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

Although I am discussing the visual arts in general, it is the cinema, to paraphrase Lenin, which is the single most important of them.⁶⁶ Cinema’s popular status, its polyfunctionality and its position as a technological innovation of the time would be reason enough to elevate it above the other arts (for the purposes of academic inquiry). But cinema’s deeper importance also lay in its ability to employ fantastical special effects and to combine music and sound in a diegesis⁶⁷ and non-diegesis⁶⁸ fashion. All of which meant that the medium’s emotional immediacy and simultaneity were far greater than any other art form. In the final analysis, one could suggest that filmmakers were the most influential historians of the twentieth century. Indeed, most common assumptions held about historical figures (whether good or bad) tend to have been derived from motion picture representations. From Jesus Christ to Oskar Schindler, from the JFK assassination to the D-Day landings cinema has attempted/helped to fashion a popular understanding of what happened in history, to whom and why. Moreover, unlike, say, theatrical performances which in some fashion, no matter how small, change from night to night, cultural producers could guarantee that once a film had been completed its message would not alter from performance to performance, region to region. In terms of exhibition, film was also a significantly cheaper propaganda medium than theatre. After the initial, and admittedly gargantuan, investment in building cinemas and developing the technology to produce the films, common sense alone tells us that the costs for transporting the reels to cinemas were relatively cheap in comparison to the expenses of transporting a theatrical show (which would include the cast, crew, sets and props). For these reasons my primary but by no means exclusive focus will be on the cinema.

Importance of Comparative Studies

A key value of comparative studies lies in their potential to challenge the basic historiographical assumption of national exceptionalism. History’s meta-narrative, in a scholarly and educational sense, is too often discussed as the story of nation states; their rise, development, fall and sometimes their rise again. It is usually in this fashion that libraries are catalogued.