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Western Cinematography on the Pages of the Soviet Cinema Screen Magazine: 1939–1941
Authors: Elena Kornienko, Andrei Novikov
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By 1939, the struggle for power in the “top” of the USSR was almost finished, with the “opposition” was over. The flywheel of repression began to noticeably decrease. Under these conditions, in 1939–1941, the Soviet government supported in high level of ideological control over cinema.
And although by the end of the 1930s there were no cultural and artistic “groups” in the USSR, and for many years a single “method of socialist realism” was prescribed for all cultural figures, the authorities still tried to tighten the screws on ideological pressure even more, reducing, for example, to minimize the import of foreign film production. That’s why July 19, 1939 Committee for Cinematography under the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR approved the “Regulations on the Directorate for Controlling the Film Repertoire” and the “Instructions on the Procedure for Controlling the Release, Distribution and Demonstration of Films”, where everything was subject to the strictest regulations.
It is clear that in such a situation, the Soviet Cinema Screen magazine, as an organ of the Committee for Cinematography under the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, had to obey strict party requirements. The share of materials about foreign cinema in the magazine has become almost negligible. Moreover, the vast majority of the issues of the magazine Soviet Cinema Screen of 1939–1941 were, in general, devoid of articles about Western films...
Therefore, based on the content analysis of texts published in the Soviet Cinema Screen magazine from 1939 to 1941, we came to the conclusion that practically the only genre of materials about Western cinema of this period was journalistic articles about (mainly) Hollywood cinema, ingenerally very negatively evaluating it and its ideological orientation.