ABSTRACT
The material culture of the twentieth-century Russian village was significantly transformed by urbanization and industrialization and by such local factors as collectivization and the building of socialism. This chapter is devoted to Soviet cinematography as a historical source, demonstrating its potential and revealing certain problems. It analyses the information potential of Soviet feature cinema for the historical reconstruction of the material world of the twentieth-century Soviet village. The chapter focuses on films dealing with life in the Soviet countryside, and in particular those which launched the trend of so-called 'village cinema' ('derevenskoe kino') in the Soviet film industry. Feature cinema's development is shaped by a number of factors, such as technical and technological conditions and innovations, ideology and politics, and cultural and social trends. In the post-war Soviet Union, the 'household revolution' in the countryside brought about new 'urban' patterns of consumption, which were different from the traditional model.
