From the Cinema ‘Dekorator’ to the Cinema ‘Arkhitektor’: Set Design, Medium Specificity and Technology in Russian Cinema of the Silent Era

Abstract This article traces how understandings about the role of the cinema set designer—referred to in Russian as the khudozhnik (artist)—evolved across the 1910s and the 1920s in relation to broader artistic debates of the period. Drawing on archival material and articles published in the contemporary Russian and Soviet cinema press, it examines the changes in the cinema khudozhnik’s professional title and what these shifts in terminology reveal about differing conceptions of the scope and nature of the set designer’s role. The debate about the cinema khudozhnik related not only to the division of responsibilities among film-makers as the nascent Russian cinema industry developed and working practices became standardized. It was also connected to film-makers’ growing appreciation of cinema’s expressive potential as an art form and to how the emergent practice of cinema set design related to other creative disciplines, such as painting, the decorative arts, architecture and, from the 1920s, production art. Moreover, during the Soviet 1920s questions about the cinema khudozhnik’s role became associated with broader concerns about what it meant to be a creative practitioner working in a collaborative context and to the value ascribed to such qualities as technological expertise and versatility in early-Soviet ideology.