„Kinematografia dla milionów”

Abstract

„A Cinema for the Millions”. The image of community in musical comedy films of Grigorii Aleksandrov Grigorii Aleksandrov’s films created with composer Isaak Dunaevskii were among the most popular of Russian cinema in the 1930s and 1940s. The first Aleksandrov’s film Happy Guys centered on the poetic of comedy as ideology or entertainment. In the article author describes the strategies of manipulation. The Soviet musical incorporated Stalinist ideology and nationalism. The patriotic language in soviet comedies is naturalized, it seems like songs in films were more about nature than politics, patriotic love and life‑ affirming laughter. Aleksandrov used archetypes and myths of the Stalin era and produced image of mythical soviet community. The maternal archetype is present in fertility imagery and is spatially encoded as “Rodina” (“homeland” or “motherland”). He put an end to the 1920s cult of ugliness in Soviet cinema and convinced Stalin, that beauty is a necessary element of Soviet art. Aleksandrov’s films reproduced the dominant ideology and gave people what they wanted – entertainment, escape from the travails of the everyday, and hope for the better life.

Keywords

• musical comedy
• laughter
• manipulation
• Mother Russia