Stalinist Cinema and the Search for Audiences: Liubov' Orlova and the Case for Star Studies - Dr John Haynes (University of Essex). 

Abstract

The study of Stalinist cinema has consistently failed to address the issue of Soviet film spectators in any meaningful ways. Revisionist approaches tend to posit an abstract, “implied” or “ideal” spectator, while the contradictions implicit in the more traditional approaches to the audiences of “propaganda” were laid bare in an article by Stephen Neale in Screen as far back as 1976. 

This paper discusses the construction and deployment of the “star persona” of one of the leading actresses in the Soviet Union of the Stalin era, Liubov΄ Orlova, in the newspapers and trade publications of the 1930s, as well as her performances in the films themselves, along with some of their associated publicity materials. It will argue that an approach grounded in “Star Studies”, while still limited in terms of fleshing out living and breathing audience members, nonetheless enables, if only by virtue of analysing a broad range of such “star texts” in their given contexts, the production of a more nuanced account of spectatorship in the Stalin era as a process of multiple negotiations, conducted from historically situated subject positions.

Dr Haynes is Lecturer in Film Studies in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex. His research interests include:

• interdisciplinary, theoretical and practitioner perspectives on film and history; 
• cinema and social change; 
• films and social justice activism; 
• films as producers of histories; 
• Soviet and Russian cinema, especially Stalinism and film; 
• and independent cinema in the United States. 

Dr Haynes is author of New Soviet Man: Gender and Masculinity in Stalinist Soviet Cinema (Manchester, 2003) and of a number of chapters and articles on Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet cinema and gender, and on contemporary non-Hollywood US filmmaking. He is co-editor (with Sanja Bahun) of the forthcoming (spring 2014) volume Cinema, State Socialism and Society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917-1989: Re-Visions. Dr Haynes is also currently producing and directing a historical documentary film based on oral history/life story interviews with participants of the May 1968 events on campus at the University of Essex.

Further details about the Russian Cinema Research Group at UCL SSEES.