Feeling Revolution - Cinema, Genre, and the Politics of Affect Under Stalin

Feeling Revolution explores the important role played by film genres in cultivating the Stalin era's distinctive emotional values and norms -- ranging from happiness to hatred for enemies. Toropova's exploration of a wide variety of primary sources brings to light the Soviet film industry's battle to shape new forms of audience response.

List of contents

• Introduction


• 1: Emotional Education


• 2: The Stalinist Film Comedy and the 'Problem' of Soviet Laughter


• 3: Learning to Hate: Paranoia and Abjection in the Stalinist Thriller


• 4: Manufacturing Happiness: The Production Drama and the Heroic Biography in the era of 'Care for the Person'


• 5: Pathos, Powerlessness and the Persistence of the Melodramatic Mode


• Epilogue: Formless Feeling

About the author

Anna Toropova completed her PhD at University College London. Before taking up her current post as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, she held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the cinema, culture, and medical history of the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1953. She is the author of numerous articles on the emotional repertoire of Stalin-era cinema, early Soviet studies of spectators, and the interface of cinema, science, and medicine in revolutionary Russia.

Summary

Feeling Revolution explores the important role played by film genres in cultivating the Stalin era's distinctive emotional values and norms -- ranging from happiness to hatred for enemies. Toropova's exploration of a wide variety of primary sources brings to light the Soviet film industry's battle to shape new forms of audience response.

Additional text

Feeling Revolution reveals the inner workings of the Soviet film industry under Stalin, the stress on emotions represented onscreen and aroused among audiences, and the contradictions in trying to use cinema to cultivate "Soviet feelings".

Product details

• Authors: Anna Toropova, Anna (Wellcome Trust Research Fellow Toropova
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 14.07.2020
• EAN: 9780198831099
• ISBN: 978-0-19-883109-9
• No. of pages: 272
• Series: Emotions In History
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > 20th century (up to 1945); Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000, European History, HISTORY / Europe / Eastern, Later 20th century c 1950 to c 1999, Former Soviet Union, USSR (Europe), USSR, Soviet Union, The Cold War, Film Theory & Criticism, c 1945 to c 2000 (Post-war period), Cold wars and proxy conflicts, Film history, theory or criticism, HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century / General, HISTORY / Russia / General