Social Realist Iconography of the Labor Woman in the Soviet Cinema of the 1930s

Abstract

In the 1930s, in Soviet cinema, social realism was established. The revolutionary pathos of the Soviet films in the 1920s was replaced by the film language of social realist cinema in the 1930s, which became "mythological realism" in the second half of the decade. In this new existence, a working person appears on the vanguard, who was supposed to build a socialist paradise according to the new course of the economy. In the visual narrative of the party rhetoric of the 1930s, the Soviet working woman appears as the main actor. The "gender emancipation" of women was sublimated in the context of labor in the Soviet cinema of the 1930s. The "new social body" competed with a man driving a tractor or flying an airplane. In social realist art of the 1930s, including cinema, one of the major passages is the visual iconography of the Soviet working woman and Stalin.