Widdis, Emma. Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War.

Widdis, Emma. Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Emma Widdis’s (Cambridge) agenda is to understand the history of Sovietness (in particular, of Soviet identity) through the ways the Soviet power organized its space (imaginary geographies), using empirical evidence from feature films and documentaries, as well as popular journalism, avant-garde aesthetics, and architectural projects. Importance of the production of map: transformation of (unknown) space into (known and conquered) territory. Tensions in terms of visions of territorial composition of the USSR: contesting visions (esp. between center and periphery). Since there (always) is a strong relationship between the questions of national territory and of national identity, “mapping” of the Soviet state turned out to be a key to the forging of new revolutionary Soviet (non-national) identity. 1920s and early 1930s as period of experiments with different forms of spatial organization in cultural production; by the late 1930s – “the imaginary map of High Stalinism pictured an immobile space, hierarchically organized around a dominant centre from which lines of influence extended radially, and the relationship between centre and periphery encoded relations of power” (8). Osvoieniie as creation of dominated space (in terms of Henri Lefebvre).

In chapter 1, Widdis discusses transformations of the Soviet infrastructure, focusing on the electrification of Russian region and creation of new industrial objects during the two first Five-Year Plans. In chapter 2, Widdis explores the poetics of the early Soviet cinematography (esp. the techniques of montage) to understand what kind of geography was created by cinematographic means. Chapter 3 starts with a study of urban representations in the Soviet cinematography (the Soviet city of the 1920s as “urban chaos” and as decentered space) and private space as a safe haven from it. Chapter 4 looks at how cinematography and cartography was used to explore and represent the Soviet periphery and make it part of the new Soviet territory.  Chapter 5 explores visual representations of travel (aerial shots as “mapping,” while train travel as “experience”). By the early 1930s travel-as-exploration transforms into travel-as-tourism as part of a wider change in representational strategies of the Soviet space. Chapter 6 focuses on the grand shift of the 1930s: “the Soviet Union began to represent a world in itself. The space that during the 1920s was implicitly unbounded – always on the point of transition into the global workers’ International – was transformed into a self-contained and bounded space” (143). Border guard as a new hero. Soviet world depicted (from ever-changing) as static and eternal – example of Rodchenko’s photography between 1920s and 1930s. Moscow re-emerges as the focus and “folklorization” of the Soviet village.