“Our job is to pull audience to Soviet films with all means necessary”. State-Monopolised Film Distribution and Patterns of Film Exhibition in Two Eastern Bloc Cities in the Stalinist Period: A Comparative Case Study of Cracow (Poland) and Magdeburg (East Germany)

This chapter deals with cinema programming policies in the early 1950s in two major, non-capital cities in former Soviet Bloc countries: People’s Republic of Poland (PRP, Cracow) and German Democratic Republic (GDR, Magdeburg). The study reveals the double standards applied in communist film culture: while the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) served as the model standard for a progressive culture, exposure to its films was, in fact, limited compared to films from the capitalist West. Films from the USSR were programmed for shorter periods, often linked to special occasions, and—most clearly in the case of Cracow—preferably in the larger (première) theatres.