“We Were Born to Make a Fairy Tale Come True…” Myth–Making of the National Newsreels of the 1930s

Abstract

The article examines the specific features of recording reality in the Soviet newsreel of the 1930s, brought about by the dialectic of the public identity at the turn of the civilizational movement from the struggle and destruction of the old pattern of life of the 1920s to the creation of a new as of yet unknown world. The analysis draws upon the analogous social order of an ancient polis based on the mythological "programming" of the society through heroic and aesthetic norms. Attention is drawn to the methodological similarity of the ways of connecting people into an integral community with its own ideal models of the social structure and the relationship between the individual and the public. Therefore the role of an example is essential here. This is not so much a program of a human being’s self-improvement as an ideal norm of a structural unit of the community.
The filmmakers of the early 1930s faced two seemingly contradictory challenges: to create a screen chronicle of the country and the society’s transformation, on the one hand, and to form a screen model of the future, extracting its constituent images from the present, on the other. So, they get actively involved in the nation’s creative labor, not as mere observers, but as enthusiastic participants in overcoming the difficulties of the stressful path to the ‘bright new future’ At the same time, a desire for a more expressive generalized, hence simulated, screen representation of reality is born, which leads to the emergence of an aesthetic canon of capturing the facts of life, gravitating towards the mythologized symbolism of reality images. The persistent tendency to forge a cinematic canon of Soviet reality at the beginning of the decade turned into the final crystallization of the mythological concept of reality, followed by its functioning in the rigid “crystalline” limits of the once found formula, which received the name of “normative aesthetics”.
The audience’s perception also changes replacing the specifics of the flow of life with the generalized “canon” of Soviet reality. These contradictory motives for the work of documentary filmmakers, based on the demands of a society looking to the future, gave rise to a particular stylistic form of newsreels of the 1930s, which have been so criticized by subsequent generations of researchers.