Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

FrOM the CradLe tO the GraVe:
COSMONaut NOStaLGIa IN SOVIet aNd pOSt-SOVIet FILM
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after Stalin’s death, options for speculative expression began to reopen.
Soviet science fction reemerged in the late 1950s after the Soviets launched
Sputnik in 1957 and Gagarin in 1961. during the early era of human spacefight
in the 1960s, flmmakers undertook a new efort at portraying spacefight
with ideological undertones similar to the previous era. this time, instead
of demonstrating how the new technology was transforming the economy
and society these movies reassured the public, combining documentary and
theatrical components. the focus was on the present indicating that the era of
science fction and the present were one. after the collapse of the Soviet union,
spacefight attracted new interest, this time without the inhibitions of party
ideology. these new, post-Soviet flms were one component of a reexamination
of the 1960s as a pivotal period in Soviet history.
While Soviet and russian portrayals of spacefight have been sporadic
over the decade, they have been consistent in the way in which they refect
their contemporary ideological realities. Similar to the real cosmonauts, flm
cosmonauts carried the ideology of their nation into space.
SpaCeFLIGht GaINS IdeOLOGY
Whether or not Lunacharsky’s memory of Lenin’s statement on the
importance of flm to the young Soviet state was accurate, the new government
indeed demonstrated a commitment to flm production that made its importance
clear. Movies had been popular in pre-revolutionary russia. In 1913, St.
petersburg and Moscow had over one hundred movie theaters even though the
Lumières brothers’ invention of the motion picture camera and projector had
only arrived in russia in 1896, one year after its introduction in France. 3 Within
fve years of the frst russian flm production, and at the onset of World War
I, russia was producing about ten percent of flms that screened in nearly 1500
russian movie theaters. 4 as was true with european audiences, the russians
preferred costume dramas and literary adaptations in this new medium. 5
Film was a very expensive industry for the young u.S.S.r. What World
War I did not destroy of the russian movie industry, the Civil War fnished of.
Movie theaters and production companies, like most enterprises that were not
essential to life, dissolved due to neglect and scavenging during the Civil War.
New foreign flms were far too expensive for the government to import during
the 1920s into the few surviving theaters. and precious materials for domestic
flm production were beyond the means of the impoverished state. promising
3. Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, pp. 10-11 and 34.
4. Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, p. 13, and Youngblood, Movies for the Masses, p. 2.
5. Youngblood, Movies for the Masses, pp. 2-3, and Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, pp. 13-18.