Animated Soviet Propaganda 2.
“Shooting the Revolution” Film Series
In the period between 1924 and the launch of Perestroika in 1985, more than 40 animated propaganda films were produced in the Soviet Union. They weren’t for export. Their public was the new nation, and their goal was to win over the hearts and minds of the Soviet masses by feeding them disinformation. The primary target of the animated propaganda films was the United States. It was important to keep the Soviet people—most of whom were locked up in the USSR—believing that they lived in the best country of the world. From the 1930s to the end of the 1970s, Americans were depicted as evil racists, unemployed, exploited workers and warmongers. Harmful and devastating in their effect, these animated propaganda films are artistically as powerful and beautiful as the great Soviet political posters made after the 1917 revolution which inspired Soviet animation.
While “Soviet Propaganda Animation 1.” in March 2017 was dedicated to the early works, this session includes a selection of films produced between 1949 and 1979, revealing the incredibly bizarre world of animated Soviet propaganda.
MR WOLF (1949, directors V. Gromov and B. Yefimov, 10 min.)
MISTER TWISTER (1963, director A. Karanovitch, 10 min.)
PROPHETS AND LESSONS (1967, directors V. Kotyonochkin & Boris Yefimov, 9 min.)
LESSONS NOT LEARNED (1971, directors Boris Yefimov & V. Karavayev, 5 min.)
PLUS ELECTRIFICATION (1972, director I. Aksenchuk, 9 min.)
FORWARD MARCH, TIME! (1977, director V. Tarasov, 9 min.)
SHOOTING RANGE (1979, director V. Tarasov, 19 min.)
This screening is the fourth event in the SHOOTING THE REVOLUTION film series that is part of the WHAT’S LEFT program series organized by the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, which aims to revisit the complex socialist ideological and visual legacy in the year marked by the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution.
The screening is introduced by Zsuzsanna Zádori, Senior Audio-Visual Archivist (Blinken OSA)
Free admission.
Limited seats are available on a first come first served basis.
The films will be screened in Russian with English subtitles. The program is in English.
In the framework of the one-year program series “What's Left?”.