Chelyabinsk movie theaters during the Great Patriotic War: the space of propaganda and “affordable entertainment”

Using the concept of “social space” by the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1901 - 1991), the authors of the article make an attempt to reconstruct the specificities in the work of movie theaters in Chelyabinsk, a rear city in the Urals during the Great Patriotic War. According to this concept, social space, as applied to a movie theater, comprises three levels. Firstly, it is a “space representation”, i.e. a set of officially fixed norms, which are imposed on consumers by the authorities and experts in the movie theater network following their own idea as to its most effective arrangement and operation (the architectural design and interior of a movie theater, a repertoire, propaganda work, etc.). Secondly, it means “space practices”, i.e. the functioning of a movie theater in real circumstances through the efforts of its personnel whose views as to the best film distribution and arrangement could considerably divert from the official opinion. Thirdly, “the space of representations”, “a look from below”, that is “experiencing” the practice of “going to the movies” on the part of moviegoers themselves. Applying the above concept to the movie theater and having analyzed the repertoire and work of movie theaters in Chelyabinsk during the wartime, and the administrative activities of party and state institutions in charge of film distribution and movie theater network, the authors came to the following conclusions. The movie theaters during the wartime mainly continued to play the role of entertainment centers, but, alongside with that, were used by the authorities as a place for mobilizing propaganda among the population. In this hard wartime period soviet movie audiences being introduced to American and British film production (“the allies’ films”) discovered a new world on the screen acquiring a new life experience.