citizens, whereby their content was saturated with positive images of America and its inhabitants. The latter often concerned the positioning of childhood, especially in a nostalgic manner. A natural consequence of this was the erosion of the negative images promoted by filmmakers. The theoretical significance of the work lies in summarizing the image of the phantom threat to children by the United States in Soviet historical cinema of the cold war period.

The Background of Stunt Performing Art as a Kind of Cinema Art (20s of the 20th Century)

The aim of this study is to identify and characterize the features of development of stunt performing art as a scientific discipline in its own right in the early period of the Soviet film industry (20-ies of the twentieth century).Research methodology. The scientific provisions of the article are substantiated at the level of the set of general scientific methods of cognition, cultural and art methodological approaches. The historical method was applied (to identify the origin and formation of stunt performing art in the Soviet cinema industry); terminological method (to clarify the interpretation of the terms “circus trick”, “cinema trick” and “gag”), typological method (to identify typological features of cinema tricks in Soviet cinema of the 1920s), etc.Results. The circus stunt in the infanthood of Soviet cinema art becomes one of the main expressive means of representing a new hero. Young Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s focused on the development of revolutionary art of the masses, mostly playgrounds led by a street clown and an eccentric, whose purpose was to entertain, and in the arsenal, apart from the skills of safe falls (the so-called cascades), series of tumbles. The idea of educating a film actor of a new formation, capable of performing tricks of any complexity without a stunt double, remained dominant among Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s. The formed strategy of performing the tricks independently in Soviet cinema was relevant to the second half of the 1960s.Novelty. Prerequisites for the formation of techniques for stunt work, as well as the process for the evolution of tricks, in accordance with the development and popularization of new genres of Soviet cinema in the 1920s are studied and analyzed. The concepts of “trick” and “gag” have been refined and supplemented. The specifics of the educational and creative process in the Soviet cinematic workshops of the State Cinematography College and the Eccentric Actor Factory are considered. The stages of the emergence of tricks according to categorization are systematized; the features and performing techniques of the most common tricks of the film industry in historical retrospect are considered and revealed. The personal contribution to the development and professionalization of stunt performing art by leading actors and directors of the early Soviet cinema has been determined.The practical significance. Information which is given in this article can become useful for the Ukrainian theorists and people on the ground of art in the context of involving it to educational and scientific appeal.

Cold War cinema and the traumatic turn in Europe: Fact (1980) as a Soviet mirror of the Holocaust film

ABSTRACTThe polarisation of WWII memory across the West and East of Europe is an enduring legacy of the Cold War. In the West, the genocide of the Jews was narrated into public memory as the defining trauma of the war and the foundation of cosmopolitan identity, with cinema playing a key role. After Stalin, Soviet cinema supplemented portrayals of monumental triumph with explorations of the personal, everyday experience of trauma. However, the Holocaust was not part of the picture, insofar as Jewish particularism was marginalised in Soviet trauma narratives of WWII, which focused rather on the internationalist ethos of communist martyrs. In time, however, this internationalism drifted towards nativism, manifest in a thematic focus on the burning of villages by German forces as an act of genocide. Soviet Lithuanian artists and filmmakers were at the centre of these developments, and their memoirs shed light on how the nativist vector of the Soviet ‘trauma drama’ of WWII developed through representations of the destruction of the village of Pirčiupiai in monument, poetry and the feature film Fact (Faktas, dir. A. Grikevičius, 1980). Presented as an orthodox rendition of the Great Patriotic War narrative, the film served as a screen memory for a nativist articulation of collective identity.