Dobrenko, Evgeny. Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History. Museum of the Revolution

Dobrenko, Evgeny. Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History. Museum of the Revolution. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

Dobrenko looks at Stalinist cinema from two perspectives. First, as a political-aesthetic project to construct the narrative of history, to transform images of the past into coherent meanings to mobilize the Soviet audience (hence the production of history). Secondly, as a source for the same images of the past for the contemporary post-Soviet societies (hence museum of the revolution). Dobrenko then speculates why it is imagery that is important and not access to past realities which it might actually provide (but nobody cares). In Introduction, he speculates on the nature of cinematography, in a manner of Society of the Spectacle: Dobrenko quotes someone: “the man who sees and hears not because he has eyes and ears, but because he has at his disposal specific audiovisual systems . . . in fact finds himself at their disposal.” Particularly important is the fact that there’s no need in the knowledge of “true” reality: cinematography creates meanings on the basis of its own “grammar” and “morphology.”

“Stalin introduced a new temporality: the concluded future (a kind of future pluperfect).” Stalin introduced nothing: he just rode the wave. But still Dobrenko notes that the cultural temporality of the 1930s did change, but describes it somehow unclearly. And then he goes into metaphors which explain nothing: “It cannot be ruled out that necrosis is an essential feature of these societies. Be that as it may, too many tranquillisers, antidepressants and other psychotropic drugs are introduced into the social organism. Partly for this reason, societies based on terror are soon worn down. They produce much more history than they can consume. This surplus of history can be likened to high cholesterol levels, leading to atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease and premature ageing.”

Chapter 2. History with Biography

Biography is a way to transform experience into a narrative; it decreases the role of personal and increases the role of public/social, and it attacks (or, rather, suppresses into silence) alternative ways/versions of life writing. “The metagenre of Stalinist cinema was not the historical-revolutionary film (which reached its brief heyday in the mid-1930s) but precisely the biographical film.” He, consequently, argues that Soviet historical films invariably turned into biographies.

A link between choice of protagonists and foreign political conjuncture of the day. “The military-biographical film became the sole forum for the visualisation of the geopolitical fantasies and phobias of Stalinism.”

“Alexander Nevsky… begins with a striking attempt to distil myth into history, and ends with the distillation of history into myth.” Makes a link between historical construction of these figures through films and corresponding orders of the WWII. Moreover, in Stalin’s wartime addresses, nearly exclusively pre-revolutionary heroes are mentioned, and almost never post-1917, which drastically deepens historical time and changes temporality of the cultural order. Heroes of Stalinist cinematography are, consequently, quite specific: they are functions, they do not experience life, but are themselves a (political/ideological) experience to be consumed by spectators; in this way, Aleksandr Nevsky is not about a real historical figure, its protagonist is patriotism.

Dobrenko then focuses on changed interpretations of the Time of Troubles (from class struggle to anti-Polish struggle) and its visual representation in Minin i Pozharskii by Khanov. Monumental technique of film-making (personification of the famous monument of the Red Square). And a strong foreign political connection: “Minin and Pozharsky and Bogdan Khmelnitsky are above all anti-Polish films; their very origins and reception are impossible to understand outside the context of the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact and the rout of Poland in 1939.”

But he is still driven by the idea to prove “Russian nationalism” and blinded by this idea: Bogdan Khmelnitsky is about the Ukrainian nation, not Russian, and still he insists: “Poland turned out to be guilty before the Russian people, whatever the circumstances.”

Sometimes his argument is not supported by any evidence at all: “Bogdan Khmelnitsky is not only a story of the history of a ‘fraternal people’; it is also a Ukrainian national epic, and in this capacity the film relied on the tradition of Ukrainian poetic cinema and Ukrainian romantic literature already formed by that time.” Because in the next paragraph, he writes of the use of preceeding tradition of Russian court culture: “The scenes in which Khmelnitsky acts are as if cribbed from the crowd scenes of Russian ‘epic operas’.”

Suvorov is another part of this series of heroic movies. However, another question arises as to what degree all elements of the composition of these movies can be explained through their paradigmatic placement, as in this case: “This army resembles the Soviet army, and Suvorov is transformed into a Chapaev of the seventeenth century. Thus occurred the final rejection of the model set out in Alexander Nevsky.”