Censorship, ideology, and style in Soviet cinema (original) (raw)
Related papers
Nelli Morozova on Censors, Censorship, and the Soviet Film Famine, 1948-52.pdf
SEER - Slavonic & East European Review, 2018
The late Stalin era constitutes the most overlooked period of Russian and Soviet cinema history, largely because of its reputation for extreme censorship and resulting artistic stagnation. This article examines the censorship machine that developed in these years, using the memoir of film editor/censor Nelli Morozova in partnership with official resolutions and other archival material to explore what the so-called death of Soviet film looked like from within. It provides an overview of how the bureaucracy of film censorship was restructured and examines how it operated in practice, from the everyday absurdities to the small acts of intrepidity that defined what was at that point the most intensive system of film censorship the world had ever seen.
2021
Fedorov, A. Record holders of the banned Soviet cinema (1951-1991) in the mirror of film criticism and viewers' opinions. Moscow: “Information for all”. 2021. 102 p. The monograph provides a wide panorama of the opinions of film critics and viewers about full-length feature Soviet films (1951-1991), which were banned for a long time (over five years) from being shown in cinemas and on television or stopped while filming. For higher education teachers, students, graduate students, researchers, film critics and historians, journalists, as well as a wide range of readers interested in the history of cinematography, the problems of cinema, film criticism and film sociology.
2023
The subject of Western cinematography was presented in a rather limited volume on the pages of the Soviet Screen magazine in 1957–1960. However, with the appointment of film critic Dmitry Pisarevsky (1912–1990) to the post of editor-in-chief the "thaw" tendencies in the Soviet screen led to a gradual increase in the number of materials about foreign cinema on the pages of the magazine (sometimes they took up to a third of the total volume of the issue). Increasingly, photographs of Western movie stars were published (in rare cases, even on color covers), neutrally or positively presented biographies of Hollywood and European actors and directors, articles about Western film weeks and international film festivals, reviews of Western films, etc. Although, no doubt, there were also ideologically biased materials in this magazine. Based on the content analysis (in the context of the historical, socio-cultural and political situation, etc.) of the texts published during the "thaw" period of the magazine Soviet Screen (1957–1968), the authors came to the conclusion that materials on the subject of Western cinema on this stage can be divided into the following genres: - ideologized articles emphasizing criticism of bourgeois cinema and its harmful influence on the audience; - articles on the history of Western cinema (as a rule, about the period of the Great Silent, with a minimum degree of ideologization); - biographies and creative portraits of Western actors and directors (often neutrally or positively evaluating these filmmakers); - interviews with Western filmmakers (here, as a rule, interlocutors were selected from among "progressive artists"); - reviews of Western films (positive in relation to most of the Soviet film distribution repertoire and often negative in relation to those movies that were considered ideologically harmful); - articles about international film festivals and weeks of foreign cinema in the USSR (with a clear division into "progressive" and "bourgeois" cinematography); - reviews of the current repertoire of Western national cinematographies (here, as a rule, criticism of bourgeois cinematography was also combined with a positive assessment of works and trends ideologically acceptable to the USSR); - short informational materials about events in Western cinema (from neutral reports to caustic feuilletons and "yellow" gossip).