| This dissertation offers an account of the stylistic changes that took place in Soviet filmmaking from the late twenties through the early thirties. At the 1928 First All-Union Party Conference on Cinema, the Soviet film industry was called upon to focus more rigorously on its ideological mission. By the 1935 All-Union Creative Conference of Workers in Soviet Cinema, the film industry had formally adopted Socialist Realism as its singular filmmaking practice. This study examines the range of cinematic experimentation during these transitional years that encompass the First Five-Year Plan and Second Five-Year Plan. Specific attention is paid to both developments in cinematic form and content and the critical discourse surrounding such experimentation, as well as the uneasy relationship between filmmakers, the film industry, and the Bolshevik Party.; The films included in this study are My Grandmother (Kote Mikaberidze, 1929), Golden Mountains (Sergei Iutkevich, 1931), Road to Life (Nikolai Ekk, 1931), Deserter (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1933), Chapaev (Georgii Vasiliev & Sergei Vasiliev, 1934), Youth of Maksim (Grigorii Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg, 1934/1935), and Jolly Fellows (Grigorii Aleksandrov, 1934). This variety of films helps to detail the wide range of experimentation undertaken as filmmakers grappled with issues of form and content and demonstrates an increasing mutual influence between the rival factions of popular cinema and Soviet Montage. Socialist Realism would ultimately involve a precise appropriation of Soviet Montage techniques into the overall classical style used by popular cinema. |
