Authors

Discussion

Urbanisation was one of the key subject-plots of the Soviet cinema of the 1920s. As the USSR expanded its frontiers, the new Socialist world was to be built and to blossom not in the countryside, but in the city. This shift was widely presented in the Soviet film of the period:peasants moved to capitals, new kinds of urban planning developed, great changes in architecture occurred. Films did not only illustrate the changes in the Soviet Union during this decade but also registered various approaches to modernity. Simultaneously, throughout the 1920s filmmakers addressed non-Soviet modernity. Influenced by the mass purchase of foreign films in the period 1923-1925, a great number of films set in countries of the West was produced, bringing to co-existence three models of modernity: Soviet, German and, later, American.The question of the specificity of Soviet modernity has been much debated recently. While Soviet Studies have shifted to analysing the role of non-Western modernities, I would like to return to discussing the role German and American ones had in shaping Soviet modernity and visual culture. The details of the process of rejecting and absorbing the Western Other will be illustrated through examples from Soviet films set in Germany and the USA that represent alternate models of the modern Western city.