'Russian Americans' in Soviet Film: Cinematic Dialogues Between the Us and the USSR - Paperback

by Marina L. Levitina (Author), Birgit Beumers (Editor), Lilya Kaganovsky (Editor)

Certain aspects of American popular culture had a formative influence on early Soviet identity and aspirations. Traditionally, Soviet Russia and the United States between the 1920s and the 1940s are regarded as polar opposites on nearly every front. Yet American films and translated adventure fiction were warmly received in 1920s Russia and partly shaped ideals of the New Soviet Person into the 1940s. Cinema was crucial in propagating this new social hero. While open admiration of American film stars and heroes of literary fiction in the Soviet press was restricted from the late 1920s onwards, many positive heroes of Soviet Socialist Realist films in the 1930s and 1940s were partially a product of Soviet Americanism of the previous decade. Some of the new Soviet heroes in films of the 1930s and 1940s possessed traits noticeably evocative of the previously popular American film stars such as Douglas Fairbanks, Pearl White and Mary Pickford. Others cinematically represented the contemporary trope of the 'Russian American, ' an ideal worker exemplifying the Stalinist marriage of 'Russian revolutionary sweep' with 'American efficiency.

Author Biography

Marina Levitina teaches Russian Cinema and Russian Cultural Studies at Trinity College, University of Dublin. Her research interests include early Soviet cinema and culture, the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky and cinema and memory. She is also a documentary filmmaker.