Ekaterina N. Shapinskaya
Social Construction of Gender Roles in Soviet Film
Soviet film ofthe 1940s and 1950s (the period of totalitarianism) provides
illustrative material to demonstrate how gender roles are constructed on the basis
of dominant ideological values. In relation to women these values were based
upon their equal participation in the process of constructing of a new social order.
At the same time the image of woman as a wife and mother was also upheld,
which always placed her in a double role-that of a man's equal in the production
process and that of traditional femininity in the patriarchal context.
It would be an error to think that such a double identity was an exclusive
creation of Soviet ideology. As early as the nineteenth-century Russian literature,
one can trace the roots ofthe myth of woman fulfilling simultaneously masculine
and feminine roles. In a popular poem by Nikolay Nekrasov, Russian Women
{Russkie zhenschiny, 1863), part ofthe school literature syllabus in the Soviet
period, this mythical image was elaborated in accordance with the life style of
Russian peasants. Nekrasov's ideal woman-laborer in the field and at home,
caretaker for her children and husband, capable of carrying out all sorts of work
and of heroic deeds in a time of need-is even able (and bravely) to enter a
burning house and stop a horse at full speed. At the same time she is not devoid
of femininity, and when she appears in public on a festival day surrounded by
her children, her image is dear to "all those who love Russian people." This
image was reinterpreted after nearly a hundred years in the context of totalitarian
popular culture and found its expression in such a widely accessible medium of
representation as film. What in fact was represented in Soviet film of the
totalitarian period was by no means the real situation of women but the myth,
which can be traced to Nekrasov and Russian democratic intelligentsia of the
nineteenth century.
The films 1 analyze in this essay all belong to popular culture and are to the
present day placed in the category of "hits." One of the reasons for addressing
this artistic field is a renewal of interest in these films during the post-Soviet
period, which shows that certain meanings and underlying structures of feeling
have not disappeared.
Three films will be examined from the point of view of how gender is constructed
through narrative schemes and the aesthetics of representation-7z//-A
Gender Roles in Soviet Film 151
{The Circus, 1940) by Grigory Alexandrov and Svinarka i pastukh {The Pig-girl
and the Shepherd, 1941) and Bogataya nevesta {The Rich Bride, 1937), both by
Ivan Pyryev. They are illustrative of the social role woman was supposed to
undertake in society and of the aesthetic construction of female figures on the
screen. 1 selected the three films based on the place they occupy in Soviet popular
culture-all of them were top box office attractions in their time-and because
ofthe return ofthe popularity of Soviet films of this period in the 1990s. The
main point in this analysis is to show, following Judith Butler's elaboration of
the connection between performative acts and gender constitution, "that what is
called gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social
sanction and taboo" (1990: 271).
A look at these films in historical perspective reveals that with the advance
of the totalitarian regime the mythological aspect of the films gets strengthened
and has a tendency to be transformed into a fairy-tale narrative. While the
women in the films at the beginning ofthe 1930s were supposed to have their
referents in reality, the fair beauties ofthe peak of totalitarianism-Lubov Orlova
and Marina Ladynina-acquired aesthetic characteristics. These characteristics
took them out of the real context and placed them in a mythological world
populated by unreal heroes as well as machines, which embodied the myth of
technological progress. In all the films open depiction of female sexuality is
taboo, but at the same time the heroine remains the object of male desire expressed
through a traditional narrative scheme of the "love triangle." The choice
the heroine ultimately makes is based on the archetypal virtues ofthe male transfigured
by ideology into the values of a new society. But this desire is always
devoid of direct sexual implications, which were supposed to be part of an alien
Western culture and is coded according to the rules of the dominant socialist
value structures. While, as Laura Mulvey notes, Hollywood film "coded the
erotic into the language ofthe dominant patriarchal order" (1989: 30), the coding
process of Soviet totalitarian cinema was done in accordance with the mythical
language of communist construction. Accordingly, the notion of pleasure, aesthetic
as well as sexual, was removed from the world of the everyday, placed
into the future-to-come, and substituted by the joys of productive labor. Thus, the
woman in Nekrasov is liberated from forced labor but continues it, nevertheless,
as a voluntary, conscious activity. She thus remains with a double workload,
which is aestheticized by the media of representation and presented to the audience
as a model female identity of socialist culture.
Sharing the common characteristics of popular success, the three films differ
in their emphasis on the social meaning of femininity. In The Circus the basic
aesthetic opposition is that of the image of Soviet womanhood and motherhood
versus the external world of alien sexualized femininity. This opposition is illus-
152 Ekaterina N. Shapinskaya
trated through a visual contrast ofthe heroine's performance as a sexual symbol
illustrative of the bourgeois world and the desexualized (but not de-aestheticized)
image of a Soviet woman participating as an equal in a man's world. The
heroine, played by Orlova, has all the features of a Hollywood film star with the
type of beauty popular in the 1930s. When featured as belonging to the Western
world, she is presented as a typical object of exploiting male gaze, transforming
herself into this object reluctantly but with a feeling of inevitability vis k vis such
subjugation. When she changes her allegiance, however, and finds warmth and
love in the socialist world, she is depicted as an equal, a comrade and therefore
as a participant in technological progress, which will transform fairy-tale to reality.
Both man and woman in that reality are devoid of any sexual characteristics.
They are presented as images of pure cosmic beauty, aesthetic beings for whom
the still far away conquest of cosmic space has become reality; although from
another world, they represent the potential of the future as present-day builders
of socialism.
The main aesthetic point of The Rich Bride is the assertion ofthe myth of affinity
between beauty and labor. The heroine is shown as an enthusiastic worker
who can select her beloved according to the ideological standard of conscientious
labor as the main social and personal value. This politics of feminine representation
is closely connected to the purely mythical treatment ofthe machine as
a magic being. The tractor, the principal instrument of creating collective farm
agriculture, is animated by being referred to it as a steel horse; the male and
female role distribution related to it is traditional-man is the rider and woman his
assistant. If one accepts a rather common point of view that "the recurring images
of women in popular media may have some infiuence on how people think
of women in real life" (de Souza 1987: 182), one may say that these repeated
perspectives appear in what has been termed "paradigm scenarios." Drawn from
everyday life, they are reinforced by stories, art, and culture. In the case of The
Rich Bride, the narrative scheme also seems to be drawn from the everyday experience
of collective farm life, but in representation it acquires a completely
different character with all its elements completely transformed by a mythology
of underlying ideology.
The Pig-girl and the Shepherd, made in the genre of a fairy-tale and completely
removed from real life, includes representation of several Soviet myths,
above all that of ethnic harmony. The heroine's representation is constructed
through a contrast with the hero. Eventually, however, different types of ethnic
features blend into a love union. Characteristically, the unifying factor for both
characters is the ideological image of Moscow as the center of social and personal
life. Being a cinematic fairy tale, the film also subverts the traditional
fairy-tale structure of narrative pertaining to the separation of the lover and the
Gender Roles in Soviet Film 153
beloved. While in a traditional plot the lover should perform feats of courage
(which he does in the film by saving the collective farm's sheep from wild
beasts), the heroine should pine for him in feminine passivity; here, however, she
also performs labor feats parallel to those of her beloved by saving her pigs from
severe cold. Thus, the traditional dichotomy of the active versus passive principle
is changed to a model of separation in which both the hero and heroine work
for the benefit of society and through this ultimately achieve reunion. In the
reunion's narrative scheme, the traditional structure is restored; the hero in his
traditional masculine role has to prove his worth and win his beloved, which he
does in a perfect fairy-tale manner as a brave horseman. Their union symbolizes
many totalitarian ideoiogemes-ethnic harmony, the leading role of labor in human
life, and the development of regions under the guiding role of Moscow-but
at the same time it does not abolish the traditional notion that the bride has to be
won over. The shepherd from the Caucasian mountains has to overcome his
rival's intrigue against him and prove himself the genuine hero. The gap between
the film and the context of its viewing is greatest among the cases under study
here, as The Pig-girl and the Shepherd was completed during the first year of
war (Great Patriotic War) and widely shown at the front where it produced welcome
moments of escape from the tough realities of battle. The element of pleasure
in the viewing process was strongest in this context because it gave soldiers
the possibility of "projecting the repressed desire onto the performer" (Mulvey
1989:31).
All these Soviet myths firmly inscribe gender roles and the aesthetics of their
representation into the basic ideological context of totalitarian society. At the
same time they are closely connected to much deeper traditional concepts of
feminine and masculine social roles and the aesthetic patterns of their representation.
One can trace in totalitarian period films a simultaneous process of undermining
traditional patriarchal structures, in which women are passive and
men are active, while confirming these structures by allowing for the visual
pleasure of the audience, especially male, in the construction of the heroine's
physical image. Falling back on Mulvey's work, one can say that Soviet film, to
no less a degree than Hollywood film, involves the manipulation of the audience's
visual pleasure, and the typical heroine of these films does not lose her
femininity due to the male's acquired social role. Thus, a new view of woman
(which, as has been seen, is not so new in Russian cultural tradition) is being
established through a popular medium.
This process makes the best samples of totalitarian film appealing not only
in the context of their generation but also in post-Soviet popular culture. In spite
of dramatic changes in the field of visual arts, which occurred in the post-perestroika
era, a nostalgic mood is prevalent both among senior and middle-aged
154 Ekaterina N. Shapinskaya
aged groups of viewers, and mass media refiect this mood by frequent exhibitions
of Soviet films and transmission of modernized remakes of Soviet lyrical
songs. This creates a visible contradiction with the statement, "it is in the realm
ofthe visual arts-and, in particular, cinema-that the evolution of subjectivity and
political consciousness is most dramatically inscribed" (Portuges 1995: 296).
The explanation of this paradoxical situation lies, in my opinion, in the universal
mythology underlying the visual aesthetics of state socialism, which has not lost
its validity in contemporary post-Soviet culture. The ideological myths inscribed
in the films have been completely unmasked and stripped of their magic qualities,
and one can trace this strong demythologization in the new Russian cinema.
It is enough to remember such instances of this process in Deti chugunnich
bogov {The Children of Iron Gocfa-Tomash Tot, 1993) as a negation ofthe myth
of the glory and beauty of labor, or numerous films on the war in Chechnya
undermining the myth ofthe ethnic harmony ofthe Soviet people. The image of
the West as an ideological enemy has long been replaced by complex relations
with Western culture and wide-spread consumption of American and European
cinematic productions. But alongside this process a new myth was created-a
myth about a myth-in which old mythologies gained the status of stability and
affirmation as regards their value. Women's images in those films, rooted in
traditional perceptions of women in Russian culture, retain their charm despite
new sexual freedom and open projection of the female body in the new Russian
cinema. Moreover, they serve as a sort of counterbalance, a steady point in the
destroyed value system, an escape from the fragmented world of the post-Soviet
variety of postmodern culture, which is so difficult to cope with for the generations
brought up in a unitary and ideologically constructed cultural atmosphere.
As for younger people, it is just a part of a gigantic collage of a contemporary
artistic field where the co-existence of styles and epochs has become so customary
that for them classical Soviet film is a legitimate part of their multiple vision
on a par with fragments of visual cultures of other periods and national contexts.
Although in this case there is hardly any identification with the heroes, they
become a part of a return to the past, of nostalgia for the lost "self in the world
of total otherness.
References:
Butler, Judith (1990) "Performative Acts and Gender Construction," pp. 270
-282, in S.-E. Case (ed.) Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and
Theatre. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
De Souza, Ronald (1987) The Rationality ofthe Emotions. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Gender Roles in Soviet Film 155
Mulvey, Laura (1989) "Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema," pp. 28-40,
in Laura Mulvey Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Portuges, Catherine (1995) "Gendering Cinema in Post-communist
Hungary," pp. 296-313, in E. Berry (ed.) Post-communism and the Body Politic.
New York: New York University Press.