Reception of Soviet Adventurous Films in the Domestic Periodicals of the 1920s

The paper examines the articles in the 1920s periodicals devoted to Soviet adventure cinema. The author identifies four main groups of people who spoke out on the issues of cinema: ordinary spectators, worker correspondents, professional critics with a strong ideological bias, and professionals in the film industry, critics, and writers who recognized the primacy of the artistic component in the cinema art. The question is raised about the attitude of representatives of these groups to the adventure (detective) genre and to films of other genres containing elements of adventure. It is revealed that the primacy of ideology in the film periodicals of the 1920s is a kind of mythologeme. In fact, despite the persistent ideological demands and the class approach of some (but not all) of those who wrote on cinema, such demands do not completely dominate. The positions of professional intellectuals, who primarily assess the artistic level of an adventure film, the presence of an author’s style, the affirmation of approved anthropological ideals, the novelty of techniques, and the overall originality / vanguard of the aesthetics, are strong. Among the ‘aestheticist’ critics, there is no inner loyalty either to N.I. Bukharin’s idea of creating a ‘communist Pinkerton’ or to the tastes of People’s Commissar of Education A.V. Lunacharsky, who appreciated traditional ‘well-made’ art. The dominance of a high aesthetic standard and a disdainful attitude towards a commercial stencil ‘product’ for mass audience became the factors that slowed down the spontaneous development of the domestic adventure film industry. The research was carried out with the support of the RNF grant for small scientific groups No. 24-28-01484 “Anthropological ideals in adventure films of the Russian silent cinema of the 1910s — 1920s”

Adventure · Ideology · Loyalty · Movie theater · Vanguard · European Cultural and National Identity · Historical and Modern Theater Studies · Travel Writing and Literature