Early Soviet Cinema as a Means of Legal Education and Visual Representation of Legal Ideology

This work focuses on a systematic analysis of the practical role of early Soviet cinema in the process of generation and intentional construction of the law culture in Soviet society between 1917 and 1940. In the paper the early Soviet cinema is analyzed as a propaganda film, the main purpose of which is understood as legal education and visual representation of legal ideology in society. For this purpose, within this work, a conceptual, terminological and scientific-methodological framework is formed that is corresponding the subject of analysis, suitable for interdisciplinary research on law and cinema. The study also comprehensively examined the Soviet legal ideology and the Soviet legal education in the form of propaganda in the period from 1917 to 1940 – their genesis, functions, instruments and content. Finally, based on the study of the above-mentioned Soviet law phenomena, a number of early Soviet films were analyzed for the presence of normative legal acts of the Soviet government, embedded in the form of visual legal symbols. The study demonstrates that the consideration of cinema as a special type of visual law representation in culture is an actual way to study the legal culture of society. This kind of research leads to the enrichment of science, filling it with a broader scientific and methodological tool for the analysis of any legal phenomena. In particular, this applies to the comprehension of Soviet cinema, the content of which was completely dependent on the official legal ideology of the country.