Up For Sale Today is

Soviet Cinema

edited by

A. Arossev

design and photomontage by

Vavara Stepanova and Aleksandr Rodchenko

Hardcover. 4to. Voks. 1935. 312 pgs. Illustrated with Black and White plates. First Edition/First Printing. Text in English.

Bound in decorative illustrated boards. Boards have light shelf-wear present present to the extremities. Celluloid of Stalin's head has seen better days (see photo; it is present but in fragments). No ownership marks present.  Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid.

An impressive feat of Soviet propaganda, the book featured history and biographies, with portraits, of key Russian filmmakers, actors, famous movies, critics' statements and more. In true Soviet fashion, it also included the celebrated fold-out, die-cut, image of a cinema's audience in front of a big screen with a "hole," through which Lenin's head peeked (see photo), as well as the tipped-in, celluloid sheet with Stalin's silhouette (rarely found intact, see photo).

FROM WIKIPEDIA:

The cinema of the Soviet Union, not to be confused with "Cinema of Russia" despite films in the Russian language being predominant in the body of work so described, includes films produced by the constituent republics of the Soviet Union reflecting elements of their pre-Soviet culture, language and history, albeit they were all regulated by the central government in Moscow. Most prolific in their republican films, after the Russian SFSR, were the Armenian SSR, Azerbaijan SSR, Georgian SSR, Ukrainian SSR, and, to a lesser degree, Lithuanian SSR, Byelorussian SSR and Moldavian SSR. At the same time, the nation's film industry, which was fully nationalized throughout most of the country's history, was guided by philosophies and laws propounded by the monopoly Soviet Communist Party which introduced a new view on the cinema, socialist realism, which was different from the one before or after the existence of the Soviet Union.