Nadège Mariotti, author of ‘A.G. Stakhanov in Gaumont Pathé’s Soviet Film Archives: Between Physical Performance and Instrumentalisation’.

Nadège Mariotti is a Professor and instructor in History at the University of Lorraine since 2002. She trains future teachers within the framework of a professional Master’s Degree in Education. For several years Nadège has been developing training sessions about the didactic approach to images. As a PhD student at the Paris Sorbonne New University since 2012, her research focuses on the representations of the world of mining and steelwork, through to the technical gesture in animated images from the end of the 19th century to the end of the Thirty Glorious Years (1975).

Nadège’s article examines the evolution of the memory of Stakhanov’s record mining achievement, moving from a retrospective point of view to a celebration, and finally to commemoration. The depiction of the miner A.G. Stakhanov in newsreels from the Gaumont Pathé archives highlights the representations of this physical performance used in the specific economic and political environment of the USSR during the interwar period. The Soviet worker is idealised as a national hero. At that time, the Soviet government was looking for the “New Man” and “new technical standards” and Stakhanov lost his individuality, becoming “only an official agent of the state”.

Posted by Borimir Totev, Executive Editor of SLOVO Journal