Maria Belodubrovskaya
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781501709944
- eISBN:
- 9781501713804
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501709944.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Not According to Plan is a history of Soviet filmmaking under Stalin (1930–1953). It addresses why the Stalin regime failed to construct a controlled propaganda cinema despite explicit intention to ...
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Not According to Plan is a history of Soviet filmmaking under Stalin (1930–1953). It addresses why the Stalin regime failed to construct a controlled propaganda cinema despite explicit intention to do so. Using new archival evidence, Belodubrovskaya shows that the Stalinist state was unsuccessful because its ideological ambitions undermined institutional reform and development. When choosing between the short-term goal of making film “masterpieces” and longer-term industrialization targeting mass production, Stalin and his policymakers consistently selected the former. The preference for quality films and Stalin’s intolerance of imperfection reinforced an artisanal, director-centered mode of production; exacerbated planning, screenwriting, and censorship dysfunction; created an entitled artistic workforce; and ultimately closed the door to a mass propaganda cinema. Not According to Plan challenges the notion that Stalin had authority over the arts and suggests that ideological control collapses in environments where artistry is rewarded.Less
Not According to Plan is a history of Soviet filmmaking under Stalin (1930–1953). It addresses why the Stalin regime failed to construct a controlled propaganda cinema despite explicit intention to do so. Using new archival evidence, Belodubrovskaya shows that the Stalinist state was unsuccessful because its ideological ambitions undermined institutional reform and development. When choosing between the short-term goal of making film “masterpieces” and longer-term industrialization targeting mass production, Stalin and his policymakers consistently selected the former. The preference for quality films and Stalin’s intolerance of imperfection reinforced an artisanal, director-centered mode of production; exacerbated planning, screenwriting, and censorship dysfunction; created an entitled artistic workforce; and ultimately closed the door to a mass propaganda cinema. Not According to Plan challenges the notion that Stalin had authority over the arts and suggests that ideological control collapses in environments where artistry is rewarded.
Carol Margaret Davison
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781784992699
- eISBN:
- 9781526124050
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784992699.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Taking as its point of focus E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a cinematic mise-en-abîme homage to, and a self-referential twenty-first century commentary on F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, ...
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Taking as its point of focus E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a cinematic mise-en-abîme homage to, and a self-referential twenty-first century commentary on F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, this essay examines vampire cinema as an emblem of ‘technological necromancy’ that mediates our ambivalent responses to modernity, its proliferating technologies, and death in the wake of the secularising Enlightenment whose driving ideal – rational empiricism – undermined long established Christian certainties about the existence and nature of a soul and an afterlife. This essay reads Shadow as a compelling and sedimented, twenty-first century meditation on the nefarious, desensitizing impact of our cultural addiction to visual technologies, in which the vampire is used to mirror its audience. Shadow is also assessed as an interrogation of the gender and racial politics of cinematic spectatorship – particularly the influence and impact of pornography and propaganda cinema.Less
Taking as its point of focus E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a cinematic mise-en-abîme homage to, and a self-referential twenty-first century commentary on F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, this essay examines vampire cinema as an emblem of ‘technological necromancy’ that mediates our ambivalent responses to modernity, its proliferating technologies, and death in the wake of the secularising Enlightenment whose driving ideal – rational empiricism – undermined long established Christian certainties about the existence and nature of a soul and an afterlife. This essay reads Shadow as a compelling and sedimented, twenty-first century meditation on the nefarious, desensitizing impact of our cultural addiction to visual technologies, in which the vampire is used to mirror its audience. Shadow is also assessed as an interrogation of the gender and racial politics of cinematic spectatorship – particularly the influence and impact of pornography and propaganda cinema.
