Lyudmila Nikolaevna Mazur,
Doctor of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor, Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin, Yekaterinburg, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Visualization of the Space of a Provincial Town in Soviet Feature Films of the 1930–1980s: Between the Future and the Past
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2022-5-2
The visualization of space in historical dynamics is one of the advantages of feature cinema as a historical source. Films allow us to see the environment (urban, rural, natural, industrial, etc.) in which the story unfolds. And it carries a significant semiotic load, filling with additional meanings the created images of time, place, characters, and events. The visualization of space is achieved by means of pavilion or field shooting, demonstrating a constructed or real landscape. The latter option is more preferable for historical interpretations, but the method of creating an image is not the most important thing, more important is the purpose and semantic load of the image. To what extent it can be defined as realistic, or futuristic, or vice versa, oriented to the past. This is the logic of visualization of the locus – it is temporal, i.e. immerses the viewer in the past, present or future. To analyze the visual images of the urban space of the province, the author uses the films “Make Noise, Little Toun” (1939, dir. N. Sadkovich); “Spring on Zarechnaya Street” (1956, dir. F. Mironer, M. Khutsiev); “Faryatyev’s Fantasies” (1979), dir. I. Averbakh; “Carnival” (1981, dir. T. Lioznova); “Train stop – two minutes” (1972, dir. A. Orlov, M. Zakharov). A feature of the selection of films for analysis is their comedy/melodramatic genre, which also leaves an imprint on the created images, mostly lyrical. The satirical image of a provincial town is presented in the film “City Zero” (1988, dir. K. Shakhnazarov), which absorbed the archetypal meanings of perceiving a provincial town as a temporary trap. In this regard, cinematic approaches to the visualization of the urban environment of a provincial city are of interest, used in feature films of different times – the Stalinist, Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, “perestroika”, differently tuned to the projection of the province. The films of the Stalin era are characterized by the desire to bring the future closer, the cinema of the 1950s–1960s is aimed at showing the “happy” present. The films of the 1970s–1980s are characterized by the perception of the province as a space of traditional culture, not deformed by urbanization. In the era of “perestroika” a provincial town acquires additional meanings of immersion in the bygone past, the guardian of which is the backward, dormant periphery, cut off from real life. Thus, at the end of the Soviet era, the image of a city-museum that has no future is born.
Publishing: 28/10/2022
The article has been received by the editor on 07/06/2022
How to cite: Mazur L.N. Visualization of the Space of a Provincial Town in Soviet Feature Films of the 1930–1980s: Between the Future and the Past // Historical Courier, 2022, No. 5 (25), pp. 21–39. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2022/ISTKURIER-2022-5-02.pdf]
The topic was supported by the grant of the Russian National Science Foundation No. 21‑18‑00418 “Small Town Museum: The Multiplicity of Memory Cultures (Historical and Sociological Research)”.
Links: Issue 5 2022
Keywords: sphere of labor; penal policy; forced labor; the Corrective-Labor Code of 1924; West Siberia