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
- 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”?
- Katerina Clark describes the typical socialist realist
novel as a Bildingsroman? What does this term mean?
- According
to the author, who are the three main characters of every socialist
realist work? How do they interact
with each other?
- What
role did irony and ambiguity play in socialist realism? Why?
How did socialist realism affect the retelling of historical
stories?
- Why
was the Civil War such a popular setting for socialist realistic films?
- 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?
- 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?
- What
was the relationship between virtue and consciousness in a typical
socialist realistic film?
- 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?
- In
what ways was Chapaev the quintessential social
realistic hero? Why was he allowed
to have faults?
- 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
- How did the
economic conditions of the Great Depression affect the kinds of movies Hollywood filmmakers produced?
- 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?
- In what ways
did filmmakers use sound – from simple “noise” to music – to attract
audiences to their movies?
- How did
gangster films speak to broader concerns about social disorder and
lawlessness? Why do you think such films resonated with Depression
Era audiences?
- Why did the
humor of Mae West and the Marx Brothers appeal to a society whose
institutions and traditional culture were in crisis?
- 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?
- What
distinguished the first 1930s “golden age” of film from the second 1930s
“golden age”?
- What messages
did the screwball comedies try to send to audiences?
- 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
- 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?
- 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?
- How
did the studio market Modern Times? Why did the publicists pursue such a
marketing strategy?
- Why
does the author say that the opening title and the opening montage to Modern Times could both be
considered politically ambiguous?
- 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?
- 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?
- What
factors account for Modern Times
not becoming a box office “blockbuster”?
Comparative Questions
- How did the
environment in which Soviet filmmakers made movies differ from the
environment in which US
filmmakers worked?
- Obviously,
politics played a major role in the Soviet filmmaking industry, but in
what ways did politics also affect the industry in the US ?
- If “socialist
realism” lent itself to mythmaking in the USSR ,
how did Hollywood
also contribute to mythmaking in the 1930s?
- Should films
attempt to give audiences a political message? By making films
explicitly “political,” do filmmakers inevitably have to make artistic
compromises?
- Were the
political and social messages in American films more potent than those in
the more heavy-handed Soviet films? Why or why not?