The Shaping of Popular Consent: A Comparative Study of the Sovie ...

The point should be underlined that this book will not examine literature or music (except in the context of film) but will restrict its focus to the role of the visual arts. The visual arts, that being primarily cinema, but also painting, plastic arts, theatre and architecture, were the primary media through which the American and Soviet elites/governments/regimes projected their themes and messages into popular culture.

In the United States the cinema was staggeringly popular. By 1939, there were between 17,000 and 18,000 cinema theatres. 66 million people attended the cinema each week.²⁷ Ticket prices were around 25 cents but could sometimes be as low as 15 cents.²⁸ The box office receipts for the year 1939 totalled $659,000,000.²⁹ Indeed, contemporaries well understood the importance of cinema as a surgical tool with which filmmakers and producers could attempt to inculcate certain values and virtues into society. In 1931, journalist and academic, Lemar Taney Beman wrote that cinema was “the most powerful teaching device civilization has produced since the invention of the printing press”.³⁰ In 1936, the poet and writer, James Agee said, “the camera can do what nothing else in the world can do:… perceive, record, and communicate, in full unaltered power…”³¹

The same was also true in the USSR. Andrei Zhdanov, the Soviet Union’s commissar for cultural affairs, implied as much in a speech to filmmakers in May 1941. “Since everyone knows that all our films are state produced,” he said, “I, a Soviet viewer, conclude when I see a film that the ideas expressed in it are recommended by the government. And if this film encourages a do nothing attitude [for example], I conclude that this is what the government recommends.”³² In 1930, Sergei Eisenstein was even more explicit. “In the Soviet Union”, he wrote, “art is responsive to social aims and demands.”³³ In the USSR, the number of cinema theatres grew from 7,000 in 1933 to 29,000 in 1940.³⁴ The number of film copies grew from tens in 1933 to over fifteen hundred by the end of the decade.³⁵ Indeed, according to Simon Sebag Montefiore, Soviet leaders considered film of such vital importance that each one of Stalin’s houses had its own private cinema.³⁶