Stalin’s Final Films: in Conversation with Claire Knight

Please join us for a conversation between Claire Knight (University of Bristol) and Stefan Lacny (UCL SSEES) about Claire's recent book Stalin's Final Films: Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Soviet Postwar Reality, 1945-1953 (Cornell University Press, 2024).

Stalin's Final Films explores a neglected period in the history of Soviet cinema, breathing new life into a body of films long considered moribund as the pinnacle of Stalinism. While film censorship reached its apogee in this period and fewer films were made, film attendance also peaked as Soviet audiences voted with their seats and distinguished a clearly popular postwar cinema.

Claire Knight examines the tensions between official ideology and audience engagement, and between education and entertainment, inherent in these popular films, as well as the financial considerations that shaped and constrained them. She explores how the Soviet regime used films to address the major challenges faced by the USSR after the Great Patriotic War (World War II), showing how war dramas, spy thrillers, Stalin epics, and rural comedies alike were mobilized to consolidate an official narrative of the war, reestablish Stalinist orthodoxy, and dramatize the rebuilding of socialist society. Yet, Knight also highlights how these same films were used by filmmakers more experimentally, exploring a diverse range of responses to the ideological crisis that lay at the heart of Soviet postwar culture, as a victorious people were denied the fruits of their sacrificial labour. After the war, new heroes were demanded by both the regime and Soviet audiences, and filmmakers sought to provide them, with at times surprising results.

About the speakers:

Claire Knight is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the University of Bristol, where she is also the Academic Director for the Centre for Study Abroad. Her work has appeared in the journals Kritika, Slavonic and East European Review, and KinoKultura.

Stefan Lacny, Lecturer (Teaching) in Russian Culture, Language and Translation at UCL SSEES, is a cultural historian of Russia/the Soviet Union, Ukraine and Poland in the twentieth century, with a specialisation in cinema. His research interests include Stalin-era formulations of national identities in the USSR's non-Russian republics and the significance of borders in the Soviet cultural imagination. His work has appeared in the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema.