Page 15 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

General editors’ preface

Cinema has been the predominant popular art form of the first half of the twentieth
century, at least in Europe and North America. Nowhere has this been more
apparent than in the Soviet Union, where Lenin’s remark that ‘of all the arts for us
cinema is the most important’ has become a cliché and where cinema attendances
today are still amongst the highest in the world. In the age of mass politics Soviet
cinema has developed from a fragile but effective tool to gain support among the
overwhelmingly illiterate peasant masses in the Civil War that followed the
October 1917 Revolution, through a welter of experimentation into a mass weapon
of propaganda through entertainment that shaped the public image of the Soviet
Union–both at home and abroad and for both elite and mass audiences–and
latterly into an instrument to expose the weaknesses of the past and present in the
twin processes of glasnost and perestroika.
Cinema’s central position in Soviet cultural history and its unique combination
of mass medium, art form and entertainment industry, have made it a continuing
battleground for conflicts of broader ideological and artistic significance, not only for
the Soviet Union but also for the world outside. The debates that raged in the
1920s about the relative revolutionary merits of documentary as opposed to fiction
film, of cinema as opposed to theatre or painting, or of the proper role of cinema in
the forging of post-Revolutionary Soviet culture and the shaping of the new Soviet
man, have their echoes in current discussions about the role of cinema vis-à-vis other
art forms in effecting the cultural and psychological revolution necessitated by the
process of the economic and political transformation of the Soviet Union into a
modern democratic and industrial society and a state governed by the rule of law.
Cinema’s central position has also made it a vital instrument for scrutinising the
blank pages of Soviet history and enabling the present generation to come to
terms with its own past.
This series of books will examine Soviet films in the context of Soviet cinema,
and Soviet cinema in the context of the political and cultural history of both the
Soviet Union and the world at large. Within that framework the series, drawing its
authors from both East and West, will cover a wide variety of topics and employ a
broad range of methodological approaches and presentational formats. Inevitably
this will involve ploughing once again over familiar ground in order to re-examine
received opinions but it will principally mean increasing the breadth and depth of