Authors

Discussion

Health enlightenment films were an important part of the campaigns launched across the Soviet Union in the 1920s to tackle pressing public health concerns such as alcoholism, tuberculosis and venereal disease. These ’utility’ films sought to transform the habits of everyday life and to cultivate new ways of seeing health and illness. The viewers of early Soviet films such as Shameful to Say (Stydno skazat’, Armand, 1930), Don’t Spit on the Floor (Ne pliui na pol, Shirokov, 1929) and Guard Your Health (Beregi zdorov’e, Medvedkin, 1929) were warned against ‘unhealthy’ behaviours that ranged from promiscuity to alcohol consumption, instructed in the perils of infectious disease and taught the importance of bodily hygiene and orderly living. Building on Kirsten Ostherr’s efforts to situate health films within the history of global aesthetic trends, this paper will explore the shifts in the representational strategies and persuasion tactics of Soviet health enlightenment films between the 1920s and the 1930s. I will bring to light the new approaches to visualising health and disease that emerged in the context of audience reception studies conducted by Soviet psychologists, the demands of Socialist Realism, as well as evolving strategies of behaviour transformation. Comparing 1920s productions with later health enlightenment films including Vitamin C (Chigorin, 1939) and A Dangerous Disease: Measles (Opasnaia bolezn’: Kor’, Prokopenko, 1937), the paper traces the shift away from the abstract visual designs, playful humour, direct spectator address and ‘shock tactics’ deployed in the films of the 1920s to a visual discourse of kul’turnost’, realism, and decorum in the 1930s. While placing health education films into dialogue with the representational conventions and concerns of the Stalin era, the paper will explore the challenge to Stalinist objectives posed by the health film’s tendency to spotlight the ‘perils of modernity’.