Representations of Urban Spaces and Their Transformations in Soviet Cinema of the 1920s and 1960s

Abstract

ABSTRACT
This dissertation explores the correlations between planned/constructed urban environments and the depiction of the city in films. The research focuses on the changing image of the socialist city in two broadly conceived modernist periods: the 1920s and the 1960s. Adhering to the methodologies of visual, film and urban studies after the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities, my thesis charts the interdependency of two fields – urbanism and cinema – in the production of Soviet urban space. The theoretical contributions of my study include: (1) revisiting the theory of dispositif and the subject it produces with regard to the Soviet context; (2) identifying the category of the socialist city symphony as a cinematic sub-genre in the 1920s; (3) re-affirming the productivity of the concept of the ‘thing’ in relation to the cinematography of the 1920s; (4) reconceptualizing utopian impulses and the inherent dialectical movement of the Soviet understanding of technology. This dissertation mirrors the theory of the ‘linear city’ proposed by Nikolai Miliutin in 1930: a scheme for the parallel disposition of industrial and living spaces, which are divided by a green zone along the lines of transport infrastructure. The three parts that form this thesis are accordingly structured around the following conceptual entities: dispositif (philosophical and film theory concepts; its application towards the railway, city and the cinema); living spaces of the socialist city (architectural and screen byt [way of life]); working spaces of the socialist city and the dialectics of technology on the cinema screen. The main findings of my work are: the explication of the affinities between the New Soviet Subject and the production strategies of urbanism and cinema; establishing the stylistic, ideological and rhetorical similarities between the modernisms of the 1920s and 1960s; and analyzing the panoply of utopian impulses embodied in urban and film material which are easily missed if the Soviet experience is only viewed as the cultural production of totalitarianism.