Soviet Cinematography, 1918-1991

Ideological Conflict and Social Reality

Michael R. Greenberg, Dmitry Shlapentokh, Michael R. Greenberg, Dmitry Shlapentokh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000679205
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

With a historical sweep that recent events have made definitive, the authors examine the influence of Soviet ideology on the presentation of social reality in films produced in the Soviet Union between the October Revolution and the final days of glasnost. Within the framework of an introduction that lays out the conceptual terminology used to describe that shifting ideological landscape, the authors analyze both the social groups appearing in the films and the relations of film directors and other film makers to state censorship and ideological control.

I

Theoretical and Historical Introduction

Before moving to the dramatic history of the Soviet movie industry, we first elucidate our methodological approach and the major fundamentals of the ideological mechanisms that the Soviet state used to control cinematography.

1

Social Reality and Ideology in Interaction

Two concepts crucial for this book, social reality and ideology, are discussed in the following sections. Let us start with the first.

SOVIET MOVIES AND THE OBJECTIVIST-CONSTRUCTIONIST CONTROVERSY ABOUT REALITIES

Whatever the intentions of filmmakers, they present in their movies their vision of some aspects of their larger social reality, even if they do so in the most allegorical ways.

For this discussion, it is important to distinguish between filmmakers best considered realists and those best considered nonrealists or formalists. These two groups are also referred to as objectivists and constructionists, respectively, since the first group objectivizes (i.e., recognizes and conforms to) ontological reality, whereas the second group constructs reality.

The distinction between realist and formalist movies is, of course, anything but clear, and numerous movies combine both approaches [see such Russian movies as Iurii Mamin’s Fountain (1988), or Sergei Soloviev’s Assa (1988)]. This combined approach is particularly prominent in comedies [see, for example, G. Bazhanov and A. Eidel’man’s Most Charming and Attractive (1985) or El’dar Riazanov’s An Office Romance (1977)].

The distinction between realist and formalist approaches in no way implies that one approach is preferable or inherently “more artistic” than the other, as some have argued (Kracauer 1960). Artists and artistic works have many goals, most of which are independent of whether realism is attained (about distinctions between filmmakers and their attitudes toward reality, see Ogle 1985; Dyer 1985; Mitry 1963; Monaco 1981, pp. 344-49; and Braudy 1976).

Realists are those who approach film as a medium for reflecting “real life,” either as it objectively exists or as it is reflected in the minds of the film’s heroes (Italian neorealist movies of the 1940s are perhaps the best examples of realist movies). Creators of representational movies, with their emphasis on the crucial role of the authors’ perceptions of the world, are slightly further away from the goal of total realism than are the realists.

Formalists, by comparison, try to present the world in a manner free of the constraints of objective reality, although they do so under different rubrics (e.g., entertainment, surrealism, expressionism, escapism, and propaganda).¹ Included in the formalist category are advocates of “pure” social realism in Soviet films and the creators of the prescriptive “political films” found in the Third World and in Western countries. Although films by formalists always reflect the objective world to a certain extent, decoding these films is often, although not always, an unfulfilling exercise (see, for instance, the analysis of utopian and realistic elements in Richard Dyer’s article about American entertainment movies; Dyer 1985).²

The idea of reality on which the analysis in this book is based is now in disfavor among social scientists. Contemporary American social literature generally avoids the concept of objective reality, attacking it from the standpoint of relativism.

The trend toward cognitive relativism emerged as a reaction against naive materialism and under the impact of various social and intellectual trends in Western society after the Second World War. This relativism was nurtured by very disparate intellectual schools of thought, such as existentialism, with its focus on the individual’s choices, and Marxism, with its preoccupation with the impact of social environment on the human mind and the altering of reality through revolutionary praxis.

American radical ideology, as it was shaped in the 1960s, also encouraged relativism. It focused on the rights of minorities, multicultural diversity, the sovereignty of the individual, and everyone’s right to claim to possess the truth and highly developed values.

Phenomenology in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and ethnomethodology was also important in the promotion of relativism in the perception of reality. It blurred the borders between “hard reality” and “subjective reality,” contending that people themselves construct the world in which they live and interact with other people. The trend toward relativism in sociology and psychology reflects a broader trend in the social sciences, the arts, and other areas of society toward the relativization of beliefs and values.

It is noteworthy that the postmodernist trend in epistemology is nearly identical to the Marxist class approach in social science, literature, and the arts that the Soviet political elite enforced with the full power of the Soviet state’s oppressive apparatus. The class approach resolutely rejected the possibility of a single objective picture of the world: There were both “bourgeois” and “socialist” visions. Adherents of the class approach found terms such as objectivity and objectivism as naive and misguided as do contemporary postmodernists [compare the Soviet definition of objectivism in Prokhorov (1983, p. 911) with that of Anderson (1990, pp. 60-64)]. Given the centrality of the class approach to Marxism, it is no surprise that the rejection of relativism and of values imposed by the class approach was one of Gorbachev’s major achievements during the glasnost era.

Two fashionable intellectual trends—structuralism and deconstructionism—made their own special contributions to cognitive relativism. Structuralism suggests that different structures—material or mental—produce different visions of the world, each of which can claim validity. For example, Kuhn (1970) did this with his theory of scientific paradigms. In its turn, deconstruction, with its attacks against “essentialism” [e.g., the idea of truth, the illusions of objectivity, the privileged reading (the dominant interpretation of novels or movies imposed by power relations)], posits that artistic and literary works send different messages whose interpretation depends on individuals and the social context in which they find themselves (Foucault 1977; Derrida 1981; Ellis 1989, pp. 67-96).

As relativistic views gained favor, social phenomena and the social construction of reality by lay people and scholars became the major preoccupation of those interested in epistemological issues. Terms such as reality, objective reality, and the objective world disappeared from publications in social science, and no such terms appear in the indexes of recent prestigious publications (see, for example, Coleman 1990; Smelser 1989; see also Lindzey and Aronson 1985). However, in emphasizing the numerous social factors that influence human perception, many modern authors of epistemological publications have disregarded purely cognitive processes, that is, those cognitive skills that operate relatively free from the influences of external variables (see, for example, Berger and Luckmann 1966).

Yet, in everyday life, as well as in the arts and sciences, most people implicitly follow some concept of reality and objectivity: Comparing available information with objective reality is an inherent aspect of human activity. Such comparisons are made when an individual contrasts the reality of goods or services as they are portrayed in the mass media to the way the goods and services are actually delivered in real life—in the individual’s objective reality. Comparing the various realities presented by the prosecution and the defense with objective reality is the core duty of a jury. Psychiatrists and psychologists attempt to help their patients differentiate between their own personal realities and objective reality.

Similarly, movie and literature critics, as well as laypeople, spend considerable time comparing what they have seen or read to objective reality. For example, Norman Denzin, in his analysis of alcoholism in American cinema (despite his flirtation with deconstruction), contends that “alcoholism films do not faithfully reproduce reality,” and agreeing with R. Steudler he suggests that “a film ‘screens’ and frames reality to fit particular ideological, or distorted images of ‘real’ social relationship.” He also claims that “sociological analysis must uncover the ideological distortions that are embedded within any film’s text.” Furthermore, he (using deconstruction terminology) opposes his “realistic reading” to Hall’s “hegemonic and negotiated readings,” even if he is ready to use “subversive reading” as an alternative interpretation of the text (Denzin 1991, pp. 9-10; see also Hall 1980; Steudler 1987, p. 46; Grossberg 1988, p. 67). Similar debates have raged about the objectivity of recent movies such as Oliver Stone’s JFK (1992) and Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991). (See also Gore Vidal’s book [Screening History 1992] about the reflection of history in American movies.)

Objective reality is also used as a benchmark when historians assess the value of a particular source of information—whether it is the famous Middle Ages penal code, the so-called Barbarian Laws, or material from contemporary mass media. Quantitative sociologists make judgments regarding objective reality when they evaluate the extent to which the results published by one of their peers accurately reflect life in a given society. And recall the controversy surrounding Coleman’s book (1983) on public and private schools, in which he was accused of distorting objective reality.

Finally, when people select sources of information, they trust or distrust these sources depending on how well the sources compare to their conceptions of “mundane reality,” a term used by social psychologists (Aronson and Lindzey 1968). Mass media surveys abound with questions asking respondents to evaluate the objectivity of various sources of information, particularly individual sources from the mass media—newspapers, television, etc. (Schuman 1981).

Despite any caveats or protestations to the contrary, all of these examples suggest that people operate with an idea of “what really happened,” to borrow the phrase of Leopold Ranke, the nineteenth-century German historian. We will use our idea of what really happened when examining the impact of ideology on Soviet movies, and assessing their importance as a source of information about Soviet society.

THE CONCEPT OF REALITY IN THIS BOOK

In analyzing Soviet movies, we will follow the materialist tradition in epistemology and differentiate between real and subjective reality in the following ways. Objective or ontological reality is the objective world faced by all people and institutions. Subjective reality is the reflection or representation of objective reality held in the psyches and documents of those same people and institutions.

This approach differs from the concept of objective and subjective reality proposed by Berger and Luckmann, who argue that objective reality is the image of the world accepted in a given social milieu and used as the basis for socialization and resocialization (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Our approach more closely matches that of Quinney, who argues that objective social reality is that with which people are prësented, even if they then act to change reality in various ways (Quinney 1982, p. 46).

We maintain that there exists only one ontological, objective reality, the Kantian reality “for itself,” which cannot be fully grasped by the human being. This implicit assumption is made, in fact, by all social actors—there exist as many subjective realities as there are individuals and institutions that hold perceptions of the world. As such, it is only by using a typology of social actors and their realities that we can reduce their numbers to a level conducive to analysis. Our approach includes the following five types, or classes, of reality:

1. 1. Ontological, Kantian reality—objectively existing or objective reality.
2. 2. Individual reality—ontological reality as reflected in individual psyches.
3. 3. Institutional reality—reality as created by social institutions (especially the mass media and educational, religious, and political institutions).
4. 4. Artistic reality—reality as it is created in literature and the arts.
5. 5. Scientific reality—reality as it is created through the use of current scientific methods.

All these realities interact with each other at the phenomenological as well as ontological levels. The individual’s perception of the world is shaped under the influence of institutional and artistic, especially cinema, realities, not to mention the impact of the perceptions of other individuals. Of course, institutional, artistic, and even scientific realities also bear the impact of other realities. What is more, the interaction between subjective realities directly affects the material world since individuals, groups, and institutions change their behavior under their perceptions of the world.

The interaction between the realities mentioned above is quite extensive, and is of crucial importance for this book. In examining this interaction, it is reasonable to make a distinction between consumers and producers of various subjective realities (about this distinction, see Anderson 1990, p. 9).

Individuals are, for the most part, consumers of realities produced by social institutions, figures in literature and the arts, and, to a limited degree, scholars. Individuals are especially susceptible to the influence of outside, subjective realities in facets of their lives that are be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• About the Authors
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Theoretical and Historical Introduction
• Part II Soviet Movies in the Revolutionary Period (1918–1928): Cordial Acceptance of Official Ideology
• Part III Movies During Stalin’s Time: Total Submission to the Official Ideology
• Part IV The Game with Official Ideology
• Part V Soviet Cinematographers Reject Official Ideology: Cinema during the Last Years of the Soviet Empire
• References
• Illustrations
• Filmography
• Director List
• Index