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영어

Soviet cinema in Stalin's era actively carried out political-aesthetic project, corresponding most fully with the very nature of Stalinist arts. In the 1930s Stalin turned cinema into the most effective medium of ideological and historical representation. Moreover, from the late 1930s Stalin himself personally corrected and censored each screenplay and film, wielding control over both reality and its representation. Fridrikh Ermler's film The Great Citizen (1937, 1939) could be regarded as first film of ‘National order’, which concretely reflected Stalin's intention and consequentially justified Stalin's Great Purges and mass terror. Great Purges, the most terrible and traumatic incident in the whole modern history of Russia, was triggered by assassination of Sergei Kirov, to whom dedicated The Great Citizen. Film depicts not only how real soviet hero Shakhov/Kirov struggled to build socialism in a single country but obvious figures of rebellious hidden enemy inside the party whose imagery directly connected with Trotsky and Bukharin. Playing a considerable role in the intensification of public need to root out ideological enemy, The Great Citizen is abundant in speech and dialogues main aim of which are to define Trotskyte-Zinovievite camp as a enemy of Bolshevic party. The Great citizen is characterized as a 'conversational cinema' by Ermler, however, film vividly describes negative portrait of the enemies not only through linguistic narrative but through the cinematic images-objet and aesthetical forms such as deep focus, mise-en-scène, long take, plan-sequence, angle and lighting. All of these cinematic instruments and image-signs solidify the signification that connotes real hero of Soviet society, Stalin, who ousted ideological enemies and the saboteurs inside the party and who played a leading role in implementation of Soviet cinema politica.