Cinema and medicine in early Soviet Russia, 1917–1936

The entanglement of medicine and cinema in early Soviet Russia sheds a unique light on the ways in which visual culture has helped to define conceptions of life, health and disease. Exploring the role of film in the early Soviet campaign for healthy habits and behaviours, this project examines three sites at which medical knowledge, cinematic technology and revolutionary agendas of psycho-physiological transformation intersected – the health enlightenment film, medical research on film spectatorship, and film psychotherapy. 

Dr Toropova seeks to show how the medical films released onto the Soviet screen in the 1920s articulated new models of healthy living and structured a biomedical way of seeing.