Directions, Objectives, and Author's Concepts of Audiovisual Media Interpretations of School and University Theme in the Soviet Cinema of the "Thaw" Period (1956–1968)

Abstract

The "thaw period" films (1956)(1957)(1958)(1959)(1960)(1961)(1962)(1963)(1964)(1965)(1966)(1967)(1968) on the school/university topic can be conditionally divided into two stages: early (1956)(1957)(1958)(1959)(1960)(1961)(1962)(1963) and late "thaw" (1964)(1965)(1966)(1967)(1968), although, naturally, there was a somewhat diffusion between these periods. The "thaw" audiovisual texts about school and university life, according to the authorities, were to support the main course of the state policy in the educational and socio-cultural spheres of the time, that is, to show that the Soviet education and culture system is being reformed: 1) the educational process is out of the strict Stalin's framework (while retaining general communist landmarks and a rigid anti-religious orientation); 2) the relationship between teachers and students is becoming more democratic, to some extent, creative, based on the experience of Soviet educators / innovators of the 1920s; 3) there are problem zones at school and university (for example, the taboo was removed from the previous interpretation of a Soviet teacher's image as almost an ideal representative of the most educated part of the people). The first "thaw" stage was more or less characterized by a romantic reliance on the pedagogical experience of revolutionary Soviet pedagogy of the 1920s and the creation of touching lyrical stories, where, despite minor difficulties, the harmony of good teachers and, * Corresponding author E-mail addresses: 1954alex@mail.ru (A. Fedorov), a.levitskaya@tmei.ru (A. Levitskaya), gorbatckova.olga@yandex.ru (O. Gorbatkova) Education, 2017, 6(3) 517 sometimes, flawed and misled at the beginning, but later good students, won. In the course of the second stage of the "thaw", new tendencies began to manifest themselves more often: on the one hand, the crisis, the disappointment and fatigue on the part of teachers, and on the other, the pragmatic cynicism of students. European Journal of ContemporaryKeywords: audiovisual text, film, the USSR, school, university, students, pupils, teachers, cinema. IntroductionIn this article, we address the goals, objectives, and author's concepts of audiovisual media interpretations of school and university in the Soviet cinema of the "thaw" period (1956)(1957)(1958)(1959)(1960)(1961)(1962)(1963)(1964)(1965)(1966)(1967)(1968). Here, as in our previous work (Fedorov et al., 2017), relying on the technologies developed by C. Bazalgette (Bazalgette, 1995), A. Silverblatt (Silverblatt, 2001: 80-81), W.J. Potter (Potter, 2001) and U. Eco (Eco, 1998; 2005: 209), we conduct a general hermeneutic analysis Soviet feature films, taking into account such key concepts of media education as "media agencies", "media/media text categories", "media technologies", "media languages", "media representations" and "media audiences". Materials and methodsThe material of our research is comprised of audiovisual media texts on the theme of school and university. The main method is a comparative hermeneutic analysis of Soviet ...