American Corner Vanadzor

History and Film: Amerika Through Soviet Eyes

2:30pm 07.12.2011

On December 7, 2011 Fulbright scholar Steven Usitalo offered an interesting look at American culture entitled: ‘History and Film, America through Soviet Eyes’ at the American Corner in Vanadzor.

Steven used a couple of examples from several Russian movies from the 1920s and 1930s such as ‘The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks’ (1924) by Lev Kuleshov, ‘Circus’ (1936) by Grigori Aleksandrov, ‘Brother 2’ (2000) by Aleksei Balabanov. The speaker demonstrated how propaganda was used to convince the viewer on a specific political point often by providing subjective content that could be deliberately misleading. Throughout the lecture Steven also explained the development of the Russian by such filmmakers as Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, who had considerable impact in the use of the motion picture as a propaganda tool.

The lecturer made an argument that the Cold War was also a cultural fight in which both the Soviets and the U.S. used film propaganda to pursue their audiences that life was better in their own country. Steven’s presentation was well received by an audience of university students and other interested people.