Study Questions for October 16th

 

As background, a Stakhonovite is an extremely productive worker, someone who rises above the others on the factory floor through great feats or accomplishments in the workplace.  The term was coined after Stakhonov, a legendary Ukrainian coal miner, who one day in the early 30’s purportedly single-handedly met the collective’s daily goal of coal production and forever changed the technology that was employed at the coal face. 

 

A wrecker was a term that meant anyone who was secretly trying to disrupt the progress toward the perfect future.  He might be a saboteur, a foreign agent, a remnant of the old aristocracy, or a selfish, intransigent bureaucrat.  

Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, Chapter 8

 

  1. What was socialist realism attempting to portray?  In what ways was the portrayal real?  In what ways not?  Why did practitioners of socialist realism reject “pure entertainment”?

 

  1. Katerina Clark describes the typical socialist realist novel as a Bildingsroman?  What does this term mean? 

 

  1. According to the author, who are the three main characters of every socialist realist work?  How do they interact with each other? 

 

  1. What role did irony and ambiguity play in socialist realism?  Why?  How did socialist realism affect the retelling of historical stories? 

 

  1. Why was the Civil War such a popular setting for socialist realistic films?

 

  1. Besides virtuous workers, what other types of characters were often depicted as heroes in 1930’s Soviet films?  Why were these individuals compelling to audiences and party officials alike? 

 

  1. To what extent did the “age of denunciation” and the purges of the 1930s affect Soviet filmmaking?  Why were border guards often the subject of films during this time?

 

  1. What was the relationship between virtue and consciousness in a typical socialist realistic film? 

 

  1. Why was it difficult for Soviet filmmakers to make a hero seem life-like?  Why was it perhaps even more difficult to make a negative hero believable?  Why was there rarely any dramatic tension between the two?

 

  1. In what ways was Chapaev the quintessential social realistic hero?  Why was he allowed to have faults?

 

  1. As depicted in The Shining Path, what requirements must be met for a love story to exist in socialist realism?  What role does a hero’s domestic or personal life play in his heroic quest?

 

Maria Enzenberger, “We were born to turn a fairy tale into reality”: Grigori Alexandrov’s The Radiant Path

 

1.      How does the role or image of the Stakhonovite support Communist ideology?  How does it subvert it?

 

2.      What is the powerful myth or fairy tale that serves as the basis of the story in the Russian film, The Shining Path?

 

3.      How is Utopia depicted in Western musicals?  How is it depicted in Soviet musicals? Why do you think the depictions are different?

 

4.      What are the sources of a woman’s sexual attraction in a Soviet musical?  How is her domestic world depicted?   What does a male hero have to do to win his heroine’s heart?   Who become her surrogate parents?   What replaces the traditional family? Do the answers to all of these questions tell us something about Soviet society or at least Soviet society as the regime’s filmmakers were told to portray it?

 

5.      Do female characters face a “glass ceiling” in Soviet films?

 

6.      Why were Stalinist musicals popular with workers?  What role does the factory play in these stories?  Why is the “maid” a popular character in Soviet film? 

 

7.      Does Tanya’s character change during the film?  Why or why not?

 

8.      What is the relationship between personal and communal life in Soviet film in the ‘30s?  What role did romance and marriage play?

 

9.      Do you think The Shining Path depict reality or a fairy tale?

 

10.  What is the Stakhonovite movement? Why does the author contend that it provided a marvelous basis for a reconciliation between Capitalist and Socialist ethics? 

 

Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America , Chapter 11

 

  1. How did the economic conditions of the Great Depression affect the kinds of movies Hollywood filmmakers produced?

 

  1. How did the technical innovation of sound shape filmmaking and the content and settings of films?  What genres of film benefited most from the introduction of sound?

 

  1. In what ways did filmmakers use sound – from simple “noise” to music – to attract audiences to their movies?

 

  1. How did gangster films speak to broader concerns about social disorder and lawlessness?  Why do you think such films resonated with Depression Era audiences?

 

  1. Why did the humor of Mae West and the Marx Brothers appeal to a society whose institutions and traditional culture were in crisis?

 

  1. Why wasn’t Duck Soup one of the Marx Brothers’ bigger hits?  Why might audiences in 1933 not have been receptive to the film’s message?

 

  1. What distinguished the first 1930s “golden age” of film from the second 1930s “golden age”?

 

  1. What messages did the screwball comedies try to send to audiences?

 

  1. How did the second generation of filmmakers differ from the first generation?  How did their experiences and their self-image affect their approach to their craft?

 

 

Charles J. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, pp. 143-158

                           

  1. According to the author, what was “Chaplin’s dilemma” as he made the film Modern Times?  What forces were in conflict within him? Why was there a dilemma?

 

  1. What impact did Chaplin’s meeting with the Soviet film executive Boris Z. Shumiatsky have on the making of Modern Times and on Chaplin himself?

 

  1. How did the studio market Modern Times?  Why did the publicists pursue such a marketing strategy?

 

  1. Why does the author say that the opening title and the opening montage to Modern Times could both be considered politically ambiguous?

 

  1. How does Modern Times reflect leftist views of capitalism and the Depression as well as Victorian sensibilities and middle-class American values?  According to the author, which worldview seems to dominate the film?

 

  1. How did the Depression affect the questions movie critics asked about films?  Why do you think more conservative critics reacted differently to Modern Times than did liberal and leftist critics?

 

  1. What factors account for Modern Times not becoming a box office “blockbuster”?

 

 

Comparative Questions

 

  1. How did the environment in which Soviet filmmakers made movies differ from the environment in which US filmmakers worked?

 

  1. Obviously, politics played a major role in the Soviet filmmaking industry, but in what ways did politics also affect the industry in the US ?

 

  1. If “socialist realism” lent itself to mythmaking in the USSR , how did Hollywood also contribute to mythmaking in the 1930s?

 

  1. Should films attempt to give audiences a political message?  By making films explicitly “political,” do filmmakers inevitably have to make artistic compromises?

 

  1. Were the political and social messages in American films more potent than those in the more heavy-handed Soviet films?  Why or why not?