Soviet feature films of the 1960s as a source for studying the history of industrial construction

Abstract

The article considers as historical sources Soviet feature films of the 1960s – “As Long as Man Lives” (1963), “On Tomorrow’s Street” (1965). It deals with some aspects of the filmmaking, thereby treating feature films as full-fledged historical source for studying not only the history of cinema, but also the history of science and technology. To reconstruct the plan and the actual process of filming, the authors used the documents of fund No. 2944 from the Russian State Archives of Literature and Art (fund of the State Committee of the USSR Council of Ministers for Cinematography {Goskino SSSR} of the period from 1963 to 1992. The archival materials helped to vividly show how the USSR Goskino initiated and controlled the process of creating feature films. The most informative in that respect were the production reports and the correspondence with the management of film studios and art councils, etc. Methodologically, the article is based on the concept of the cinema-photo-phono-documents elaborated by V.M. Magidov. According to the above concept, Soviet feature films are considered to be an integral part of the cinema-photo-phono-document identity, in which the cinema, through visualization, content of the film frame and the montage specifics brings to the screen items of machinery, objects of industrial production and attributes of industrial development. By transferring the visual symbols into the field of historical research, there appears the need to interpret the director’s decisions and assess the authenticity of the depicted events.