Abstract
Marko Dumančić's first book has been much anticipated in Soviet gender history, and it does not disappoint. Showing an admirable facility with film studies, gender analysis, cultural methodology, and the dynamic terrain of Soviet history in the two decades after the 1953 death of Joseph Stalin, Dumančić offers a deeply researched and persuasively argued portrait of the Soviet gender order from about 1953 to 1968: a moment of post-Stalinist modernity when men's lived experiences as masculinized subjects, and filmmakers’ treatment of cinematic masculinity, overlapped and reinforced one another. Dumančić dubs this moment “the sixties,” a moniker that draws on a Russian movement from the 1860s, when a particularly active intelligentsia talked and wrote about remaking society, while simultaneously referencing the emergence at this time of a postwar generation of cultural dissidents in the West. He argues that a “crisis” of masculinity that broke into a debate in the press in 1968 actually began in the early 1950s and “was hidden in plain sight on the nation's movie screens” (7). That this is a book about the Soviet film industry is not immediately apparent in its title, but that is also one of its many strengths. To support his interpretations of over eighty films, Dumančić also draws on a wide array of sources, including archival evidence from institutions such as the cinematographers’ union, interviews and reviews attesting to audience reactions, major film periodicals, newspapers, and cartoons that supplement (and complement) the book's visual analyses.
The result is a rich study of post-Stalinist society using gender and family as the guiding categories. It complicates our picture of this era, which is one that has produced particularly fruitful research in the past fifteen years on how people in Soviet society recovered, rebuilt, and reconnected to each other after Stalin's death. Those studies have focused on discrete population groups such as youth, released prisoners, single mothers, demobilized veterans, new conscripts, athletes, gay men, artists, “hooligans,” and a new middling class experiencing single-family living for the first time. Dumančić's book is a welcome addition to this historiography in that it shows us how this post-Stalin narrative had multiple layers: the challenges of modern life for Soviet men in reality, as well as how those challenges were portrayed onscreen. As Dumančić writes, “Men Out of Focus is a story about masculine figures on the silver screen, a commentary on the directors who made them, and a portrait of a society reacting to new productions” (11).
Dumančić also offers a new way to think about this time period by locating male film characters’ troubles not in wartime or Stalin-era trauma, but in a new modernity, “defined by mass consumerism, (sub)urbanization, technological revolution, and the democratization of the public space so as to more substantively include youth and women” (8). In arguing for Soviet men's “modern” malaise in this way, Dumančić goes further than most Soviet historians in finding similarities between the Soviet sixties and that same moment of change in the West—where governments and societies were grappling with similar elements of modernity in a postwar, Cold War, and newly nuclear world. This implicit comparison throughout the book culminates in Chapter 6, “De-Heroization and the Pan-European Masculinity Crisis,” which places Soviet sixties films in direct conversation with films of that era from other European countries. Dumančić's sources insulate Soviet men from the usual markers of post-Stalin society: war recovery, including disability, and Cold War sabre rattling. It is bold but effective of Dumančić to frame men's ennui in this way, as part of a pattern of modernity anxieties in common with the West, rather than the result of the USSR's unique wartime and Stalin-era experiences.
In Chapter 1, “What Was Stalinist Masculinity and Why Did It Change?” Dumančić tackles the unenviable task of defining the dominant themes of Soviet masculinity before the “sixties” that the rest of the book will explore. Non-specialist readers might be tempted to assume that “Stalinist masculinity” is easily identified and summarized as a reflection of the dictator's view of himself: hegemonically masculine workers and soldiers who valued physical labor, muscular heterosexuality, and uniform nationalist ideals. While those archetypes did often appear onscreen under Stalin, Dumančić shows that Stalinist masculinity had its own pluralities—and in doing so, he successfully avoids opening the book with an easy Stalinist strawman. Out of de-Stalinization in the mid-1950s, Dumančić identifies five main reasons why masculinized film tropes changed: more permissive censorship laws; increased autonomy from the unionization of cinematographers in 1957; the growing sense of freedom among moviegoers to voice their characterization demands; the cooperation between filmmakers and the wider intelligentsia to question Stalinist norms and tropes; and the rise in market-driven sociological research to determine character attributes that would appeal to film audiences (31–32). “Unlike Stalinist heroes, whose ultimate goal was to integrate into a homosocial hierarchy by becoming self-disciplining subjects,” Dumančić writes, “post-Stalinist protagonists sought to independently and idiosyncratically come to terms with a world they perceived as alien and sometimes threatening” (53).
After an introduction and this first chapter on the era before 1953, the book unfolds as four core chapters on fatherhood, the family, women's roles, and scientists as film heroes. These four are followed by the European comparative film chapter referenced above, and an epilogue, which collectively unpack the multiple ways that sixties film expanded—or overturned—Stalinist tropes of masculinity. In Chapter 2, “Being a Dad Is Not For Sissies,” Dumančić makes a welcome contribution to perhaps the fastest-growing subfield for historians of Soviet masculinities: fatherhood studies. Here, again, we see films of this era complicating their Stalinist predecessors, this time by showing fathers as involved rather than distant, and in many cases, playing a distinct cultural rather than a simple biological role. Sixties film fathers could be made, not born, reflecting the predominance of non-traditional families off-screen in the wake of the Second World War.
Dumančić nicely situates the film analyses in this chapter within the broader emerging historiography on postwar pronatalism, abortion access, and fatherhood imagery in other art forms, drawing on the work of Mie Nakachi, Amy Randall, Claire McCallum, and Helene Carlbäck, among others. He continues to examine the theme of fatherhood in Chapter 3, “Fathers versus Sons, or, the Great Soviet Family in Trouble,” but this time expanding it to consider fatherly film relationships with older sons rather than small children. Once a boy in a family grew old enough to challenge his father as the so-called man of the house, competing generational visions of masculinity and social power took root. This focus provides a nice way to discuss the theme of post-Stalinist youth so crucial to the history of this era, while also taking a new approach to it. On film, breaking up the myth of the Stalin-era “great Soviet family” became an effective way to both signal this new era to filmgoers, and to reflect changes already happening in society—despite persistent disapproval from the post-Stalin political elite about film portrayals of young men. Dumančić's layered reading of the multiple meanings of fatherhood in a variety of films make these two the book's strongest chapters.
Chapter 4, “The Trouble with Women: Consumerism and the Death of Rugged Masculinity,” offers a very welcome treatment of women's place in the world of cinematic masculinity. An imperative of masculinity history that nevertheless often falls under the radar is the inclusion of women—and not only inclusion, but acknowledgement that masculinized cultural terrains are too often built and maintained through the demonization, violation, or erasure of women. In this chapter, Dumančić finds several films that played on specific tropes about “man-eating, gold-digging, and momism” (151) as ways of building sympathy for the leading man. He discusses women as consumers, drawing on the work of Susan Reid, Christine Varga-Harris, Deborah A. Field, and others, and adds further evidence to his argument throughout the book that the troubled growing pains of an updated vision of Soviet modernity after Stalin ran parallel to the West in the same time period, both on film and in broader (consumerist) culture. The misogyny that the film industry showed through its focus on women's supposed frivolity, greed, and propensity for entrapment, provides welcome new evidence that women's inequality remained a feature of Soviet socialism after the war—despite longstanding labor contributions and the government's ideological insistence on parity. Moreover, the revelation that such anti-woman plots onscreen were so popular among audiences should influence how we think (and teach) about the toxicity of the Soviet gender order in everyday life.
In Chapter 5, “Our Friend the Atom? Science as a Threat to Masculinity,” Dumančić rather creatively finds a way to discuss portrayals of scientific and intellectual masculinity—a common factor in Soviet society but one often overlooked in gender history. “Because members of the scientific/technical intelligentsia ranked high in the popular imagination and figured prominently in official discourse,” Dumančić writes, “filmmakers exploited the popularity of the scientist to promote a subversive masculine model” (191). At the same time, however, the filmmakers themselves were part of a society that misunderstood and occasionally feared scientists’ perceived power, resulting in film portrayals of them as only cogs in a stifling bureaucracy, or as men with weak morals and bodies alike.
The book's final chapter, “De-Heroization and the Pan-European Masculinity Crisis,” in many ways goes in a different direction than the previous ones and could certainly be assigned separately in a comparative film class. Dumančić zooms out from his focus on Soviet society in the sixties to put the USSR's film industry and its gendered characters in conversation with four other European film schools of this era in Poland, Britain, Italy, and Czechoslovakia. Placing one Soviet film in each section with one from one of the above countries, Dumančić demonstrates his admirable facility with film history and studies, diving deeply into the details of postwar filmmaking and visual culture in Europe. With Polish film, the comparison comes from the war's influence on Soviet and Polish masculinity; for British New Wave cinema, it is about comparative working-class portrayals; for Italy, the class comparisons move to discuss “middle-class angst” (238), rather than workers; and for Czechoslovakian film, in a country with a complex relationship to communism in the sixties, Dumančić compares irony and humor as film tropes for male characters. This chapter overall argues for Soviet film's inclusion in this broader European tradition. Few studies of post-Stalin society have made such overt comparisons to Western Europe, and one might well ask whether legitimate Soviet exceptionalism suffers as a result. But Dumančić's innovative framework in this chapter and throughout the book deserves the attention of historians of this era.
Dumančić's bold stances on two issues in particular—one historical and one theoretical—should ensure that this book remains influential for many years to come. The first is his near silence on the aftermath of the Second World War in sixties art and society. Historians of the USSR have long debated the appropriate periodization for the post-1945, or post-1953 era, asking to what degree the end of the war and Stalin's death signaled significant change. Many, including myself, see the war as a clear break and a massive factor in postwar life, with state policies from military service terms to family law changing, to say nothing of shifting social and cultural imperatives led by a population overcome by trauma and loss. Other historians have taken Stalin's death in 1953, or Nikita Khrushchev's consolidation of power three years later, as more substantial moments of change. Still others have argued for various periodizations in between. Men Out of Focus stands out, however, not only for minimizing the war as a factor in sixties culture, but for almost completely removing it. In this, Dumančić has followed his sources: his extensive filmography simply does not mention it often enough for him to consider the experience of war a significant factor. Through his persuasive film analysis of sons rebuking Stalin-era fathers, for example, Dumančić makes a strong case for a timeline in which the war alone does not explain the emergence in sixties films of a post-Stalin modernity filled with ennui among male protagonists.
Second, Dumančić has renewed an older conversation in gender history about the notion of masculinity in “crisis.” He is well versed in the broader discussion, sparked most recently when French historian Mary Louise Roberts declared in a 2016 piece that the concept of a crisis of masculinity has been semantically overworked and no longer holds distinct meaning. If men are/were in crisis, is it constant across historical times and places, and if so, how can historians move the conversation forward? But Dumančić fully adopts the word and concept right from the book's subtitle, “The Soviet Masculinity Crisis in the Long Sixties.” In this, he is again supported by the research: the sense of crisis comes directly from his primary sources, beginning with his page one discussion of a 1968 op-ed that openly discussed the place of Soviet men in modern society. While his analysis is persuasive, we might expand the question to: crisis for whom? Were men in power, including in the film industry, using the concept and expressing such handwringing about men's place because of threats to their own power, real or perceived? Did unmarried urban women share the sentiment? Tajik teenage conscripts? Or was it about a certain demographic of Slavic men in power in the government and media (and even perhaps among film audiences) fussing over the changing world in the sixties that challenged them? Jeff Sahadeo has recently published research on the migration of men from the Caucasus and Central Asia into Moscow and Leningrad from the 1960s to the 1980s and beyond, who often sought to support families in their home republics. When paired with Dumančić's work, this history potentially offers us a fuller portrait of Slavic men's urban malaise and sense of crisis—influenced not only by the new modernity or by perceptions of (Slavic) women's consumerism, but by the increasing visibility of Muslim men in central Soviet cities. More research on the film intersections between masculinity and nationality would be welcome.
Men Out of Focus is an excellent contribution to Soviet cultural history and film studies that enriches each of the many fields it touches. The epilogue points to several administrative changes after 1969 that decreased the independence of the Soviet film industry, providing a clear path for where future researchers might follow the sixties man. “Post-Stalinist celluloid heroes,” Dumančić concludes, “now had a sense of autonomy, yet they also seemed unable to assert themselves in a world where preschoolers and pre-teens exercised a monopoly on morality, young men fulminated against their father's (Stalinist) sins, mass consumerism had made women the dominant economic actors, and science offered more questions than answers” (255). The book is accessibly written (including smooth and easily digestible descriptions of dozens of films), meticulously researched, and it offers new ways of thinking about the postwar and post-Stalin eras—which will perhaps now become known more broadly in Soviet history as “the sixties,” thanks to this important book.