Soviet Musical Film Under Stalin
Unlike the musical films of Hollywood and Bollywood, popularly identified with escapism, the Soviet musical was first and foremost a form of propaganda. Vladimir Lenin said that cinema was “the most important of the arts.” His successor, Joseph Stalin, also recognized the power of cinema in efficiently spreading Communist Party doctrine. Films were widely popular in the 1920s, but it was foreign cinema that dominated the Soviet filmgoing market. Films from Germany and the U.S. proved more entertaining than Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s historical dramas. By the 1930s it was clear that if the Soviet cinema was to compete with its Western counterparts, it would have to give audiences what they wanted: the glamour and fantasy they got from Hollywood. The musical film, which emerged in the 1930s embodied the ideal combination of entertainment and official ideology.
A struggle between laughter for laughter’s sake and entertainment with a clear ideological message would define the golden age of the Soviet musical of the 1930s and 1940s. Then-head of the film industry Boris Shumyatsky sought to emulate Hollywood’s conveyor belt method of production, going so far as to suggest the establishment of a Soviet Hollywood.
Read more about this topic: Musical Film
Famous quotes containing the words soviet, musical, film and/or stalin:
“So they lived. They didn’t sleep together, but they had children.”
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“If we cannot sing of faith and triumph, we will sing our despair. We will be that kind of bird. There are day owls, and there are night owls, and each is beautiful and even musical while about its business.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You should look straight at a film; that’s the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.”
—Werner Herzog (b. 1942)
“To choose one’s victims, to prepare one’s plan minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed ... there is nothing sweeter in the world.”
—Josef Stalin (1879–1953)