Talk: Colour as an essential element in the multinational art of the USSR

Talk on colour as an essential element in the multinational art of the USSR: Joseph Stalin, Walt Disney, & the quest for for Soviet colour film, 1929-1945.

The desire to produce films in colour has been part of the story of cinema virtually from the day the moving picture was invented. In the popular imagination, early colour film is associated mainly with technological developments in North America, most prominently, and exuberantly, the invention of Technicolor, which was the system adopted in Disney cartoons and several full-length features in the 1930s, for example The Wizard of Oz.  Less well known, even among specialist film historians, is the Soviet quest for colour in the same decade. The acquisition of commercially viable colour technology was an ideological and political priority which had been urged on the Soviet film industry by no less a figure than Stalin himself- success in this endeavour was handsomely rewarded; failure led to arrest and execution during the Great Terror of 1937 & 1938. In fact the USSR only acquired a fully viable colour system after the acquisition of Agfa colour-film patents as a ‘trophy of war’ by the Red Army in 1944 as Hitler’s armies retreated. This talk will tell the fascinating and tragic story of Soviet colour-film: it will offer important insights into the paradoxical aesthetics of Stalinism, the economic and industrial strategies of the Soviet state during the 1930s, and the ways in which the official rhetoric of that period masked persistent failures and shortcomings. An illustrated lecture.

Dr. Philip Cavendish is Reader in Russian and Soviet Film Studies at the School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College, London. He is a leading specialist on pre-revolutionary Russian cinema and Soviet silent cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. He has published two monographs “Soviet Mainstream Cinematography: The silent Era”(London: UCL Arts & humanities Publications, 2007); and “The Men with the Movie Camera: The poetics of Visual Style in Soviet Avant-garde Cinema of the 1920s (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012). His research interests include the relationship between film-technology and aesthetics, the theory and practice of camera operation, and the early development of Soviet colour-film. Recent articles have examined the complex use of still images in Andrei Zviagintsev’s Vozvrashchenie (The Return 2003) and the archival reconstruction of Sergei Eizenshtein’s first film Dnevnik Glumova (Glumov’s Diary). He is currently researching exhibitions of the British two-colour system, Kinemacolor, in Russian film-theatres in 1910 and 1914.