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“LIFE AS IT SHOULD BE” SOCIALIST REALISM OF THE 1930S

“LIFE AS IT SHOULD BE” SOCIALIST REALISM OF THE 1930S

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Page 1: “LIFE AS IT SHOULD BE” SOCIALIST REALISM OF THE 1930S

“LIFE AS IT SHOULD BE”

SOCIALIST REALISM OF THE 1930S

Page 2: “LIFE AS IT SHOULD BE” SOCIALIST REALISM OF THE 1930S

Soviet Cinema in the 1930-s• 1933 – The government makes plans for a “Soviet Hollywood.” All-union council for comedies is created.

•Search for new, ideologically acceptable forms and themes

•1935 – Union of Filmmakers; self-censorship

•Emergence of musical comedy

•Back to star system

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LiubovOrlova Marlene Dietrich

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LyubovOrlova(1902-1975)

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Jolly Fellows (1934)

Venice Film Festival Best Director and Best Music Awards (1934); proclaimed one of 6 best movies ever.

Genre: “Jazz-comedy”

Plot: a cowherd (mistaken for a foreign celebrity) and a cleaning girl from Odessa region are talented musicians; they find their way to Moscow, rehearse posing as a funeral orchestra and perform, with a jazz band, in the Bolshoi Theatre.

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Jolly Fellows (1934)First Soviet musical comedy

Director: Grigori Aleksandrov

Script: Grigory Aleksandrov, Vladimir Mass, and Nikolai Erdman (a comedy writer, arrested while the film was being shot, his name deleted from the credits)

Music: Isaak Dunaevski

Starring: Leonid Utyosov, Lyubov Orlova. (Orlova’s first lyrical-comedic role)

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Liubov Orlova in Jolly Fellows

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Jolly Fellows (1934)

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Grigori Aleksandrov (1903-1983)

Actor and film-director;

Started his career in the Proletkult Theatre with Eisenstein; participated in all Eisenstein’s theatrical projects and films as assistant director and actor

In 1929-1932 traveled with Eisenstein to the USA, Mexico and Europe to study the technique of making sound films

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The Circus (1936)

Grand-Prix in Paris (1937)

Orlova’s acting style borrowed from Marlene Dietrich (The Blue Angel by J.Sternberg, first German sound film)

International context: “Charlie Chaplin” clown in the circus (Chaplin’s Circus 1928)

Eccentric acting, the theme of circus, grotesque (the image of the evil German) – inherited from Eisenstein’s aesthetics

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Orlova and Aleksandrov

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Grigori Aleksandrov

Learned the technique of shooting musical films from Walt Disney (first, the phonogram is recorded, then the film is shot to the phonogram)

Makes a film (International, 1932) on Stalin’s personal order

Jolly Fellows: theoriginal title was Jazz Comedy

The public excited, the critics enraged

Stalin’s approval; the genre thrives; Aleksandrov and his wife LyubovOrlova reign in the Soviet cinema.

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The Circus (1936)

Director: Grigori Aleksandrov

Music: Isaak Dunaevski

Starring: Lyubov Orlova, Sergei Stolyarov

Synopsis: American actress Marion Dixon and her German manager are on tour in Moscow. Her number includes tap-dancing and a canon shooting her to the trapeze. The Moscow circus makes a (better, futuristic) copy of this act. Marion falls in love with a Russian; the German manager blackmails her with her mulatto baby; the Soviet people surprise him (and Marion) with lack of racism; Marion stays in Moscow.

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The Circus

Soviet realism: the reality “as it should be”

Soviet values opposed to “Western” ones; proletarian internationalism. The lullaby scene; Solomon Mikhoels, the Jewish actor later killed on Stalin’s orders.

Dialogue with Hollywood: James Whale’s Show Boat (1936), the issue of racism (a female star is forced to leave the show: with her “impure blood,” she breaks the law forbidding interracial marriage); Paul Robson sings “Old Man River”

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The Circus (1936)

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Forward to the shining future!