Scholars of film and cultural studies have extensively documented the aesthetic revolutions of postwar cinema. As European economies recovered from the devastation of World War II, bringing major social and cultural shifts in the following decades, film industries underwent their own processes of modernization. Traditionally, scholarship has focused on the formal and thematic innovations of postwar cinematic movements, beginning with the Italian neorealists, and including various New Waves across Europe and beyond: France, Germany, the UK, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, to name some of the best known. Studies of postwar cinema have tended to emphasize the names of individual director-auteurs that have become metonyms for their respective movements, like Godard, Antonioni, or Fellini.
As much as these movements expressed themselves through the creative talents of individuals and groups of filmmakers, they were just as vitally underpinned by large-scale restructuring of the infrastructures of film production and distribution. Such infrastructural factors, however, tend to be minimized in studies of the New Waves, mentioned merely as a footnote, a precondition of the ‘real’ revolution, which was formal, aesthetic, and often political. Information about logistical and organizational shifts in postwar cinema is currently dispersed across a variety of sources that take up other primary analyses, interwoven haphazardly and anecdotally within the primary scholarly narrative. While many studies of postwar Europe center the well known infrastructural revolutions of this era, such as housing, transportation, and European economic integration, there are no resources to date devoted to a systematic study of postwar cinematic infrastructure—no resources that take a critical infrastructure studies approach to postwar cinema. And yet, one could argue that the postwar cinematic revolution was infrastructural fundamentally, not incidentally.
This post, as part of a longer series, sets out in the direction of a critical infrastructure studies approach to postwar film in Europe. In particular, this post will focus on the shifting infrastructures of cinema in the post-war USSR, which provided the foundations for a distinctive Soviet “Thaw cinema” to emerge in the 1950s and 60s.
Soviet film and infrastructural approaches
In scholarship on Soviet cinema, infrastructural factors tend to be more prominent than in corresponding scholarship on Western European cinema (though Hollywood’s post-war reforms are well documented). The reason for this lies in the more obvious and prominent connection between the cinematic industry and government bureaucracy in the USSR. Being a state-socialist totalitarian regime, the Soviet government exercised tight control over its creative industries, which were considered an integral part of the planned economy. Thus scholars researching cinema in the USSR necessarily center government policies, institutions, and often individual political figures, which often leads directly to discussion of the role of bureaucracy in facilitating, constricting or directing cinematic production by infrastructural means: providing training, access to facilities and equipment, organizing the production process, approving (or not) distribution in particular national circuits, building subsidized movie theaters, regulating imports and exports, etc. Moreover, the (sometimes overdetermined) understanding of Soviet cinema as a socialist state cinema (rather than an individual, ‘auteur’ cinema, or a commercial cinema, or even a national cinema), necessarily filtered through many layers of official channels on its way to movie screens, makes analysis of Soviet films tend to favor bureaucratic, institutional, and infrastructural readings. This is largely in contrast to Western European cinema of this time, which tends to be read as the expression of a single ‘auteur,’ an expression of an independent aesthetic/ political/ ideological movement. Though often inflected with national characteristics, favored readings tend towards the consolidation of a transnational ‘art cinema’ language and style.
It’s true that the Soviet government was highly invested in cinema as a political technology, though this fact should not be used to sequester Soviet cinema from the broader history of European cinema in the twentieth century—in fact, the aesthetic trends and technological and institutional forces behind them were more similar than different.
For the Communist Party, the development of an ideologically proper popular culture was a fundamental part of the state’s goal of creating communism; artists and cultural producers were charged with the vital task of creating enlightened socialist subjects. In this task, film was granted an outsized role from the country’s inception. As Lenin famously proclaimed, cinema was to be regarded as the “most important of the arts,” a powerfully immersive, highly entertaining, and widely accessible art form which could spread communist ideology to the masses. Indeed, short agitprop (agitational propaganda) films were a staple of the Red Army’s propaganda technique during the Revolution and Civil War. Trains would carry these films to remote areas of the country, where they could ‘educate’ largely illiterate people to encourage them to support the Bolshevik cause.
After the revolution came the well-known period of revolutionary experimentation in the 1920s, when now-canonical films like Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929) pioneered montage editing techniques. At the same time, many of the experimental techniques of the day came about in part as reactions to material and infrastructural constraints, namely the shortage of film stock in the USSR. By the early 1930s, with Stalin’s consolidation of power, the cultural industries were wrested under tight Party control.
Socialist realism was proclaimed the official artistic method in 1934. Like Lenin, Stalin took a particular interest in film; he insisted on being involved in every step of the production process, screened all films carefully before release, and maintained close personal contact with filmmakers working in the industry. This meant that film was prominently affected by the dictator’s repressive and increasingly paranoid impulses. By the end of Stalin’s rule, in the late 1940s and early 50s, film production had fallen drastically, largely as a result of his increasingly restrictive oversight. Thus, ‘safe’ thematic content had shrunk to a repertoire of films that glorified thinly veiled Stalinesque figures in historical biopics, many dramatizing Soviet victory and heroism in World War II.
Stalin’s death in 1953 set in motion a period of chaos, confusion, reckoning, and eventually cautious liberalization, which gave the post-Stalin period its colloquial name of the “Thaw.” Unsurprisingly, cinema had a large share in the cultural renaissance of the period. Many studies have taken up various facets of Thaw cinema, and most devote significant space to the bureaucratic changes that allowed cinema to flourish. Fewer, however, examine infrastructural changes systematically or in detail; a fuller picture emerges only by carefully surveying multiple sources.
In the rest of the post, I will survey the infrastructural changes set in motion in the years following Stalin’s death, which allowed for the expansion and transformation of Thaw cinema. Though film production directly responded to shifting Party rhetoric, this post will focus on policies, decisions, and trends with an explicit material or operational component, such as reorganizing the film production process, or renovating or expanding the physical spaces, technologies, or staffing capacities of film studios and theaters. I rely mainly on published research in English (and some in Russian), as well as select web resources. Unfortunately, finding exact statistics has not always been straightforward; wherever desirable details are missing, I have flagged the topic and indicated, when possible, areas of further investigation and possible resources. At the end of the post, there is a bibliography of sources, as well as further reading regarding Soviet and Eastern European film infrastructures. By isolating and compiling this information, I hope to lay the groundwork for further studies that take a critical infrastructure studies approach to this period, both within the USSR and comparatively.
Soviet Film production from Stalin to Khruschev: 1953-60
The production process
Broadly, after Stalin’s death, film production increased drastically, as demand rose. At the same time, censorship lessened, partly per new Party policy, but partly as an infrastructural effect: the existing censorship apparatus was not equipped to oversee the volume of films produced to meet official demands.
Famously, by the end of Stalin’s reign, film production stagnated, with less than ten feature films released in 1951 (Woll 4). Production fell during WWII, as in other countries, but failed to recover even when the material conditions were restored. A painstaking process of government oversight, spearheaded by Stalin himself, meant that very few films obtained approval to shoot, and even fewer released. The model was both unprofitable and had questionable ideological effects; as a result, the majority of film releases in the post-war period were foreign, including many “trophy films” captured by the Red Army during its WWII campaign, which became hugely popular.
After Stalin’s rise to power, film production in the USSR was a top-down process—and largely remained so even after his death, though not without significant changes. After 1934, studios received plans from the Ministry of Cinema detailing the number of films to be made, broken down by topic and genre (Woll 4). By the time of Stalin’s death, the Ministry of Cinema had about twelve studios under its jurisdiction, and two years later, in 1955, it still reported directly to the Party Central Committee (Woll 8). After several name changes, in 1963, Goskino was reestablished, the original Soviet government body for cinema. Despite changes in title, Goskino retained control over all studios in the USSR: the major studios for features, Mosfilm, Lenfilm, and Gorky Studios; the studios of the national republics; studios that made documentaries, educational films, popular science films, cartoons and children’s films (Woll 6).
As Josephine Woll and other scholars have noted, Goskino in all its various incarnations retained close ties with high-ranking Party members; film industry bureaucrats often had connections to, or had previously served on, the Party Central Committee, or even the KGB (6). Within the organization, individual departments managed distribution and advertising, and in the post-Stalin period, new departments were formed to oversee international markets—film exports and imports, co-production, and dubbing foreign films—as well as film festivals and press conferences (Woll 6).
Lenfilm studio in St. Petersburg, Russia. Photographed in 2015. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Galina Gornostaeva has described this structure as a multi-tiered network of “patron-client relationships,” in which access to resources and opportunities became increasingly dependent on individual relationships in the post-Stalin period (41). Goskino, as representative of the central government, acted as patron, producer, financier, distributor and exhibitor; in the 1960s, it operated seven plants for producing copies of films, 158 distribution centers, and 155,000 projection cameras (Gornostaeva 42). Goskino also set the rules for exhibition, setting ticket prices and the wholesale costs of film copies.
The next tiers consisted of the film studios, the clients of the state that oversaw production, provided patronage to film crews, and housed the majority of the “material means of film production”—resources that individuals needed economically and socially to make films (Gornostaeva 42). Within the studio, film units were directly responsible for production; headed by a leading director, they included other professionals like assistant directors, scriptwriters, camera operators, actors, scenic artists, costume makers, builders, and post-production specialists (Gornostaeva 42).
Within each studio, procedures for approving and producing new films were highly systematized. First, a “Script Board” read and evaluated drafts of potential scripts produced by writers. The script then passed to an artistic council, including directors, editors, writers, and others involved in a film’s production, which discussed and approved scripts internally. Each script was also externally approved by the Ministry of Cinema, Goskino, or the equivalent government organization. Once approved, film units (also called creative units) made the films; screen tests and rushes (also called dailies) were assessed by a team of critics, writers, actors, camera operators and other creative professionals, along with at least one Party representative (Woll 6). Internal studio newspapers reported on these discussions.
Censorship was concentrated at the script phase, for several reasons and with several effects. Firstly, Soviet film since Stalin’s time privileged the script, being the narrative and semantic component of the film, as “formalism” (understood as any sort of aesthetic experimentation or individuality, deviating from accepted ‘socialist realist’ style) was forbidden. Thus, the film’s content was considered to be fully present and contained within the script phase, and post-production would have no effect on meaning. From a more practical perspective, filtering scripts meant intervening at the earliest phase of a project, before time and resources could be wasted on an ideologically unsound project that would have to be intensively revised or even shelved—although this also happened. During the Thaw, the script-centrism of Soviet film bureaucracy ironically allowed for more formal experimentation. Cinematic innovation and experimentation took place largely off the page, in non-verbal, non-narrative components that could nonetheless convey strong emotional and even semantic content, like setting, lighting, editing, and actors’ movements, mannerism, and tones (this argument had been made by Lida Oukaderova in The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw: Space, Materiality, Movement, 2017).
Once completed and approved in its final cut, a film would receive a classification category, which determined the number of copies authorized, whether these would be made in color or black and white. Individual municipalities and republics could decide whether to accept films for local distribution, providing for a small degree of decentralization at the distribution stage (Woll 6).
On the surface, this production process did not change significantly in the transition between Stalin and Khrushchev. However, shifts within and beyond the production structure can help account for the cinematic Thaw of late 1950s and 60s.
Who’s in charge?
In part, individual actors played an outsized role in changing production patterns and film aesthetics. As Woll notes, filmmakers replaced bureaucrats in key positions within the system, even as the system itself remained. For instance, Ivan Pyrev, a renowned director of the Stalin period, became the director of Mosfilm, the largest studio in the USSR, in 1954, the year after Stalin’s death. A polarizing personality but highly effective figure, Pyrev applied his skill and experience with maneuvering in the network to champion projects and filmmakers that he believed in, including a young generation graduating from the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), the oldest and most prestigious film school in the USSR, located in Moscow.
Just as significantly, Pyrev was closely involved in organizing the Cinematographers’ Union in the late 1950s and early 60s. Unlike the Musicians’ or Writers’ Unions, which were created by government decree, the Cinematographers’ Union was formed gradually, through passionate, bottom-up organizing by industry professionals. Even before it was officially recognized in 1965, the Union increased film industry professionals’ autonomy by providing a space—literally, Vasil’evskaia Street no. 13 in Moscow—and a supportive professional network for filmmakers to discuss projects, rally around particular concepts and interpretations of ideology (which was notably in flux during this period), and advocate for their work as a united community that included highly respected and ideologically vetted veteran filmmakers like Pyrev (Dumančić 38).
Censorship vs. targets
In addition, as Dumančić notes, the censorship apparatus failed to keep pace with the rapid increase in film production after Stalin’s death—though the request to boost production came from the Central Committee. From single digits of feature films produced in 1951, by 1956, the film industry rebounded to 85 features (Dumančić 37). As Dumančić writes, “the Stalinist system had been designed to closely monitor the filming of no more than thirty ‘masterpieces,’ so the upsurge in production left the censorship apparatus ill-equipped to deal effectively with the avalanche of new projects” (37). However, the censorship apparatus reacted and gradually increased its ranks, from 70 employees at the Ministry of Culture’s central committee for the production of films in the early 1950s, to 400 employees at the Committee of Cinematography in 1963 (Dumančić 37). Still, this lag left an opening of about a half-decade when the government’s own film production targets far outstripped its own ability to closely supervise these films’ content.
For instance, the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 set ambitious target figures for film production, and committed financial resources (Woll 11) [Here, further research is required to determine the precise targets and financial resources committed, and if and how this was subsequently delivered]. Specific goals included the construction of new cinemas with a total seating capacity of 500,000; modernization of equipment; and increased authors’ fees allocated to filmmakers and scriptwriters (Woll 11). Further, the newly established Moscow International Film Festival would promise monetary prizes, rather than “administrative recognition,” to award-winning films in order to provide more appealing incentives for participation.
During the Thaw, Moscow and Leningrad remained central to Soviet film production, as the locations of not only the major studios but also other significant cinematic institutions, like VGIK, research institutes, and archives. However, film studios of the republics were also revived, most notably in Georgia and Ukraine.
Infrastructures of going to the movies
On the consumer side, film viewing was encouraged by the building and renovation of cinemas, as mentioned above, but also by a revival of the mass-media bi-weekly fan magazine, Sovetskii ekran (Soviet Screen), in 1957. With photographs of film celebrities, short, punchy pieces, and extremely popular audience choice surveys, the magazine encouraged film culture at a time when industries around the world were facing new competition from television. In the USSR, the golden age of cinema lasted until the late 1960s; in the 50s and 60s, the average Soviet citizen visited cinemas at least twice per month, and regular viewers attended about 35 films per year, roughly twice the rate of American audiences during the same period (Woll xii).
From an infrastructural standpoint, the continuing popularity of cinema could have many causes. First, perhaps counterintuitively, it was a relatively accessible form of entertainment and leisure. In 1960, only five percent of Soviet people had access to television. Films could be seen cheaply at ordinary movie theaters, as ticket prices were set and subsidized by Goskino, reflecting the government’s enduring commitment to cinema as support of its propagandistic, educational mission. Films could also be watched at “Palaces of Culture” operated by professional unions and other organizations, as well as at film clubs. Overall, film projections made up a large part of the cultural infrastructure of the USSR.
Additionally, it’s plausible that going to the movies was a particularly attractive leisure activity for many Soviet citizens of the Thaw period. The postwar housing crisis left many unhoused, and a decade into recovery, rapid construction had not met demand. The famous khrushchevski, prefabricated apartment buildings that provided many Soviet families with a private, individual apartment for the first time, began to go up in 1961, which meant that through the 1950s, and well into the 60s, millions were under-housed, living in cramped quarters, often in communal apartments. In these conditions, domestic space was not a desirable place for spending one’s leisure time. Nor was there an availability of affordable cafes or restaurants for social gatherings. Rather, children played outside in yards, teens and young adults went on strolls through the city with friends, which naturally led to the cinema. Shorter working hours implemented by the early 1960s afforded working people with more time for leisure, including cinema-going.
"Khrushchev house" in Minsk, Belarus (Klumava Street 27 or 25). Source: Homoatrox - Own work, Wikimedia Commons.
While this blog post has attempted to consolidate and interpret certain information available from easily accessible sources, many questions remain which require deeper research. In this study, I have not yet been able to consult non-digitized archival records, nor have I fully explored Russian-language resources available digitally. To continue a critical infrastructure approach to the study of postwar Soviet film, possible topics for further inquiry include:
Statistics on funding and other resources allocated to different USSR studios in the 1950s and 1960s
Numbers and distributions of cinemas across the USSR (a map would be highly desirable)
Statistics (and visual representations) of films produced and distributed across the USSR republics
Records of external relations: films sold for distribution abroad, films imported from abroad, dubbing practices, subtitles, alternative cuts
Locations of film productions: in-studio and on-site, as well as popular filming locations for various studios
Descriptions and images of working spaces inside of film studios
New film technologies developed and introduced to the USSR in the 1950s and 60s, their rates of adoption, as well as changes in editing procedures and techniques
Availability and price of supplies - cameras, film stock, etc.
Details of recruitment, selection, support and course plans for students of VGIK
Works Cited
Dumančić, Marko. Men out of focus: the Soviet masculinity crisis in the long sixties. U of Toronto Press, 2021.
Gornostaeva, Galina. “Soviet film-making under the ‘producership’ of the party state (1955–85).” Working in the Global Film and Television Industries: Creativity, Systems, Space, Patronage, edited by Andrew Dawson, Sean Holmes, Bloomsbury, 2012, pp. 39-56.
Oukaderova, Lida. The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw: Space, Materiality, Movement. Indiana UP, 2017.
Woll, Josephine. Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw. Bloomsbury, 1999.
Further reading
Beumers, Birgit. "Special/spatial effects in Soviet cinema." Russian Aviation, Space Flight and Visual Culture. Routledge, 2016. 187-206.
Discussion of camera as affecting perception - centering the material capabilities of the technological object
Clark, Katerina, and Evgeniĭ Aleksandrovich Dobrenko. Soviet Culture and Power: a history in documents, 1917-1953. Yale University Press, 2007.
This book examines Soviet cultural politics from the Revolution to Stalin’s death in 1953. Drawing on a wealth of newly released documents from the archives of the former Soviet Union, the book provides remarkable insight on relations between Gorky, Pasternak, Babel, Meyerhold, Shostakovich, Eisenstein, and many other intellectuals, and the Soviet leadership.
Faraday, George. Revolt of the Filmmakers: The Struggle for Artistic Autonomy and the Fall of the Soviet Film Industry. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.
Infrastructural approach to changes in Russian film after the fall of Soviet Union
Karpova, Yulia. Comradely objects: Design and material culture in Soviet Russia, 1960s–80s. Manchester University Press, 2020.
This book identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet design inherited from the avant-garde.
Material focus to culture - not about film
Koshkina, Vera. Radical Aesthetics and State Sponsorship in Soviet Cinema, 1960-1968. Diss. Harvard University, 2017.
Ideology + institutions + poetics/aesthetics
Dissertation
Kozlov, Denis, and Eleonory Gilburd. The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s. University of Toronto Press, 2013.
General perspectives - including infrastructural elements
Chapter on Thaw film in international perspective
Mikkonen, Simo, Giles Scott-Smith, and Jari Parkkinen, eds. Entangled East and West: cultural diplomacy and artistic interaction during the Cold War. Vol. 4. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2018.
It aims at providing an essentially European point of view on the cultural Cold War, providing fresh insight into little known connections and cooperation in different artistic fields. Chapters of the volume address photography and architecture, popular as well as classical music, theatre and film, and fine arts. By examining different actors ranging from individuals to organizations such as universities, the volume brings new perspective on the mechanisms and workings of the cultural Cold War.
No chapter on film
Miller, Jamie. "Soviet Cinema, 1929–41: The Development of Industry and Infrastructure." Europe-Asia Studies 58.1 (2006): 103-124.
Roth-Ey, Kristin Joy. Mass media and the remaking of Soviet culture, 1950s–1960s. Princeton University, 2003.
Dissertation
In this period, the Soviet regime was, for the first time in its history, materially capable of fulfilling its goal of making culture a part of daily life on a mass scale. What made this possible were major sociological shifts in the postwar era, such as mass urbanization, coupled with a vast expansion in the Soviet Union's cultural infrastructure. This dissertation explores the implications of the postwar mass-media explosion for the press, radio and television broadcasting, and popular cinema, and argues that it had the unintended consequence of transforming Soviet culture in both form and function.
Skopal, Pavel. "The Cinematic Shapes of the Socialist Modernity Programme: Ideological and economic parameters of cinema distribution in the Czech Lands, 1948–70 1." Cinema, Audiences and Modernity. Routledge, 2013. 81-98.
Nationalization of film
Vinogradova, Maria. "Scientists, punks, engineers and gurus: Soviet experimental film culture in the 1960s–1980s." Studies in Eastern European Cinema 7.1 (2016): 39-52.
Discusses two types of film studios - popular science and amateur - officially sanctioned types of film production more marginal to Soviet studio system
Vorontsov, Yuri and Igor Rachuk. The Phenomenon of the Soviet Cinema. Translated by Doris Bradbury. Progress Publishers, 1980.