If Hollywood managed to avoid regulation by state institutions through the use of the Hays Office, and the British documentary movement relied on state institutions, it is often suggested that in the totalitarian states of the 1930s – the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the Japanese Empire – the cinema was no more than a crude form of state propaganda. Certainly these were not liberal states and overt opposition was not tolerated, but it would be equally wrong to see the films that were produced in these countries as simply propagandist.

Admittedly Soviet cinema had been state controlled since the revolution but in the 1930s there was a push to increase the number of films produced in the Soviet Union. The man placed in charge of this process was Boris Shumyatsky, who was anything but the stern propagandist. On the contrary, he was a champion of entertainment and opposed Soviet montage on the grounds that it was too difficult and intellectual. He therefore favoured a cinema that spoke more directly to popular competences and dispositions.

This did not mean that Soviet cinema was not subject to censorship and, from 1934, socialist realism was the approved style of filmmaking. However, this style of filmmaking is often caricatured by critics who want to present it as simple propagandist affirmation of Soviet society. It was supposed to present Soviet communism as representing historical progress, and as leading the world towards a socialist Utopia, but it was also associated with the rejection of the objective ‘documentation’ of reality.