Educating the emotions: affect, genre film and ideology under Stalin

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This thesis explores the process of 'Sovietising' the emotions through the framework of the genre film. The reorientation of the film industry in the 1930s towards mass entertainment, I argue, saw a turn to generic formulas as a means to increase the emotional impact of cinema on its audience. Although essential to the construction of 'structures of feeling' that could help support the ideological codes of Stalinist society, genre films and the affects they solicited also exposed fissures within official discourses. Whereas previous studies have emphasised the successful amalgamation of ideology and entertainment, I find an irreconcilable tension between genre cinema's tendency to excite the senses and disturb psychical balance and Socialist Realism's aim of establishing a stable, normative value system. Employing psychoanalytic theory, I posit that this tension is manifest in individual films and the contemporary debates about them, which I show, display a pervasive anxiety over affec

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