Feeling Revolution: Cinema, Genre, and the Politics of Affect under Stalin

by Anna Toropova

Overview

Stalin-era cinema was designed to promote emotional and affective education. The filmmakers of the period were called to help forge the emotions and affects that befitted the New Soviet Person - ranging from happiness and victorious laughter, to hatred for enemies. Feeling Revolution shows how the Soviet film industry's efforts to find an emotionally resonant language that could speak to a mass audience came to centre on the development of a distinctively 'Soviet' cinema. Its case studies of specific film genres, including production films, comedies, thrillers, and melodramas, explore how the genre rules established by Western and prerevolutionary Russian cinema were reoriented to new emotional settings.

'Sovietising' audience emotions did not prove to be an easy feat. The tensions, frustrations, and missteps of this process are outlined in Feeling Revolution, with reference to a wide variety of primary sources, including the artistic council discussions of the Mosfil'm and Lenfil'm studios and the Ministry of Cinematography. Bringing the limitations of the Stalinist ideological project to light, Anna Toropova reveals cinema's capacity to contest the very emotional norms that it was entrusted with crafting.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198831099
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/08/2020
Series:	Emotions in History
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Anna Toropova, Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, University of Nottingham

Anna Toropova completed her PhD at University College London. Before taking up her current post as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, she held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the cinema, culture, and medical history of the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1953. She is the author of numerous articles on the emotional repertoire of Stalin-era cinema, early Soviet studies of spectators, and the interface of cinema, science, and medicine in revolutionary Russia.

Table of Contents

Introduction1. Emotional Education2. The Stalinist Film Comedy and the 'Problem' of Soviet Laughter3. Learning to Hate: Paranoia and Abjection in the Stalinist Thriller4. Manufacturing Happiness: The Production Drama and the Heroic Biography in the era of 'Care for the Person'5. Pathos, Powerlessness and the Persistence of the Melodramatic ModeEpilogue: Formless Feeling

Editorial Reviews

"Feeling Revolution reveals the inner workings of the Soviet film industry under Stalin, the stress on emotions represented onscreen and aroused among audiences, and the contradictions in trying to use cinema to cultivate "Soviet feelings"." — Stephen M. Norris, Russian Review

From the Publisher