Nostalgia on the Web: Soviet Film Viewing as a “Common Place” in the Memory of Generations

Abstract

The report analyzes the specifics of digital reception of memory about the experience of Soviet film screening in the 1960s–1970s. During the period under study, cinema visits and the widespread practice of watching television became an important form of leisure that organizes the free time of a Soviet person, and therefore memories of films they saw occupy a significant place in the memory of the Soviet past as a whole. However, the analysis of the Soviet experience of watching films and forming a special cultural attitude towards them is a little-studied aspect of Russian memorial research (in particular, in the context of studying nostalgia for Soviet everyday life). The author hypothesizes that not only the films themselves, but also the narratives constructed around the experience of watching them, organize nostalgic reflection in the memory of several generations and even become a resource for the formation of post-Soviet identity. The report examines the processes of bringing people together in front of the screen, the practice of going to the cinema in a friendly group or with family, watching and re-watching films themselves, discussing films, reading thematic literature and the press, as well as ways to preserve and recreate Soviet leisure forms in digital culture.