The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures a
Edited by: Aga Skrodzka , Xiaoning Lu , and Katarzyna Marciniak
Abstract
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures critically examines and historically reconstructs the visual practices that have accompanied social transformations initiated by communist ideals in various parts of the world in the twentieth century. Bringing together diverse and broadly understood visual texts, including architecture, interior design, cartoons, computer games, fashion, photography, film and television, this volume explores how communism engages the visual. It is divided into five themed sections, focusing, respectively, on materiality; institutional factors and theoretical discourses; international and intercultural dimensions; visual production and strategic spectacles; and after-images, memory, and legacy of communist visual cultures. Thirty-two chapters written by an international team of scholars from their unique disciplinary perspectives investigate the ways in which communism uses visual aesthetics to articulate its value system and to implement its improvement project. The contributors ask how communist visual culture defines itself as a culture of specific media, specific forms, and specific practices. Supported by archival research and historical analysis, this volume is a call to examine the communist visual culture in a range of media and theoretical dimensions, toward a shared goal of reimagining it beyond the existing ways of thinking about it as a defunct project.
Keywords: communism, visual culture, communist ideals, socialist realism, socialist art, visual aesthetics
Bibliographic Information
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020 ISBN: 9780190885533
Published online: Jul 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.001.0001
EDITORS
Aga Skrodzka, editor
Aga Skrodzka, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Clemson University
Xiaoning Lu, editor
Xiaoning Lu, Lecturer in East Asian Languages & Cultures, SOAS, University of London
Katarzyna Marciniak, editor
Katarzyna Marciniak, Professor of Global and Transnational Media, Occidental College
Q X F O R ^Copyright © 2022. All rights reserved.
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Print Publication Date: Jun 2020 Subject: Literature Online Publication Date: Jul 2019
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937373
ISBN 978-0-19-088553-3
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Contributors a
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020 Subject: Literature Online Publication Date: Jul 2019
Djurdja Bartlett,
Reader in Histories and Cultures of Fashion, University of the Arts London
Sara Blaylock,
Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Minnesota Duluth
William C. Brumfield,
Professor of Slavic Studies and Sizeler Professor of Jewish Studies, Tulane University
María A. Cabrera Arús,
Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor, Brown University
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Cristina Cuevas-Wolf,
Independent Scholar and Curator, Resident Historian, Wende Museum
Lindiwe Dovey,
Professor of Film and Screen Studies, SOAS University of London
April A. Eisman,
Associate Professor of Art History, Iowa State University
Antonia Finnane,
Honorary Professor in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne
Dana Healy,
Senior Lecturer in Vietnamese Studies, SOAS University of London
Nick Hodgin,
Lecturer in German Studies, Cardiff University
Anikó Imre,
Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
Rohan Kalyan,
Assistant Professor of International Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University
Yulia Karpova,
Assistant Archivist at Open Society Archives at Central European University
Vivian Y. Li,
The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art, Dallas Museum of Art
Jacqueline Loss,
Professor of Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Connecticut
Xiaoning Lu,
Lecturer in East Asian Languages & Cultures, SOAS, University of London
Joshua Malitsky,
Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Indiana University
(p. x) Katarzyna Marciniak,
Professor of Global and Transnational Media, Occidental College
Laura U. Marks,
Grant Strate University Professor in Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University
Doreen Mende,
Associate Professor in Visual Arts, HEAD Geneva University of Art and Design
Magdalena Moskalewicz,
Lecturer of Art History, Theory and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Pablo Müller,
Senior Research Associate, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
Stephen M. Norris,
Walter E. Havighurst Professor of Russian History and Director of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University
Serguei Alex. Oushakine
Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University
Constantin Parvulescu,
Senior Researcher in Film and Media Studies, Babes-Bolyai University
Birgitte Beck Pristed,
Associate Professor of Russian Studies, Aarhus University
Vicente Sanchez-Biosca,
Professor in Film Studies and Visual Culture, University of Valencia
Aga Skrodzka,
Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Clemson University
lulia Státicá,
Visiting Scholar at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University
Jaroslav Svelch,
Assistant Professor of Media Studies, Charles University
Claudiu Turcus,
Associate Professor in Film and Literary Studies, Babe§-Bolyai University
Travis Workman,
Associate Professor in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Minnesota,
Twin Cities
Kimberly E. Zarecor,
Professor of Architecture, Iowa State University
Introduction: The Communist Vision Today d
Aga Skrodzka
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Jan 2020 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.34
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures expands and enriches the field of Visual Culture Studies primarily through its global scope—a result of the project's focus on communist visual cultures, which brings together disparate and broadly understood visual texts, produced in different places and moments in time—nevertheless, texts connected by the mobilization of looking employed in processes of social transformation and political action. Interdisciplinary in method, the book allows the reader to think about visual culture beyond representation, as something embedded in everyday life, a rich fabric of visual communication with specific, collective and individual, sites of meaning. Ultimately, the coming together of different fields of visual culture in this book will facilitate a rethinking of the visual within particular disciplines, lifting the conceptual restrictions imposed by ideas related to taste, function, visibility, dissemination, and appropriation, which are used to stake out disciplinary boundaries.
Keywords: communist visual culture, materialism, Marxism, utopia, futurism, social justice
Conceived at a time when the world's community is facing a certain crisis of imagination with regard to seeing a better future for all, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures turns to the past to un-forget how revolutionary vision shaped the cultures of diverse communities that have come into dialogue with communist ideals in search of social justice. These ideals focused prominently on building an egalitarian society, some argue— an unattainable dream, a utopia. The ideals may appear distant, perhaps more so today, at a time when the numbers of the have-nots and are-nots (if we include those, whose lives, as Zygmunt Bauman poignantly observed, have been wasted by the neoliberal biopolitics) are simply unprecedented in the history of the planet.1 Despite the challenge of the staggering numbers,2 most of us agree that we need a radical reform, if not a revolution, and probably sooner rather than later.
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The existing materializations (and archived remnants of such materializations) of the communist vision have arguably delivered mixed results, even in societies that dared to completely reorganize their social contracts, and in good faith, commit to creating the communist utopia. The book, however, is less interested in judging the ultimate social, political, and economic successes and failures of specific communist projects. Nonetheless, many of our contributors deliver such judgments and caution against repeating the mistakes from the past. There is a growing sense of the “deterritorializing power” of today's “multitudes” and their burgeoning readiness, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri see it, to destruct the global empire. Certainly Hardt and Negri's critique of the late capitalist networked economy as imperial is not farfetched.3 Our modest purpose as scholars collaborating in this volume is to analyze the visual cultures of communism (in some cases, postcommunism) as a sphere that illustrates, narrates, debates, questions, confronts, and ultimately remembers the dream of a better future. In the process, by historicizing it on a case-by-case basis, we hope to demythologize communism as well as resist its growing demonization—two tendencies that defuse whatever potential the communist ideals may still have to offer. Our first step is to salvage the dismissed (p- 2) achievements and forgotten aspects of communist cultural work. Our second step is to ask how these cultural formations inform our contemporary grappling with social, economic, and political challenges. What can we reuse? What might we wish to avoid? How exactly is this relatively recent past still resonating with us today?
On May 6, 2019, HBO and SkyUK premiered a five-part miniseries Chernobyl, which dramatizes the 1986 nuclear accident at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant in Pripyat, Ukraine, then a republic within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The plot focuses on the immediate aftermath of the accident: the massive cleanup operation, the investigation of the causes of the disaster, and the trial of those accountable. The show quickly garnered critical acclaim and a global audience. Overnight, it has become one of the Internet Movie Database's (IMDb) highest-rated series, ranking ahead of other popular shows such Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad.4 This popularity comes after years of Chernobyl's fame as the main protagonist within the dystopic subculture of dark tourism. Chockfull of narrative suspense, body horror, and postapocalyptic steampunk aesthetic, the show is an indictment of politics that corrupts and devalues truth. Critics have pointed out the show's resonance with our own milieu. Writing for The Atlantic, Sophie Gilbert refers to the scene where a power plant employee stares at the blinding core of the damaged nuclear reactor as a “metaphor for life online in 2019: the surprises, the gravitational yank of innocuous portals, the toxic aftershock.”5 She also sees a resemblance between the Soviets' denial of the severity of Chernobyl's disaster and the current denial of climate change by conservative governments. Instead of a vehicle for social and cultural critique, Kate Brown, the author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, sees the HBO show as a typical Cold War narrative that execrates the Soviets, a tale easily recognizable by the older generations of Americans who grew up being force-fed the anti-Soviet propaganda.6 In some way, Craig Mazin, the creator of Chernobyl, confirms this reading. In an interview, he explains that the Soviet system is the villain of the story, but he also adds that the Soviet people are its collective hero.7 Some of the se-ries' more heartening moments show the collective effort of Soviet scientists, firefighters, miners, and soldiers who work together selflessly to contain the disaster, despite the painful awareness of the system's betrayal. While reenacting history, the show acts out some of our collective fears about the safety of the planet, democracy, and human solidarity.
Much like the characters in Chernobyl, we are living our lives in a moment that could be described as post disaster and pre apocalypse. The recent renewal and escalation of the Cold War dynamics, the mass organizing and protests on the Left that question the neoliberal status quo, the increasing shrinkage of workers' protections and civil rights in the name of economic and bureaucratic efficiency, the continued dehumanization and alienation enforced by technological organization of life, the unrelenting ecological exploitation, and finally the intensification of racial and religious tensions on a global scale contribute to a state of affairs where something must be done to change the course of development determined by the total and uncompromising subordination of all processes of social organization to the single principle of private accumulation of capital. The political and economic thought of Karl Marx, who envisioned a classless and stateless (p- 3) society, where distribution of resources and material wealth would be based on need, remains a source of the most sophisticated and extensive critique of capitalism. Whether today the change of the economic system may be accomplished by small steps of reform carried out within the existing paradigm of representative democracy or only through a revolutionary upheaval is a matter of political and ethical debate. In either case, the actors, whether radical or reformist, do need a concrete program of change and a clear image of the alternative. Indeed, the lack of such a program has been the most serious accusation posed against the radical Left and the Marxist philosophers and theorists who speak today of the possibility of the “communist horizon,” the “communist hypothesis,” or the “new communist project.”8
While The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures does not pretend to offer such a program, the scholars represented in the volume look at the archives of communist and postcommunist visual cultures in hope that many valuable lessons may still be gleaned from revisiting those repositories. At the very least, the researchers have combed the archives to recoup the visual traces of imagined better futures, or what Agnieszka Mrozik, paraphrasing Enzo Traverso, described as “the memory of what still demands realization.”9 In the course of their inquiry, the contributors had to contend with what Mrozik diagnoses as the “museumization of communism”—a symbolic, rhetorical, and material process of emptying out, “based on the perception of the communist movement, and, more broadly, Marxism as a relic of a bygone era, a museum exhibition, not a living idea capable of gripping the masses.”10 The editors hope that this collaborative project of scholarly recovery will aid those who are urgently looking to construct a new vision of arriving at a better collective order—not an easy undertaking at the time when catastrophe has become the dominant telos in narratives about the future. Utopias are considered the domain of the naïve. The privileged deem them altogether superfluous, listing the advancements of the Western civilization as proof of realized utopia, while ignoring the rising costs and irreversible consequences of such advancements.
By looking at the communist visual cultures of the twentieth century, especially through their everyday material practices, changing institutional structures, and dynamic transnational exchanges, the volume wishes to draw attention to the voluntarist dimension of social change as a collective endeavor, away from the all-too-easy determinisms of the grandiose political, scientific, and economic theories that herald the thermal death of the universe, the end of history, the immanence of capitalism, or communism for that matter. To unsettle these looming predictions, the volume embraces Ilya Prigogine's belief that “visions of the future—utopian visions—play a very important role in the present conduct” and, indeed, determine the possibility of “reasoned, ethical action today.”11 If one envisions a future of endless exploitation of people and the environment in service of capital accumulation as the only possible, maybe even natural, course for the planet, is it not simply to habituate and naturalize our current resignation to the social contract enforced by the few who benefit from it?12 What future can we envision to overcome the impasse, and how do we construct a culture around such a vision? How do we teach, propagate, and model the vision so that it begins to alter our conduct today? How do the existing models found in visual culture inform such a search?
(p. 4) To answer these questions, this project proposes to look at how in communist party states, social and political change was facilitated by cultural influence, both formal and informal. Writing about the cultural component of communist regimes, and how culture was used to mobilize citizens, Stephen A. Smith points out that “the party-state created a complex of official knowledge, norms, orientations, and rules designed to shape the activity of the individual, while simultaneously seeking to elicit his or her support.”13 But this top-down cultural indoctrination, Smith insists, was often negotiated and accommodated by citizens “who were far from being passive objects of power.”14 The history of communist cultural initiatives discussed in this volume allows us to make productive connections between communist cultural revolutions and the ways in which soft power is being deployed today by various political and economic actors, who seek to achieve specific military, economic, and political goals by reshaping the social subject through sophisticated cultural management of the subject's imagination, desires, values, and, more generally, the processes of identity construction. The twenty-first century's “culture wars” gain a new perspective when analyzed vis-à-vis the previous century's experiences of communist social engineering enacted in the register of culture as projects of forming a new ideological consciousness as well as the wide-reaching initiatives geared to improve the conditions of everyday life for the masses. Studying the communist cultural legacy shows us that cultural work can mobilize social and political change on a massive scale within relatively short periods of time and can, indeed, be used—as both Lenin and Mao had theo-rized—to form the “third front” of revolution.15 Many of our contributors showcase the expanse and effectiveness of communist cultural works as well as their dependence on the availability of specific technologies, resources, and material conditions. Other contributors uncover the complexity of shifting power relations formed and continuously reformed by the collective and individual producers, mediators, and consumers of communist culture.
The book's main impulse is to critically examine and historically reconstruct the visual practices (including theories that shaped them) that have accompanied transformations undertaken in the name of social improvement projects initiated at different historical moments in various parts of the world by diverse agents and agencies of communist party states. The communist visual cultures show us how utopian ideas altered daily material practices and social interactions, how vision became a collective resource. The scrupulous research presented in this collection by an international group of sociologists, anthropologists, historians, art, media, and cultural studies scholars offers a timely and nu-anced intervention in today's volatile landscape of visual debate, which has been polarized between commercial appropriation and iconoclasm. On one hand, we witness the West's nostalgic and highly commodified recycling of the Cold War iconography and, on the other hand, we learn about the indiscriminate decommunization purges that set out to eradicate communist symbols and tropes from public memory in many postcommunist states across the post-Soviet region.
The editors of this volume have been born and raised in societies that may well be called communist—a more nuanced discussion of our use of the term “communist” follows. We also share the distanced vision framed by emigration and a decision to pursue (p- 5) our professional careers in the West, while our early formative education had been scripted by the communist discourse. Our experiences of the state-sanctioned attempts at materializing the communist ideals vary along generational, religious, ethnic, and class divides and are far from homogenous. On the topic of radical social change, our ideological differences may be considered insurmountable, by those on the Left, yet subtle or even insignificant, by those on the Right. We believe, however, that these differences have positively impacted the volume's editorial process and the curatorial efforts behind its text selection. Our divergent experiential, affective, and ideological encounters with communist ideals and their realizations within lived reality led to many difficult debates over the potential of those ideals and their possible political currency today. The differences quickly revealed our inability to provide a unified narration about communist legacy and, in many ways, showed us that the ideals have not expired, that we deeply care about our parents' and grandparents' social experiments, and their meaning today, even if they no longer do. The complexity of our collective approach ensured a certain informal system of checks and balances that helped us moderate the content when concerns about nostalgia, ahis-toricism, political amnesia, rhetorical violence, discursive imperialism, or ethical responsibility were raised.
The use of the word “communist” in the volume's title and its conceptual mapping is a direct result of the editors' decision to focus the content in the book on visual cultures that were formed and disseminated, through formal and informal channels, in the communist party states, where partially or fully planned economies were implemented to create a new order, and with it a new man—the communist subject. While in purely Marxists terms, communism as the final stage of social development has not been achieved in any
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of the party states under consideration, the intention of pursuing such a goal has very much shaped the parties' agendas and explicit ideological discourses, which found an emphatic and sophisticated expression in the cultural register; even if they eventually failed across most other registers engaged in anticapitalist systemic change. The Western Left has effectively put an embargo on the term “communism” in reference to the many communist experiments that took place in the East and the South, which have been dismissed as perversions of Marxism-Leninism. The word “communist”—rather than “socialist” or “state socialist”—is used as an act of resistance to the rhetorical colonization of communism by the conservative and neo-conservative movements that promote a wholesale dismissal and criminalization of radical Left politics. It would be irresponsible to deny the crimes committed by communist actors. Many efforts that comprised the materialization of the communist utopia devolved into pathology, lies, and loss of life. When exploring the cultural expressions of communism, one must also focus on carefully historicized accounts of such crimes, where specific individuals (Stalin, Pol Pot, Ceausescu) and specific events (The Holodomor, The Great Leap Forward, the Cambodian genocide) are considered before communist ideals are blamed for people's unethical and immoral actions. The increasingly evident criminal record of capitalism complicates the wholesale rejection of communism on account of its ideological liaisons with crimes committed by those acting as its champions. By refusing to relegate the communist revolution to a totalitarianism, often equated with (p- 6) fascism, the volume attempts to push against what Constantin Parvulescu recognizes as the act of orientalizing North Korean, Chinese, and Eastern European communist experiments by the Western Left, who consider those experiments “embarrassments” to Marxist revolutionary theory.16 In many subtle and complicated ways, our contributors follow Parvulescu's call to study the communist “taking of power, mobilization, organization, and governance”—especially as those processes were filtered through the visual cultures of specific states—in order to contribute to the growing body of knowledge about the practical, processual, and logistical implementation of radical social change.17 Using the term “communist” allows us to return the life work of those who labored for communism to public memory without the orientalizing, shaming, ridiculing, or dehumanizing frame.
Reconstructing public memory to preserve the agency of the collective subject is at the heart of the recent interest in communist legacy. In October 2018, the artist Jasmina Wojcik released Symphony of the Ursus Factory—a film summary of her long-term community art project, involving the former workers from one of the largest tractor factories in the twentieth-century Europe—the pride of the Polish communist-era machine industry. After 1989, the Ursus Factory, located in Warsaw, Poland, long mismanaged, was closed down and thousands of its workers were laid off. In 2011, Wojcik stumbled upon the community of workers, who continued to live in the same neighborhood around the ruins of the factory. She came to realize that, while their biographies had been deleted from the official narratives at the moment of the regime change, and the site of the factory was now completely squandered, the workers' bodies retained and continued to perform the factory's functions in many symbolically meaningful ways. The former workers preserved their community narratives to perpetuate the now extinct work culture. Wojcik researched the history of the factory and its community, then ran choreography and vocalization workshops to recreate the collective memory of factory life. Using participative art techniques, she involved the workers in an experiment to recreate a day of work at the factory by imitating the sounds and gestures of the factory organism, and thus reviving it once more as a lived experience that allowed the participants to recapture their former agency as an immense collective body. Wójcik's project, delivered to us in the form of a creative documentary that echoes Dziga Vertov's montage experiments, is a good example of group knowledge production that seeks to change how we think about our communities and their potential. The film's final scene features a visually stunning ballet of tractors and brings together the users, owners, and collectors of the Ursus machines with their constructors and producers. The scene's earnest tone and unapologetic energy celebrate and dignify the lives of the Ursus workers against the dismissive rhetoric that dominates Polish public discourse about life under communism.
Bringing about improvement to people's collective well-being has become conceptually difficult not only because of the weakening of the role of the state and the fast growth rate of the world's population, but also because the neoliberal economic policies have resulted in the increased value placed on individualism and self-interest, the loss of coalition engagement, and the erosion of communal solidarity and responsibility. (p- 7) The rise of nationalism and the attraction of nationalistic sentiments, deeply invested in the alliance of nation-state, church, and capital, develop in defiance and avoidance of the daunting complexity of global problems that may be addressed best through international collaboration and organization, perhaps the kind that was modeled for us in the previous century by communist international movements. The local protesters already signal their full awareness of the transnational scope of the local issues they are facing, and the knowledge of the global power dynamic at play, when they use English on their protest signs and when they rally for international support through social media channels.
Today's digital democratization carried out via social media platforms, whose limited scope is painfully felt by citizens who find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide, and whose control rests in the hands of the relatively few privileged actors who own them, shapes how we engage in work and leisure, negotiate our identities, participate in politics, develop our social interactions, and more. Technologies of the new media, and the complex yet highly monopolized social media ecosystem created by those technologies, define today's visual culture. They filter and determine not only what we can see, but also, more pertinently for the issue of social change, how and what we imagine is possible. The revolution “may well be tweeted” or even “YouTubed,”18 but not without the users' access to the means of technological production of the very media that are used to design and regulate the users' “right to look,” but also the very parameters and blueprints of that look.19 This may entail a struggle for a different regime of property that would demonopolize the communications industry and introduce some form of shared ownership in cyberspace. Otherwise, the mediated visual commons of today cannot become a shared resource that serves the community—the collective agent, who, per definition of the “commons,” should both use and govern the resource. The extractionist logic of information and media communication technologies leads to expropriation of content
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generated by those who create, tend to, and enrich the visual commons with their symbolic labor. Further, the structures employed in the process of extraction heavily determine how the users' imagination is deployed in their symbolic production. This systemic limitation enforced by the so-called culture industry upon our ability to see (and act accordingly to what we see) was already observed, and cautioned against, by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in 1944.20
The essays collected in this volume remind us that revolutions, as well as the antirevolutionary reactions and critiques, have been largely orchestrated on the visual plane and were often followed by the strategic mass reorganization of the sphere of vision, especially through the renegotiation of the visual aspects of collective life and the mobilization of the visual commons, including the construction of such commons in the private sphere. The reorganization entailed careful design and long-term planning, systemic changes in production and labor practices, state-funded educational initiatives and comprehensive propaganda campaigns, democratization of arts and literacy, and the unionization of the aesthetic and cultural labor force.
Centered on the extensive deployment of the official propaganda, popular and scholarly accounts of communist visual cultures tend to focus on how the communist party (p- 8) states used the visual realm to manipulate and indoctrinate. Approached differently, the studies on the work of reeducating the citizen through mass media speak more to the modern means of communication employed by the communists than their specific politics or ideology.21 After all, communist propaganda relied on the very same technologies of modern vision and information strategies used under capitalism. When, in 1964, Herbert Marcuse writes about the totalitarianism of one-dimensional society and its “total mobilization of all media for the defense of the established reality” to the degree where “communication of transcending contents becomes technically impossible,” he is referring to the Western society, whose freedoms have been curtailed through invisible processes of “repression” and sophisticated forms of policing.22 Upon a closer look at the culture of communist propaganda, its methods, practices, and institutions, which this volume invites, one sees not only the similarities in how communist and capitalist propaganda systems operate and ultimately limit the collective imaginary (see chapters by Norris, Parvulescu & Turcus, Workman), but also surprising distinctions that have not been explored in sufficient detail before. For example, our contributors (Blaylock, Eisman, Li, Moskalewicz, Pristed) point out the overt and voluntary individual and group participation in state-sponsored propaganda campaigns, and grassroots-level revisions of such campaigns. These important studies suggest a view of knowledgeable participants and active agents of political change, far from the easily duped objects of power, secretly or forcefully manipulated into ideological submission. The materialist view assumed in the scholarly analysis unveils the propaganda system as a dynamic project, where collaboration and organizational participation opened the project up to continuous renegotiations and a high level of self-reflexive operations, geared toward perfecting the tools of propaganda.
Marx's aesthetic theory is based in a simple yet politically loaded proposition, which focuses on the economic determinism of the symbolic superstructure. In Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, he famously observes: “The object of art— like every other product—creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also the subject for the ob-ject.”23 Through this statement, Marx brings to our attention the effects of specific material conditions (conditions of economic production) on the sensed environment (including the formation of the subject) through the objects with which we interact, commodities, but also, as Marx emphasizes here, the objects of art. Versions of Marx's theory have dominated Visual Culture and Film Studies for much of their disciplinary life, with short detours into other theoretical frameworks (psychoanalysis, structuralism, phenomenology), which in many ways worked to enrich the Marxist analytical lens. With the exception of some strands of medium specificity theory and semantic inquiry, the scholars working in Visual Culture and Film Studies have engaged in material analysis, which has recently gained theoretical momentum once again through New Materialism, Transhumanism, and Object Studies, summoned by the rapidly changing ecology of humans and things. Although seldom informed by classic Marxist thought, these new trends signal a paradigm shift that responds directly to the material pressures experienced by the human subject in the economy, where technology and information (p- 9) industries create nonhuman centers and agents of power, while exacerbating social divides and limiting access to, and in some cases the very possibility of, political self-determination.
Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures continues the disciplinary tradition of investigating the socioeconomic conditions of symbolic creation and adds new insights to the recent attempts to formulate materialist, even realist, ontologies. Our contributors demonstrate how communist material cultures went about reshaping the metabolism between humanity and the environment (Brumfield, Karpova, Stâticâ, Zarecor), ideas and their materializations (Arus, Bartlett, Finnane, Malitsky, Norris), industrial and commercial production and ideological reproduction (Brumfield, Oushakine, Svelch, Zarecor), and historical presence and visual representation (Lu, Marciniak, Marks, Norris, Sânchez-Biosca, Skrodzka, Workman). In tracing the complex relationship between the (material) object and the (political) subject, the essays collected in this volume investigate the formation and cultivation of political consciousness through a careful orchestration of public and private space (Brumfield, Marciniak, Stâticâ, Zarecor), public communication and education platforms (Imre, Li, Lu, Oushakine, Parvulescu & Turcus, Pristed), art experiments and politically engaged art (Blaylock, Cuevas-Wolf, Eisman, Healy, Malitsky, Marks, Mende, Moskalewicz, Müller), visual projections of the past, present, and future (Kalyan, Loss, Lu, Marciniak, Mende, Sânchez-Biosca, Skrodzka, Workman), and material articulation of the social subject (Arus, Bartlett, Blaylock, Finnane).
The book is organized into five sections, which hopefully provide the reader with a manageable way of engaging with material that spans diverse subfields of communist visual cultures. These thematic sections have been designed to highlight the connections existing among cultural production from different world regions and historical periods with the aim of presenting the communist project as a global formation, very much an aspect
Page 9 of 16 of modernity in sync with its capitalist developments, with both future and past orientations. What emerges from this approach differs from Marx's view of a simple progression that configures communism as the final stage in socioeconomic development. We have seen that the materialist dialectic, very much a theoretical tool of nineteenth-century Europe, does not suffice when we analyze the twentieth- and twenty-first-century networked economic systems of global reach. Rather, the studies collected here, necessarily narrowed down to cultural production, suggest many points of coexistence and cross-fertilization. While in no way can they serve as evidence for the blending of the two seemingly hostile economic systems—as proposed by Jan Tinbergen in his convergence theory,24 these studies do problematize the Cold War era's view of the two alien systems in conflict as well as Marx's dialectical vision of development, where capitalism is followed by the socialist transition and the ultimate installment of communism.
Part I: Material Cultures, Technologies, Industries brings together essays that comment on how social change was engineered and reflected through modernizing initiatives, such as electrification (Malitsky), industrialization (Oushakine), modular housing (Zarecor), architectural stylization (Brumfield), or domestic design (Statica), which (p- 10) purposefully altered the ways in which people saw each other and their environment, and how they interacted as individuals and members of the collective. The availability and use of specific technologies, for example computing (Svelch) or wall newspaper (Pristed) determined not only the aesthetic and formal organization of material culture, but also the organization of society itself and the formation of the individual subject. The new forms of cultural expression were made possible by the changes in the economic structure (applied differently in different party states)—the introduction of planned economy, limited private ownership, redistribution of capital and resources, promotion of cooperative and public ownership, common ownership of the means of productions, and so on. The contributors in this section pay close attention to the impact that shortages and rationing of specific technologies, resources, and materials, caused by systemic flaws in the new economy, had on the fruition of communist ideals, ironically providing the strongest argument for Marx's theory of economic determinism of cultural life.
Part II: Institutional Discourses, Communist Visions, Theory focuses on the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of cultural production and its institutional support. The contributors draw on archival documents that allow the reader a glimpse into the official and unofficial discourses that were used to script the communist cultural projects (Li, Moskalewicz, Karpova, Mende). The sources used by scholars in this section include doctoral dissertations, academic promotion peer reviews, art manuals, art exhibition catalogues, design portfolios, meeting minutes, declassified state security records, and theoretical texts. Two chapters (Kalyan and Müller) address the extent to which communist cultural legacy influenced, and continues to influence, Western theoretical trends and their bearing on institutional directions within the academy and art criticism.
The realm of cultural influence and exchange is at the center of Part III: International and Intercultural Dimensions. The communist international movement and the many visual arts and media campaigns that were designed to promote it, but also to enact its major
Page 10 of 16 tenets of global revolution and the eventual advent of stateless world community, provide the historical core for the studies collected in this part. Aside from the political organization of international effort within The Communist International (Comintern), collaboration across state borders that was to promote the anticapitalist struggle, defined in MarxismLeninism as the antinationalist struggle,25 took the form of cultural exchange between international cultural communities. Explicitly anticolonial in its rhetoric and its actual military and economic support provided to decolonizing forces around the world, the communist international movement was not completely free of its own expansionist aspirations (see Dovey's essay on Soviet African film culture collaborations). As elsewhere in this volume, the contributors here are sensitive to the complications and stumbling blocks that prevented the communist vision from seamless and unchallenged construction of the utopia (Bartlett) or led to its utter degeneration in crime (Sánchez-Biosca). But they also showcase the advantages of transnational imperatives that dared to question the logic of the nation-state, which seem especially relevant in our own moment, so hopelessly weighed down by the rise of phobic nationalism (as the most common reaction to the compromised neoliberal order) and racial supremacy.
(p. 11) Part IV: Visual Production and Strategic Spectacles offers a number of close analyses that explain how the communist vision worked rhetorically and formally. This section of the book is most attuned to the unique role of the visual in the communist project and, with it, the democratizing impact of the image, along with its weaponization (Norris), the visual experiments targeting the modern processes of reification and alienation (such as the technique of montage in Cuevas-Wolf's essay), the politicized practice of visual consumption, and the elaborate acts of visual dissidence and visual dissent (Blaylock). The essays testify to the dynamic and continued retooling of communist vision, its vibrant and strategic evolution, adaptation, and renewal. What emerges is vision as the seat of utopia (Workman), the breeding ground of change. The materialization of the vision, fleeting and imperfect, may disappoint, but it does not deal away with the revolutionary impetus of vision (Finnane and Arús). The daring subjective articulations and creative tweaks of the official mandates, which the state used to delimit the field of communist vision and dictate the dynamics of looking, point to the highly individualized nature of building the collective culture (Healy).
Finally, in Part V: After-images, Memory, Legacy, the authors evaluate the communist legacy (Imre, Loss), along with its controversies, directly in terms of what Jodi Dean recognizes today as communism's “political possibility.”26 Measuring the past experiments with the ways in which they are remembered allows the scholars to contemplate the gains and losses of the communist project. The visual space of where public commemoration takes place and the collective rituals of public memory determine whether communism haunts or inspires, and this is, again, a matter of visual production that combines imagination and material practices (Marciniak). In this section devoted largely to specific visual representations of communist ideals and their multifarious mediations that reach into the present and the future, the scholars reflect on how the ideals have withstood the test of time, but also how their meanings have necessarily changed (Hodgin). While both the idea and the history of the communist state and party have received a thorough critique,
Page 11 of 16 other radical leftist articulations have emerged around the world as the concept and practice of the commons becomes an important platform of the egalitarian, emancipatory politics. The following are the questions that guide the inquiries in Part V: What does the communist visual legacy contribute to our understanding of communist ideals and their future political and cultural potential? Is the memory of past communist visions essential to our project of confronting and evaluating the present and future currency of communism? How is communism remembered? What are the strategies of constructing its visual archive? How does visual culture narrate the heroes, villains, and the everyday men and women of communism?
The volume concludes with a coda by Laura Marks, who writes about Arab communism and the ways in which “the audiovisual cultures of previous generations when communism animated anticolonial revolutions, workers' organizations, guerrilla movements, and international solidarity” inspires the emancipatory movements of today across the Arab world.
In summary, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures expands and enriches the field of Visual Culture Studies primarily through its global and interdisciplinary
(p. 12) scope—a result of the project's focus on communist visual cultures, which brings together disparate and broadly understood visual texts, including buildings, monuments, murals, interior design, sculpture, painting, craft manuals, fashion, film, photography, computer games, television, cartoons, prison mug shots, theoretical diagrams, art magazines, recycling campaigns, wall newspapers, and children's books, produced in different places and moments in time—nevertheless, texts connected by the mobilization of looking employed in processes of social transformation and political action. The ideological framework of the book allows for viewing large-scale, state-sponsored forms, such as housing projects, side by side with individually created artifacts and subjective articulations of culture, thus bringing into dialogue different ways of seeing and different methodologies of aesthetic analysis. Drawing on a variety of disciplines that deal with distinct forms, scales, and genres of visual production, the contributors engage in critical reevaluation of communist visual cultures and, in combination, they bring out the connections among visual practices that are usually studied in disciplinary isolation. These connections allow the reader to think about visual culture beyond representation, as something embedded in everyday life, a rich fabric of visual communication with specific, collective and individual, sites of meaning. Thus the historical and material character of the visual is brought to the forefront. Ultimately, the coming together of different fields of visual culture in this book will facilitate a rethinking of the visual within particular disciplines, lifting the conceptual restrictions imposed by ideas related to taste, function, visibility, dissemination, and appropriation, which often contour out disciplinary boundaries.
The contributions foreground visual culture as a discursive register best suited to articulate communist ideology and, indeed, communist idealism. By using field-specific methodologies, the contributors explore how communism engages the visual. They examine the ways in which communist visual culture defines itself as a culture of specific media, specific forms, specific genres, and specific practices. They consider how communism uses
Page 12 of 16 aesthetics to articulate its value system, to implement its improvement project, to agitate, propagate, seduce, and play. Supported by archival research and historical analysis, this book is a call to examine the communist visual culture in a range of mediums and theoretical dimensions, toward a shared goal of reimagining it beyond the existing ways of thinking about it as a defunct project.
Applebaum, Anne. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956. New York: Anchor Books, 2013.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Meridian, 1962.
Badiou, Alain. The Communist Hypothesis. London: Verso, 2010.
Bird, Robert, Christopher P. Heuer, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Tumelo Mosaka, and Stephanie Smith., eds. Vision and Communism: Viktor Koretsky and Dissident Public Visual Culture. New York: The New Press, 2011.
Bosteels, Bruno. 2011. The Actuality of Communism. New York: Verso, 2011.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Bren, Paulina, and Mary Neuburger, eds. Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.
Dean, Jodi. The Communist Horizon. London: Verso, 2012.
Dean, Jodi. Crowds and Party. London: Verso, 2018.
Douzinas, Costas, and Slavoj Zizek, eds. The Idea of Communism. London: Verso, 2010.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.
Hobsbawm, Eric. How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
Imre, Anikó. TV Socialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
Jampol, Justinian, ed. Beyond the Wall: Art and Artifacts from the GDR. Cologne: Taschen, 2014.
Li, Jie, and Enhua Zhang, eds. Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
Mazierska, Ewa, and Alfredo Suppia, eds. Red Alert: Marxist Approaches to Science Fiction Cinema. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016.
(p. 15) Mazierska, Ewa, and Lars Kristensen, eds. Marx at the Movies: Revisiting History, Theory and Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Parvulescu, Constantin. Orphans of the East: Postwar Eastern European Cinema and the Revolutionary Subject. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.
Pence, Katherine, and Paul Betts, eds. Socialist Modern: East Germany Everyday Culture and Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.
Rivero, Yeidy. Broadcasting Modernity: Cuban Commercial Television, 1950-1960. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
Scribner, Charity. Requiem for Communism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Tsipursky, Gleb. Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945-1970. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016.
Wolf, Erica. Aleksandr Zhitomirsky: Photomontage as a Weapon of World War II and the Cold War. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2016.
Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Zizek, Slavoj. Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso, 2015.
(1.) Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).
(2.) The UN Refugee Agency (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) has recorded the highest levels of displacement on record. According to their statistics, an unprecedented 70.8 million people have been “forced from home.” The agency also reports 3.9 million people who are stateless and “they have been denied nationality and access to basic human rights such as education, healthcare, employment and freedom of movement.” UNHCR, “Figures at a Glance,” June 19, 2019, https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/ figures-at-a-glance.html
(3.) Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
(4.) Internet Movie Database, “Top Rated TV Shows,” https://www.imdb.com/chart/toptv/
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(5.) Sophie Gilbert, "Chernobyl Is a Gruesome, Riveting Fable,” The Atlantic, May 6, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/05/chernobyl-gruesome-riveting-fable-hbo/588688/
(6.) Dawid Krawczyk, "Czarnobyl? Amerykanie nie sg lepsi,” interview with Kate Brown in Polish, Krytyka Polityczna/Political Critique, July 30, 2019, https://krytykapolityczna.pl/ kultura/czytaj-dalej/czarnobyl-amerykanie-nie-sa-lepsi/
(7.) Drew Schwarts, "Craig's Mazin's Years-Long Obsession with Making Chernobyl Terrifyingly Accurate,” interview with Craig Mazin, Vice, June 3, 2019, https:// www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5wbq4/craig-mazin-interview-about-chernobyl-hbo-minis-eries-on-how-accurate-and-what-really-happened
(8.) Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012); Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London: Verso, 2010); Slavoj Zizek, "Foreword: Why Communism Today?”, in The Idea of Communism 3: The Seoul Conference, ed. Alex Taek-Gwang Lee and Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 2016).
(9.) Agnieszka Mrozik, "Anti-Communism: It's High Time to Diagnose and Counteract,” Praktyka Teoretyczna 31, no. 1 (2019): 178-184, 182. Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
(10.) Mrozik, "Anti-Communism,” 181. In her analysis, Mrozik connects her concept of "museumization of communism” to the crisis of the Enlightenment project, which she sees in our society's turn against rationality, egalitarianism, emancipation, collective action, and more important, in our departure from utopic aspirations and attempts to realize them.
(11.) Ilya Prigogine, "Beyond Being and Becoming,” New Perspectives Quarterly 21, no. 4 (2004): 5-12, 12, 10.
(12.) Mike Wayne describes this process of naturalization as follows: "Within the mainstream media, for instance, what the ‘markets' are doing is discussed as if the ‘markets' were not human-made institutions, but instead forces of nature independent of human activity.” Mike Wayne, "The Dialectical Image: Kant, Marx and Adorno,” in Marx at the Movies: Revisiting History, Theory and Practice, ed. Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 27-45, 34.
(13.) Stephen A. Smith, "Introduction: Towards a Global History of Communism,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1-33, 29.
(14.) Ibid., 30.
(15.) For a thorough review of communist cultural revolutions, see Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015).
(16.) Constantin Parvulescu, Orphans of the East: Postwar Eastern European Cinema and the Revolutionary Subject (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 10.
(17.) Ibid.
(18.) David Kenner, “YouTube Revolutions,” Foreign Policy, March 30, 2011, https:// foreignpolicy.com/2011/03/30/the-youtube-revolutions/; Courtney C. Radsch, “The Revolutions Will Be Hashtagged: Twitter Turns 5 as the Middle East Demands Democracy,” Huffington Post, March 29, 2011, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-revolutions-will-be-h_b_839362
(19.) Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 3-4.
(20.) Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1972).
(21.) In his analysis of communist politics as “neo-traditional” versus “modern,” Stephen A. Smith mentions the “pervasiveness of propaganda and mass media” as one of the modern features of the communist system. Smith, “Introduction,” 21.
(22.) Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 68.
(23.) Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, translated by Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books & New Left Review, 1993), 92.
(24.) Jan Tinbergen, “Do Communist and Free Economies Show a Converging Pattern?” Soviet Studies 12, no. 4 (1961): 333-341.
(25.) Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (New York: International Publishers, 1978). Vladimir I. Lenin, “The ‘Withering Away' of the State and Violent Revolution,” in The State and Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 16-21.
(26.) Jodi Dean, “We're Back!” The European, May 28, 2014, https://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/jodi-dean%E2%80%942/8500-communism-in-the-21st-century
Aga Skrodzka
Aga Skrodzka, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Clemson University
Socialist Domestic Infrastructuresand the Politics of the Body: Bucharest and Havana a
lulia Statica
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Oct 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.37
This article discusses the role of domestic infrastructure in the constitution of subjectivities through the concrete examples of two socialist cities: Bucharest and Havana. This comparative study investigates the manner in which socialist ideological intentions materialized explicitly and in nuanced ways through the physical transformation of domestic space. The domestic revolution initiated by Khrushchev is interpreted as a narrative that both cities share, generating-through the implementation of state socialism—a common archaeology of the politics of domesticity that goes back to the programs of the 1920s Russian avant-gardes. The article proposes that this manifold archaeology of domesticity reveals that the political agenda, manifested in both contexts as an aesthetic project, entered the sphere of private life, transforming the home into a vehicle through which the body was politically shaped.
Keywords: domesticity, Bucharest, Havana, body, subjectivity, aesthetics, communism, housing, prefabrication
Nikita Khrushchev's speech, given in 1954 at the National Conference of Builders, Architects, and Workers in the Construction Materials, marked the road to the reformation of the Soviet Union and the countries within its sphere of influence.1 His set of reforms, commonly known as the “Thaw,” culminated in the endeavor that introduced the industrialization of construction, transforming domesticity and homemaking into mass practices controlled by the state. Khrushchev's ambitious housing program aimed to build 15 million apartments in order to provide every family with their own home.2 Promoting the slogan “Build quickly, cheaply, and well,” the paternalist state intended to use these standardized apartments as vehicles to shape the socialist society and to accommodate all types of families. Housing provision was envisioned as the right of all citizens, and simultaneously as a means to emancipate women by transferring household duties to socialized facilities such as kitchens, childcare centers, and laundries. Proposing a return to the ideas of the 1920s avant-gardes, Khrushchev's 1954 speech emphasized the role of the industrialization and rationalization of production, the home, and the body in the pursuit of
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mass modernization. The new type of construction—the khrushchevka—became the emblem of Khrushchev's technological drive, extending well outside of the Soviet Union. The Central Research Institute for the Experimental Planning of Housing in Moscow disseminated the technologies for the prefabricated panel factories to numerous Soviet cities and, simultaneously, to “nations such as Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Iran, Vietnam, Cuba, and Chile.”3
(p. 20) This chapter interprets the domestic revolution initiated by Khrushchev as a narrative that both Bucharest and Havana share, tracing a common archaeology of the politics of domesticity through the implementation of state socialism. The communist state's desire to establish a new ideology through the convergence of productive and domestic life by means of industrialization resulted in an ontological transformation that connected ideology, domestic infrastructure, and the subjective body. This chapter asserts that the formation of the subjective body is rooted in the experience of the space—here, of domestic architecture—and is itself subject to transformation in its interaction with the governmental technologies that are embedded in the infrastructural project.4 The notion of domestic infrastructure discussed here refers to the mass-produced housing units and the consequent domestic standardization that the communist state imposed in Romania from the 1950s through the 1980s and in Cuba from the 1960s through the 1980s. The main question guiding my inquiry is: how were aesthetic and technological processes of domesticity embedded in the rhetoric of the transformed everyday life, which paired the modern home with a modern body that was able to rationally respond to the ideological framework? Focusing on the cases of Bucharest and Havana, I argue that domestic infrastructure was the aesthetic and technological vehicle through which the body became politically inscribed and shaped. Further, I place the questions of women and family at the center of this inquiry.
Early ideals supported by the Russian avant-gardes such as the emancipation of women through the communalization of private life, household chores, and childrearing were rescued in the Khrushchev era by means of the totalizing role of the state. The dwelling cell —the apartment made from prefabricated panels—paralleled the rehabilitation of the nuclear family as foundational unit of socialist society, while the emancipation of women was to be accomplished through technology.5 In the envisioned scenario, women's housework would be eased by the modern amenities (running water, electricity, and sewers), equipment (their own bathroom and kitchen), and décor (functional standardized furniture) that the apartments offered, while women's role as active, productive citizens would be highly encouraged. The new socialist feminine ideal arose from the unique mediation between the new domestic infrastructures and the government's intention to transform women into both political subjects as well as productive and reproductive bodies.
Understanding the total project of domesticity initiated in the 1950s as built on the legacy of the programs of the Russian avant-gardes,6 I interpret the political formation of the body as an infrastructural and cognitive process articulated at the “hearth” of the home. I further draw attention to the fact that these material and ontological transformations were exported in various forms outside of the USSR, and I explore the processes through
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which this ideological colonization was achieved in both Bucharest and Havana. Supported by an extensive propaganda campaign, the industrialization of housing, standardization of design, and specific legal framework, combined with the strong rhetoric of labor in both cities provided the vehicles to control the private life and to create new patterns of socialization, interaction, and production.
Employed as early as 1940 by Max Gluckman to talk about how spatial patterns can mediate power relations between the indigenous population and the colonizer,7 the notion of infrastructure has maintained its relevance to the discussion of spatio-political agendas. In recent years, this notion has primarily been considered in the encounter between the science and technology studies and anthropology, in an attempt to understand the processes of materialization and their effect on subjects (and vice versa).8 The articulation of infrastructure in cultural anthropology as “ontological experiments” has brought forward the question of the cultural and political assumptions that are embedded in those experiments' design, as well as the social aftermath of their use.9 Furthermore, the emergence of the notion of infrastructural violence has illuminated the ways in which physical infrastructures become mechanisms of inclusion or exclusion, negotiating the interaction between inequality and marginalization.10 In this way, the materiality of the city-through its buildings, walls, streets, and so on—becomes an instrumental medium that reinforces certain social orders, and plays a key role in shaping certain biased hierarchies and practices.
In the anthropology of socialism, the use of the notion of infrastructure refers primarily to the architecture and artifacts that shape social relations and urban praxes, in line with the political ontology of Marxism.11 As anthropologist Caroline Humphrey suggests with reference to the Soviet Union, while it was essential to the social formation, infrastructure was often taken for granted and subordinated to the essential process of production.12 The provision of infrastructure as an ongoing and guaranteed service of the paternalist state was thus transformed into a subtle process not only for fulfilling citizens' basic needs, but, more importantly, for, “orchestrating” their lives through state planning.13 In what follows I argue that, in the cases of both Bucharest and Havana, the question of infrastructure is fundamental insofar as politics intervened not only in the production of infrastructure, but also in its functioning in relation to the subjects that inhabit it.14 Infrastructural modernization not only became synonymous with the socialist state itself, but it was also critical in the articulation of the social development and therefore of the people within. The industrialization of domesticity transformed these socialist infrastructures into mediators between the ideological intent and the transformation of human subjectivities—that is, people's embodied experience of the built environment.
My choice to juxtapose these two different contexts—Romania and Cuba—is part of an attempt to understand how Soviet instruments of ideological influence were translated in countries that were not part of the USSR, but that were under its influence, appropriat-
Page 3 of 27 ing both ideological programs and technological support. In bringing these two contexts together, I establish that the material transformation of the domestic space constituted the primary ground of ideological colonization. Along with the collective vision of housing as an instrument of social formation, both contexts share many (p- 22) features: Soviettype prefabrication, industrialization of housing, transformation of the domestic space, and penetration of the state into the private realm. Nevertheless, despite the decisive Soviet influence in terms of the ideological and technological imports, these two countries were peculiar in their ability to construct specific national discourses. In Romania this attitude emerged after the coming to power in 1965 of Nicolae Ceau§escu who was praised at the time by the Western world for his refusal to take part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact forces. Marking a certain detachment from the Soviet power, this episode ensured an open road toward the creation of a “local” socialist discourse. The geographic detachment from the Soviet Union, and the strategic position due to its embeddedness in the US political and economic model as a function of distinct geopolitical agendas of the latter in the region before the 1959 Revolution, makes Cuba's situation equally significant. What is particular about these two national versions of socialism is that both, in distinct ways, made the use of the body explicit in the shaping of socialist politics and imaginaries.
In Cuba, the institution of the microbrigades marked the emergence of a rhetoric in which the body had to be physically formed by the revolution, heralding the importance of a corporeal becoming of socialism. Initiated by Fidel Castro in his annual July 26 speech in 1970, the microbrigades were defined as worker collectives responsible for the construction and distribution of housing units for themselves and their colleagues. The microbrigades model in Cuba represented a unique case of the way in which the state used the rhetoric of bodily labor to support the process that anthropologist Martin Holbraad calls infrastruction—whereby the construction of the socialist housing districts becomes a necessary process of self-construction.15 In Romania, the politics of demography—aimed at increasing the population—launched in 1966 through the criminalization of abortion and lack of contraception, just months after Nicolae Ceau§escu came to power, emphasized the role of the family and women in the construction of communism. While the home assumed the concrete, tangible framework in which individuals were formed, the womb became the transformative organic locus of the future socialist citizen, and control of fertility was proclaimed to be a right of the state, and not of women or of families.16 The award by the communist state of the title of Heroic Mother (Mama Eroina) (to women with ten or more children) as well as the Medal of Maternity (Medalia Maternitd^ii) (to women with six or more children) emphasized the role of women and of their bodies in the social reproduction. The rhetorical framing of the reproductive energy of the body and its regulations through a specific legal framework emphasized the state's intention to define the womb as a national space.17
In what follows, I reassess the instrumental role of housing infrastructures as a state project in the construction of a common domestic imaginary with the potential to direct the communalization of subjectivities and therefore the formation of a socialist body. The relationship between material forms and subject formation unfolds in this argument
Page 4 of 27 through the use of domestic infrastructure as a technical and aesthetic instrument linking subjects to the state. The emphasis on the power of aesthetics emerged with particular force in the work of the Russian avant-gardes, in which communist visual culture did not just reflect but embodied and complemented the endeavors of scientific (p- 23) progress and subject formation. The emergence of the avant-gardes during the late nineteenth century supported the new political orientation that started to be shaped in Russia at that time. The Orthodox icon painting, folk art, popular lithographs (lubok), and children's drawings became a major source of influence at the beginning of this movement and developed into experimentation with large patches of color, thick black contours, and compositions that rejected the principles of classical art.18 The artists of the avant-garde embraced the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, which implied that any artistic and material manifestation should become a vehicle for the total and complete political and social transformation.
For a period of about a decade (1918-1929), avant-garde artists played an important role in shaping cultural and social politics and in creating a new aesthetics of the revolution. Anatoly Lunacharsky—the People's Commissar of Education—became an instrumental figure in this endeavor by appointing representatives of the movement, such as El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and Alexander Rodchenko, to key positions within the new cultural hierarchy.19 These representatives envisioned the creation of an art whose objectives would satisfy not only aesthetic but also utilitarian principles, and would respond to the anti-traditional goals of the revolution. The movement—later called Constructivism—proclaimed the supremacy of production, while the worker was “invited to become machine” and to identify with the process of production itself.20 In the discourse of the avant-gardes, the emphasis on hyper-industrialized society sought to connect with the spirit of revolutionary aspiration,21 which included a new political order shaped by technological mediation. Architecture became an essential instrument of this mediation.22
Soviet science and technology became the source of revolutionary truth through their portrayal in popular culture as an exemplary model,23 while the New Soviet Person (Novy Sovetsky Chelovek) proposed by the communist regime was himself or herself “scientifically” constructed.24 Referenced often in the official discourses of the Khrushchev era, the scientific-technological revolution transcended the realm of the Cold War's international race against the capitalist West, and its role was to transform everyday socialist life.25 The standardization of housing and workers' facilities was the main area where this was to be accomplished, shaping the socialist city and new socialist subjects. Buildings were not merely functional, utilitarian constructions; they were “new social condensers” to transform humanity, generating not only technical progress but also enthusiasm.26 Constructivist architects worked toward the industrialization of housing, materials, and labor, seeking to rationalize the body and its capacity to produce. They promoted the transformation of society through the application of industrial techniques to eliminate domestic space and make domestic labor scientific,27 in the conviction that the configura
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tion of the home determined consciousness and behavior.28 (p- 24) Home itself became industrialized,29 in the striving for an ontological transition from high socialism to communism, where “there would be no room for domestic pleasures.”30
One recognizes in these ideals the endeavor to create an entirely new rationalized architecture and material culture based on communist theories of industrialized production and on the patterns of consumption guided by socialist ethics. By emphasizing the importance of an ontological transformation of the subject, the project of the avant-gardes asserted the total character of the new domestic infrastructure. These principles translated into the innovation of dom kommuny (communal housing): the complete attempt to reform byt (everyday life) and consolidate Soviet socialism's revolutionary Marxist principles.31 The materialization of these ideas was the famous Narkomfin project, a “social condenser”32 meant to ensure the transition from preexisting bourgeois living patterns toward the collective living whereby collective dining, socialization, and childcare would become directed by state communal facilities.33 Built between 1928 and 1929, the original Narkomfin complex, imagined by architects Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis, comprised four separate buildings. The first and largest structure, the living block, was a long horizontal building that accommodated various types of living units. The second structure, the communal block, was connected to the living block by a covered bridge. This building accommodated most of the collectivized aspects of everyday life: kitchen, dining room, gymnasium, and library. The third structure housed the communal laundry, while the fourth structure—never built—would have housed the communal crèche. The vision was that the community's children would spend their days and nights under the supervision of trained professionals, in order to ease the burden on their parents—especially their mothers, who had to be able to pursue social and political work.34 Narkomfin was designed as a prototype for all subsequent state housing in Russia. It was an early version of the dom kommuny, and it was seen as a social condenser to ensure the transition from preexisting bourgeois living patterns to F-units.35 F-units were the ultimate expression of socialized life and the new byt, in which individual functions were to be transformed into social functions and housing was to play a major role in the transformation of humanity. F-units had no kitchens and could accommodate individuals or couples without children.36 Narkomfin Communal House represented the Soviet state's most complete endeavor to use domesticity for the production of a new consciousness and of a new social structure.37 Lenin himself regarded communal facilities as a means to liberate women and transform them into productive citizens:38
Notwithstanding all the laws emancipating woman, she continues to be a domestic slave, because petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and the nursery, and she wastes her labor on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery. The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins (led by the proletariat wielding state power) against this petty housekeeping, or rather when its wholesale transformation into a large-scale socialist economy begins.39
(p. 25) Revolutionary housing policy, however, was contradictory, and the endeavor to emancipate women translated into multiple, often conflicting, interpretations of their role. The effort to construct an “abstract standardized citizen with no gender, opinions, or needs” thus directed the state toward a mass modernization through the industrialization of construction.40 Despite the political discourse that placed at its center the question of the emancipation of women—whereby house chores and child rearing would be replaced by the communal dining rooms, nurseries, and other amenities—the industrialization of housing and the fragmentation of domesticity provided the ideal vehicle through which the state was able to control both private life as well as the patterns of socialization, reproduction, and interaction. In the 1930s, the avant-gardes' dream of buildings that would act as social condensers was replaced in practice with communal apartments, presented by the authorities as a “new collective vision of the future,”41 and in line with the Stalinist restoration of family values. Abortion was outlawed, and the values of the traditional family were enforced with the aim to rationalize and control social order. Instead of creating gender neutrality, this made women's role harder, as they had to negotiate between home, work, and political duties. Even though housing was the regime's main concern, until the late 1950s, new apartments were designed to accommodate multiple families, while the production of furniture and small household goods remained artisanal.42
With the specific goal of moving away from Stalin's paradigm, Khrushchev's housing reform of providing every family with an affordable apartment, connected to modern amenities, transformed the cities through the implementation of industrialized mass construction and promised to finally realize the ideals of the revolution on a mass scale. The new apartments brought about a new, modern aesthetic, but simultaneously demanded changes in form—lower ceilings, smaller rooms, standardized furniture, use of reinforced concrete—and the domestic environment which was radically modernized.43 The industrialization and standardization of housing construction, combined with the state's attention to the scientific approach with regard to the manufacture of everyday goods, food consumption, hygiene, and childrearing, emphasized the importance of a modernized domesticity in the construction of socialism.44 The domestic interior represented a space for the formation of the socialist subject and for aesthetic production, and thus it had to be regulated by the state. This rationalization of the domesticity involved not only the material shaping of the interior—efficiencies of space, furnishing, or decoration—but also the way in which the dwellers appropriated these transformations.
The communist paradigm that emerged in the Soviet Union had a major global impact and its influence grew alongside its accumulation of territory and power. In Romania, the communists took power in March 1945 with help from the Soviets, and on December 30, 1947, the communists proclaimed the People's Republic of Romania (RPR). Produced within the bipolar background of the Cold War, the Missile Crisis in 1962 was the step to ensure Cuba's pro-Soviet orientation. After the crisis, in June 1963, Castro made a historic visit to the Soviet Union and returned to Cuba to recall the construction projects he had seen, specifically the Siberian hydropower stations. He spoke about the (p- 26) devel-
opment of Soviet agriculture and repeatedly emphasized the need to draw on the Soviet experience to solve internal tasks of socialist mass construction in Cuba.45
An article published in Arhitectura RPR (succeeding Arhitectura published between 1906 and 1944, Arhitectura RPR was reborn in 1952 during the communist regime as the publication of the Union of Romanian Architects) in 1954 discussed the idea of standardized architecture for the first time in the Romanian context.46 Written by I. Silvan, chief architect at the Institutul de Proiectare a Ora§elor, a Construcfiilor Publice §i de Locuit (Institute for the Design of Cities and Public and Housing Constructions), the article acknowledged the use of prefabrication methods imported from the Soviet Union to respond to the housing construction targets set out in the 1951-1955 five-year plan:
Architects face the duty to express, through the typified housing that they create, their care for the working people, who have to be accommodated in beautiful and comfortable houses. At the same time, the need for rapid and high-quality construction determines the other side of the problem: to ensure, through design, rapid, economical, and high-quality work. In this domain as well, we can rely on the immense experience of the Soviet Union, which has found the right methods to continuously improve living conditions for the Soviet people.47
The article emphasized the importance of technology, where the aim was to produce all components in a factory; the workers on site would only need to assemble the prefabricated elements. The article presented one- and two-bedroom apartments,48 indicating the standard dimensions of the living room, kitchen, hallway, and so on, as well as the overall area of the apartment. Two categories of apartment were proposed: large apartments (34-38 square meters for one-bedroom apartments, 46-55 square meters for two-bedroom) and apartments of reduced size (24-30 square meters for one-bedroom, 40-46 square meters for two-bedroom).
In the realm of architecture and urbanism, the annual or five-year plans marked the beginning of state design through the creation of the Institutul de Proiectari Industriale (Institute for Industrial Design) and Institutul de Proiectari de Construcfie (Institute for the Design of Constructions), which were in charge of the new standardized design. The Institute for the Design of Cities and Public and Housing Constructions was created alongside these; however, it did not cover Bucharest, for which a special institute was created called Proiect Bucure§ti (Bucharest Institute for Architectural Design). The six-year state plan for 1960-1965 set even higher economic goals and demanded further intensification of the housing sector, stipulating the construction of more than 300,000 apartments.49 Housing reform was a result of a centralization process that aimed to use infrastructure to ensure the collectivization of society and the elimination of bourgeois (p- 27) individualism.50 A new spatial structure for the city was envisioned to meet industrial requirements and reshape the socioeconomic system (see Figure 1.1). Forced industrialization had absorbed a significant proportion of the rural population and sent it into towns or large cities, where it was never effectively integrated.
Photograph published in Arhitectura RPR XII, no. 4 (1964): 26. (C) Revista Arhitectura, Bucharest
Inspired by Soviet economics, the urban unit that reshaped the city of Bucharest in the 1950s was the cvartal (quarter), which organized “identical buildings into regular patterns orthogonally aligned with the street grid.”51 The surface area of this urban unit varied between 6 and 10 hectares, and the housing blocks were grouped around an inner courtyard that incorporated spaces for children's play and learning.52 The cvartal model was exported from the USSR at the end of World War II as a pattern for socialist countries to apply in order to adhere to the newly emerged ideology; it was a synthesis born of the early relationship between the Soviet Union and the avant-gardes. The notion of cvartal was born in the early 1930s when ideas of the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne)—such as standardization, rational use of space, low-cost mass housing—came in contact with Soviet practices from the collaboration between European and Soviet architects.53 During the 1960s, as a result of the process of de-Stalinization, architecture and urban planning underwent further transformations. (p- 28) In contradiction to the rationalization and rigid structure of the earlier Soviet-inspired cvartal, the microrayon (microdistrict) gave state-owned housing spaces a structure that was at once more organic and more self-sufficient (see Figure 1.2). It consisted of a somewhat independent structure that could function entirely within its own borders. Two main functions determined the dimensions of the microrayon: the space for production, that is, the factory; and the school, which was required to accommodate all pupils in the neighborhood. Moreover, the buildings were much taller than in previous conceptions of urban organization, in order to ensure maximum efficiency. Generally, the occupied area varied between 15 and 45 hectares, with a population of between 4,000 and 12,000 inhabitants.54 The domicile was standardized according to state-imposed norms,55 and the apartments were distributed by state agencies according to the number of family members. The maximum
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living area was imposed by the state (law 78/1952 and law 10/1968) and restricted to 8 square meters per person, excluding the auxiliary spaces such as kitchen, hallway, or the balcony. The same laws assert that anything beyond this limit gives the right to the state to assign the excess to other persons.
Photograph published in Arhitectura RPR XII, no. 4 (1964): 27. (C) Revista Arhitectura, Bucharest
Furthermore, an article in Arhitectura RPR acknowledges the rational organization of the interior of the apartment: “The people who occupy a new apartment come from houses with different organization of space to dwellings in which the space is standardized. [ ... ] The spatial organization of the apartment understands the use of space so that it belongs to the person and not to the objects. [ ... ] In furnishing the apartment, one has to take into consideration the activity areas within the home. This is very important insofar as the furnishing responds to psychological and social needs [ ... ]”56 The living (p- 29) room in a standardized apartment occupies usually an area of 16-20 square meters, and its furnishing comprises almost with no variation “dining table and chairs, sideboard, cabinet along with a piece for TV and an extensible couch or armchairs.”57
The spatial representation of the new lifestyle was frequently featured in films that attempted to transmit the “right way” in which the urban and domestic transformations should be appropriated by citizens. Serenade for the 12th floor (Serenada pentru etajul XII, Dir. Carol Corfanta, 1976) portrays the transition from a traditional way of living characterized by individual houses to a newly built housing district—a microrayon—in Bucharest in the 1970s. The film narrates and visualizes not only a material but also a spiritual transformation.58
The opening scene focuses on a heated discussion between Vasilica, the bartender of the local bar, and a retired lathe operator, Mr. Firu, who had to leave his house in order to move into a newly built apartment. Vasilica acknowledges the care of the state that “gave you homes,” but he is corrected by Mr. Firu, who explains that the state has not given but assigned him—a member of the working class—an apartment. Portraying the improved living conditions in the new apartments—more comfort, running water, sewage, bath tub,
Page 10 of 27 and new furniture—the film was a propaganda vehicle to present the benefits of the standardized apartment living and to facilitate the transition between the two types of domesticity. The joy of moving into a new apartment is expressed when Mr. Firu goes in the middle of the night to see the apartment where he is, not was supposed to move in the next day. He confesses to the tree in front of his apartment block: “Tomorrow, starts the first year, the first day: hot water, goodbye to coal, and goodbye to creaky floors!”
The housing district is portrayed here as the expression of the state whereby the value of egalitarianism and the technical value of standardization were reciprocally reinforcing: university professors, musicians, but above all workers would mingle in the same block as a result of the socialist-emplaced equality. The voice-over comments on the new social arrangement: “People who have never seen each other, but who, from tomorrow will greet each other as neighbors; people who know each other just for moments, but who joyfully help each other.” Despite the monotonous exterior of the new building, the neighbors are showcased as a vibrant community, gathering around the table to eat crepes with jam. The episode takes place in the living room of an apartment furnished with a standardized dining table and chairs, cabinet, sideboard, and armchairs; an exotic plant and the embroidered window curtain are the only elements that give the space more specificity. The representation of the house as a space of encounter and sharing popular food emphasizes the psychological dimension of the transition intended by the state.
In Cuba, one of the first policy initiatives of the revolutionary government was to address the housing crisis. The documentary produced in 1959 by the Rebel Army's National Bureau of Culture, Housing (La Vivienda, Dir. Julio García Espinosa, 1959), (p- 30) anticipated the desire for a housing reform by emphasizing the profound differences that existed between different social classes in Cuba. Standardized housing was thus imagined as a social equalizer. The film ends with a projection of Cuba as a communist country: “That day, a day that dawned like any other, all the houses in my city finally looked the same.”59 The Urban Reform Law of October 1960 initiated this process and established the normative idea of housing as a public service and—guided by the collectivizing ideals of the revolution—replaced the urban bourgeois idea of domesticity with the new housing units for the workers.60 The introduction of the Soviet prefabricated panel was significant for the 1959 Revolution, as it validated the role of industrial technologies in the standardization of living, endorsing Castro's plan for an egalitarian socialist utopia.61 Within the context of ideological accord with the USSR, but also following the 1963 devastation wreaked by Hurricane Flora, the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev donated a factory that was built in the city of Santiago de Cuba, in the southeastern region of the island, for the production of prefabricated panels. The imported large-panel factory marked the Soviet hegemony and initiated a period of mass housing considered by the state to be the center of social formation. State-controlled planning, industrialization of construction, commu-nalization of housing, and urban configuration based on the Soviet neighborhood district
(microrayon) were all elements of the infrastructural transformation with new aesthetic, political, and symbolic values.62
The industrialization of construction and the use of prefabrication determined the emergence of the so-called microbrigades, as the government attempted to find parallel routes to state action on housing construction.63 The initiation of microbrigades came at the pressing point of the failure of the 10-million-ton sugar harvest planned for 1970, when the government had to reconsider its strategy of adopting the Soviet economic and social model.64 Envisioned as the most efficient socialist approach to housing provision, the microbrigades consisted of groups of thirty-three unskilled workers from factories, released from their daily work assignments and integrated into building brigades while receiving their normal salary. The state provided technical expertise and design templates for the assemblage of the prefabricated and semiprefabricated apartment buildings designed by the architects of the Ministry of Construction.65 The resulted housing units—that were distributed by state agencies among workers based on need and merit—constituted a unique paradigm of government-regulated collective self-help housing, through which the state was able to project socialist ideals in order to inform subjective experiences of do-mesticity.66
Photograph published in Arquitectura Cuba 345 (1976): 54. Image in the public domain
In Havana, the microbrigades built several satellite districts, including Altahabana, Reparto Eléctrico, San Agustín, Cotorro, and Alamar (see Figure 1.3), the latter accommodating more than 130,000 people. The housing uniformity in design and layout achieved the level of abstraction desired within the Soviet Union as the base for a new social arrangement. Apart from the attempts to reduce the monotony of the facades through vividly painting the panels or cultivating the areas between the blocks, “what contributed more than anything to maintain a high social status and a considerable sense of pride in these settlements was the fact that their inhabitants were ‘honorable citizens' selected on the basis of their outstanding work merits.”67 As in the Romanian (p- 31) case, propaganda film reinforced the construction of the housing ideal. The first cultural institution fund
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ed by the revolutionary government in 1959 was the Cuban Institute of Film Industry (ICAIC), and film represented one of the main vehicles that sought to construct the significance of Cuban housing and prefabrication.68 Documentary films such as We Have No Right to Wait (No tenemos derecho a esperar, Dir. Rogelio París, 1972), To Build a House (Para construir una casa, Dir. Nicolás Guillén, 1972), Microbrigades, a Diary (Microbri-gadas, un diario, Dir. Héctor Veitía, 1973), and Of Life and Housing (De la vida y la vivienda, Dir. Víctor Casáus, 1975) sought to orient the popular taste towards the new lifestyle and to reinforce the idea that the building of homes meant primarily the building of so-cialism.69
A series of articles from an issue of Arquitectura Cuba (magazine of the Cuban architects, published for the first time in 1917 under the name Arquitectura), published in 1976, articulates the strong relationship between human formation, infrastructure, and ideology. The articles “The Man at the Center of the Transformations of the Community”70 and “Human Settlements: An Expression of the Economic, Political and Social Structures”71 suggest that creating a new society based on socialist principles was conceived not only as an objective transformation of sociopolitical structures but also implied the attendant construction of a subject formation and the creation of the New (Socialist) Person.72 In the same issue of Arquitectura Cuba, an article on Alamar—the largest district that was built within the microbrigades system—describes how the (p- 32) inhabitants are expected to appropriate the new housing units by providing an analysis of three aspects: the person (el hombre), the furnishing, and the interior space.73 The author emphasizes the role of the families for the new district: “The family-oriented character of the new community is outstandingly accentuated when compared to the percentages of nuclei of a single person in Havana. While in the capital the percentage of inhabitants who live alone reaches 13.7—some 50,000 people—in Alamar the figure reached has no statistical weight,”74 as the scientific distribution of space is commensurate with the number of family members. Recognizing that the “social changes have an impact on housing,” the use of domestic space receives a clear gendered dimension, while the rational furnishing of the apartments becomes an integral part of the new project of domesticity.75
The distinct place that the constitution of the domestic space had in the formation of the masses was significant not only with regard to design and construction, but also in informing subjective aesthetic experiences to shape a common taste.76 For the district of Alamar, “a furniture system was designed to break the traditional conception of living room, dining room, etc., flexible enough to allow its growth, at the same pace as the needs of the family nucleus increases; [ ... ] that the furniture system be adjusted in its dimensions to the architectural spaces and dimensions of the population.”77 The dining set (along with the large art objects that were historically stored in the dining room) would now be distributed in the kitchen or in other parts of the apartment: “It can be said in general terms that the original functions of the dining set are diluted into other areas; its specific function is minimized.”78 Thus, the socialist design was imagined to reinforce the modern project of domesticity, while simultaneously allowing the state to regulate behavior that would lead to achievement of the revolutionary goals. Rationalizing and disciplining domestic behavior according to patterns of regimented taste were intended to regu-
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late preexisting practices and constituted one of the vehicles responsible for the reach of the socialist ontology.79
But how did such political agendas come to be constructed on the basis of a powerful rhetoric that linked the constitution of the subjective body and the home? I suggest that the basis of this political agenda was constituted by an aesthetic project, whose traces go back—through an archaeology of domesticity—to the early Russian avant-gardes. In this way, Kazimir Malevich's paradigmatic Black Square (1915)— the visual reduction of all material content and, for a long time, the symbol of the avant-gardes80—anticipated the total transformation of domesticity generated by the industrialization of housing. Malevich declared the need for an abstract representation shorn of spiritual symbols to create a new society: “Only with the disappearance of a habit of mind which sees in pictures little corners of nature, madonnas and shameless Venuses, shall we witness a work (p- 33) of pure, living art.”81 At The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10, he placed the painting high up in the corner of the room, in the space that was traditionally reserved for the religious icons in the Russian home, suggesting the political need for disorientation of the New Soviet Person.82 Repudiating the figurative in favor of abstraction, Malevich's Black Square becomes the visual manifesto of the new prefabricated panel that would accomplish the domestic revolution. Using combinations of pure forms—built in conscious dialogue with the icons and the folk art—Malevich's aesthetic “subconsciously” aimed to determine the relationship between the subject and the world.83
The etymological meaning derived from the Greek aisthesis points to the aesthetics as linked to perception and ontology that goes beyond the realm of art, becoming a reality.84 With the body at its center, aesthetics develops into a cognitive form acquired through a corporeal experience: seeing, smelling, touching, and so on.85 Thus space not only functions as the Foucauldian disciplinary technique,86 but also, as in Susan Buck-Morss's conceptualization, it becomes a seductive and sedative instrument of the empathetic body whose critical power lies primarily in aesthetic domestication.87 The character of an aesthetic experience has an immediate embodied, phenomenal reaction, in which the subject not only looks from the outside but is involved in giving meaning to the material form.88 The transformation of domesticity becomes thus an aesthetic project that involves a total bodily experience—spatial, material, sensorial, and ultimately cognitive—that enables the user to appropriate a new mode of being.
Pierre Bourdieu envisions the way in which the repetition of small gestures within a daily routine—through a bodily experience of a certain ritual—teaches the body to behave, transforming patterns of understanding of its environment:
the “totalitarian institutions,” [ ... ] that seek to produce a new man [ ... ] entrust to it in abbreviated and practical, i.e. mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture. The principles em-bodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness, [ ... ] nothing seems more ineffable,
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[ ... ] than the values given body, made body by the transubstantiation achieved by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy, capable of instilling a whole cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, a political philosophy, through injunctions as insignificant as “stand up straight” or “don't hold your knife in your left hand.”89
The performative character of this ritual enables the subject to become part of it and to inhabit and appropriate the space of its production. Thus, through a similar process, new spatial patterns, materials, technologies, and taste became regulatory mechanisms that are normalized and appropriated over time as habitual. The reconsideration of the aesthetic project of the avant-gardes through Khrushchev's reforms involved the elimination of the traditional, superfluous forms by means of the emergence of the concept of dizain (design) and of the standardization of taste: interiors of the apartments were no longer subjective, artisanal products, and the experience of the domestic interior started to have a communal, rational base.90
As Malevich observed, the new aesthetic needed to work through the state since “the state is an apparatus by which the nervous systems of its inhabitants are regulated.”91 The regulation of the domestic life intensified to such an extent that the “state was becoming a member of the family,”92 and the primary “agency of socialization.”93 The Federation of Cuban Women (FMC—Federación de Mujeres Cubanas) founded in 1960 aimed to construct a new socialist woman incorporated into both the political project and the workforce. Accepting a heteronormative discourse, the state encouraged marriages based on equal partnership between man and woman, through national campaigns,94 and established policies to ease the burdens of housework through programs for socializing domestic labor.95 It supported these new policies by allocating a large part of its gross national product to childcare services.96 Increasing in number, from 109 nurseries in 1962 to 658 in 1975, day-care establishments provided medical care, meals, and clothes for children between the ages of six weeks and six years, and in 1967 they all became free of charge to the population.97 Free access to the state health system aimed to promote a healthy body through scientific care, while trained personnel replaced traditional healers, midwives, and herbalists.98 The coming into effect of the Family Code promoted equality between men and women in the context of domestic work, while the 1976 Constitution emphasized the state's role in protecting “family, motherhood, and matrimony.”99
Nevertheless, the access of the state to domestic space through standardized design—allowing it to impose processes of socialization and appropriation of the space—was complemented by a specific legal framework with measures that determined the “acceptable understanding” of the family, the relations between genders and generations, and in the Romanian case, the rigorous control of reproduction.100 In Romania, abortion was declared illegal in 1948, and the key role of women, children, and families in the construction of communism was underlined in the Family Code introduced in 1953.101 Alongside an aggressive propaganda campaign, Ceau§escu implemented economic measures to
Page 15 of 27 stimulate natality, introduced legal mechanisms to make divorce harder to obtain, and restricted access to contraception. Later, in the 1980s, a project designed to build six standardized canteens in Bucharest would have replaced the domestic kitchens; these canteens were planned as spaces for intensive, collectivized food consumption with standardized menus, attempting in this way to ease the burden of domestic work for women, but at the same time to control consumption. Through a legal and symbolic apparatus that dominated both public and private life, the state encouraged women to pursue their social and cultural roles as workers, wives, and mothers.102
In many ways women became the main site of antagonistic political agendas: on one side, woman was the emancipated subject that could contribute to the building of socialism through her power to both produce and reproduce; and on the other side, she was a subject whose privacy and capacity to decide about her own body were tightly controlled by the state. Despite the idealized image of a domestic revolution in which technological
(p. 35) advance and emancipation of the women were championed, the high degree of state control often left women's bodies objectified and reduced to a productive and reproductive mass.
Through her critique of Marx and Foucault, Silvia Federici observes that the battle against the rebel body, its political status, and its relationship to spaces, limits, and enclosures are all essential conditions for the development of labor-power relations and for the rule of modern capitalist governments.103 Articulating the body as an essential medium to inquire into forms of power, Foucault has also provided the tools to understand how the body has been “historically disciplined.”104 The rise of the notion of “enclosure,” the process of territorialization of the social, and the emergence of the new ideology of home as a political project,105 all paralleled the idea of territorial and bodily control in the constitution of wealth. These processes of capitalist modernization required the transformation of the body into a work machine, able to mimic the technological process of the machines, and thereby resulting in the systematic destruction of women's power over biological and social reproduction.106 The constitution of capitalism and the modern state addresses thus both the body's productive and reproductive capacities in relation to spatial concerns that have an infrastructural quality. In an attempt to form a new type of individual, the capitalist bourgeoisie engaged in the battle against the body attempting to overcome its “natural state,”107 and to suppress the medieval concept of the body as a “receptacle of magic powers.”108
Despite struggles against capitalist structures, the way to socialism translated precisely into a mass modernization, that radically transformed urban and social structures. Having strong agricultural traditions prior to the transition to socialism, both Romania and Cuba experienced mass migration from the countryside to the reformed city, and this had a profound impact on the dynamic of modernization. Rural labor, different temporal rhythms, and strong ties to land and/or religion were constitutive for a large part of the population. Consequently, socialism became not so much an alternative to the capitalist system of control—that would later be understood in biopolitical terms—but rather an opportunity to domesticate and systematize the body through radical mechanisms con
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cealed behind the rhetoric of emancipation through labor. Like the feudal estate, the paternalist socialist state provided its workers with all services and facilities—houses, kindergartens, clinics, food, and so on—in an attempt to control and direct all aspects of everyday life, and to make workers dependent on the structure of the system.109 Belonging to a suzerain power by simply being part of a territorial enclosure meant dependence just as in feudal times; it also meant minimum control over one's own life.110
As these arguments show, socialist domestic infrastructure thus became a political technology that mediated between, and therefore transformed, spatially and temporally reconfigured practices, generating new ontologies.111 Along with a new spatial structure and design, the state acknowledged the material dimension of the prefabricated housing and endorsed the idea that reinforced concrete offered a means to draw people together and therefore to enhance collective social consciousness.112 In the Soviet Union, the synthetic nature of reinforced concrete made it a symbol of what Lenin called the “indissoluble unity” of the proletariat, formed through the revolution. Feodor Gladkov's (p- 36) classic novel Cement (1925), set in a cement plant, emphasizes the power of cement to bind together a “mass of loose particles,” and as the hero Gleb Chumalov puts it: “We produce cement. Cement is a firm bond. Cement is us, comrades—the working class.”113 Responding to the new factory techniques of prefabrication, cement was the material to accomplish the desired architectural standardization, becoming a material and aesthetic symbol of the working class. It was precisely the introduction of a machine culture and the industrialization of all aspects of life that aimed to discipline the body through the appropriation of mechanization processes that transformed not only the productive realm— the productive labor—but also the domestic space.
The analogue between the materiality of the house and that of the body was also present in the Cuban propaganda discourse. Celebrating workers and the mass housing, in 1972 the Cuban government broadcasted the color documentary We Have No Right to Wait.114 Along with scenes of the “social reality,” the documentary's musical score reinforces the accomplishments of the construction industry. Pablo Milanes's “The Builder's Song” speaks about the transformation of the country, the relationship between “material and social structures,” and the bodily engagement with the socialist project of infrastructure: 115
I see your brief body parked in the space where my legs and my hands were moving yesterday I touch your elaborate structure and I think of when you were nothing and how, from nothing, we brought you into being. [ ... ]116
While the song is embedded in popular culture, it also has a clear propagandistic value. The text presents the becoming of the housing building and the power of the human body over that becoming. The song reveals the indispensability of the corporeal involvement in the constitution of socialism. It emphasizes once more the importance of the notion of in
Page 17 of 27 frastruction—the buildings and materials—in which people become “part of the very fabric of their being, containing them by being contained by them in the most literal sense.”117 The transformation of the body through labor marks not only the subject's conformation, but also the very porous boundary between state control and individual privacy.
In Romania, the understanding of labor as a homogeneous, centralized expression of the communist ideology was a dominant theme, and simultaneously an explicit object of power, of social cohesion, and of coercion: “Work has become for us a matter of honor, enjoying the respect and appreciation of our society. The socialist Party, state-awarded prizes, medals, the title of Hero of Socialist Labor for the best of us [ ... ]. To labor are dedicated poems and novels, musical and artistic works.”118 The engagement of the body in the production of the socialist Romania and the socialist subject was made explicit through an extreme cultul muncii (cult of labor) constituted in various manifestations: (p- 37) from labor as coercion,119 to heroic labor, to patriotic labor. The normative right to space—the 8 square meters per person—could be increased depending on the “quality,” the productive capacities of the inhabitants,120 and the number of family members. It was possible to stretch the limits of the state-imposed norms of standardization in the allocation of the domicile only by contributing to the productive character of socialism; the corporeal experience of labor—in both the symbolic and physical construction of socialism—became the currency for improved infrastructural conditions, including domestic spaces. Bodily labor, thus, became not liberating as Marx had envisioned, but commodifying.
The cases of Bucharest and Havana point to the complex narratives of a transnational history of the communist body and domestic space. An evaluation of this manifold archaeology of domesticity reveals that the political agenda, manifested in both contexts as an aesthetic project, entered and reconstructed private lives. As I have shown, this took place in the formative environment of home, which led to the transformation of subjective bodies, and ultimately the construction of the political subject. The conflation between the project of the body and that of the home probably represents the most radical and longest-lasting legacy of those nations' socialist discourses, whose vestiges continue to shape the postcommunist experience.
Alonso, Pedro, and Hugo Palmarola. Panel. London: Architectural Association, 2014.
Birkenmaier, Anke, and Esther Whitfield, eds. Havana beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings after 1989. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Buchli, Victor. An Archaeology of Socialism. Oxford: Berg, 1999.
Buchli, Victor. “Moisei Ginzburg's Narkomfin Communal House in Moscow: Contesting the Social and Material World.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57, no. 2 (1998): 160-181.
Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004.
Groys, Boris. The Total Art of Stalinism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Hamberg, Jill. Under Construction: Housing Policy in Revolutionary Cuba. New York: Center for Cuban Studies, 1986.
Hamilton, Carrie. “Sexual Politics and Socialist Housing: Building Homes in Revolutionary Cuba.” In Homes and Homecomings: Gendered Histories of Domesticity and Return, edited by K. H. Adler and Carrie Hamilton, 154-173. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Harris, Steven. E. Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2013.
Holbraad, Martin. “I Have Been Formed in This Revolution: Revolution as Infrastructure, and the People It Creates in Cuba.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 23, no. 3 (2018): 478-495.
Humphrey, Caroline. “Ideology in Infrastructure: Architecture and Soviet Imagination.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11, no. 1 (2005): 39-58.
Humphrey, Caroline. “Rethinking Infrastructure: Siberian Cities and the Great Freeze of January 2001.” In Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World, edited by Jane Schneider and Ida Susser, 91-107. New York: Berg, 2003.
Kligman, Gail. Politica duplicita^ii. Controlul reproducerii in Romania lui Ceau§escu. [The Politics of Duplicity. Controlling Reproduction in Ceau§escu's Romania]. Bucharest: Hu-manitas, 2000.
(p. 43) Kopp, Anatole. Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning 19171935. New York: George Braziller, 1970.
Mathey, Kosta. “Microbrigadas in Cuba: An Unconventional Response to the Housing Problem in a Latin American State.” Habitat International 12, no. 4 (1988): 55-62.
Maxim, Juliana. “Mass Housing and Collective Experience: On the Notion of Microraion in Romania in the 1950s and 1960s.” Journal of Architecture 14, no. 1 (2009): 7-26.
Oldenziel, Ruth, and Karin Zachmann. “Kitchens as Technology and Politics: An Introduction.” In Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology and European Users, edited by Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, 1-29. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009.
Scarpaci, Joseph, Roberto Segre, and Mario Coyula. Havana: Two Faces of the Antillean Metropolis. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Smith, Lois, and Alfred Padula. Sex and Revolution: Women in Socialist Cuba. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Tulbure, Irina. Arhitectura urbanism in Romania anilor 1944-1960: Constrangere §i experiment. [Architecture and Urbanism in Romania between 1944-1960: Constraint and Experiment]. Simetria: Bucharest, 2016.
Verdery, Katherine. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
(1.) Steven E. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2013).
(2.) Lynne Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Space (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 154.
(3.) Pedro Alonso and Hugo Palmarola, “Tropical Assemblage: The Soviet Large Panel in Cuba,” in Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America, edited by Eden Medina, Ivan da Costa Marques, and Christina Holmes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 162.
(4.) See Sven Olov-Wallenstein, Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).
(5.) See Susan Reid, “The Khrushchev Kitchen: Domesticating the Scientific-Technological Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (April 2005): 289-316.
(6.) See Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford: Berg, 1999); and Reid, “The Khrushchev Kitchen.”
(7.) Max Gluckman, “Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand,” Bantu Studies 14, no. 1 (1940): 1-30; referenced in Casper Bruun Jensen and Atsuro Morita, “Introduction: Infrastructures as Ontological Experiments,” Ethnos 82, no. 4 (2017): 616.
(8.) See Sheila Jasanoff and Marybeth L. Martello (eds.), Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Casper Bruun Jensen and Brit Ross Winthereik, Monitoring Movements in Development Aid: Recursive Infrastructures and Partnerships (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
(9.) Casper and Morita. “Infrastructures as Ontological Experiments.”
(10.) Dennis Rodgers and Bruce O'Neil, “Infrastructural Violence: Introduction to the Special Issue.” Ethnography 13, no. 4 (2012): 401-412.
(11.) Caroline Humphrey, “Ideology in Infrastructure: Architecture in Soviet Imagination,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11, no. 1 (2005); Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism; Martin Holbraad, “I Have Been Formed in This Revolution: Revolution as Infrastructure, and the People It Creates in Cuba,” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 23, no. 3 (2018): 478-495.
(12.) Caroline Humphrey, “Rethinking Infrastructure: Siberian Cities and the Great Freeze of January 2001,” in Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World, eds. Jane Schneider and Ida Susser (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 93-94.
(13.) Martin Holbraad, “I Have Been Formed by this Revolution: Cuban Housing as Revolutionary Infrastruction” (2016) research paper, Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics research project, unpublished manuscript, 10.
(14.) Humphrey, “Rethinking Infrastructure,” 92.
(15.) Holbraad, “Cuban Housing as Revolutionary Infrastruction.”
(16.) Gail Kligman, Politica duplicitatii. Controlul reproducerii in Romania lui Ceausescu (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2000).
(17.) Roxana Cazan, “Constructing Spaces of Dissent in Communist Romania: Ruined Bodies and Clandestine Spaces in Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days and Gabriela Adame§teanu's ‘A Few Days in the Hospital'” Women's Studies Quarterly 39, no. 3/4 (2011): 93-112.
(18.) See Revolution: Russian Avant-Garde 1912-1930 (The Museum of Modern Art: New York, 1978).
(19.) Ibid., 7.
(20.) Manfredo Tafuri, “Avant-garde et formalisme: Entre la NEP et le premier plan quinquennial,” in URSS 1917-1978: La ville, l'architecture, eds. Jean-Louis Cohen, Marco De Michelis, and Manfredo Tafuri (Paris, LEquerre, and Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1979), 30.
(21.) Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 12.
(22.) Tijana Vujosevic, Modernism and the Making of the Soviet New Man (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 2.
(23.) Irina Tulbure, Arhitectura §i urbanism in Romania anilor 1944-1960: Constrangere §i experiment (Bucharest: Simetria, 2016), 91.
(24.) Usually translated in English as the New Soviet Man (and Woman), I will employ in this text what I consider to be a more accurate translation—The New Soviet Person—that maintains the substance of the Russian word chelovek, which is neutral with regard to gender.
(25.) Reid, “The Khrushchev Kitchen.”
(26.) Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning 19171935 (New York: George Braziller, 1970), 101.
(27.) Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 201-202.
(28.) Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 158.
(29.) Buck-Morss, Dreamworld, 202.
(30.) Buchli, An Archaeology, 139.
(31.) Victor Buchli, “Moisei Ginzburg's Narkomfin Communal House in Moscow: Contesting the Social and Material World,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57, no. 2 (June 1998): 161.
(32.) Kopp, Town and Revolution.
(33.) Buchli, An Archaeology, 67.
(34.) Ibid., 174.
(35.) Ibid., 67.
(36.) Kopp, Town and Revolution, 144.
(37.) Victor Buchli, “The Social Condenser: Again, Again and Again—The Case for the Narkomfin Communal House, Moscow,” The Journal of Architecture 22, no. 3 (2017).
(38.) V. I. Lenin, “Velikii pochin. (O geroizme rabochikh v tylu),” Polnoe sobranie sochi-nenii, 5th ed. (Moscow, 1970), vol. 39, 23-24; cited in Reid, “The Khrushchev Kitchen,” 292.
(39.) V. I. Lenin, The Emancipation of Women (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 63-64.
(40.) James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 345-346.
(41.) Accommodating from two to seven families—one room per family, with communal use of the kitchen, bathroom, and hallways—the communal apartment became the predominant form of housing for several generations, until Nikita Khrushchev announced the reform of housing provision through prefabrication.
(42.) Susan E. Reid, “Khrushchev Modern,” Cahiers du monde russe 47, no. 1-2 (2006): 232.
(43.) Ibid., 234.
(44.) Ibid., 237-279.
(45.) See Jill Hamberg, Under Construction: Housing Policy in Revolutionary Cuba (New York: Center for Cuban Studies, 1986).
(46.) I. Silvan, “in legatura cu proiectarea secfiunilor-tip de locuinte," Arhitectura RPR, no.1 (1954).
(47.) Silvan, “in legatura," 3.
(48.) In Romania, a one-bedroom apartment is usually referred to as an “apartment with two rooms" (apartament cu doua camere), while a two-bedroom apartment is an “apartment with three rooms" (apartament cu trei camere).
(49.) Grigore lonescu, Arhitectura in Romania: perioada anilor 1944-1969 (Bucharest, Ed-itura Academiei Republicii Socialiste Romania, 1969), 107.
(50.) Cristian Culiciu, “Legislatia locativa a Romaniei de la reconstructie la demolari," Buletinul Cercurilor §tiinfifice Studen£e§ti, no. 22 (2016), 188.
(51.) Juliana Maxim, “Bucharest: The City Transfigured," in Sanctioning Modernism: Architecture and the Making of Postwar Identities, eds. Vladimir Kulic, Timothy Parker, and Monica Penick (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 10.
(52.) Grigore lonescu, Arhitectura pe teritoriul Romaniei de-a lungul veacurilor (Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste Romania, 1982), 643.
(53.) Maxim, “Bucharest: The City Transfigured," 22.
(54.) lonescu, Arhitectura in Romania: perioada anilor 1944-1969, 74.
(55.) Mirela Stroe, Locuirea intre proiect §i decizie politica. Romania 1954-1966 (Bucharest: Simetria, 2015).
(56.) Cezarina Nicolau, “Camera de zi in folosirea curenta" in Arhitectura 21, no. 5 (1973): 5.
(57.) Ibid., 5.
(58.) N. C. Munteanu, “Serenada pentru etajul XII"—pe platouri," Cinema, no. 11 (November 1976).
(59.) Cited in Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola, Panel (London: Architectural Association, 2014), 124.
(60.) James Lynch, “Cuban Architecture Since the Revolution," Art Journal 39, no. 2 (2014): 100-101.
(61.) Palmarola and Alonso, “Tropical Assemblage,” 159.
(62.) Lynch, “Cuban Architecture Since the Revolution,” 101. See also lulia Statica, “From Domesticity to Environmentality. Socialist Housing Infrastructures, and the Politics of the Feminine Body in (Late) Socialist Cuba” in Political Architecture: Havana (Copenhagen: Royal Academy of Fine Arts, 2018), 91.
(63.) Mario Coyula, “The Bitter Trinquiennium,” in Havana Beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings after 1989, eds. Anke Birkenmaier and Esther Whitfield (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 43.
(64.) Carrie Hamilton, “Sexual Politics and Socialist Housing: Building Homes in Revolutionary Cuba,” in Homes and Homecomings: Gendered Histories of Domesticity and Return, eds. K. H. Adler and Carrie Hamilton (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 155.
(65.) Joseph Scarpaci, Roberto Segre, and Mario Coyula, Havana: Two Faces of the Antillean Metropolis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 203.
(66.) See www.projectalamar.com; see also Hamberg, Under Construction and Statica, “From Domesticity to Environmentality.”
(67.) Kosta Mathey, “Microbrigadas in Cuba: An Unconventional Response to the Housing Problem in a Latin American State,” Habitat International 12, no. 4 (1988): 70.
(68.) Alonso and Palmarola, Panel, 125.
(69.) Ibid., 124.
(70.) “El Hombre: centro de las transformaciones de la communidad,” Arquitectura Cuba 345 (1976): 4-7.
(71.) “Los Assentimientos Umanos: una expression de las estructuras económicas, políticas y sociales,” Arquitectura Cuba 345 (1976): 8-24.
(72.) Holbraad, “Cuban Housing as Revolutionary Infrastruction,” 4.
(73.) Wilfredo Benitez, “Investigación y diseño para la comunidad un Nuevo mobiliario para Alamar,” Arquitectura Cuba 345 (1976): 53-57.
(74.) Ibid., 55.
(75.) See also Statica, “From Domesticity to Environmentality.”
(76.) David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, “Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc,” in Socialist Spaces. Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, eds. David Crowley and Susan E. Reid (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 11.
(77.) Benitez, “Investigación y diseño,” cited in Statica, “From Domesticity to Environ-mentality.”
(78.) Ibid., 57.
(79.) Buchli, An Archaeology, 139-140.
(80.) Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 15.
(81.) Kazimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting,” trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin in Malevich on Suprematism. Six Essays: 1915-1926, ed. Patricia Railing (Iowa City: The University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1999).
(82.) Alonso and Palmarola, Panel, 13.
(83.) Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, 16.
(84.) Buck-Morss Dreamworld, 101.
(85.) Ibid., 101.
(86.) See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).
(87.) Buck-Morss, Dreamworld, 257.
(88.) Renée Hoogland, “The Matter of Culture: Aesthetic Experience and Corporeal Being,” Mosaic, a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 36 (2003): 1-18.
(89.) Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 94.
(90.) Buchli, An Archaeoogy, 138.
(91.) Kazimir Malevich, Bespredmetnyi mir, cited in Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, 17.
(92.) Lois S. Smith and Alfred Padula, Sex and Revolution: Women in Socialist Cuba (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 147.
(93.) Lourdes Casal Bengelsdorf, “On the Problem of Studying Women in Cuba,” in Cuban Political Economy: Controversies in Cubanology, ed. Andrew Zimbalist (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), cited in Smith and Padula, Sex and Revolution, 146.
(94.) Nicola Murray, “Socialism and Feminism: Women and the Cuban Revolution: Part 1,” Feminist Review 2 (1979): 64.
(95.) Hamilton, “Building Homes,” 157.
(96.) Murray, “Socialism and Feminism,” 65.
(97.) Ibid.
Page 25 of 27
(98.) Smith and Padula, Sex and Revolution, 60. Eventually, there was an effort made to integrate them in the system by providing a workplace especially in medical facilities from rural areas (Smith and Padula, Sex and Revolution, 60).
(99.) Hamilton, “Building Homes,” 157-158.
(100.) For an extensive analysis of communist Romania's control of reproduction, see Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity. Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu's Romania (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). See also Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).
(101.) Kligman, Politica duplicitatii, 25.
(102.) Ibid., 83.
(103.) Sutapa Chattopadhyay, “Caliban and the Witch and Wider Bodily Geographies,” Gender, Place and Culture 24, no. 2 (2017): 160-173. See also Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2014).
(104.) Linda Zerilli, “Rememoration or War? French Feminist Narrative and the Politics of Self Representation,” Differences 3, no. 1. (1991): 1-19.
(105.) Hester Eisenstein, “Caliban and the Witch” (book review), Socialism and Democracy 20, no.2 (July 2006): 167.
(106.) Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 63.
(107.) Ibid., 9.
(108.) Buck-Morss, Dreamworld.
(109.) Simon Clarke, “The Quagmire of Privatisation,” New Left Review 196 (1992): 3-28. And Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 206.
(110.) Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? 206.
(111.) Buchli, An Archaeology.
(112.) Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture (London: Reaktion, 2012), 146.
(113.) Fyodor Gladkov, Cement (1925, Eng. transl. Moscow, 1985), 103; cited in Forty, Concrete and Culture, 147.
(114.) Alonso and Palmarola, Panel, 146.
(115.) Ibid., 150.
(116.) “The Builder's Song,” ICAIC Sound Experimental Group Project; cited in Alonso and Palmarola, Panel, 150. Veo tu breve cuerpo estacionado; en el espacio en que mis piernas; y mis manos se movían ayer; Toco tu estructura elaborada; y pienso cuando no eras nada, y de la nada te llevamos a ser.
(117.) Holbraad, “Cuban Housing as Revolutionary Infrastruction.”
(118.) B. Barbulescu, File din istoria UTC (Bucharest: Institutul de Studii Istorice §i Social Politice de pe langa CC al PCR, 1971), 313.
(119.) The legal framework for coerced labor was set up in 1950 as a measure for the “reeducation of hostile elements.” Prisoners were obliged to work on massive projects proposed by the communist government, such as the Danube-Black Sea Canal and the Great Braila Island.
(120.) Comisia Prezidentialá pentru Analiza Dictaturii Comuniste din Romania, Raport final (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2008), 396.
lulia Státicá
Iulia Statica, Visiting Scholar at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University
Architecture in Series: Housing and Communist Idealism
Kimberly E. Zarecor
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Oct 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.2
Communist governments in Europe believed that the state should enable the provision of material goods to its people—food, clothing, and shelter among the most critical of these needs. A long-term strategy for how to achieve this goal was left unresolved in the iconic texts and statements of the international communist movement. Architects, planners, and economists had to develop their own solutions to the vexing question of housing for the masses. As part of their work, they had to respond to the new planning regimens of the command economy and institutional structures such as the Five-Year Plan. While the perils of mass production have received much scholarly attention, this essay argues that an alternative base of knowledge about architectural modernism can be mobilized from the history of communist mass housing programs. This model of architecture—referred to here as “serial architecture”—embodied both an aesthetic approach and an ethical stance that remains relevant to enduring questions of the built environment's agency in creating and sustaining social progress.
Keywords: prefabrication, mass housing, Neues Bauen, serial architecture, Czechoslovakia, materialism, Karel Teige, CIAM
Communist governments in Europe believed that the state should enable the provision of material goods to its people—food, clothing, and shelter among the most critical of these needs. Described first by Engels in The Housing Question and later codified in MarxismLeninism, universal access to housing was a fundamental component of plans to overcome the inequities of capitalism and improve quality of life for the working class. A longterm strategy for how to achieve this major goal was left unresolved in the iconic texts and statements of the international communist movement.1 Engels himself rejected architecture as a primary solution on its own, since it could never remedy the economic inequities underlying the system. First in the Soviet Union, and later in the Eastern Bloc satellites, architects, planners, and economists therefore found it necessary to develop their own solutions to the vexing question of housing in countries led by communist par-
Page 1 of 23 ties.2 As part of their work, they also had to respond to the new planning regimens of the command economy, including five-year plans and chronic shortages of building materials and skilled labor.
The resulting communist-era neighborhoods are known in stereotypical depictions as visual landscapes of gray, repetitive, poorly constructed prefabricated apartment blocks, often made from large concrete panels and situated on the urban periphery in anonymous clusters. While one aspect of their history is certainly about the perils of mass production, this essay argues that an alternative base of knowledge about architectural modernism can be mobilized from the history of communist mass housing programs. This model of architecture-referred to as “serial architecture” throughout this chapter-embodied both an aesthetic approach and an ethical stance that remains relevant to enduring questions of the built environment's agency in creating and sustaining social progress. These prefabricated buildings helped to define communist visual culture by creating a universalizing built environment in which serial grids and (p- 45) repetition became the backdrop for socialist everyday life and the emergence of a new socialist subject.3 As the primary housing stock in many cities in the region, these buildings now have postcommunist afterlives as sites of new transformations in the context of global capitalism.4
In the tropes of Marxist discourse and its dynamic vision of environmental evolution, nineteenth-century capitalism produced polluted, crowded, and unhealthy living conditions for the working class, especially in growing industrial cities. Socialism responded with solutions derived from the scientific methods of Marxist materialism to turn this chaos into the rational and ordered terrain of a new and improved living environment that would foster the collective.5 In the language of the “short course” on Marxism-Leninism, published in Czech for the first time in 1939, the “concrete conditions of the material life of society” should matter more than the “abstract ‘principles' of human reason.”6 The dialectical tension between class struggle and material production would produce the space of social, economic, and political transformation. Sociologist Virág Molnár writes about the importance of architecture and housing in particular to the communist project.
It was assumed that radical new housing design would lift workers out of their culture of poverty and uplift society. To this, socialist states added the Marxist premise that material conditions determine social consciousness. Consequently, probably in no other political system did the state believe so thoroughly in the social-transformative role of architecture and architects as in socialism. The mobilization of architecture to radically reshape the built environment was a crucial component of state-orchestrated modernization programs while it was also deeply enmeshed in everyday life.7
The visuality of this everyday mass housing reinforced the totality of the plan for comprehensive social transformation with repetitive, controlled, and gridded architectural units that combined to form a collective at multiple expanding scales-units within buildings, buildings within neighborhoods, and neighborhoods within cities.
Architects were no longer individual creators, but collaborative producers of industrialscale goods.8 In her work on Bucharest, Juliana Maxim writes about these changes:
From the early 1950s onwards, socialist architects successfully redefined the act of inhabitation by replacing the individual house with collective mass housing, thus transforming architectural design into urban planning. This new paradigm could only occur alongside a transformation of architectural practice: the socialist state became the main, if not the sole, commissioner of construction work; architectural conception was no longer an individual pursuit and instead occurred in design collectives composed of large numbers of architects; and the object of architecture was no longer the single building, but was always formulated at the level of the neighborhood, the district and even the city.9
In a 1948 speech celebrating the creation of Stavoprojekt, the newly created system of state-run architecture offices in Czechoslovakia, Otakar Novy spoke about this shift and (p. 46) the ultimate goals for socialist architects to “transition the building industry from handicraft to production ... [and] transform our building sites into factories.”10 (See Figure 2.1.)
Published in Architektúra CSR (1957)
This chapter challenges assumptions about the origins and failures of communist visual culture in the realm of architecture by returning to the 1930s debates about the necessity of political change as a precursor to transformative architecture. If one of the goals of socialist revolution was to solve the housing question as formulated by Engels, then this chapter argues that serial architecture is best understood as a multifaceted response to this crisis. The architecture of socialist mass housing embraced seriality not only in its
Page 3 of 23
aesthetics, but also in its forms of production and approaches to inhabitation of the socialist living environment—itself reproduced ad infinitum across the Second World.11
This emergent built environment was always conceived in contrast to the travails of the nineteenth-century city and its continuing decline in post-World War I Europe.12 (p- 47) The worsening housing conditions for many poor people in European cities in the 1920s and 1930s attracted the attention of the elite of modern architecture. CIAM (Congrès internationaux d'architecture modern/The International Congresses of Modern Architecture), founded in Switzerland by Le Corbusier and Siegfried Giedion, made the “minimum dwelling” and the “housing crisis” the focus of the group's second meeting in Frankfurt in 1929 and also the third in Brussels in 1930.13 Organized to bring together carefully selected national delegations to “participate in the struggle to promote and consolidate Modernism,” the CIAM gatherings showed an internal political cleavage within the Modern movement between Marxists and those with more moderate political views.14 In the words of Christiane Craseman Collins and Mark Swenarton, two different views of “new architecture” emerged at the early CIAM meetings. On one side “was the more traditional view of Le Corbusier that architecture was still ultimately an aesthetic affair, and that what mattered was an architecture appropriate to the idea (rather than the pragmatic requirements) of the new age.”15 CIAM President Cor van Eesteren, and members including Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, were among those aligned with Le Corbusier and supported his efforts to keep political factionalism out of CIAM.16
On the other side were the Neues Bauen architects, steeped in Marxism, who believed that “aesthetics were unimportant compared to the social objectives of economy, function and rationalization.”17 They embraced anti-aesthetics as a visual culture derived completely within a language of scientific experimentation—arguing that form should result from functional and social needs only.18 Swiss and German architects, including Hans Schmidt, Ernst May, and newly appointed Bauhaus Director Hannes Meyer, led this group at the first CIAM meeting in 1928.19 They hosted the next meeting in 1929 at May's offices in Frankfurt without Le Corbusier, who was traveling in South America at the time.20 Czech critic Karel Teige brought the first national delegation of Czech and Slovak architects to CIAM in 1929; they aligned themselves with Neues Bauen.21 Notable to the political divides within the group, Schmidt, May, and Meyer, along with colleagues and some of Meyer's students from the Bauhaus, left for the Soviet Union in 1930 where they found work for a few years designing housing estates and public buildings before becoming disillusioned with the realities of everyday life under Stalin.22
Teige had been a prominent avant-garde figure in Prague and around Central Europe for more than a decade by 1930. A public intellectual who espoused provocative Marxist views, he led the influential and multimedia avant-garde collective Devetsil in the 1920s.23 At the Brussels meeting, he was asked to write a summary of the reports submit
Page 4 of 23
ted by the delegations on subsistence-level housing in their countries; his text appeared in German the following year in the conference proceedings.24 Among his observations was that “the actual housing need is so pressing in all countries that when it comes to the classes at subsistence level we must use the term ‘housing destitution.' ”25
Like many of the more politically oriented architects at the meetings, Teige was disappointed that CIAM itself was not making more material progress on its stated goals to improve living conditions for the masses.26 In response to CIAM's inaction and with an emphasis on producing results among the architects closest to him, he wrote the 1932 book titled The Minimum Dwelling (Nejmensi byt).27 This Engels-inspired text was a (p- 48) manifesto, presented in four-hundred dense pages, that challenged Czech and Slovak architects to finally solve the decades-long crisis of housing shortages and poor housing conditions in Europe through demonstrable action. In characteristically vivid language, Teige began the book with harsh criticism of most modern architects working at the time. He vilified them for ignoring the causes of the housing crisis and instead designing villas for “businessmen, factory owners, and bankers,” that is, “the ruling class,” who for the sake of fashion wanted houses in a modern style.28 Taking aim at some of the best known interwar modernists, Teige wrote:
Once the taste of [the ruling class] has become really “modernized,” it then becomes acceptable to build in place of the Trianon Le Corbusier's Villa Garches or Villa Poissy, or Loos's Villa in Prague, or Mallet-Steven's Villa in Paris, while Mies van der Rohe builds as the pinnacle of modernist snobbism and the ostentation of a millionaire's lifestyle a villa for the factory owner T[ugendhat] in B[rno]. All these houses, with all their technical luxury and radical design devices, with all their formal originality, are really nothing other than new versions of opulent baroque palaces, that is, seats of the new financial aristocracy. A machine for living? No, a machine for representation and splendor, for the idle, lazy life of the bosses playing golf and their ladies bored in their boudoirs.29
What followed was a treatise on the scientific problem of housing, including charts and diagrams about essential needs and pointed criticisms of non-Marxist responses that failed to address underlying economic inequality. The text was accompanied by extensive analyses of built and unbuilt housing projects by Czechs and other European architects working in a modern style from the turn of the twentieth century to 1932.
In many cases, Teige criticized the work as stylistic play that made no meaningful intervention into the capitalist system, even when architects claimed to have a left-wing dispo-sition.30 Teige's desire for action was stated clearly in his conclusion, where he wrote that Marxist materialism as a scientific approach “has the potential to become a fertile creative method in modern architecture and is well suited to supply the modern architectural movement with a much-needed element of conviction.”31 Then Teige listed the reasons for his choice of Marxist materialism—“it provides a clear direction for action, coupled with an in-depth understanding of relevant problems and their mutual relationships as well as a rational explanation of the root causes of past economic and historical failures.”32 With these words, Teige spoke on behalf of the entire hardline left among the European avant-garde who had grown increasingly frustrated around 1930 with the stylistic slant of modernist discourse, particularly in the orbit around Le Corbusier.
As Teige emphasized in his 1931 report, their collective anger originated from the perceived ambivalent political stances of many CIAM delegates who did not want a radical overturning of the social or economic order. These differences were especially tied to politics as all architects affiliated with CIAM shared a modernist visual sensibility and formal preferences for the smooth surfaces and cubic volumes of the International Style.33 Their primary arguments were over architecture's sociopolitical agency. The volatile politics of countries in Europe at the time certainly contributed to the unease (p- 49) among CIAM leaders at appearing to support any particular regime or ideology. The rise of Nazism and the imposition of socialist realism under Stalin put an end to modernism as a state-sanctioned style in Germany and the Soviet Union around 1933. At the same time, the absolute alliance between the political left and modernism was called into question by the work of architects such as the Italian rationalists who supported Mussolini's fascist program and proliferated modern architecture from the right in Italy and its colonies in Eritrea and Ethiopia.34 Eric Mumford argued that around 1934 Le Corbusier succeeded in making CIAM an apolitical organization and after that the group promoted its housing “solutions” as “applicable for any modernizing regime concerned with improving mass living conditions.”35 In effect, by embracing depoliticization, Le Corbusier erased the initial debates between the Marxists and the more aesthetically minded members, thus allowing a contingent and highly individualist political approach to emerge.
This was not surprising given the context. Even before Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini stepped into the domain of architecture, many of the CIAM architects were stridently and un-apologetically apolitical, elitist, and form-driven in their approaches. Above all else, they sought to propagate a universal visual culture of modernism without interference. Criticism of this approach, voiced so clearly at the time by Teige and the contemporary Neues Bauen architects, has been largely hidden within histories of the Modern movement. The dominant narrative mythologized the avant-garde's dramatic stylistic choices as also being expressions of a social consciousness.36 These histories accepted statements of belief about what the ideal society might look like as evidence of a political will to participate in radical social change. Mary McLeod explored these questions in her work on Le Corbusier and argued that he did not embrace a social justice mission for architecture. Instead, he rejected party politics, courted wealthy industrialists as clients, and imagined a future “industrial utopia, [which] unlike Marxism, offered both the promise of social redemption and a means by which to continue to practice one's art.”37 Capitalism and the resources its wealthy purveyors provided as patrons were crucial for architects like Le Corbusier and many others; they could not imagine a different economic model that also protected individual artistic integrity. This mid-1930s vision of the avant-garde, cleansed of its more politically minded protagonists, survived into the postwar period in the West, especially in the United States, where postwar modernism became completely entangled with corporations and global capitalism.38
By returning to the initial split within CIAM and the broader debates about the direction of architectural practice in the 1930s, this essay disrupts the standard historiographic treatment of the European avant-garde as a monolithic movement invested in a modernist visual culture driven by architectural form and without a clear political stance. The extremes of politics, economic depression, and then war in the 1930s inevitably contributed to the simplification of the movement's stated intentions, suppressing the rivalries and disagreements that characterized the early 1930s in the face of more urgent concerns that emerged later in the decade. Many architects under threat in central Europe scattered in the 1930s, which dissipated the intensity of the discussions and pushed architects into new contexts such as the wartime and postwar economy of the (p- 50) United States.39 Marxism as practiced by the Soviet Communist Party was increasingly discredited by Stalin's crimes and the country's turn against modernism as a style.40 The voices of those who remained committed to both modernism and the Communist Party, either in the Soviet Union or behind the Iron Curtain after the war, were largely invisible in the historiography of the Cold War era. In understanding postwar architecture, these rifts within the avant-garde over politics and architecture's agency in social change must be brought back into the narrative and revisited as the prehistory of the debates to come.
For architects working in countries led by communist parties after World War II, early 1930s arguments in favor of Marxist materialism, functionalism, and against style as a determining category of success were often still the foundations of their belief systems. As Czech architect Stanislav Semrad proclaimed in a 1945 speech to his fellow architects just days after the country's liberation from Nazi occupation, “the fantastical and paper planning” of the previous era was just preparation for “a time of real creation, to which we have now arrived.”41 The postwar architects and planners wanted to produce material results and not just promote more “slogans.”42
In this context, the events of the late 1940s in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union offer a counterpoint to the typical story of the legacies of the avant-garde in postwar period. Rather than reinforcing a narrative of triumphant corporate patronage, the experiences of countries in the Eastern Bloc showed the endurance of modernist rhetoric and aspects of its visual culture that originated with the Neues Bauen architects. Although the core group of Marxists dissipated within CIAM in the mid-1930s, their arguments that architecture could promote and enact national-scale change in a revolutionary socialist society still resonated after the war.43 Even those who had sided with a more formalist approach in the 1930s, including Karel Honzik in Czechoslovakia and Szymon Syrkus in Poland, took up the cause of socialist transformation after the war as the arrival of real political change completely reformulated the question of what was possible for architecture.44
The most critical change in postwar practice was the shift in scale from the design of an individual building to a series of buildings; a process that Juliana Maxim characterized as “transforming architectural design into urban planning.”45 Engels saw no agency for ar-
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chitecture until after political revolution and chose not to offer any prescription for what do upon its arrival. In the wake of communist parties coming to power across the Eastern Bloc, the urgent question became how to position architecture as a profession and how to build at the unprecedented scale that was suddenly possible. In his 1956 book, Architektúra vsem (Architecture for All), Ana Miljacki wrote that Karel Honzík “thought [under socialism], architects had the mandate to develop a new understanding of groups, blocks, quarters, and cities as the proper concern of architecture.”46 Honzík observed that only “ ‘owing to habit (custom) inculcated by the capitalist system and the (p- 51) regime of private-ownership, everyone believe[d] that architecture [was] a matter of single buildings.'”47 (See Figure 2.2.)
From the Photograph Collection, Ostrava Municipal Archives, Ostrava, Czech Republic
To achieve the scale of architecture that was needed to address the housing problem, architects first had to leave behind romantic notions of architecture as a form of art and embrace its status as an aspect of industrial production.48 This did not mean eschewing its formalism in an absolute sense, but rather expanding the expectations of design work to include novel technologies, comprehensive planning in ensembles, and the aesthetics of grids and lines. In doing so, these architects participated in the global spread of the visual culture of the postwar International Style, what Kenneth Frampton described as “a cubistic mode of architecture ... which generally favored lightweight technique, synthetic modern materials, and standard modular parts so as to facilitate fabrication and erec-tion.”49 Unlike their counterparts in much of the world, architects in communist countries worked with this style to generate serial architecture-buildings designed according to their programmatic type and then standardized to limit design choices. This process of standardization and typification was intended to reduce costs, speed up construction, and provide flexibility to adapt designs to specific site conditions.50 In the realm of housing, the objective to provide modern living conditions for the masses in a relatively short period of time remained paramount.
Just as communist politicians argued that the capitalist system had to be overturned in a revolutionary fervor, some architects vigorously challenged the status quo in architectural practice. Regime loyalist Jiff Kroha, an avant-garde modernist turned practitioner
(p. 52) of socialist realism in the late 1940s, made the case for the transformation of practice in the terms of the Marxist concept of base and superstructure. Dismissing earlier styles of architecture as the cultural superstructures of capitalism, he wrote that “socialist art must be the true cultural superstructure over the socialist reality.”51 He posited the task for socialist architects as defining this new superstructure, while rejecting the interwar modernism of CIAM and the Bauhaus as the superstructure of bourgeois elites. While there was no immediate consensus about what the superstructure of a socialist reality should be in terms of the built environment, the debates in postwar Czechoslovakia and other countries in the Eastern Bloc focused on adopting “rational scientific working methods and the collectivization of architectural work” as two tangible goals that would initiate the desired transformation.52
Looking back at the situation in the 1930s and just after the war in Europe, the alarm that Teige and others expressed about the lack of tangible progress on housing was not overstated. Most cities had long-standing housing problems going back to the nineteenth century, and modern experiments in the 1920s had stopped due to the 1930s economic crisis.53 As Wolfgang Sonne wrote in his study of urban perimeter block models before World War II, much of the production of new housing in European cities between the wars had focused on private-market rental housing for the middle class.54 As the CIAM discussions in Frankfurt and Brussels highlighted, such apartment buildings had no influence on the situation for the poorest and most vulnerable residents because the economics of building housing for subsistence living did not work in a profit-driven real estate market.
The Great Depression made the situation even worse. Cities like Frankfurt and Berlin that had experimented with public financing and modern forms had to abandon these programs in the early 1930s.55 Teige himself argued in his 1931 summary that the country reports showed that “private enterprise building, which responds to demand in the housing market, cannot respond to the need of those classes that are unable to pay profitable rents and therefore must be ruled out altogether from the field of subsistence level hous-ing.”56 In other words, the market would never solve the housing question, just as Engels had argued fifty years earlier. The situation was already dire in the early 1930s, and the following decade saw no improvements. The battles of World War II destroyed housing in some cities, and where buildings survived, the wartime emergency only exacerbated the long-term neglect of the housing infrastructure.57
This is the context in which architects across Europe found themselves in 1945. Beyond the immediate recovery challenges of food, shelter, and jobs for those who survived the war, governments quickly started planning for rebuilding, both of the physical infrastructure and the severely damaged social fabric.58 Architects participated as experts in these processes, but they had little experience with large-scale implementation of their ambitious ideas. Many modernists had expressed utopian and naive plans to remake cities before the war and in doing so to address the housing problem—the most famous example
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being Le Corbusier's City for Three Million Inhabitants and its many variations. In the Czech context, radical urban proposals proliferated in Teige's circles throughout the interwar period, including from young architects who were highly influenced by him and his rhetoric such as the members of the Architectural (p- 53) Working Group (Pracovní ar-chitektonická skupina).59 Yet before the war, this had primarily been a theoretical debate across Europe, as the labor, material, and financial resources were not available to undertake such changes beyond the local scale.60 Even if such resources had been available, the political will for such an upheaval was absent in most European countries. In the Soviet Union, the political revolution provided a new context in which massive housing campaigns were possible, but the nascent building industry struggled to modernize and implement industrial methods on a mass scale until after World War II. As such, the Soviet Union was a poor test case for the potential impact of the new technological methods available in more developed countries, even with a communist party in power.61
All across Europe after the war, communist and capitalist governments began using the resources of the state to experiment with new approaches for the provision of mass housing. Snapshots from around the continent indicate the extent of the predicaments they faced. Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius showed that Britain had been spending significant resources on the construction of public housing starting in 1919.62 The postwar needs escalated demand even more, and over four million units of public housing were constructed in Britain from 1945 to 1969.63 The building types ranged from highly visible tower blocks in cities to suburban cottages, which were the majority of the units built.64 Eli Rubin described historic Berlin in shambles between and after the wars in his book, Amnesiopolis, and emphasized that the construction of the city's Marzahn district in the 1970s was a long-awaited and much celebrated event.65 Among the families whose stories he included, there were many who moved from cramped, dark, and unsanitary dwellings in East Berlin's historic neighborhoods, where they had been stuck for decades, directly into modern apartments in high-rise blocks with panoramic views of open sky.66
The plight of coal miners and steel workers living without modern conveniences in “workers colonies” in the Czechoslovak city of Ostrava before 1948 has been extensively chronicled by historian Martin Jemelka and his research team.67 Czechoslovakia was one of the first countries to institute centralized state-sponsored industrialized housing production, and cities important to the heavy industry sector, like Ostrava, became priority sites for investment.68 In terms of scale of need in countries with more rural economies, anthropologist Krizstina Fehérváry's study of the Hungarian steel-producing city of Dunaújváros noted that in 1949, only 17 percent of all Hungarian dwellings had indoor running water and only 12.5 percent had indoor toilets.69 Although her research was highly critical of the tactics and priorities of the state in these years, she noted that the regime did achieve results, with the statistics improving to 83 percent for plumbing and 74 percent for toilets by 1990.70
In Eastern Europe, communist parties were taking power, some with popular support such as in Czechoslovakia and others with the heavy hand of the Soviets like in Hungary (p. 54) or Poland. Once in power, the regimes could work on a massive scale and as a monopoly since the private construction industry was largely shut down by 1948.71 From 1948 to 1989, old cities were transformed and expanded. At the same time, new cities and districts as large as cities were built to facilitate industrialization and fulfill the promise to modernize the living environment through state socialism.72 The Soviet story was even more radical in the rapid urbanization of a primarily rural population into large industrial cities. Case studies, such as Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain about Magnitogorsk in the 1930s or Lewis Siegelbaum's Cars for Comrades about the automobile city of Togliatti in the 1960s and 1970s, closely chronicled these processes.73
Marxist thinking was critical to many architects' optimism about practicing architecture in a socialist state. Unlike most countries in the region, the Communist Party had been legal in Czechoslovakia through the interwar period, and many prominent architects publicly expressed their Marxist and Communist Party affinities without fear from the 1920s forward.74 Although not typical, the Czechoslovak case is instructive for understanding how abstract notions from Marx and Engels were concretely integrated into the postwar architectural profession. Calls for unionization and mass state employment were already present in the 1930s among Teige's young disciples—followers who continued to promote architecture as a scientific materialist method even after Teige himself gave up this pursuit in the mid-1930s.75 These proposals returned immediately in 1945 within reconstituted professional organizations, including the powerful Union of Socialist Architects (Svaz socialistickych architektu). After the uncertainties of the Great Depression and war, architects looked forward to guaranteed monthly salaries and building on a large scale to achieve material progress.76
The Communist Party takeover in February 1948 finally made this vision possible and changes happened rapidly. By 1949, most architects worked at the state design institutes (in a system called Stavoprojekt) or for a state-owned enterprise.77 Many expressed genuine enthusiasm at the start for the work and the possibilities to improve people's quality of life.78 The negative consequences of state control and limited individual agency in design decisions became apparent with the imposition of socialist realism in the early 1950s, but this period was short lived.79 After Stalin's death and the Khrushchev turn toward mass production, architects once again found their purpose in neighborhood-scale housing ensembles that included civic and public buildings, although many had irrevocably lost their initial optimism about the system.80
If the visual culture of CIAM can be described as an architecture of undecorated smooth surfaces and cubic volumes, then the visual culture of postwar socialist architecture can be captured in the prefabricated panel—an element that became the building block of serial architecture from the 1950s forward. To achieve the pace of construction and low budgets demanded by the socialist regimes, the building industry had to reorganize and set new priorities with prefabrication as a focus.81 Its potential to industrialize production of large-scale buildings—unburdened by decoration and deployable in series on any site— was crucial to the conception of a future socialist living environment.
Prefabrication itself was not ideological; architects had been experimenting with it since the nineteenth century.82 In the immediate postwar years, it was first embraced (p- 55) across political systems as a means to an end for quick and efficient housing production.83 Communist governments with planned economies were attracted to its methods in particular as the material and labor requirements for new buildings could be predicted ahead of site-specific information. Made from a kit of parts, prefabricated buildings organized by type were ideal interchangeable units to replicate and scale according to local needs and five-year planning targets. In Czechoslovakia, the earliest experiments with building prefabrication occurred during and after World War II in Zlm (later named Gottwaldov) at the research institutes of the Bata Shoe Company. These first prototypes, erected in the 1940s, mimicked the floor plans and size of Bata company apartment buildings constructed with traditional techniques. Researchers tested prefabrication's capacities to reduce skilled labor needs and minimize time spent outside on building sites where conditions were volatile throughout the year. The mechanics of fully prefabricated construction were better understood by the mid-1950s and only then did architects begin to experiment with panel sizes and materials, façade aesthetics, and the urbanism of building ensembles.84
Engels proposed that revolution had to happen before architecture. One might reconstitute this formulation to say that only after serial architecture was feasible could a new visual culture emerge that imbued these buildings with meaning beyond just utilitarian requirements. To say this another way, it was from the ideological and materially productive mechanisms of serial architecture that its total qualities of visuality emerged. In his study of socialist urbanism, Michal Murawski pointed out that “Soviet modernity was a project existentially invested in the goal of achieving a maximal extent of serialization and prefabrication, and in the classification of the ‘series' it produced into a universally intelligible typologization system.”85 He goes on to say that “while no two neighborhoods or blocks were built in exactly the same way, a remarkable quantity and spread of neighborhoods and buildings were built in almost exactly the same way, to the point of practical indistinguishability even to the expert eye. Soviet prefabricated mass housing was, to use planner and researcher Kuba Snopek's term, a ‘radically generic' terrain.”86 The characteristic panelized and gridded facades of this “terrain” were innate to the experience of socialist life—the visual culture in which to develop social relations and achieve ideological transformation.
Even before the war, architects including Ivan Leonidov in the Soviet Union and Karel Teige's close confidant Jan Gillar in Czechoslovakia had imagined the serial repetition of apartment blocks and groups of buildings as the basis for the infinite propagation of new socialist neighborhoods and cities across a tabula rasa landscape—one cleansed through demolition of the chaotic urbanism produced by the Industrial Revolution. Because there were no political or economic mechanisms to enact such ambitious (and destructive) projects, these and other similar proposals remained unbuilt before World War II. Howev-
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er through their visualizations of an architecture with machine-like patterning and industrial-scale objects on cleared sites, the influence of such proposals lingered into the postwar decades. Once given the opportunity to build, the visual culture of postwar architecture coalesced around the infinite possibilities of the grid as a two-dimensional planning tool and the panel as its three-dimensional counterpart.
(p. 56) The formal similarities of postwar mass housing across the globe have been often remarked upon, but rarely explained outside of commentaries on the aesthetic or socioeconomic failures of modernism—of Eastern Bloc urbanism, American public housing, or the dense peripheries of Paris, Cairo, or Hong Kong.87 Apartment blocks designed using repetitive, gridded, and often tall forms exist as counterexamples in many contexts to the usual celebration of individual and iconic site-specific designs. Often publicly funded and built in response to significant housing shortages, mass housing proliferated in pockets across geopolitical blocs, developmental categories (first, second, and third world), and both capitalist and communist economies, bringing not only an economic logic but a striking visual signature of repetitive grids and linear elements.88 Yet the form of the grid itself cannot be dismissed as a passive element in the creation of the socialist built environment. In the conception of serial architecture, the communist political project came together with the global turn to the forms and functionalism of the postwar International Style, creating a specificity worth interrogating.
In her book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Caroline Levine proposes form and its affordances as a new way to understand political power, writing that “politics involves activities of ordering, patterning, and shaping. And if the political is a matter of imposing and enforcing boundaries, temporal patterns, and hierarchies on experience, then there is no politics without form.”89 In these terms, the grid and the panel provided more to institutions of state power than just speed and low-cost construction. Governments of all types turned toward abstract, scientific, and supposedly neutral forms to organize housing for the undifferentiated masses. Levine's framework exposes such efforts as propositions of control, ordering, and spatial segregation of populations needing to be contained and coerced.
In the context of building socialism, this gridded space was the physical and discursive field in which to enact the expertly planned transformation of the working class into enlightened and productive socialist men and women. As visual cues, the grid and the panel play into the narrative of rationalization and equity as responses to disorder. Similarly to 1930s Neues Bauen thinking, postwar serial architecture and its urbanism emphasized “the social objectives of economy, function and rationalization”90 through formal choices, creating an aesthetic, or to use Hitchcock and Johnson's term, an “anti-aesthetic”91 derived explicitly from these intentions. Another framework in which to think through these relations would be dialectical synthesis, the repetitive forms of postwar modernism, Snopek's “radically generic terrain,”92 had to come together with the politics of state socialism to produce serial architecture; in this sense, one was not possible without the other.
The new socialist serial architecture was not conceived as mindless mechanical reproduction. Following Engels, Marxist architects in the 1930s, and those who practiced after
(p. 57) the political revolutions of the 1940s, faced questions about how architecture could participate in socialist transformation that did not have obvious answers. State socialism held creativity in high regard as a form of synthesis, the coming together of aesthetics with material and functional needs to offer new solutions. Yet the political project of the region's communist parties had objectives that could not be addressed through individual creative interventions, even when architects had long argued for the agency of modernism as a style to enact a progressive social project.
In the early decades of state socialism, once the radical overturning of the system had been achieved, architects aspired to push society forward by bringing community needs to the forefront, dismissing historical debates about decorative styles, and developing a scientific base of knowledge about materiality and form. Efficiency, rationality, and seriali-ty were all aspects of a new kind of emergent creative synthesis that brought about its own collective visual culture. In Levine's terms, the form of the grid and the panel themselves echoed and reinforced a logic for solving the housing problem that was simultaneously aesthetic, political, and ideological.
In challenging the assumptions about the origins and failures of communist visual culture in the realm of architecture, this chapter offers a new set of criteria on which to judge the successes and continuing legacies of serial architecture. Unlike the failed responses to the housing crisis that were common throughout the capitalist world from the nineteenth century forward, and which continue to burden many countries where startlingly high levels of income inequality have become the norm, state socialism intervened and radically changed how housing was designed and provisioned. While the results of the housing campaigns were uneven and many problems have resulted from poor maintenance, lack of investment, and underserved public spaces, the serial architecture of Second World neighborhoods endures as a public infrastructure that continues to bolster quality of life in the postsocialist countries.
Collins, Christine Crasemann, and Mark Swenarton. “CIAM, Teige and the Housing Problem in the 1920s.” Habitat International 11, no. 3 (1987): 153-9.
Dluhosch, Eric, and Rostislav Svacha, eds. Karel Teige, 1900-1951: L Enfant. Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Miljacki, Ana. The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle, 1938-1968. London: Routledge, 2017.
Molnár, Virág. Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Postwar Central Europe. London: Routledge, 2013.
Rubin, Eli. Amnesiopolis: Modernity, Space, and Memory in East Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Svácha, Rostislav, Sona Ryndová, and Pavla Pokorná, eds. Forma sleduje védu/Form Follows Science. Prague: Jaroslav Fragner Gallery, 2000.
Teige, Karel. “The Housing Problem of the Subsistence Level Population Summary of the National Reports at the International Congress for New Building (CIAM), 1930.” Translated by Christine Crasemann Collins and Mark Swenarton. Habitat International 11, no. 3 (1987): 147-151.
Teige, Karel. The Minimum Dwelling. Translated by Eric Dluhosch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
(p. 64) Teige, Karel. Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia and Other Writings. Translated by Irena Zantovská Murray and David Britt. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000.
Zarecor, Kimberly E. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.
Zarecor, Kimberly E. “What Was So Socialist about the Socialist City?” Journal of Urban History 44, no. 1 (2018): 95-117.
(1.) On the evolution of the “housing question” from Engels to the present, see Edward Murphy and Najib B. Hourani, eds., The Housing Question: Tensions, Continuities, and Contingencies in the Modern City (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013).
(2.) For recent scholarship on housing in the region, see Krisztina Féherváry, Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Steven E. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Brigitte Le Normand, Designing Tito's Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014); Katherine Lebow, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949-56 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Juliana Maxim, The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture: Bucharest, 1949-1964 (London: Routledge, 2018); Ana Miljacki, The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle, 1938-1968 (London: Routledge, 2017); Henrieta Moravcíková, Bratislava: Atlas sídlisk/Atlas of Mass Housing 1950-1995 (Bratislava: Slovart, 2011); Eli Rubin, Amnesiopolis: Modernity, Space, and Memory in East Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Mark B. Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from
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Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010); Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); and Kimberly E. Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).
(3.) On socialist subjectivity and its gendered categories, see Éva Fodor, “Smiling Women and Fighting Men: The Gender of the Communist Subject in State Socialist Hungary,” Gender and Society 16, no. 2 (April 2002): 240-263.
(4.) On the transition to postsocialism, see Kimberly E. Zarecor, “What Was So Socialist about the Socialist City?,” Journal of Urban History 44, no. 1 (2018): 95-117.
(5.) In her book on postwar Czechoslovakia, Ana Miljacki shows how lifestyle and living environment are useful categories for understanding the objectives in building socialist-era neighborhoods. Miljacki, The Optimum Imperative.
(6.) Commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, ed., History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1939), 115.
(7.) Virág Molnár, Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Postwar Central Europe (London: Routledge, 2013), 7.
(8.) Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity.
(9.) Juliana Maxim, “Mass Housing and Collective Experience: On the Notion of Micro-raion in Romania in the 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of Architecture 14, no. 1 (2009): 9.
(10.) “Zápis I.celostátní porady vedoucích vsech oddelení Stavoprojektu (Minutes of the First Nationwide Conference of the Heads of All Stavoprojekt Departments),” speech by Otakar Novy, p. 18, carton 431, Ministerstvo Techniky (Ministry of Technology), National Archives, Prague, Czech Republic.
(11.) I use the term “Second World” in the context of the research network Second World Urbanity. See Daria Bocharnikova and Steven E. Harris, “Second World Urbanity: Infrastructures of Utopia and Really Existing Socialism,” Journal of Urban History 44, no. 1 (2018): 3-8.
(12.) On these conditions, see Christine Crasemann Collins and Mark Swenarton, “CIAM, Teige and the Housing Problem in the 1920s,” Habitat International 11, no. 3 (1987): 153159.
(13.) Eric Mumford, CIAM Discourse on Urbanism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 27-58. The stated topic for Brussels was “rational lot development,” which Mumford described as focusing on “a new urban pattern,” 53.
(14.) John R. Gold, “‘A Very Serious Responsibility'? The MARS Group, Internationality and Relations with CIAM, 1933-39,” Architectural History 56 (2013): 252.
(15.) Collins and Swenarton, “CIAM, Teige and the Housing Problem in the 1920s,” 156.
(16.) Eric Mumford, “CIAM and the Communist Bloc, 1928-59,” The Journal of Architecture 14, no. 2 (2009): 243-244. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became Bauhaus director in 1930 after Hannes Meyer was forced to leave, over the very same split of how politicized architectural production should or could be in Germany at the time.
(17.) Collins and Swenarton, “CIAM, Teige and the Housing Problem in the 1920s,” 156.
(18.) On the analogy to science, see Rostislav Svâcha, Sona Ryndovâ, and Pavla Pokornâ, eds., Forma sleduje vedu/Form Follows Science (Prague: Jaroslav Fragner Gallery, 2000). Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson call the group the “anti-aesthetic functionalists” and offer one of the first critiques of their position in the catalog accompanying their 1932 International Style exhibition at MoMA; see Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 (New York: W W Norton & Company, 1995), 51.
(19.) On Meyer and his legacies, see Philipp Oswalt and Thomas Flierl, eds., Hannes Meyer und das Bauhaus. Im Streit der Deutungen (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2019).
(20.) Collins and Swenarton, “CIAM, Teige and the Housing Problem in the 1920s,” 157.
(21.) Klaus Spechtenhauser and Daniel Weiss, “Karel Teige and the CIAM: The History of a Troubled Relationship,” in Eric Dluhosch and Rostislav Svâcha, eds. Karel Teige, 19001951: L'Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 216-255.
(22.) Mumford, “CIAM and the Communist Bloc,” 237-254. All three left by 1937. On some of the other immigrant architects in the USSR at that time, see Martina Hrabovâ, “Between Ideal and Ideology: The Parallel Worlds of Frantisek Sammer,” Umeni 64, no. 2 (2016): 137-166. An appendix focuses specifically on Czechs, some of whom went with Meyer, others on their own. Some died in the USSR.
(23.) On Teige and Devetsil, see Steven Logan, “Automobility, Utopia, and the Contradictions in Modern Urbanism, Concerning Karel Teige,” in Christopher Kopper and Massimo Moraglio, eds., The Organization of Transport: A History of Users, Industry, and Public Policy (London: Routledge, 2015), 118-134; Thomas Ort, Art and Life in Modernist Prague: Karel Capek and His Generation, 1911-1938 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
(24.) Teige's summary was first published in German in Congrès internationaux d'architecture modern/Internationale Kongresse für Neues Bauen, Rationelle Bebauungsweisen (Frankfurt, 1931), 64-70. An English translation appeared in 1987. Karel Teige, “The Housing Problem of the Subsistence Level Population Summary of the National Reports at the International Congress for New Building (CIAM), 1930,” Christine Crasemann Collins and Mark Swenarton, trans. Habitat International 11, no. 3 (1987): 147-151.
(25.) Teige, “The Housing Problem,” 147.
(26.) On the critique of CIAM, see Karel Teige, “The Minimum Dwelling and the Collective House,” in Karel Teige, 1900-1951, eds. Dluhosch and Svacha, 195-215. Also Gold, “‘A Very Serious Responsibility'?,” 251-254.
(27.) Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, Eric Dluhosch, trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). On Teige within the broader European avant-garde, see Jean-Louis Cohen, “Introduction,” in Karel Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia and Other Writings, Irena Zantovska Murray and David Britt, trans. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000), 1-55. The scope and quality of The Minimum Dwelling should have made it a prominent contribution to the CIAM debates. Teige's choice to publish it only in Czech reinforced his action-oriented point of view. He was speaking to the people around him and wanted to see the results; he did not intend to broadcast an abstract manifesto to an international audience.
(28.) Teige, Minimum Dwelling, 6; see also 9-31.
(29.) Teige, Minimum Dwelling, 7.
(30.) See Eric Dluhosch, “Teige's Minimum Dwelling as a Critique of Modern Architecture,” in Dluhosch and Svacha, Karel Teige, 1900-1951, 140-193.
(31.) Teige, Minimum Dwelling, 400.
(32.) Ibid.
(33.) See Hitchcock and Johnson, The International Style.
(34.) See for example, Lucy Maulsby, Fascism, Architecture, and the Claiming of Modern Milan, 1922-1943 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014); David Rifkind, “Gondar: Architecture and Urbanism for Italy's Fascist Empire,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 70, no. 4 (Dec. 2011): 492-511.
(35.) Mumford, “CIAM and the Communist Bloc,” 244.
(36.) As Teige pointed out in 1931, there is little built evidence of the movement's social agenda despite the extensive record of the architects talking and writing about it. A narrative that prioritizes a universal search for modern style over politics appears in many important survey texts; see, for example, Alan Colqhoun, Modern Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); William Curtiss, Modern Architecture Since 1900 (New York: Phaidon, 1996); Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007, 4th. ed.); and Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Architecture Since 1400 (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2014). The foundation of the domi-
Page 18 of 23 nant narrative comes from Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941).
(37.) Mary McLeod, “'Architecture or Revolution': Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change,” Art Journal 43, no. 2 (Summer, 1983): 144.
(38.) See for example, Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945-1976 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Hyun Tae Jung, Organization and Abstraction: The Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill from 1936 to 1956, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation, 2011.
(39.) Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilbersheimer, Erich Mendelsohn, and Sibyl and László Moholy-Nagy are among the most famous emigres to the United States in this period. See Robin Schuldenfrei, “Assimilating Unease: Moholy-Nagy and the Wartime/Postwar Bauhaus in Chicago,” in Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture, ed. Robin Schuldenfrei (London: Routledge, 2012), 87-126.
(40.) Karel Teige and Jaromír Krejcar are examples of Czech architects who traveled to the Soviet Union and returned with changed minds; both spoke aggressively against the Soviet Communist Party in the 1930s. Teige never joined the Czechoslovak Communist Party, despite remaining a committed Marxist until his death in 1951. Rare among his cohort, Krejcar emigrated in 1948, fearful for the future in a communist-led country. See Rostislav Svácha, Jaromír Krejcar, 1895-1949 (Prague: Jaroslav Fragner Gallery, 1995); Dluhosch and Svácha, Karel Teige, 1900-1951.
(41.) Stanislav Semrád, “6 - Poslání architekta a organisace jeho práce” (Speech 6: The Mission of the Architect and the Organization of His Work), Architektúra CSR 5, no. 1 (1946): 11.
(42.) Teige, Minimum Dwelling, 400.
(43.) On Meyer's legacy in postwar Czechoslovakia, see Kimberly E. Zarecor, “Das Bauwesen der Tschechoslowakei der Nachkriegszeit” in Hannes Meyer, eds. Oswalt and Flierl, 345-360.
(44.) On Honzík, see Miljacki, The Optimum Imperative, esp. 122-146. On Syrkus, see Marcela Hanácková, “Building New Warsaw, Building a Social Warsaw: The First Reconstruction Plans and Their International Review,” in Re-Humanizing Architecture: New Forms of Community, 1950-1970, eds. Ákos Moravánszky and Judith Hopfengartner (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016): 129-144.
(45.) Maxim, “Mass Housing and Collective Experience,” 9.
(46.) Miljacki, The Optimum Imperative, 134.
(47.) Ibid. Quoting Miljacki's translation of Honzík's text.
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(48.) Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity, 78-91.
(49.) Frampton, Modern Architecture, 248.
(50.) For an extended discussion of standardization and typification in the Czechoslovak context, see Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity.
(51.) Jiff Kroha, “Architektúra socialistické budování" (The Architecture of Socialist Building), Architektúra CSR 8 (1949): 131.
(52.) “Zprávy Svazu socialistickych architektu" (Newsletter of the Union of Socialist Architects), September 1945, p. 1, carton 636, Ústfední kulturne propagacnf komise a kulturne propagacnf oddelení UV KSC (Central Cultural-Propaganda Commission and the Cultural-Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia), National Archives, Prague, Czech Republic.
(53.) See Helen Meller and Heleni Porfyriou, eds., Planting New Towns in Europe in the Interwar Years: Experiments and Dreams for Future Societies (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016); Mumford, “CIAM and the Communist Bloc."
(54.) Wolfgang Sonne, “Dwelling in the Metropolis: Reformed Urban Blocks 1890-1940 as a Model for the Sustainable Compact City," Progress in Planning 72 (2009): 53-149.
(55.) See Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945; Susan Henderson, Building Culture: Ernst May and the New Frankfurt am Main Initiative 19261931 (New York: Peter Lang, 2013).
(56.) Teige, “The Housing Problem," 150.
(57.) See for example Fehérváry, Politics in Color and Concrete; Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945-1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Lebow, Unfinished Utopia.
(58.) On the role of architecture in state formation, see Vladimir Kulic, Timothy Parker, and Monica Pennick, eds., Sanctioning Modernism: Architecture and the Making of Postwar Identities (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014); Molnár, Building the State, 2013.
(59.) See Svácha, Ryndová, and Pokorná, Forma sleduje védu/Form Follows Science.
(60.) Vienna's interwar housing remains an unique example of a local effort, see Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
(61.) See, for example, Richard Anderson, Russia: Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion Books, 2015); Daria Bocharnikova, Inventing Socialist Modern: A History of the Architectural Profession in the Soviet Union (1932-1971), PhD dissertation, European University Institute, Department of History and Civilization, 2014.
(62.) Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Postwar Modern Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).
(63.) Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block, 1. See also Miles Glendinning, Stefan Muthesius, and Nicholas Warr, Towers for the Welfare State: An Architectural History of British Multi-Storey Housing 1945-1970 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2017).
(64.) Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block, 2.
(65.) Rubin, Amnesiopolis, 13-27. Nicole Rudolph provides a similarly dismal picture of French conditions after the war, see Nicole C. Rudolph, At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015).
(66.) Rubin, Amnesiopolis, esp. 77-103.
(67.) See Martin Jemelka, Ostravské délnické kolonie I. Závodní kolonie kamenouhelnych dolu a koksoven (Ostrava: Ostravská univerzita, 2011); Martin Jemelka, ed., Ostravské délnické kolonie. II Závodní kolonie kamenouhelnych dolu a koksoven ve slezské cásti Os-travy (Ostrava: Ostravská univerzita, 2013); Martin Jemelka, ed., Ostravské délnické kolonie III. Závodní kolonie Vítkovickych zelezáren a dalsích prumyslovych podniku (Ostrava: Ostravská univerzita, 2015).
(68.) Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity. On Ostrava, see Martin Strakos, Nová Ostrava a jejísatelity Kapitoly z déjin architektury 30.-50. let 20. století(Ostrava: Národ-ní památkovy ústav, územní odborné pracoviste v Ostrave, 2010).
(69.) Fehérváry, Politics in Color and Concrete, 86.
(70.) Ibid.
(71.) There were some differences across the Bloc. On Yugoslavia, see, for example, Veronica Aplenc, “Held in Suspension: Competing Discourses on Urban Modernity in 1960s Slovenia, Yugoslavia,” in ed. Patrick Haughey, Across Space and Time: Architecture and Politics of Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2017), 207-232;
Le Normand, Designing Tito's Capital, 147-188. On Hungary, see Virág Molnár, “In Search of the Ideal Socialist Home in Post-Stalinist Hungary: Prefabricated Mass Housing or Do-It-Yourself Family Home?,” Journal of Design History 23, no. 1 (2010): 61-81.
(72.) On defining the socialist city as a unique type, see Zarecor, “What Was So Socialist about the Socialist City?”; Sonia Hirt, “Alternative Peripheries: Socialist Mass Housing Compared to Modern Suburbia,” in The Suburban Land Question: A Global Survey, eds. Richard Harris and Ute Lehrer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 43-61.
(73.) Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Lewis Seigelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
(74.) Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity, 4-68. Some were already members of the party before 1948.
(75.) For example, see Karel Janu, Socialistické budování (oc pujde ve stavebnictví a ar-chitekture) (Prague: Ed. Grégr a syna, 1946). This book makes the case for nationalization of architectural practice and was written in the 1930s, but only published after the war. On the disciples in the Architectural Working Group, see Svácha, Ryndová, and Poko-rná, Forma sleduje védu/Form Follows Science; Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity, 21-38.
(76.) See Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity, 13-16, 24-30.
(77.) Ibid., 73-74.
(78.) Ibid., esp. 75-90.
(79.) Ibid., 113-223.
(80.) On post-1960 architecture in the region, see Kimberly E. Zarecor, “Architecture in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union,” in A Critical History of Contemporary Architecture, 1960-2010, eds. Elie Haddad and David Rifkind (London: Ashgate, 2014), 261-279.
(81.) Kimberly E. Zarecor, “The Local History of an International Type: The Structural Panel Building in Czechoslovakia,” Home Cultures 7, no. 2. (Spring 2010): 217-236.
(82.) See Colin Davies, The Prefabricated Home (London: Reaktion Books, 2005).
(83.) On capitalist examples, see Barry Bergdoll and Peter Christiansen, eds., Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008); Ulrich Knaack, Prefabricated Systems: Principles of Construction (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2010). On the Soviet case, see Philipp Meuser and Dimitrij Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing: Prefabrication in the USSR 1955-1991 (Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2015). For a 1960s survey of global examples, see Gyula Sebestyén, Large-Panel Buildings, trans. A. Frankovszky (Budapest: Publishing House of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1965).
(84.) On the history of the early panel buildings in Zlín, see Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity, esp. 224-294.
(85.) Michal Murawski, “Actually-Existing Success: Economics, Aesthetics, and the Specificity of (Still-) Socialist Urbanism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 60, no. 4 (2018): 928.
(86.) Ibid., 929. Citing Kuba Snopek, Belyayevo Forever: A Soviet Microrayon on Its Way to the UNESCO List (Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2015).
(87.) For example, see Kenny Cupers, The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Lawrence J. Vale, Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Yue Chim Richard Wong, Hong Kong Land for Hong Kong People: Fixing the Failures of Our Housing Policy (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015).
(88.) See Florian Urban, Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing (London: Routledge, 2012).
(89.) Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 3. The author thanks Alona Nitzan-Shiftan for the introduction to Levine's work as relevant to architectural history.
(90.) Collins and Swenarton, “CIAM, Teige and the Housing Problem in the 1920s,” 156.
(91.) Hitchcock and Johnson, The International Style, 51.
(92.) Snopek, Belyayevo Forever as cited by Murawski, “Actually-Existing Success,” 929.
Kimberly E. Zarecor
Kimberly E. Zarecor, Professor of Architecture, Iowa State University
Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architecture, 1930s-early 1950s a
William C. Brumfield
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Aug 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.3
This article examines the development of retrospective styles in Soviet architecture during the Stalin era, from the 1930s to the early 1950s. This highly visible manifestation of communist visual culture is usually interpreted as a reaction to the austere modernism of 1920s Soviet avant-garde architecture represented by the constructivist movement. The project locates the origins of Stalin-era proclamatory, retrospective style in prerevolutionary neoclassical revival architecture. Although functioning in a capitalist market, that neoclassical reaction was supported by prominent critics who were suspicious of Russia's nascent bourgeoisie and felt that neoclassical or neo-Renaissance architecture could echo the glory of imperial Russia. These critics left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, but prominent architects of the neoclassicist revival remained in the Soviet Union. Together with the Academy of Architecture (founded 1933), these architects played a critical role in reviving classicist monumentalism—designated “socialist realism”—as the proclamatory style for the centralized, neoimperial statist system of the Stalin era. Despite different ideological contexts (prerevolutionary and Stalinist), retrospective styles were promulgated as models for significant architectural projects. The article concludes with comments on the post-Stalinist—and post-Soviet—alternation of modernist and retrospective architectural styles.
Keywords: neoclassical revival, prerevolutionary Russian architecture, constructivism, socialist realism, Stalin-era architecture, Academy of Architecture, post-Soviet architecture
Soviet architecture, like cinema, was not only a highly visible expression of political power but was also subjected to pervasive ideological pressures in the name of communist ideology. The typical scholarly narrative about Soviet architecture presents it as initially defined by a highly motivated avant-garde that drew on engineering and technology to create rational approaches to construction design. The main modernist avant-garde movements to shape Soviet architecture were constructivism and rationalism, both linked by their negation of ornamentation, seen then as a manifestation of bourgeois, capitalist
Page 1 of 25 exploitation. This Soviet avant-garde, as certain specialists explain, was associated with contemporary movements such as the Bauhaus and the International modern style. Lesser known is the reaction against Soviet modernism that occurred in the early 1930s—dur-ing Stalin's reign—with the accelerated industrialization campaigns of the five-year plans, formulated and directed by the state for total mobilization of the economy. Factory design (production) was placed in the realm of engineering, while major urban projects were assigned to the realm of culture and were expected to show signs of cultural heritage. The architecture of Stalin's state found its expression—its voice, I would say—in classicist monumentalism.
The culturally defined markers of the classical system of orders reflected the hierarchal, bureaucratized social structure of the Stalinist state. They also reflected a statist cultural position demanded by the turn from the doctrine of worldwide revolution toward the Stalinist formulation of “socialism in one country,” that is, the development of the Soviet Union as the beacon of Marxism-Leninism. Instead of a “withering away of the state,” defined by Friedrich Engels as the ultimate result of Marxism, the power of the Soviet state expanded as the struggle with class enemies intensified. It has to be noted (p- 66) that this tendency toward neoclassical architecture projecting the power of the Soviet state had parallels in fascist states during the 1930s.
Monumentalism is a product of size and scale (such as the Egyptian pyramids), but it also typically involves stylistic, decorative markers that visibly define the structure as a “mon-ument”—a building endowed with prestige and importance. The traditional, and most frequently used, source for these monumental markers is the stylistic system derived from classical Greece and Rome. The systematic revival of classical styles and stylistic markers in Europe during the Renaissance led to a new classicism—neoclassicism—that was especially prevalent in France and England, Europe's major imperial powers in the eighteenth century. From the reigns of Catherine the Great through Alexander I (victor over Napoleon), Russia adapted neoclassicism from Western imperial centers, especially in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as an expression of the glory of the Russian Empire. Every educated Russian—including the radical Marxist intelligentsia—understood neoclassicism as the expression of state power and privilege, above all in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg. Against the negation of ornamentation in avant-garde modernist Soviet architecture of the 1920s, the architectural design of the Stalinist state reacquired decorative elements derived from the earlier prerevolutionary neoclassical implementations. Depending on the vantage point, one may see this process as an ironic communist expropriation of the style of the capitalist and imperial expropriators.
The visual evidence accessible to anyone who visits central Moscow today shows us that Soviet architecture—by definition, state architecture—had adopted variants of the neoclassical style beginning in the 1930s. As the center of world communism, Moscow was to project the visually imposing image of a “model socialist city,” a term that became widespread in the early 1930s. Indeed, architecture was to proclaim this message as an expression of the visual culture of communism. Neoclassism, with its columns and capitals, cornices and pediments, was to serve as a proclamatory style, the ideal means for the im
Page 2 of 25 age projection of triumphant communism. However, the mechanism and sources of the Soviet adoption of neoclassicism have not been carefully explored, particularly as an expression of communist visual culture. This chapter provides the critical context and the logic behind the reassertion of neoclassicism in the 1930s.
In making this case, I will also sketch out the trajectory of modernist (avant-garde) Soviet architecture as an essential part of the dialectical development that eventuated in the adoption of neoclassicism as the proclamatory style of communist supremacy. Without a discussion of the avant-garde in Soviet architecture, which exacted sizeable aesthetic influence domestically and internationally, and itself frequently gestured toward monumen-talism, one cannot understand the reasons for the radical shift of state policy in architectural style—toward neoclassicism—during the Stalin era. The shift involved a careful and methodical justification of neoclassicism, in part by saying what it was not and what it was reacting against. When establishing the genealogy of the 1930s neoclassicism, I propose that Stalinist visual culture found a ready architectural platform in an analogous neoclassical reaction that took place in early twentieth-century Russia, after the Revolution of 1905 and before the Russian Revolution of 1917. (p- 67) Hereafter I refer to this earlier neoclassical reaction as the “prerevolutionary neoclassicism" or “early twentiethcentury neoclassicism.” Ultimately I argue that Russian neoclassicism in the twentieth century, both before the Russian Revolution, in its imperial iterations, and in the 1930s, as an expression of Soviet power, was supported by ideologies opposed to modern styles (functional or decorative) in the name of a unified social and aesthetic vision employed to proclaim state power and collective cohesion.
Before offering the discussion of Soviet monumentalism's long reign and enduring legacy, I introduce the prerevolutionary adoption of neoclassicism in commercial architecture as a precursor to the proclamatory classicist monumentalism of Stalin-era architecture. I demonstrate that this neoclassical revival was supported by monarchist, ideologically conservative critics reacting against the “bourgeois" style moderne (Russia's equivalent of art nouveau). I then discuss the 1920s Soviet avant-garde (with its culmination in constructivism) as a cultural movement against which monumentalism reacted. In the 1930s, classicist monumentalism triumphed in the built environment as a proclamation of “model socialism" and its claim to power in Soviet architecture.
As I have demonstrated in other publications, a clearly articulated neoclassical revival had occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century in reaction to seemingly decadent, bourgeois values of the style moderne (Russia's equivalent to the Vienna Secession).1 The political climate for this revival must be understood as a national crisis of identity, where the post-1905 Russia desperately searched for a sense of stability and national coherence in the aftermath of massive political and social unrest, which inadvertently led to the rise of Bolshevism. Although the prerevolutionary style moderne and the
Page 3 of 25 later Soviet avant-garde were very different cultural phenomena in very different political environments, each was labeled suspect by supporters of the neoclassical revival, who derided modernism as lacking the values of a unified social order within a strong state. Indeed, the key representatives of the neoclassical revival such as Ivan Zholtovskii achieved prominence in both its prerevolutionary and Stalinist iterations. For both groups of re-vivalists—prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary—the earlier nineteenth-century neoclassicism, and particularly the work of Andreian Zakharov in imperial St. Petersburg, provided models to be emulated.
The prerevolutionary neoclassical revival in Russian architecture, extending from the latter part of the first decade of the twentieth century until the Russian Revolution, formed part of a larger cultural movement that encompassed both artistic and intellectual life. In the forefront of refined neoclassical aestheticism stood the journal Apollon, which began to appear in 1909 under the editorship of the poet and critic Sergei Makovskii. A literary journal with an interest in the visual arts, Apollon contained (p- 68) frequent commentary supporting the new classicism in architecture, as well as copiously illustrated articles on the neoclassical revival and its ideological significance in support of Russia's imperial status. In this journal the revived neoclassical form in Russian architecture was praised from a monarchist perspective as an expression of aristocratic nobility and imperial grandeur in opposition to the bourgeois values of the style moderne. Although the neoclassical revival flourished in Moscow, in an ideological sense the revival was centered in St. Petersburg, which, as the imperial capital, not only contained the defining monuments of an earlier nineteenth-century neoclassicism but also housed the cultural and architectural journals that propagated the early twentieth-century neoclassical revival.
The origins of the neoclassical revival can be traced most clearly in the work of Ivan Fomin (1872-1936). His mentors at the turn of the century included modernists such as Fedor Shekhtel and Lev Kekushev, and Fomin himself made a significant contribution to the new style (style moderne) with his interior designs.2 More important, however, was the influence of Aleksandr Benois, an arbiter of taste and culture who in 1902 published an article entitled “Picturesque Petersburg” in World of Art (Mir iskusstva). Benois defended the capital's classical architectural heritage at the expense of its new architecture.
In 1908, Fomin published a statement in the journal Bygone Years (Starye gody), in which he polemicized that modern architecture lacked an essential unifying force present in the neoclassical period.3 Fomin and Georgii Lukomskii praised the neoclassical revival for its normative aesthetic principles. At the Fourth Congress of Russian Architects, held in Petersburg in January 1911, Lukomskii gave the most concentrated expression of his advocacy of the neoclassical revival. Dismissing the style moderne as a rootless invention of “a little decade-long epoch of individualism,” the critic noted the return to principles in architecture.4 Yet in praising the return to classical monumentality for modern urban housing, Lukomskii was imposing an architectural ideal from the precapitalist era within an environment created by and for private financial interests. The prerevolutionary neoclassical revival appeared in commercial architecture, such as large retail stores, where the
Page 4 of 25
fashion for classical detail coexisted with an expression of modern structure and construction technology. Notable examples include Marian Lialevich's building for the firm of F Mertens (1911-1912) on Nevskii Prospekt and Vladimir Shchuko's apartment building for the military engineer Konstantin Markov at Kamennoostrovskii Prospekt 65 (see Figure 3.1), with its massive articulation of the classical order (1910-1911).5
Photograph © William Brumfield, January 2, 2017
The critique of the prerevolutionary neoclassical revival was made forcefully in 1914 in two articles on the social aspect of contemporary architecture by the critic V. Machinskii. In the opening remarks to his second article, Machinskii attacked not only the changing fashions of individualism in the arts but also the sterile imitation of historical styles. From the perspective of rapid urbanization and its concomitant social change, Machinskii ascribed the decline of aesthetic sensibility to the loss of cultural hegemony on the part of the nobility, which was succeeded by competing social groups engaged in a capitalist process of “mutual struggle and self-definition.” In his view, even (p- 69) the triumph of the bourgeoisie in developed Western countries would prove ephemeral before the rise of the working class.6
Even as the prerevolutionary neoclassical revival achieved ascendancy over prerevolutionary modernism, there were signs that the debate had lost its relevance as the existing social and economic order moved more deeply into crisis during World War I. In January 1916, the architect Oskar Munts (1871-1942) published an essay entitled “The Parthenon or Hagia Sophia,” which appeared in response to another article by Aleksandr Benois in praise of neoclassicism.7 Having reviewed the familiar explanations for the neoclassical revival—as a reaction against the “unceremonious moderne,” and as a reflection of the creative stagnation of the age—Munts rejected the application of a supposedly eternal stylistic system to modern structures:
It is both significant and horrible that this neoclassicism, just as much as the infatuation with free decorative forms [the moderne] threatens a general catastrophe: the complete separation of so-called artistic architecture from construction itself,
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with its technical, engineering innovations ... .In order to avoid the catastrophe, it is necessary to return architecture to its eternal source—to purposeful, intelligent construction, the principle of which is so imposingly expressed in the temple of Hagia Sophia.8
On the eve of the collapse of the monarchy in 1917, proponents of a new, rational era in architecture (among whom were the critics of prerevolutionary neoclassicism, Machinskii (p- 70) and Munts) dismissed both the style moderne and the neoclassical revival. On the other hand, Lukomskii and Lialevich wrote of their belief in the eventual coming of a new sociopolitical era but remained advocates of classical tectonics.9 The ramifications of this train of thought can be found in Lukomskii's book Contemporary Petrograd (Sovremennyi Petrograd), published a few months before the so-called bourgeois revolution in February 1917.10 The normative tendency in Lukomskii's writings on neoclassicism reached an extreme in the book's call for an “artistic dictatorship.” The nostalgic reference to Petersburg during the golden age of Alexander I, a century earlier, represented an attempt to revive the myth of the imperial capital and of Russia itself. The collapse of the empire did indeed bring about a dictatorship, ostensibly of the proletariat, although not one immediately concerned with aesthetic or planning issues.
Lukomskii's advocacy of a controlled urban design would become, mutatis mutandis, accepted practice in the Soviet period. After 1917, the appeal of the neoclassical revival on aesthetic and ideological grounds proved transferable to the heroic enthusiasm of the early period of Soviet power, when architects such as Fomin, Belogrud, and Shchuko produced numerous designs for public buildings in the so-called Red Doric or proletarian classical manner.
The fact that almost every architect of prominence during the first two decades of Soviet architecture (e.g., Ivan Fomin, the Vesnin Brothers) had built or designed in some variant of neoclassicism before the revolution suggests that Soviet modernism, and constructivism in particular, were related to a rationalist interpretation of neoclassicism.11 Yet the protean nature of neoclassicism—as a term and as an architectural phenomenon—demands a careful definition of its often contradictory impulses. The neoclassical revival in communist visual culture of the 1930s was derived from high classical and Renaissance models. When these models were revived in the 1930s by architects such as Ivan Zholtovskii, they were presented as a cultured response to faceless modernism.
From the perspective of the innovators of the 1920s, Russian prerevolutionary architec-ture—whether modern or neoclassical—had achieved little as a reflection of the values and requirements of the modern age. In their interpretation, architecture had served a narrow segment of the ruling class. Yet certain prerevolutionary design visions provided a bridge to the new era. Even as the country plunged into civil war in 1918, groups of ar-
Page 6 of 25
chitects in Moscow and Petrograd envisioned workers' settlements that represent an extension of the “garden city” movement that first arose in England in 1898 through the work of Ebenezer Howard and had appeared in Russia during the decade before World War I.12 More monumental designs drew upon massive, archaic forms of (p- 71) neoclassicism (reminiscent of the heroic architectural visions of the French Revolution), such as projects by Ivan Fomin and Andrei Belogrud for a Palace of Workers in Petrograd.13 In their association of proletarian culture with a muscular interpretation of classicism, these designs could later be seen as prototypes for a neoclassical revival in the 1930s, but in the early revolutionary period they were little more than abstract sketches.
Indeed, the poverty and social chaos of the early revolutionary years propelled other architects toward radical ideas on design, many of which were related to a thriving modernist movement in the visual arts. Lissitzky's concepts of space and form (proun), along with those of Kazimir Malevich (planit) and Vladimir Tatlin, played a part in the development of an architecture expressed in “stereometric forms,” purified of the decorative elements of the eclectic past. The experiments of Lissitzky, Wassily Kandinsky, and Malevich in painting and of Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko in sculpture had created the possibility of a new architectural movement, defined by Lissitzky as a synthesis with painting and sculpture.14
The assumption that a revolution in architecture (along with the other arts) would accompany the Marxist-Leninist political revolution was soon put to the test by social and economic realities. Russia's industrial base lay in shambles; technological resources were extremely limited in what was still a predominantly rural nation; and Moscow's population-poorly housed before the war-increased sharply as the city became in 1918 the center of a thoroughly administered state. One of that state's earliest edicts, in August 1918, repealed the right to private ownership of urban real estate.
Nonetheless, the prerevolutionary building boom in apartments and commercial buildings in various decorative styles (including the neoclassical revival) had established a viable foundation for urban development on a large scale. Furthermore, the Russian architectural profession was relatively intact after the emigration that decimated other areas of Russian culture in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. Amid diverse architectural alliances, one Moscow institution served as the gathering ground for architects and artists dedicated to the Bolshevik Revolution as a platform for innovation in the arts and to an exploration of the social ramifications of the new aesthetic movement in a Leninist context. Named VKhUTEMAS (the Russian acronym for Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops), and established by Lenin's decree, the organization was formed from the merger in 1918 of two art schools: the Stroganov School and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture.15 Originally known as the Free Workshops, the new entity acquired its name after a reorganization in 1920.16 In 1925, it was reorganized again, subsequently to be called the Higher Artistic and Technical Institute (VKhUTEIN). VKhUTEMAS-VKhUTEIN was not the only Moscow institution concerned with the teaching and practice of architecture in the 1920s, but it was unique in the scope of its concerns (including the visual and the applied arts) as well as in the variety of viewpoints that existed there before its closing in 1930.
Theoretical direction for VKhUTEMAS was provided by the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK, also founded in 1920), which attempted to establish a science “examining analytically and synthetically the basic elements both for the separate arts and for art as a whole.”17 Its first program-curriculum, developed by Wassily Kandinsky, was (p- 72) found too abstract by many at INKhUK, and Kandinsky soon left for Germany and the Bauhaus. But the concern with abstract, theoretical principles did not abate with Kandinsky's departure. Indeed, the issue of theory versus construction became a source of factional dispute in Soviet modernism.
In the early 1920s, the Higher Workshops established the Working Group at INKhUK and began to exhibit architectural sketches in Russia and in Germany (for example, in Berlin in 1922). In 1923, the nucleus of the group—which included Nikolai Ladovskii, Vladimir Krinskii, Nikolai Dokuchaev, and for a time Lissitzky—formed the Association of New Architects (ASNOVA), an organization devoted to the “establishment of general principles in architecture and its liberation from atrophied forms.”18 Its members called themselves rationalists. The group and its name arose in the ideological context of the early Soviet vision of the transformative power of innovative architecture. In their view, the new architecture would be based on a deep study of basic geometric principles, their development in space, and the psychological bases of perception of architectural forms.
The theoretical programs developed by Ladovskii and his colleagues were closely related to the work of Lissitzky and Malevich, whose architectonic models (Lissitzky's prouns and Malevich's planity or arkhitektony) represented the refinement of “pure” spatial forms. For Malevich, architectonic forms were a logical extension of his “Suprematism.”19 Even as art and sculpture influenced the development of modern architectural design, architecture was seen by early Soviet modernists as the dominant synthesis of art forms in the new era. (Cf. the work of Walter Gropius and Bruno Taut during the same period.)
Most of the projects realized during the 1920s belong to a group of architects known as the constructivists (or functionalists). Devoid of ornamental detail, the streamlined, modernist aesthetic of constructivism served as a statement of progress “under socialism.”20 Despite the polemics between the rationalists and constructivists, their origins and goals had much in common. Like the rationalists, the constructivists drew inspiration from modernism in painting and sculpture. In 1920, the year of genesis for so much in Russian modernism, the brothers Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner released their “Realistic Manifesto,” with its praise of kinetic rhythms and negation of outmoded concepts of volume. Yet they reaffirmed the integrity of art and disputed the credo of the faction within INKhUK that called upon artists and designers to turn to utilitarian, “productionist” (and political) goals.21 The importance of “pure” artistic experiments in spatial constructions to the evolution of the principles of constructivism is demonstrated in the work of Aleksandr Rodchenko, who in 1921 stated that “construction is the contemporary demand for organization and the utilitarian application of materials.”22
In the early 1920s, the evolution of constructivist ideas at INKhUK passed through various polemical phases. The term konstruktivizm was still broadly interpreted and had not yet acquired the functionalist emphasis of the mid-1920s. The art faction, influenced by Kandinsky, was opposed by the "productionists"—associated with the Left Front of the Arts—who anticipated an age of engineers supervising the mass production of useful, nonartistic objects.23 A reaction to both sides, particularly the former, led in 1921 to
(p. 73) the formation of a group of artists-constructivists: Aleksandr Vesnin, architect; Aleksei Gan, art critic and propagandist24; Rodchenko, sculptor and photographer; Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg, poster designers; and Varvara Stepanova, set designer.
Soviet artists and architects of the modern movement experienced considerable success in Europe, particularly among the intelligentsia, who were often favorably disposed toward the social experiment underway in the Soviet Union and saw the Russian avantgarde as a fitting manifestation of an unshackled society.25 Lissitzky, who spent much of the 1920s in Germany but maintained contacts in the Soviet Union, served as a propagandist for the movement. During that decade, Russian artists active at VKhUTEMAS and INKhUK visited the West (Kandinsky, Malevich, Gabo, Pevsner), while Western architects visited, and in some cases worked in, the Soviet Union (Bruno Taut, Ernst May, Erich Mendelsohn, Le Corbusier).26
Although in the early Soviet period, the means were lacking for large-scale architectural projects, architects understood that the time would come for major allocation of state resources for building projects. Therefore, the discussion of the essence of Soviet architecture assumed critical importance. The crux of the early debate between the rationalists (formalists) and constructivists lay in the relative importance assigned to aesthetic theory as opposed to a functionalism that was derived from technology and materials. In 1920, constructivist proponents declared “uncompromising war on art" and maintained that architectural design must not be separated from the utilitarian demands of technology. Moisei Ginzburg accused the rationalists of ignoring this principle. ASNOVA found the constructivists guilty of “technological fetishism." Constructivists responded with the terms “naive," “abstract," and “formalist."27 Yet both groups shared a concern for the relation between architecture and social planning; and both insisted on a clearly defined structural mass based on uncluttered geometric forms.
Until 1925, the constructivists had little more to show in actual construction than their more theoretically minded colleagues, the rationalists. Social and economic reconstruction severely limited the resources available, particularly for structures requiring a use of modern technology. The most advanced of constructivist works in the early twenties were wooden set designs by Alexandr Vesnin, Varvara Stepanova, and Liubov Popova.28 Nonetheless, by 1924, constructivist architects had acquired vigorous leadership in Aleksandr Vesnin and Moisei Ginzburg, an articulate spokesman in polemics with ASNOVA. In 1924, Ginzburg published Style and Epoch, which established the theoretical and historical base for a new architecture in a new age, devoid of the eclecticism and aestheticism of capitalist architecture at the turn of the century.29 The following year the constructivists founded the Union of Contemporary Architects (OSA); and in 1926, the Union began publishing the journal Contemporary Architecture, edited by Ginzburg and Vesnin.
Perhaps the most accomplished example of the functional aesthetic is Ginzburg's own creation, the apartment house for the People's Commissariat of Finance (Narkomfin, 1928-1930), designed in collaboration with Ivan Milinis. Ginzburg had just completed
(p. 74) his architectural training at the Milan Academy of Arts, when World War I broke out; and after returning to Russia, he continued his studies at the eminent Riga Polytechnic (then evacuated to Moscow).30 In addition to theoretical works establishing the principles of constructivism in architecture, Ginzburg contributed in the 1920s to the development of housing concepts with emphasis on the social aspects of modern communal liv-ing.31 Ginzburg's concept of functionalism in the Narkomfin project created a defining example of Soviet modernism that could be applied on an expanded scale. Indeed, Ivan Nikolaev's design of the “student village” for the Textile Institute in Moscow (1929-1930) demonstrated a monumental scale without decorative additions (see Figure 3.2).
Photograph ©William Brumfield, August 19, 2018
The most productive proponents of constructivism were the Vesnin brothers: Leonid, Viktor, and Aleksandr, all of whom had completed their education in St. Petersburg before World War I and launched successful careers.32 The culminating project in the Vesnins' constructivist oeuvre was an extension of the concept of the workers' club, conceived as a large complex of three buildings to serve the social needs of the Proletarian District, a factory and workers' district in southeast Moscow. The site overlooked the Moscow River and was adjacent to the Simonov Monastery, part of whose walls were razed in constructing the project. The central element, however, was the club building itself, built in 19311937. The prolonged construction period illustrates that constructivist projects could be carried through even during the 1930s, provided they followed a clear, functional design.
During the early five-year plans (the first began in 1928), the metaphorical connections between “construction” and the creation of a new society were exploited as a part of the cultural revolution promulgated by Stalin and his party apparatus. The clearest example of this socio-architectural dialectic was the demolition of Konstantin Ton's massive Church of Christ the Redeemer and the international competition for the signature building on the site, the Palace of the Soviets.33 It is ideologically telling that the word “palace” was chosen for this project—a nominal announcement of the approaching embrace of neoclassical monumentalism. The guidelines established by the construction committee signaled a move toward classical models that would become a basis for “socialist realism” in architecture.
The Palace of the Soviets was to exploit modern technology in ways that became clearer during the fourth phase of the competition, in 1932-1933. By the middle of 1933, the project had been awarded to a team consisting of Boris Iofan, Shchuko, and Gelfreikh, who over the next six years developed the artistic and technical aspects of the structure to their final forms: halls with a seating capacity of 21,000 and 6,000, set within a rectangular base with endless columniation. From this base (or stylobate) a tiered structure formed of massive pylons was to rise to a height of 315 meters, crowned by a 100-meter statue of Lenin.34 A trip to the United States in 1935 gave the architects an encouraging view of the technical possibilities for the gargantuan project, and by 1937, work had begun on the foundation pit, excavated to limestone bedrock at a depth of 20 meters below the level of the adjacent Moscow River. By 1940, the steel frame began to rise above ground level from the concentric circles of the ferroconcrete foundation; but the outbreak of war halted construction. Various attempts to resurrect a diminished project proved futile, and in 1958-1960 the foundation pit was converted into the basin for an outdoor heated swimming pool (130 meters in diameter) designed by Dmitrii Chechulin. Despite the failure of the Palace of the Soviets project, the development process played a critical role in providing technical experience and design motifs for the postwar Stalinist skyscrapers.
Urban construction in the 1930s glorified the achievements of the new industrial power and transformed the cityscape of the country's two major centers. The earlier dispute between the “urbanists” and “deurbanists” was resolved in favor of regulated but intensive urban development as set forth in a speech by Lazar Kaganovich at the Central Committee plenum in June 1931.35 As a result, both Moscow and Leningrad developed comprehensive city plans that were to serve as a setting for the new monumental architecture. By the time the Moscow plan, by Vladimir Semenov and Sergei Chernyshev, was adopted in 1935, measures were underway to implement a reconstruction of the (p- 76) Soviet capital.36 The Okhotnyi Riad market area between the Bolshoi Theater and the Kremlin was cleared, and the former Tverskaia Street—renamed in honor of Maxim Gorky in 1932— was widened and endowed in 1936-1940 with rows of buildings designed primarily by
Page 11 of 25
Arkadii Mordvinov in an eclectic, vaguely Italianate style that defined the early phase of Stalinist monumentalist architecture.37 Other major projects included the construction of Peace Prospekt as the main thoroughfare in the north of the city; the design of the Gorky Park of Culture and Rest (1934-1936, to a design by Aleksandr Vlasov); and the first phases of the Moscow subway, whose stations displayed lavishly decorative, often neoclassical, approaches to monumentalist design.38
Even as the functional architecture of industrial production continued with the help of Western engineers and specialists in the Urals and on the Volga (particularly in Stalingrad), the blossoming of surface decoration on the buildings of the new administrative and cultural “superstructure” reflected a diminution of functionalism and the increasing domination of neoclassical monumentalism. The Academy of Architecture was founded in 1933 to define the aesthetic content of socialist realism, with its basic premise of the “critical assimilation of the heritage.” The architecture of the totalitarian state was, in imitation of its imperial predecessors, to adapt academic styles of the past to a new ideological and technical environment.39 A telling example of this development is provided by the return to prominence of Ivan Zholtovskii, whose prerevolutionary devotion to the Italian Renaissance found new applications in the design of major buildings during the Stalinist period. A signature example is his apartment house for the Moscow City Soviet (Mossovet) at Mokhovaia Street 13, opposite the Kremlin (see Figure 3.3).
Photograph © William Brumfield, August 6, 1987
Like prestigious neoclassical revival projects by architects such as Vladimir Shchuko, the design was based on a Renaissance model—in this case Andrea Palladio's Palazzo del Capitaniato in Vicenza. Built to the highest standards in 1932-1934, the structure was interpreted as a direct rebuff to constructivism. Soon after completion, it was transferred to the United States Embassy as its main building. When the embassy received a larger building in 1953, the structure was transferred to the Soviet tourist agency Inturist, which placed a large sign proclaiming “Communism will triumph,” the clearest expres-
Page 12 of 25 sion of ideology with triumphalist, retrospective architecture. (The sign was removed in 1990.)
This restatement of monumentalism cannot be attributed solely to Stalin or his closest advisers, although they surely approved of it.40 Rather, it represented both a reaction against monotonous architecture falsely associated with constructivism (whose projects, due to economic and technical limits, were often subverted by the poor quality of finish) and a preference by the "people"—or the rapidly evolving party elite—for an architecture of decoration and monumentality representative of the power of the Soviet state. One sees parallels to the early twentieth-century reaction against the prerevolutionary style moderne derided as “bourgeois" from an imperial, statist position (see earlier).
Just as the earlier autocrats erected triumphal arches and palaces in celebration of the state, its victories, and their supreme role in both, so the new order expected its (p- 77) achievements to be celebrated with an appropriately grandiloquent style. The construction of multistoried monoliths in Moscow symbolized the hierarchy of technical-administrative cadres and separated them from the masses, whose spartan living conditions were masked in the 1930s by grand “parks of culture," by the expansion of the Moscow subway, and by the ornamented building facades that arose along the wide boulevards and squares of reconstructed Moscow. Avant-garde modernism had no place in this architectural order, and its demise was completed at the First All-Union Congress of Architects in June 1937 as former modernists accepted the party's direction or remained silent.
The Soviet retrospective revival reached its apogee in the monumental postwar Stalinist towers. The unprecedented destruction visited upon the Soviet Union by World War II (approximately 30 percent of the national wealth) cleared the way for a new wave of gargantuan construction projects as cities such as Stalingrad, Minsk, Kharkov, and (p- 78) Kiev were rebuilt from the ground up. Architecture reached even greater heights of monumentalism, epitomized in the late 1940s and early 1950s by the rise of “Stalinist gothic" buildings. Cities from Warsaw to Tashkent exhibited examples of the style; but the center remained Moscow, where eight tower buildings were planned in a display of a decorative pastiche that included classicizing elements from the unbuilt Palace of the Soviets as well as ornamental motifs from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Muscovite architecture. At the same time the towers borrowed noticeably from early twentieth-century Manhattan neogothic skyscrapers such as the Woolworth Building, designed by Cass Gilbert and constructed in 1910-1912.41 Skyscrapers had long embodied for Russians the dynamic spirit of American capitalism and were frequently described in Russian architectural publications at the turn of the twentieth century.42 The fact that the Stalin-era socialist realist towers partially replicated that dynamic spirit, along with a capitalist blend of modernist monumentalism, is something less emphasized in discussions of communist visual culture.
A leading proponent of tall buildings was the architect Viacheslav Oltarzhevskii (18801966), who had worked with Ivan Rerberg before the revolution in the design of one of Moscow's first towers (the Northern Insurance Company). He went to the United States for study purposes in the 1920s and became one of the few Soviet experts in Western skyscraper construction. Caught by the Stalinist purge machinery in 1938 (Third Moscow Trial), Oltarzhevskii returned from penal exile in 1943 and was elevated in the late 1940s to the position of Doctor of Architecture in recognition of his expertise in tall buildings.43
Among the first to be completed was a twenty-four-story apartment building with ramifying wings on the Kotelnicheskaia Quay to the southeast of the city center. Designed by Dmitrii Chechulin, assisted by a team of architects and engineers, the building was erected in 1948-1952 at prominent location near the confluence of the lauza and Moscow Rivers. Apartments were restricted to those with the highest level of state access. On the north of the Garden Ring, Aleksei Dushkin designed an office and apartment building at Lermontov Square (1953); and in the same area, Leonid Poliakov built the Hotel Leningrad (1949-1953) near the Leningrad Station. The west portion of the Garden Ring was marked by an apartment building by Mikhail Posokhin and A. Mdoiants at Insurrection Square (1950-1954); and at the southwest portion of the Ring stands the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade on Smolensk Square, by Vladimir Gelfreikh and Mikhail Minkus (1948-1953) (see Figure 3.4).
Photograph © William Brumfield, October 13, 2018
Further to the southwest beyond the Moscow River is the most curious of the group: the sprawling Hotel Ukraina, designed by Arkadii Mordvinov with the participation of Oltarzhevskii (built in 1950-1956).
The most imposing of the seven tower buildings was the new central building of Moscow State University on Lenin (formerly Sparrow) Hills. Lev Rudnev, Pavel Abrosimov, and Aleksandr Khriakov built in 1949-1953 a tower with a spire overlooking all Moscow. The main architect, Rudnev, had played an important role in defining Soviet monumentalism with buildings such as the M. V. Frunze Military Academy (1932-1937; in collaboration with V. O. Munts). The Academy's rectangular bulk was implemented (p- 79) in a style that I call “early totalitarian massive,” with an unyielding grid of square windows above a long stylobate.44 The university building represents a later, flamboyant stage of statist architecture and was designed as a self-contained and tightly regulated community, a melding of utopian notions of communism with the consummate elitism of the late Stalinist period. Although it too suggests elements of early Manhattan skyscraper design, its vast ramifying symmetry is unique. In the original published design, the Moscow University tower was surmounted by a gargantuan statue of a Soviet scholar. Although Stalin had earlier suggested that the Palace of the Soviets serve as a pedestal for the 100-meter statue of Lenin, it was he who insisted that the university scholar statue be replaced by a spire, thus unifying Moscow with a series of needle-pointed skyscrapers. Bombastic and profligate in the design of interior space, the Moscow University tower—like its lesser spired counterparts—served, as intended, to dominate the city.
Ultimately, only seven of the eight projected towers were built. The fate of the eighth provides an insight into the vagaries of large state-sponsored projects in the postwar period. Originally planned for administrative purposes, the eighth tower was to occupy land cleared of the nineteenth-century commercial buildings southeast of Red Square. (p- so) In 1947, work began to commission a design by Dmitrii Chechulin, and by 1953 the massive stylobate base was complete. The death of Stalin brought the expensive project to a halt, however; and the stylobate subsequently served as the base of the Hotel Rossiia, built in 1964-1967 by the same Chechulin in an austere “techno” style. Although functional, the looming bulk of the hotel (at that time the largest in the world) was considered inappropriate for a site next to the Kremlin, and the hotel was demolished in 2006. After many proposals the site was allocated to the Zariadye riverside park, built in 2014-2017 to a design by the New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Thus, Western capitalism devised a means to preserve the historic scale of the Kremlin.
The placement of these seven postwar towers—and lesser buildings in the same style— defined key points in the topography of Moscow, a capital intended as a beacon to the socialist world. This role was emphasized by the towers' large spires, redolent both of medieval bell towers and of the Admiralty spire in St. Petersburg. The Russian built environment had for centuries been characterized by an unplanned array of low structures (usually wooden) punctuated by vertical dominants such as churches and bell towers. On a larger scale the late Stalin-era buildings continued this model. Although not all of these “tall buildings” (vysotnye zdaniia) were originally designed with the spires, they obtained them in the final designs as a recognition of their symbolic and visual role in a city that would retain a largely horizontal, “communal” profile.
The Stalinist towers were by no means the only expression of statist monumental architecture. Stalin's architects were also encouraged to spread the forms of St. Petersburg's late neoclassicism throughout the Soviet Empire. The decision in late Stalinist architecture to revert to models both of the tsarist period and of American capitalism might seem ironic, but Stalin and his associates had a greater sympathy for the monumentality of prerevolutionary culture than for the innovative, rationalist, cosmopolitan thought of the 1920s, loud in its debates and obviously a hotbed of deviationism. Monumental architecture in a historicist form allowed for a proclamatory style that could express “the main ideas of the epoch"—reminiscent of the call for a unifying sociocultural idea in architecture at the beginning of the century expressed by the prerevolutionary champions of neo-classicism.45 The revival of neoclassical monumentalism in the 1930s and 1940s was joined by a postwar reversion to neo-Muscovite forms. Apart from nationalistic overtones, this move provided a link with the architecture of potentates such as Ivan the Terrible, whose role in Russian history was glorified during the Stalinist era (cf. Sergei Eisenstein's cinematic interpretation of Ivan).
The Stalin-era towers were vastly regressive in their wasted space and elaborate decoration—isolated points of opulence in a country wracked by destruction and deprivation. This lack of functional and economic rationalism exemplifies the principle elucidated by the Czech semiotician Jan Mukarovsky, of substitution for vanished functions.46 The usual considerations of design, material, and use of a structure were displaced by symbolic functions, denoting, in the case of Stalinist Russia, the power of the state, the glory of Muscovite culture, the central position of Moscow in the communist world, and the omnipotence of Stalin himself—the “Great Architect of Communism."
The period following Stalin's death, in March 1953, was marked by a sober reassessment of priorities in light of the acute housing crisis in Moscow and other cities. A reaction against decorative styles (the campaign against ukrashatelstvo) was instituted as a prerequisite for standardized architecture during the building campaigns of the Khrushchev era. Yet constructivism was ignored as a precedent in the early post-Stalinist years. Teams of engineers and architects began to produce standardized plans that could be widely applied with relatively simple technology, while the pursuit of a historical framework for architectural style was largely discarded—as indicated by the abolition of the Academy of Architecture in the early Khrushchev era.47
The acceleration of standardized construction achieved an impressive volume, first with five-story apartment buildings that appeared throughout the country, and subsequently with mass-produced buildings as high as twenty stories—in rare cases even higher.48 The industrialization of building and the curbing of decorative pomposity produced, however, a different set of problems. Apart from the general monotony of design, even the creative projects conformed to the processes of standardized, “industrial" construction, based on prefabricated modules or precast concrete forms assembled on site. Soviet architects
Page 16 of 25 were faced with a narrow range of options limited by mass construction methods and meagre financial resources. In no small measure, architecture had been supplanted by engineering in the routinized production of buildings issuing from design bureaus.
The most prolific practitioner of postwar Soviet modernism was Mikhail Posokhin, who had collaborated in the design of the Stalinist apartment tower on Insurrection Square but then shifted into the new functionalism, interpreted in Moscow on a sweeping scale appropriate to the confidence of the Sputnik era. Posokhin adapted the international modern style, with its glass and aluminum facades, to industrialized methods of construction in the creation of such ensembles as Kalinin Prospekt (1964-1969; also known as the New Arbat), extending westward from the Kremlin and Arbat Square.
His design for the Kremlin Palace of Congresses (1959-1961, in collaboration with A. Mn-doiants and others) had the appearance of a modern concert hall, with a marble-clad rectangular outline marked by narrow pylons and multistoried shafts of plate glass. In its primary function as the site of Communist Party meetings, the Palace of Congresses opened on the first day of the Twenty-Second Party Congress, which witnessed the culmination of Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign. Indeed, the contrast between late Stalinist monumentalism and the neutral modern style of the Khrushchev Palace of Congresses could not have been greater or more expressive of the pragmatic values of a technocratic state. Yet both shared an affinity with the contrasting varieties of American capitalist architecture in the twentieth century, from the proclamations of Manhattan and Chicago “skyscraper gothic” to the streamlined rectilinear blocks of the International Style.
(p. 82) At the same time, it should be noted that Russia has for centuries emphasized the display of political markers in architecture. These “verticals of power”—from sixteenthcentury votive churches to Stalin-era apartment towers—proclaim the presence and endurance of central authority. In the final (1990) version of his novel First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn compellingly evokes a sense of elite Stalinist architecture as a structure of privilege and power. The novel's action occurs during the period when the seven main towers were under construction.
The simplification of design remained dominant in late Soviet architecture until the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, after which revivalist styles reappeared in office and apartment buildings. Throughout Moscow, ziggurats crowned with retro ornamentation arose in stylistic echoes of the Stalinist towers. Notable examples are the tellingly named Triumph Palace (Triumf Palas) apartment tower in the Sokol region of Moscow and the Oruzheinyi Lane Business Center, both of which were roundly criticized for their aesthetic pretentions. Andrei Trofimov, the main architect of the Triumph Palace, spoke of following the features of the earlier Soviet towers and even added a spire to the final design of the central tower. Beset by technical difficulties during and after its pro
Page 17 of 25 longed construction (2001-2006), the massive project has ramifying lower structures in the manner of Moscow University and Hotel Ukraine.
The Oruzheinyi Lane complex was designed by Mikhail Posokhin, son of the Mikhail Posokhin who had co-designed one of the Stalinist towers (as discussed earlier). Although begun in 2006, the sprawling complex experienced aftershocks from the 2008 global financial crisis that extended its construction until 2016. Located at a highly visible point on the Garden Ring in central Moscow, the structure is swathed in cascades of glass framed by innumerable receding vertical planes—an echo of Manhattan tower setbacks (see Figure 3.5).
Photograph © William Brumfield, August 8, 2018
It, too, has a pinnacle, although lower than Triumph Palace.
Yet the appearance of these retrospective “heritage” designs that echo the pre- and postrevolutionary neoclassicism are isolated examples within a larger proliferation of high-tech skyscrapers epitomized by Moscow City, a gargantuan development project (comparable in scale to London's Canary Wharf), launched in the early 1990s with the support of mayor lurii Luzhkov. Fueled by substantial government investment and designed by an array of international architectural firms, this concentration of streamlined towers is monumental in scale yet little concerned with retrospective gestures. Contemporary Moscow monumentalism thus seems placed within two competing impulses, each of which has its connections to the global architectures of capitalism. While the retrospective, neo-Stalinist designs can be compared to postmodernism, the (p- 83) international commercial towers hearken to the architectural fashions of major financial centers in Europe and beyond. Each of these impulses exists within the peculiar Russian variety of
Page 18 of 25 state capitalism. In this quasi-pragmatic context, the scattered examples of neo-Stalinist architecture seem less a revival than a curious relic marketed as luxury for a moneyed elite.
Brumfield, William C. “America as Emblem of Modernity in Russian Architecture, 18701917.” In Thresholds (Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 32 (2006): 26-32.
(p. 88) Brumfield, William C. “Anti-modernism and the Neoclassical Revival in Russian Architecture, 1906-1916.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 48 (December 1989): 371-386.
Brumfield, William C. “Architecture and Urban Planning.” In The Soviet Union Today: An Interpretive Guide, edited by James Cracraft, 163-172. Chicago: Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, 1983.
Brumfield, William C. The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Brumfield, William C., ed. Reshaping Russian Architecture: Western Technology, Utopian Dreams. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Brumfield, William C. “Russian Architecture and the Cataclysm of the First World War.” In Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914-22, Book 1: Popular Culture, the Arts, and Institutions, edited by Steven G. Marks et al., 165-188. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2014.
Cooke, Catherine, ed. Russian Avant-Garde Art and Architecture. London: Academy Editions, 1983.
Dabrowski, Magdalena. Liubov Popova. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991.
Ginzburg, Moisei. Style and Epoch. Translated by Anatole Senkevitch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982.
Khan-Magomedov, Selim. Aleksandr Vesnin and Russian Constructivism. New York: Rizzoli, 1986.
Khan-Magomedov, Selim. Pioneers of Soviet Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1987.
Lissitsky, El. Russia: Architecture for a World Revolution. Translated by Eric Dluhosch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970.
Lodder, Christina. Russian Constructivism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983.
Mukarovsky, Jan. “On the Problem of Functions in Architecture.” In Structure, Sign, and Function: Selected Essays by Jan Mukarovsky, translated and edited by John Burbank and Peter Steiner, 236-250. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978.
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Paperny, Vladimir. Kul'tura Dva. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985. [English edition: Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002]
Ruble, Blair. “From Palace Square to Moscow Square: St. Petersburg's Century-long Retreat from Public Space.” In Reshaping Russian Architecture: Western Technology, Utopian Dreams, edited by William Brumfield, 145-175. New York: Cambridge University Press.
(1.) William C. Brumfield, The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), chap. 6.
(2.) Vladimir G. Lisovskii, I. A. Fomin (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1979), 10-11. Fomin's designs for houses in both the modern and neoclassical styles appeared in Ezhegodnik Obshchest-va Arkhitektorov-Khudozhnikov (Annual of the Society of Architect-Artists), no. 1 (1906): 116-119.
(3.) Ivan Fomin, “Istoricheskaia vystavka arkhitektury v S.-Peterburge,” Starye gody (July-September 1908), 178.
(4.) Georgii Lukomskii, “Arkhitekturnye vkusy sovremennosti,” Trudy IV S"ezda russkikh zodchikh (Petersburg, 1911), 28. A similar attack against “excessive” individualism appeared in Lukomskii's “Novyi Peterburg (Mysli o sovremennom stroitel'stve),” Apollon (1913), no. 2: 9.
(5.) After the revolution Lialevich (1876-1944) returned to Warsaw, where he pursued an architectural career. He died during the Warsaw Uprising. Boris M. Kirikov, “V rusle neoklassiki,” Stroitel'stvo i arkhitektura Leningrada (1977), no. 6: 40-43. On Shchuko, see Tatiana Slavina, Vladimir Shchuko (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1978).
(6.) V. Machinskii, “Arkhitekturnye zametki,” Zodchii (1914), no. 25: 297-300.
(7.) Oskar Munts, “Parfenon ili Sv. Sofiia? K sporu o klassitsizme v arkhitekture,” Arkhitekturno-khudozhestvennyi ezhenedel'nik (1916), no. 2: 19-22. The article by Benois, which appeared during November and December in the newspaper Rech', took as its point of departure the neoclassical, retrospective trend in a recent show of student projects at the Academy of Arts.
(8.) Munts, “Parfenon ili Sv. Sofiia?,” 22.
(9.) “Za arkhitekturu,” Arkhitekturno-khudozhestvennyi ezhenedel'nik (1916), no. 9: 116. The polemic continued in subsequent issues during 1916, with replies from both Munts and Duodecim. See also Lukomskii, “Novyi Peterburg,” 10.
(10.) Sovremennyi Petrograd (Petrograd, n. d.), 30. Subtitled “A Sketch of the History of the Appearance and Development of Neoclassical Construction,” the volume represents a compendium of Lukomskii's major writings on the neoclassical revival-including the 1913 and 1914 issues of Apollon.
(11.) On the relation between modern classicism in Russia and the rationalist approach to design before and after the revolution, see Selim Khan-Magomedov, Aleksandr Vesnin and Russian Constructivism (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 15, 34. The early Soviet fascination with “proletarian classicism”—reminiscent of architecture following the French revolution—is illustrated in Tatiana Suzdaleva, “Otkrytie naslediia revoliutsionnogo romantiz-ma,” Arkhitektura SSSR (1989), no. 2: 98-105.
(12.) A survey of new plans for workers' communities is contained in Vigdariia E. Khazanova, Sovetskaia arkhitektura pervykh let oktiabria (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), 51-71. More generally on early planned communities in Russia, see S. Frederick Starr, “The Revival and Schism of Urban Planning in Twentieth-Century Russia,” in The City in Russian History, ed. Michael Hamm (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 222-242; and Brumfield, Origins of Modernism, 295, 321n95.
(13.) The Belogrud design was modeled on the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome, with additional components in the Florentine style. For a detailed analysis of the projects for this competition, see Khazanova, Sovetskaia arkhitektura pervykh let oktiabria, 125-127.
(14.) Russia: Architecture for a World Revolution, trans. by Eric Dluhosch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), 28-34. Lissitsky's essay was originally published in 1930 as Russland, Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion (Vienna: A. Schroll, 1930) and republished, with supplementary material, as Russland: Architektur fur eine Weltrevolution (Berlin: Ullstein, 1965).
(15.) For a summary of the organizational history of VKhUTEMAS, see Khazanova, Sovet-skaia arkhitektura pervykh let oktiabria, 200-201. See also Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 113-114.
(16.) The revolutionary ambiance of the Free Workshops is conveyed in Elena Ovsianniko-va, “Svobodnye ili gosudarstvennye,” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR (1988), no. 10, 23-27.
(17.) Khazanova, Sovetskaia arkhitektura pervykh let oktiabria, 204.
(18.) Vigdariia E. Khazanova, Iz istorii sovetskoi arkhitektury 1926-1932 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), 39-41. On Ladovskii, see Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, “N. Ladovskii,” in Margarita I. Astaf'eva-Dlugach, et al., Zodchie Moskvy: XX vek (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1988), 135-144. A biographical sketch and excerpts from the writings of Dokuchaev are contained in Mikhail G. Barkhin, ed., Mastera sovetskoi arkhitektury ob arkhitekture (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975), vol. 2, 186-210. On Krinskii, see Barkhin, ed., Mastera sovetskoi arkhitektury ob arkhitekture, 105-127.
(19.) Kazimir Malevich, The Nonobjective World, trans. by Howard Dearstyne (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1959), 27-102 (with illustrations). See also Khazanova, Sovetskaia arkhitektura
pervykh let oktiabria, 24-26; and A. Shumov, “Ot ploskosti k prostranstvu,” Arkhitektura SSSR (1990), no. 4: 54-60.
(20.) Major publications on constructivism in English include Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983); and Selim O. KhanMagomedov, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1987).
(21.) The Realistic Manifesto and the Pevsner brothers' relation to the Moscow avantgarde are examined in Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 34-42. See also Steven A. Nash, “Sculptures of Purity and Possibility,” and Christina Lodder, “Gabo in Russia and Germany,” in Naum Gabo: Sixty Years of Constructivism, eds. Steven A. Nash and Jorn Merk-ert (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1985), 23-26 and 51-54, respectively.
(22.) For a summary of Rodchenko's role in the formulation of the constructivist view of geometric form as a function of economy of material, see Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 22-29. See also Alexander Lavrentjev, “Alexander Rodchenko's Architectural Language,” in Alessandra Latour, ed., Alexander Rodchenko 1891-1956 (New York: New York Chapter, American Institute of Architects, 1987), no pagination; and David Elliott, ed., Rodchenko and the Arts of Revolutionary Russia (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).
(23.) A survey of the constructivists and their Union of Contemporary Architects (OSA) is contained in Kirill N. Afanas'ev and Vigdariia E. Khazanova, Iz istorii sovetskoi arkhitektury 1926-1932 gg.: Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo AN SSSR, 1963), 65-68; with statements pertaining to the movement, 69-105. The impact of the constructivist movement in architectural design is surveyed in Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 118180; and Anatole Kopp, Constructivist Architecture in the USSR (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985).
(24.) Aleksei Gan's programmatic statement Konstruktivism (Tver: Tverskoe izdatel'stvo, 1922) adopted an antiaestheticist approach that would be pursued by the major architectural theoretician of the movement, Moisei Ginzburg. Gan's work is examined in Khazanova, Sovetskaia arkhitektura pervykh let oktiabria, 20-22; Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 98-99; and John Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism (New York, 1976), 217-225.
(25.) On Western modernist architects in the Soviet Union, see Anatole Kopp, “Foreign Architects in the Soviet Union during the First Two Five-Year Plans,” in William C. Brumfield, Reshaping Russian Architecture: Western Technology, Utopian Dreams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 176-214.
(26.) I. Kokkinaki surveys the links between Soviet and Western architects of this period, with emphasis on De Stijl, in “K voprosu o vzaimosviaziakh sovetskikh i zarubezhnykh arkhitektorov v 1920-1930-e gody,” in I. M. Shmidt et al., eds., Voprosy sovetskogo izobrazitel'nogo iskusstva i arkhitektury (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1976), 350-382.
(27.) Afanas'ev and Khazanova, Iz istorii sovetskoi arkhitektury 1926-1932 gg., 50-53, 43-44, 70-72.
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(28.) Popova's development of architectonic forms in painting and her substantial contributions to constructivism are noted in Magdalena Dabrowski, Liubov Popova (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), 20-25.
(29.) Stil' i epokha (Moscow, 1924). In English: Style and Epoch, trans. by Anatole Senke-vitch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982). On the constructivist approach (primarily Ginzburg's) to design, see Catherine Cooke, “‘Form Is a Function X': The Development of the Constructivist Architects Design Method,” in Russian Avant-Garde Art and Architecture, ed. Catherine Cooke, 34-49 (London: Academy Editions, 1983).
(30.) Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, M. Ia. Ginzburg (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo literatury po stroitel'stvu, 1972). A biographical sketch and a selection of Ginzburg's writings are presented in Barkhin, ed., Mastera sovetskoi arkhitektury ob arkhitekture, vol. 2, 266-320.
(31.) For an analysis of Ginzburg's work within the context of housing and urban planning debates, see Khazanova, Sovetskaia arkhitektura pervoi piatiletki (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), 72-74, 164-165, passim. On Ginsburg's Narkomfin housing complex (built for the People's Commissariat of Finance) and Soviet housing design of that period, see Milka Bliznakov, “Soviet Housing during the Experimental Years, 1918-1933,” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, eds. William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1993), 85-148. For plans of the various Narkomfin apartment configurations and photographs of the building in its original form, see Nikolai Bylinkin, Vera Kalmykova, Aleskandr Riabushin, and Galina Sergeeva, Istoriia sovetskoe arkhitektury (1917-1954) (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1985), 46-47. A discussion of the building from the perspective of theories of communal housing is presented in Khazanova, Sovetskaia arkhitektura pervoi piatiletki, 168-171.
(32.) Leonid Vesnin graduated from the Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1909, and Aleksandr and Viktor graduated from the Institute of Civil Engineering in 1912. See M. A. Il'in, Vesniny (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo AN SSSR, 1960); A. G. Chiniakov, Brat'ia Vesniny (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo literatury po stroitel'stvu, 1970); and S. O. Khan-Magomedov, Aleksandr Vesnin (Moscow: Znanie, 1983).
(33.) A summary of the Palace of Soviets competition is presented in Bylinkin et al., Istoriia sovetskoi arkhitektury, 70-74; and Antonia Cunliffe, “The Competition for the Place of Soviets in Moscow, 1931-33,” Architectural Association Quarterly (1979), no. 2, 36-48. Commentary on the first phase of competition and reproductions of a large sample of en-tries—including the three main winners, by Boris Iofan, the American architect George O. Hamilton, and Zholtovskii—are presented in N. Zapletin, “Dvorets Sovetov SSSR (po ma-terialam konkursa),” Sovetskaia arkhitektura (1932), no. 2-3, 10-116.
(34.) For an analysis of the Iofan design in its variant forms, see Eigel, Boris Iofan (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1978), 80-117.
(35.) Nikolai Miliutin reported on this shift of policy and presented an adaptation of his own theories to it in “Vazhneishie zadachi sovremennogo etapa sovetskoi arkhitektury," Sovetskaia arkhitektura (1932), nos. 2-3, 3-9.
(36.) An analysis of the 1935 plan by Semenov (an early disciple of the English Garden City theorist Ebenezer Howard), as well as competing proposals in 1931-1933, is presented in Vladimir N. Belousov and Olga V. Smirnova, V N. Semenov (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1980), 80-102. For discussions leading to the plan, see also Khazanova, Sovetskaia arkhitektura pervoi piatiletki, 273-303. Semenov's views, which included an attack on constructivism in the name of returning the artistic element to architecture, were presented in a series of articles in Stroitel'stvo Moskvy in 1932-1933 and recapitulated in the chapter “Arkhitekturnaia rekonstruktsiia Moskvy," in Voprosy arkhitektury (Moscow, 1935), 119-158.
(37.) The work of Mordvinov is surveyed in Astaf'eva-Dlugach et al., Zodchie Moskvy: XX vek, 244-250. His apartment houses on Gorkii Street were built at an accelerated pace that included the extensive use of prefabricated components.
(38.) On Moscow's major reconstruction projects during the late 1930s, see Bylinkin et al., Istoriia sovetskoi arkhitektury, 83-87.
(39.) On the ideology of the principle of “critical assimilation" in socialist realist architecture, see Cunliffe, “The Competition for the Place of Soviets," 41-42. The basic forum of the academy's mission was the journal Akademiia arkhitektury, published in 1934-1937. A corollary of the emphasis on “critical assimilation" was the raising of the cultural level of the architectural elite, to which end leading architects at the academy were sent on an extended trip to Europe. This exposed them, in time-honored Russian fashion, to the masterpieces of Western culture, yet also enabled them to meet distinguished contemporary architects such as Le Corbusier. See Barkhin, ed., Mastera sovetskoi arkhitektury ob arkhitekture, vol. 2, 458. The exemplar of this retrospective revival was Ivan Zholtovskii. See Selim Khan-Magomedov, Ivan Zholtovskii (Moscow: S. E. Gordeev, 2010).
(40.) For a discussion of the Stalinist administrative apparatus and the development of Soviet architecture, see S. Frederick Starr, “The Social Character of Stalinist Architecture," Architectural Association Quarterly (1979), no. 2, 49-55: and Vladimir Papernyi, Kul'tura Dva (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985).
(41.) Surveys of the tower skyscrapers include Ikonnikov, Arkhitektura Moskvy, 112-119; and Zhuravlev et al., Arkhitektura sovetskoi Rossii, 185-190.
(42.) Extensive material on prerevolutionary Russian appraisals of American skyscrapers is contained in William C. Brumfield, “Russian Perceptions of American architecture, 1870-1917," in Brumfield, Reshaping Russian Architecture, 43-66.
(43.) V. K. Oltarzhevskii published a lavish survey of the Stalin-era towers: Stroitel'stvo vysotnykh zdanii v Moskve (Moscow: Gos. izdat. literatury o stroitel'stvu i arkhitekture, 1953).
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(44.) For a brief survey of Rudnev's career, see Astaf'eva-Dlugach et al., Zodchie Moskvy: XX vek, 167-174; and V. Asse (Rudnev's assistant), “Lev Rudnev,” Arkhitektura SSSR (1985), no. 1, 101-107.
(45.) The most insistent statements on the role of monumental historicism in late Stalinist architecture came from critics such as Mikhail Tsapenko and Ivan Matsa, formerly head of VOPRA and a leading figure in the Academy of Architecture. See Ivan Matsa, “Sovet-skaia arkhitektura—novyi etap v razvitii mirovoi arkhitektury,” Arkhitektura SSSR, 17-18 (1947): 11-14; and Mikhail Tsapenko, O realisticheskikh osnovakh sovetskoi arkhitektury (Moscow: Gos. izdat. literatury o stroitel'stvu i arkhitekture, 1952).
(46.) See “On the Problem of Functions in Architecture,” in Structure, Sign, and Function: Selected Essays by Jan Mukarovsky, translated and edited by John Burbank and Peter Steiner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 236-250, with specific reference to p. 245.
(47.) A clear statement of the shift from historicist ornamentation was Lev Rudnev's article “O formalizme i klassike,” Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 11 (1954): 30-32.
(48.) The early stages of Soviet industrialized apartment construction, between 1955 and 1960, are surveyed in Zhuravlev et al., Arkhitektura sovetskoi Rossii, 215-229. In English, see William C. Brumfield, “Architecture and Urban Planning,” in James Cracraft, ed., The Soviet Union Today: An Interpretive Guide (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988), 164174.
William C. Brumfield
William C. Brumfield, Professor of Slavic Studies and Sizeler Professor of Jewish
Studies, Tulane University
EsfirShub's K.Sh.E. (1932) and the Movement of Energy
Joshua Malitsky
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Jan 2020 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.4
This article contributes to the volume's effort to understand the history of communist visual cultures by exploring the work of the pioneering Soviet woman documentary filmmaker Esfir Shub's cultural contribution to the First Five-Year Plan for economic development. Shub's K.Sh.E. (1932) focuses on the production and circulation of energy both inside and outside human bodies. Her first sound film, K.Sh.E., turns to synchronized and nondiegetic sound to make the invisible transfer of energy and the location of latent energy sensible. The article situates Shub's work both in relation to earlier visual cultural projects' use of energetics and contemporary photomontage practices. The period of the Plan was one when forms of nonfiction narration were highly contested; locating Shub's film and the discourse surrounding it within this terrain allows us to see the range of allowable documentary abstraction at a time when efforts were being made to consolidate aesthetic practice more broadly.
Keywords: documentary film, energetics, Esfir Shub, montage, First Five-Year Plan, early sound cinema
In one of the final speeches of Esfir Shub's 1932 film K.Sh.E. (Komsomol: Shef elektri-fikatsii or Komsomol: Patron of Electrification), a party leader celebrates the day the Dnepr Hydroelectric Station began to produce electricity. To a crowd assembled on the steps of the power station, he says, “The importance Lenin gave to electricity in the industrialization of the Soviet Union proves how right he was because what Soviet industry lacks most is energy.” For Lenin, energy was one of the biggest challenges facing the Soviet Union if they were to catch up and pass the West. They not only had to dramatically increase the output of electrical energy so that it could reach the whole Union, but they had to transform the work ethic of the Soviet workers, increasing their kinetic energy and therefore their labor output (in Marxian terms). The production and circulation of energy both inside and outside human bodies—potential energy, manifest electrical energy, and kinetic energy in human bodies, water, and from sound resulting from the vibration of matter—is the central topic of Shub's first synch-sound feature-length documentary.
K.Sh.E. is one of a number of films made in coordination with the First Five-Year Plan for economic development (1928-1932), a period dominated by an effort to instill a command economy—bringing Soviet life and work even more directly under a centralized authority.1 This period was also the acme of Soviet leaders' and cultural workers' efforts to coordinate industrial and cultural production. Although focused on the industrialization of the economy and forced collectivization of agriculture, Soviet leaders simultaneously asserted increasing control over cultural life. For cinema, the government reorganized all of its activities under the aegis of the state agency Soyuzkino, with Boris Shumy-atsky selected as head in December 1930.2 But the link between the Plan and the cinema extended beyond the reorganization of the industry. The content of the films produced during this initial period likewise reflected a commitment to technological development, calling attention to it as materiality and theme. Ian Christie specifies this quality, pointing out that sound films were thought to provide viewers greater access to (p- 90) the construction process; they were more capable than silent films of communicating the intense auditory experience of industrial production.3
Although these early sound films all emphasized elements of construction, Evgenii Mar-golit argues that the production of sound films began with and was tied to the production of agitka (nonfiction propaganda films) much more so than it was to fiction films.4 Shub became part of this effort. She sought to make a film about and for the youth who were laboring so tirelessly for the electrification of the country—the Komsomol.5 As an experienced and celebrated editor and director, Shub was skilled at articulating connections between things that existed in different spatio-temporal locations. But in K.Sh.E., she aimed to make a different type of invisible connection knowable. She turned to sound to make the invisible transfer of energy and the location of latent energy sensible.
To be sure, Esfir Shub was not the first Russian or Soviet visual artist interested in communicating the principles and movements of energy. The first part of this essay establishes the conceptual foundations for Soviet understandings of energetics and their realization in early Soviet visual culture, namely in painting. This work was most closely associated with a constructivist approach that blended abstraction with rootedness in the material world. Cultural work during the First Five-Year Plan—the focus of the rest of this essay—exhibited a rebirth of attention on the aesthetics of energy, unsurprising given the massive industrialization efforts underway. But instead of painting, I demonstrate subsequently that these efforts emerge most forcefully through photographic-based media, namely photomontages in political posters and in documentary films. It is through techniques of photographic or cinematic montage that energy is located, identified, and traced and it is on the terrain of montage that battles over forms of documentary speech take place. This framework allows us to better understand the contribution of this pioneering woman documentary director to Soviet film history and to communist visual cultures more broadly. Shub, as I and some others have argued, is a critical figure for understanding the range of allowable documentary abstraction. In the 1920s, cultural critics
Page 2 of 23 celebrated her ability to speak about the world creatively while locating her material foundationally in the world. During the period of the First Five-Year Plan, however, the cultural watchdogs sought to pull back tighter on the reins of documentary expressivity. K.Sh.E., and the discourse surrounding it, therefore, allows us to reimagine and reconfigure the trajectory of this groundbreaking film artist during a period when the manner in which an artist-citizen engaged with the real world was so highly contested. The fact that she fared less well in the early 1930s than she did in the mid- to late 1920s speaks both to the cultural climate and to her artistic and political commitments.
Although this moment in Soviet cultural history was unique in its efforts to bring “art into everyday life” (the constructivist slogan) and everyday life into art, it was not the first time that Soviet visual artists sought to coordinate cultural and industrial production.
(p. 91) We see numerous examples of artists supporting the New Economic Policy (19211928), for example, in futurist-informed designs for agit-trains such as the one for the ag-it-train “VI. Lenin” in 1919 and in constructivist efforts in advertising (Vladimir Mayakovsky's verses for Mosselprom) or industrial design (Lyubov Popova's 1924 flapper dress), to name just a few. For Maria Gough, the second and most prominent strand of constructivism emerged in April 1921 when the group decided to “abandon their inquiry into the nature of art as a mode of production and enter the realm of industrial production itself.”6
If the merging of artistic and industrial production was one of the dominant strands of the culture of the First Five-Year Plan, energy—the ability to do work—was, unsurprisingly, one of the primary themes. Charlotte Douglas, in fact, opens her essay on the influence of the German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald and the Russian physician and philosopher Alexander Bogdanov on Russian and Soviet painting by asserting, “Thermodynamics and its extension into energetics ... so permeated the art of the Russian avant-garde in the first years after the Revolution that it may be said to form a major underlying paradigm of Russian abstract painting between the years 1918 and 1924.”7 For Douglas, this emphasis is a result of the historical moment, with artists responding to ideological emphases on materialism, science, and analysis over idealism and abstraction. But it also has earlier roots in socialist philosophies of the second half of the nineteenth century and in strands of modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Whereas the postrevolutionary painters influenced by these tenets varied in their efforts to make energy visible on canvases, they shared a commitment to avoid depicting objects as the primary means of expression. Rather, they turned to paintings of graphs and diagrammed relationships, abstract designs for representing various forms of energy itself, and consistently turned to color as a means for communicating Ostwald's work on the laws of energy conservation and entropy and Bogdanov's general systems approach derived from mechanics and thermodynamics (which he called tektology).8
In the postrevolutionary period, Bogdanov translated his scientific principles into a broader theory of proletarian culture. He believed that culture, including science, emerged from the social system that produced it and became one of the fundamental organizing principles of society. Culture needed to be studied and approached like a science with workers analyzing previous cultural forms and learning from them rather than rejecting them. In this way, workers could remove emotion from the equation and develop an objective art.9 Bogdanov's ideas, with its foundations in Ostwaldian thermodynamics, combined an organizational order (based in a theory of systems) with a high level of abstraction. In this way, they “provided a real-world analogue for Post-revolutionary abstractionism.”10 Although this did not result in a single style of abstraction, the application of Bogdanov's energetics offered hope that fundamental (Marxist) concepts could be communicated through, or even required, abstraction while remaining rooted in the material world.
Because he played such a leading role in Proletkult and because this Soviet artistic organization was so prominent across the Union in the 1920s, Bogdanov's ideas were (p- 92) widely disseminated. And, as Douglas demonstrates, they were absolutely integral to the constructivist agenda. Shub, in this way, was surely familiar with these tenets. But if efforts to communicate energetic principles visually emerged in painting during the early 1920s, by the period of the First Five-Year Plan, it is cinema and photomontage artists who assume the effort.
Energy exists in various forms, some of which are more easily representable than others. For photographic-based artists, the manifestation of energy in light, for example, is easier to visually index than that of heat. And as we will see in more detail later, the movement of energy, potential energy, and the harnessing of energy pose particular challenges—and opportunities—for visual artists. But it is through montage—that process by which things are simultaneously united and divided—that they turn to primarily in the efforts to communicate energy and its principles.
The Soviet leadership's decision to exert greater control over the cinema industry was replicated in their efforts to shape another media vehicle seen to have considerable persuasive power: the photo poster. In Spring 1931, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party itself established new regulations controlling this form that was thought to have such agitational potential. The leading journal focused on major construction projects across the Union, USSR in Construction (CCCP na stroike), highlighted photography as a means to communicate this dramatic industrial growth. The journal employed many of the leading Soviet and even visiting visual artists at the time including Gutsav Klucis, Aleksandr Rodchenko, John Heartfield, El Lissitsky, Sophie Kuppers, Max Al'pert, and Arkadii Shaikhet. And Dneprostroi—Hydroelectric Station—was their most popular subject.11
For Klucis, to be an agitational art, Soviet photography required montage. He argues, “the photo fixes a frozen, static moment,” whereas “photomontage reveals the dynamics of life, developing the thematic of a given subject.” It is the combination of the photograph's visual factness, its relation to political slogans, its use of color, and its spatial disjunctions that produces the agitation in the mind and body of the spectator.12 Over the course of the First Five-Year Plan, the use and scope of photographic montage increase in efforts to communicate the reality of Dneprostroi in the pages of USSR in Construction. Erika Wolf contrasts the journal's issues from 1930 and 1932, each of which focuses on Dneprostroi, noting that whereas the earlier issue focuses on detailing facts and more singular compositions, by 1932 there's a significant change. In the issue edited by El Lissitsky, we see a more witty, literary text centered on a narrative of transformation that frames much larger, more sophisticated montage compositions.13 What results are compositions that communicate a transformation of nature through a sensible dynamism, in this way both referencing and communicating the energy of the First Five-Year Plan.
(p. 93) But while this period in USSR in Construction (the year before and during the production and release of K.Sh.E.) saw an increase in the number and scope of photomontages, there was considerable debate about the aesthetics appropriate for communicating this industrial work. And, as we will see, the debate has particular applicability to Shub and nonfiction film. In 1931, the Central Committee, concerned over political posters that actually criticized the Soviet project, encouraged discussion over their proper form. Increasingly, modernist work like that of Klucis was critiqued as too fragmented and therefore unintelligible to the majority of the population. The critical voices argued that the modernist posters included too many source photographs, employed too much spatial variation, and thus lacked clarity. The Russian Association of Proletarian Artists (RAPKh) and the Russian Association of Proletarian Photographers (ROPF) labeled photomontag-ists—specifically still photographers Klucis, Rodchenko, Boris Ignatovich, and Eleazer Langman—“constructivists.” These members of the October Association were now seen as too aligned with the fragment and what was needed, the critics claimed, was greater aesthetic synthesis and clarity. John Heartfield, with his use of superimposition and more legible spatial and thematic compositions, was seen as the new model, the way forward for a true proletarian visual culture.14 These were the critical debates taking place about how photographic-based media can best communicate the dynamic changes of the First Five-Year Plan when Esfir Shub produced and exhibited K.Sh.E. in 1931-1932.
Esfir Shub was born into a Jewish family in 1894 in the town of Surazh, part of Ukraine and the Russian Empire. When she was a teenager, she moved to Moscow, where she studied literature, became involved in revolutionary activities, and was fortunate to run in circles with many experimental poets, writers, and painters. After the Revolution, she attended the seminar of the Women's Institute for Higher Education, where she studied with progressive scholars and social activists. Her first formal cultural work began in 1919, when she was hired into the Theater Department of the People's Commissariat of
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Education (Narkompros). There, Shub met and worked with members of the artistic avant-garde including, most prominently, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Vladimir Mayakovsky.
She began her career in cinema by working for Goskino, the state cinema agency, re-editing foreign films for Soviet distribution. Like many others who became noteworthy Soviet directors, Shub learned her craft by breaking down how foreign films were constructed— narratively, artistically, and rhetorically—and reorganizing the elements to achieve a different meaning, in the process making them ideologically aligned with communist principles in the new postrevolutionary moment.15 This work provided a base of skills that served Shub well when she began her own directorial work editing material that others had shot into what Jay Leyda called “compilation films.”16 In becoming (p- 94) a director, Shub broke through the glass ceiling in place for women film workers, with whom she always felt a deep connection. Alla Gadassik points to an article that Shub wrote on “mon-tazhnitsy,” the feminine plural term used to describe editing assistants, in which she highlights the central and undervalued role the (often-female) montazhnitsy played in the production of a film. Gadassik sums up the importance of this stage for understanding Shub's and other female cultural workers' roles in the film industry at the time. She writes, “in her career transition from seeking out and restoring film material, to re-cutting imported films according to new ideological specifications, and finally to making her own films by re-working found footage, Esfir Shub passed through the rhetorical role typically assigned to the montazhnitsa and developed it into an autonomous filmmaking form.”17 It is through these efforts working with ready-made material that Shub began to establish her reputation as one of the leading voices in “unplayed film” during the postrevolutionary period.18
Her directorial debut came from a commission in 1927 with the production of the film that remains her best-known, The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Padenie Dinastii Ro-manovykh). In addition to The Fall, the state film organization Sovkino commissioned Shub to make two additional historical compilation films—The Great Way (Veliky put',
1927) , and Lev Tolstoy and the Russia of Nicholas II (Rossiya Nikolaya II i Lev Tolstoy,
1928) .19 The films in the trilogy emphasize the differences between the new (or coming) socialist way of life and the forces that oppose it. Whereas The Fall focuses on the years leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution (1912-1917), The Great Way looks at the battle for revolutionary progress waged in the years since the February Revolution.20 The films' arguments are made through related aesthetic strategies—a combination of ironic juxtaposition, realized in titles and editing choices, and contrasting spatio-temporal logics. The old order and the counterrevolutionary forces seeking to overthrow the Revolution are presented through images and sequences with longer duration and with less velocity than those pointing to revolutionary change. But both types of sequences are comparably more visually stable, with less camera movement and less jarring cinematography, than those common to Shub's friend, fellow supporter of the communist revolution, and the most prominent voice in nonfiction film at the time, Dziga Vertov. This aspect of Shub's films was lauded as providing “authenticity” to the film document, doing the work Viktor Shklovsky and Sergei Tret'iakov urged—specifically, locating things and events in their times and places.21 As a whole, these films were celebrated by Shklovsky, Tret'iakov, Osip
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Brik, and others for their efficient means of production, organization, clarity, and ability to inspire audiences. They were even seen to inaugurate a new era in Soviet nonfiction filmmaking, with Shub's historical compilation method and her use of long takes replacing Dziga Vertov's fast-moving, “metrical” montage editing of short takes. Shub's films were seen to restore authenticity to the film document and to connect with the masses, whereas Vertov's contemporary films were understood to distort material reality and appeared incomprehensible to the masses.22 Despite these differences, Shub and Vertov23 understood the fundamental relationship between the camera and the subject similarly. Both recognized that the camera's presence affects the subject's actions (when the subject is aware of it), but neither saw this as a problem. Rather, as (p- 95) Shub argues in 1929, this recognition often prompts the subject to reveal essential aspects of his or her personality in the process.24 But they were both critical of fiction film—Vertov much more so—and were skeptical of the value of combining nonfiction and fiction approaches in which case the “audience ceases to believe in the facts.”25 This last stance ran counter to the dominant position in the 1930s, a period during which nonfiction film was thought to require aesthetic and methodological flexibility to align with potentially shifting political demands.
By the early 1930s, the moment when the First Five-Year Plan was coming to an end, the context for newsreel and documentary filmmakers had changed in ways comparable to those we saw for photomontagists. This was especially true for some of the most notable documentary filmmakers of the 1920s—Vertov, Shub, Ilya Kopalin, Victor Erofeev, and Mikhail Kaufman (Vertov's brother and cameraman who started to make his own films at the end of the 1920s). The key issue was that of sound. As early as the mid-1920s, cultural workers placed enormous hope in the potential of sound film to transform communication as they knew it. “Radio-Cinema,” as it was described by Alexander Fevralsky, Vertov, and others, was imagined to soon become the foremost tool for education and propaganda and as having limitless possibilities.26 For Vertov, the distinction in the 1920s between fiction and nonfiction cinema remained the key issue. He rejected the emphasis on the dissonance and consonance between sound and image so famously asserted in Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Aleksandrov's “Statement on Sound.”27 In its place, he celebrated natural sounds, that, when organized into facts “unlimited by space,” function as agitation and propaganda radio-cine documents. He even quotes the cinema sound engineer Alexander Shorin, who asserted that the Vertov Group's work, “produced such fine recordings that ... you would think you were not in the theatre but on the street, in a factory, a station, and so on. You would even feel the air, the intensity ... The works ... open your eyes to the fact that studio sounds are dry and lifeless.”28 For Vertov and Shorin, location-recorded sounds are better because they are real—authentic, genuine, and unacted—and capable of transferring something of the richness of the lived experience. Therefore, even though in his early sound experiments (most notably with Enthusiasm) Vertov continued
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his long-standing commitment to constructing arguments by means of an array of audio and visual material, he consistently asserted the value of documentary recordings as a record of reality. But in addition—as is evident from Shorin's quote and Vertov's “editorial” selection of it—the quality of the recordings combines with the recognition of that process to transform the bodily cinematic experience of the spectator.
For the editors and many contributors to the prominent Soviet journal Proletarian Cinema (Proletarskoe Kino), formerly Cinema and Life (Kino i zhizn), however, those (p- 96) who extended the 1920s battle between documentary and fiction film to the era of sound film were “documentalists.”29 They were “fact-fetishists” who were only looking at, and now recording the world, instead of trying to change it. The editors of the journal did not align documentalism with formalism, which was a “bellicose and idealist” theory. But they did maintain that documentalists adopted a “vulgar, materialist, mechanical conception” and they saw it, like formalism, as an anti-Marxist, “illiterate, presumptuous, and excessively pretentious 'theory.'” Writing “for the vital interests of Bolshevism,” the journal editors assumed “the positions of implacable struggle against documentalism,” setting for themselves “the task of destroying it completely.”30 The documentary filmmakers, on the other hand, insisted that they were committed to recording facts from the real world, as the Shorin quote demonstrates, the sound in the theater corresponding to that of the moment of recording. Whether that recording was synched with the image or, as frequently in Vertov, part of a complex interaction of sound with image, the documentalists insisted that this approach was preferable to the counterpoint or dissonant sound promoted by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Aleksandrov in the “Statement on Sound.” But for the new cultural watchdogs, the problem was not that of the documentalists' method of capturing sound but the aesthetic approach that they maintained and the rhetorics they adopted in articulating it. For the journal editors, the documentalists' continuous effort to distinguish themselves from fiction filmmakers supporting the contrapuntal use of sound revealed that their attention was still too focused on aesthetic instead of political issues. Proper attention on the latter would have revealed to them the importance of “heroic portraiture, written scenarios, and a willingness to stage” within the nonfiction film framework.31 Furthermore, their (and here I refer to Erofeev and Vertov most particularly) rhetorical aggressiveness demonstrated that they were still caught up in factionalist debates no longer deemed appropriate. Instead of arguments about documentary versus fiction, or cinema versus theater, attention had to be paid to eradicating the vestiges of bourgeois ideology. As such, many filmmakers and cultural critics became vulnerable to being categorized as formalists or documentalists.
Shub had always been much less confrontational than Vertov and/or Erofeev. She was much more pragmatic in her approach and strategic in her communications. This is likely in part due to her personality and in part due to circumstances (to be sure, not entirely separable). As a Jewish woman, documentary filmmaker, and member of the intelligentsia associated with the artistic avant-garde, Shub had increasing reasons to be flexible in her aesthetic and agreeable in print. In the period just prior to K.Sh.E. (1928-1931), she and her husband, Aleksei Gan, participated in the Oktiabr' (October) Association, joining architects such as the Vesnin brothers, photographers and graphic designers such as Gus-
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tav Klucis and Aleksandr Rodchenko, the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, and multimedia artists such as El Lissitzky and Solomon Telingater who were committed to maintaining certain constructivist principles.32 Maria Gough specifies, describing Oktiabr' as a group of artists steadfast in “foregrounding the constructedness of visual representation” and promoting “especially those arts that shared with modern industrial production its primary condition of technological reproducibility.”33 Despite this participation, Shub's writing of the early 1930s started to reflect this changing mood, (p- 97) responding to the increasing distrust of formal experimentation and its association with aesthetic factionalism. In an issue of Proletarian Cinema in 1932, Shub takes a moderate approach to the debates; she chooses to spread responsibility for problems in the industry, she takes personal blame, and she asserts the validity of both fiction and nonfiction approaches to cinema.34 But these comments do not entirely line up with what we see in K.Sh.E. And in light of them, it makes her decision to create a film that aims to identify the residences of latent energy and make the movement of energy sensible—ideas that practically necessitate formal experimentation—even more surprising. For it was Vertov's 1928 film that dealt most specifically with energy—The Eleventh Year—that was also likely his most highly criticized. For Vertov, as John MacKay argues, the decision to make a film based in an “ener-geticist” model is rooted in a Helmholtzian “transcendental materialist” philosophy emanating from understandings of the laws of thermodynamics. Aesthetically, Vertov aims to communicate the idea that all phenomena leave traces of energy—that none is lost— through cinematographic and editing choices. The film registers the traces of energy and then shows, through montage, the movement of it, the conversions it has taken, and the changes it might still take. Moreover, it does so through a nonlinear structure, de-empha-sizing the techniques of narrative fiction storytelling or documentary narration that had become dominant at the time.35 Shub's choices in K.Sh.E. were much less strident philosophically and less likely to flout formal conventions that supported intelligibility. The film has a much more legible narrative trajectory than The Eleventh Year and is less aesthetically experimental and far-reaching. But its primary concerns are energy location, conversion, and potential. And sound plays a central role, both indexing energy itself and figuring the movement of different types of energy. But even though energy—in all its forms —was a central topic of the day, as MacKay points out, “there is nothing inherently ‘progressive' or even ‘meaningful' about energy flow.”36 I argue then that in her most Vertov-ian film, in a film that is both highly reflexive and that celebrates materiality in and as cinema, Shub turns to sound as a solution to the problem of the sensibility of energy. That she thought it was a problem worth solving perhaps speaks to her cultural alliances and aesthetic principles more than does some of her more accommodating writing.
Shub was commissioned to make her first sound film by the Central Committee of the Komsomol. The film chronicles the drive to electrify the Soviet Union, a struggle led by the Komsomol, a political youth organization that was generally known as the youth organization of the Communist Party. For Shub, the film was made “about the Komsomol and for the Komsomol” so they could see what the “drive to electrification” of the countryside Page 9 of 23
was like.37 Visually, it consists largely of sequences from factories, active power plants, and speeches taking place at those locations. The soundtrack consists of synchronous recordings of location sounds such as those from machinery in (p- 98) factories, moving water, singing birds, and construction site noise. But it also consists of other forms of audio recordings such as dubbed speeches and symphonic music composed (as his first film score) by Gavriil Popov. Structurally, the film is fairly uneven, comprised of some fairly rapidly edited montage sequences, a number of mobile sequence shots, and extended sequences of speeches and musical performances. In many instances, Shub maintains her commitment to the long take—the advent of sound and the contemporary moment seemingly reinforcing her commitment to the deep relation the thing in the image has to the thing in the world.
The film opens with a complex sound-image prologue that establishes the central role energy plays in the film. After the title (quoting Lenin) “A Country Must Know Its Heroes,” the prologue announces via titles that we will see the debut of an electric instrument—the theremin—at the Moscow Sound Factory. The first images we see, however, are of a film reel being loaded and a filmstrip being threaded. The cameraman tracks into place and Shub's sound assistant, Nato Vachnadze, sets up the sound recording equipment. We see the image of a suspended hand, seemingly preparing to make contact with an instrument. But as time passes, the volume of music rises. Shub then cuts to the theremin wire, and we recognize that the hand is and has been making the sound all along. The suspended hand was not a hand anticipating action; it was always already acting, already producing music. Emanating from the development of the oscillator in radio technology, the theremin, developed by the Soviet inventor Leon Theremin (Lev Teremin), is a musical instrument played without physical contact. The thereminist plays by standing in front of the instrument, controlling frequency or pitch through proximity of the right hand to a metal antenna and amplitude or volume through proximity of the left hand to another metal antenna. The closer the hand is to the right wire, the higher the pitch. The further away the left hand moves from the left wire, the louder the note.38 The prologue thus opens with a site of energy production in the guise of potential energy. The demonstration of the theremin continues with the camera tracking out to reveal orchestral accompaniment. The performance proceeds, intercut with Vachnadze managing the sound recording equipment. We then return more fully to the recording technology—sound followed by image and then to a micro-image of the sound registering on film stock. The sequence concludes by returning to the finale of the overture from high above, cuts tight to the conductor, and back to the registration on film stock. This time, however, the visual registration on the stock mimics the profile of the conductor, his large nose jutting like a note. In a playful Kuleshovian choice, Shub then cuts to the female sound assistant, Vachnadze (and it's not to be disregarded that the assistant is a woman), who chuckles at the visual joke.
What we see in this opening scene is both Shub's primary theme and her method. The theme is that of energy (that which is normally invisible) and its sensibility, here as sound. Her method is that of registration (sound on film stock) and amplification (to the rest of the Union). If factography is the cultural work of the First Five-Year Plan and cinema is
Page 10 of 23 the industrial art of modernity (as practitioners have claimed), the theremin is the musical instrument of the moment. It is electric. And it was conceived and produced in the Soviet Union (an issue of vital importance at the time). The theremin, therefore, is (p- 99) the perfect symbol for Shub's film: it heightens attention on the invisibility of energy and the work energy does, it highlights the technological skills of Soviet engineers, it analogizes the labor performed by the thereminist and that of the Soviet worker, and its use of electrical signals through nonphysical operation functions as a metaphor for the broader communist electrification project.
The opening to the film is also a clear reference to Vertov's famous prologue in Man with a Movie Camera. (Shub admits that MWAMC and Vertov's work as a whole influenced this work considerably.) As in Vertov's prologue, K.Sh.E. not only functions reflexively but also as a way of sparking narrative drama by creating a sense of anticipation, one connected to the cinematic apparatus itself. In MWAMC's prologue, the drama is about the anticipation of the film on the screen (realized in part through anticipation of the orchestra), a sensibility that continues into the first reel with Vertov's version of a “chase” scene. In K.Sh.E. the anticipation likewise relates to sound and is likewise reflexive but with a different narrative trajectory and establishing different expectations. The initial moment with the theremin creates the anticipation of action, an anticipation that is thwarted when we recognize that the action, the playing of the instrument, is already in process. Shub's reveal sets the tone for the rest of the film; we have to be prepared to locate energy, to sense energy in places not immediately recognizable. The opening scene thus identifies the film as partaking of an energeticist or productivist framework. The body operating the instrument becomes, as Anson Rabinbach describes, “a site of conversion, or exchange, between nature and society—the medium through which the forces of nature are transformed into the forces that propel society.”39 This is a new sound-cinematic image of labor power, one with limitless energy that cannot be turned off.
Shub continues to develop this line of thought about the identification, registration, and amplification of sound-energy throughout the film, extending its political usefulness throughout the Union. The subsequent sequence does so by attending to communication networks and their infrastructure. It begins with a focus on the telephonic as young women phone operators connect people from across the Union. We then see a series of radio broadcasts celebrating the Komsomol in English, German, and French. With the radio host's French words in our ears, Shub cuts to a loudspeaker, which turns, demonstrating its activity and potential reach, as the speaker celebrates the Soviet mass's commitment to labor. Immediately thereafter, we see a daytime image of coal plants as smoke emerges from the stacks. The music then shifts as she cuts to evening where energy is no longer sensible through an imaginary transference of words, or visible through smoke, but visible through electric bulbs as the electric music, emitted by theremin, plays. Shub concludes the sequence by returning to where she began, to the visibility of the theremin. It is the musical example par excellence of what her film aims to achieve: the sensibility of energy. The sequence thus uses montage and sound-image relations to demonstrate how various energy forms and processes link the Union and are themselves often interconnected. She begins with the people and wires that connect citizens telephonically; she
Page 11 of 23 moves to the amplification of sound waves through radio broadcasts; she shifts to the connection between coal and electricity, with the energy (p- 100) resulting from coal production realized in electrical light; and she concludes with the theremin, the most Soviet and immediate example of energy location—in the body.
The sequence that immediately follows is one of the most famous in the film and one for which Shub was occasionally criticized for being formalistic. It focuses on the incredible productivity of young female Komsomol members who work in a light bulb factory. Shub aims to show the ease, purposefulness, efficiency, and “lightness” of their effort to overfulfill the plan.40 And she does so through a montage that, while opening with a synchsound interview with Komsomol member Katia Paramonova, shifts to an abstract play of light that brings together the factory production and Popov's waltz. Lilya Kaganovsky describes the section and its implications beautifully:
from women's hands handling nearly transparent light bulbs we move to the light bulbs themselves, spinning and twirling, as if performing a dance. We see the glass of the light bulb melting into a drop, reminding us that glass is never completely solid, but remains partially liquid for its entire existence. Finally, as Shub's camera moves closer and closer to the light bulbs, the glass surrounding the filigree elements melts away completely, and we see only the elements themselves, and eventually—just an abstract play of lights, as the camera goes out of focus, blurring our vision. This moment of making light and energy material (visible, tangible as a light bulb, as glass) is equally a moment of the de-materialization of cinema. There is an insistence here on both the solid and the transparent; on glass as something that is never completely solid but always somewhat liquid, always moving ... what we have here is glass (the lens, the camera) looking at glass (the light bulb), which is itself produced from something liquid and melting that then takes on solid form. But Shub does something else here as well—in the last shots of the sequence she “melts” the image—everything becomes simply a play of light, cinema reduced to its most basic form: the traces of energy left on the filmstrip.41
For Kaganovsky, the montage sequence manifests Shub's desire to communicate the materiality of various forms of energy in an organic and reflexive way. It is one that unites sound, light, and labor through movement and through the only mechanism capable of doing so—through the cinematic apparatus itself.
But if this moment in the film is very Vertovian in its dialectics, the larger structure of the film is not predominantly juxtapositional, at least not in the ways Shub had commonly employed montage juxtaposition. I want to provide an additional example to explain how a film of this manner might have been produced and interpreted in the 1920s as one that juxtaposed the backwardness of the countryside with efforts to modernize and contrast that with K.Sh.E. to explicate the point. Twenty-one and a-half minutes into the film we enter the region of Dzorages, the name of the Armenian hydroelectric station. We see the almost treeless landscape dotted with small homes, we see destroyed churches, and then we see a river flowing robustly with what we presume to be local folk music accompanying the images. We go back further in the process and get a pan of the source of the flow —the snow-capped mountains that provide the water for the region. We get a hypercanted shot of the terrain with its four-legged inhabitants, (p- 101) here to remind us of the terrain's steepness, which increases the power of the water flow and therefore its potential energy. We then see the signs of progress and our lesson in political economy: electrical towers foregrounded with the mountains in the background—the source and realization of electrical energy juxtaposed in a shot. We see roads as signs of progress and then the prime Soviet icon of progress and movement—the train, which drives with increasing momentum and power, indicated by the musical rhythms, until it arrives at the Dzorages hydroelectric station. The train is the manifestation of the flow of energy, in this way calling attention to the human labor that goes into reshaping the countryside so that the flow of water can be used for Soviet modernizing and industrializing purposes.
Formally, the sequence also points to an expansion of Shubian montage. Without question, the decimated churches are set in opposition to the electrical towers in a familiar old/new theme. But the rest of the montage operates less ironically and accumulatively than her work in the trilogy does. Rather, in this sequence (also evident in the prologue) Shub employs cinematographic and montage strategies that confirm her contemporary support for constructivism—a reminder that she and Gan participated in the Oktiabr' (October) Association from 1928 to 1931. The hypercanted shot of the sheep on the mountainside is surprising and would seem to function as a sharp, unexpected, or “Rodchenko” angle, one designed to encourage viewers to look at the familiar in a defamiliarized way (see Figure 4.1). In this case, it encourages viewers not simply to know the relationship between the steepness of the terrain and the powerful flow of water but to feel it bodily.
K.Sh.E., 1932. Frame capture
Likewise, the shot of the electrical towers foregrounding the mountains operates on a plane beyond ironic juxtaposition and thematic accumulation (see Figure 4.2).
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K.Sh.E., 1932. Frame capture
The image is a compound image reminiscent of Eisenstein's and Vertov's use of multiple planes with contrasting vectors of direction and object-themes, in all cases making use of juxtaposition within the shot.42 As a whole, the sequence incorporates certain constructivist tendencies, not, as Yuri Tsivian writes in describing Kaufman's or Rodchenko's images, to produce something “uncanny or unreal” but, “for a Constructivist, to see a street [or in this case a mountain] in a strange—defamiliarized—way was tantamount to making it more real.”43 For Shub, defamiliarization here both urges us to see something new in the familiar and to envision something unseen—connections between objects and energy flow.
Having established the ideas of the flow and political economy of energy, Shub in the second half of the film focuses much more on the actual achievements of Soviet workers in building the hydroelectric stations and the mechanisms they require to work. Four types of sequences predominate: those involving factory workers in Leningrad making turbines for hydroelectric plants in Dzorages and Dneprostroi (highlighting labor energy); live musical and dance performances in the factories, at the plants, and even socializing on the beach (sound and kinetic energy); numerous speeches that mark the completion of production (of a major turbine, for example) or the opening of the hydroelectric station (again, sound and/as energy); and interludes that bring us back to the natural materials (most often water and its movement), their (potential) energy and the process by which they get harnessed into energy.
(p. 102) The factory sequences are some of the least successful in the film. The shots of turbine production are long in duration (and not particularly informative); they shift into dancing scenes with musical accompaniment, and from there they move into speeches by workers and factory leaders. The sequences are much more focused on providing synch sound and image evidence of the factory experience than on developing the themes established earlier. Shub admits that it was a challenge to shoot the factory scenes with limited
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film stock and with such bulky equipment. But she also saw such sequences as inspiring, lyrical, and even autobiographical, the implication being that the film accurately captured her experience of being on the scene.44
Meetings typically follow the recorded performances. After the conclusion of one slapstick dance sequence accompanied by an accordion, we get an important speech by an archetype of the Soviet “new man,” Comrade Klimov. The young, serious, strong leader calls for more enthusiasm from Komsomol members and, perhaps more important, greater organization from those in charge of factory production. He laments the late completion date of the turbine even as he celebrates the workers' efforts. For Shub, the Klimov speech was an important document of the day, indicative of the Soviet level of mastery in the field of electrical production.45 Although somewhat tedious, such sequences are much more clearly aligned with what the cultural watchdogs were looking
(p. 103) for—the celebration of individual workers as heroes. But to be sure, watching people play music and dance to music takes on a different valence when encountered after an analysis of energy location and energy production. We now see these acts as creating a force, as energy emerging from bodily labor, even when that labor is seen as play.
That said, Shub's concern in the second half of the film is less on visualizing productive labor than on the celebratory speeches during which laborers and engineers discuss these achievements. But what's most interesting is that in these scenes, the discursive content of the speeches is rarely what's important. Let me explain by way of Shub's own vision. In her essay “The Advent of Sound in Cinema,” Shub argues that sound film “has the opportunity to become the most perfect instrument in international communication.”46 But how is one to reconcile this sense of perfect international communication in a film that has presumably untranslated speeches in Armenian, speeches given by people with heavy Ukrainian accents, and even a speech by the American civil engineer Hugh Cooper at Dneprostroi. The final one of these, Cooper's speech, I want to argue, hints at the explanation.47
Cooper gives a speech about how he had a dream and in the dream he spoke perfect Russian. But when he woke up, he realized it was just a dream, evidenced by the fact that when he tried to tell his cook what to make him in Russian, he ended up with a horrible
(p. 104) meal. Therefore, he must speak through an interpreter. The example is particularly revealing about the role of international speech in early Soviet sound documentaries in that it says, in a sort of paradoxical way, that comprehending language, understanding the details, is in fact not the most important thing here. The story itself is discursively pointless. It is the process of communication transference and its potential perfectability that drives the scene. It does not demonstrate how speech is the most perfect means of international communication. Or if it does, it does so in a decidedly nonlogocentric fashion. What cinema is now able to communicate in a far more sophisticated way is the “reality” of public performances. Evgeny Margolit expands on this idea, arguing that this use of multilingualism or heteroglossia was a feature of Soviet audiovisual culture of the period. Heteroglossia, for the Soviets in the early 1930s (as wells as for Germans of the same era), was not seen to be a problem. Rather, filmmakers employed multiple heteroglossic
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strategies in films of the period.48 They did so for a few cinematic reasons, two of which are germane here. First, “heteroglossia—with its tendency toward natural sound—acts as a kind of counterbalance to the overwhelming predominance of industrial noise in Soviet cinema of the early 1930s.”49 Second, it serves to individualize characters in a period of increasing conventionalization.50 Speeches, one could argue Shub is claiming, remain uncinematic in the early 1930s, but they can still serve a function. They highlight, individualize, and celebrate heroes. They visually unify ethnically and linguistically diverse people, who must communicate despite linguistic barriers. They provide a human balance to noisiness of the factory. And they prioritize the only important language—that of revolution. But in addition they reveal the reality of the performance itself, register the transfer of sound energy, and gesture to the future perfectability of communication.
The climax of the film is an extended sequence on the opening of Dneprostroi, where Shub develops the major ideas of the film. We see and hear speeches by Cooper, workers, and leading engineers. And we see shots of swirling water magically converted to electrical energy through the power of montage. But the film concludes with a three-minute coda that returns us, aesthetically and thematically, to the prologue.
We are brought to the research laboratory of the academic Chernishov who is researching high-voltage transmission. A group of young Komsomol men and women are given a tour and being introduced to the scientific concepts. But what is most striking, in addition to the science fiction visuals of the youth walking through the maze of electrical equipment, is the sound of the high voltage frequency. An intense hum pervades the sequence. In case the comparison were not apparent, Shub shows us two massive spheres move ever closer, presumably providing visible evidence of electrical noise, as the students are taught the value of high voltage transmission and its potential to bring electricity to the entire Union. The sequence and film conclude with an educational demonstration. We see visible electric discharges between spheres and along massive coils while hearing sharp electric sparks. Cut to the impressed students. Shub then cuts back to the spheres, only this time Popov's score replaces the electrical noises. The pace increases, cutting among the high voltage transmitters as the electrical sparks (p- 105) join the soundscape. The film concludes with a rapid-fire high voltage electrical dance, replete with electrical flash sound and a classical score.
Shub has thus chosen to conclude her film both structurally and formally with a Vertovian gesture. The return to the prologue echoes Vertov's famous return to the screening space at the end of Man with a Movie Camera. And the rapid montage is Vertovian in its logic. To explain, the conclusion is an object lesson demonstrating the principle Shub has been working toward throughout: that music is energy, sound is energy, and cinematic montage can serve as a vehicle for communicating the movement and location of both. It is thus an intense, reflexive trick, revealing what the film itself has been doing.
In setting out to make K.Sh.E., Shub was actively responding to the criticism of her previous film, Today (Segodnya, 1930).51 Although it was her first film focused on the contemporary moment, Today maintains many of the strategies on which she had relied in her compilation trilogy. It makes use of found material, it draws sharp contrasts between revolutionary Russia/Soviet Union and another example—in this case the West—and it makes use of ironic juxtaposition, thematic accumulation, and rhetorical intertitles to make its argument. But the film received some unfavorable reviews. Lev Shatov, writing in 1930 for Cinema and Life, makes an early argument against documentalism, claiming that the argument of Today was not clear enough and the film relied on an outdated formalist approach.52 Shub attempted to respond with K.Sh.E., claiming that it was organized as an organic whole, made its argument clearly, and that she “didn't allow herself any pure montage sequences.”53
The response to K.Sh.E. was tepid at best, fairly unsurprising given that the film does not exactly align with Shub's ambitions for it. But perhaps this reaction can be presaged by a piece Shub wrote following the release of Leo Tolstoy and the Russia of Nicholas II. In “And Again the Newsreel,” Shub urges people to watch nonfiction films with a different attitude than they do fiction films. Whereas “fiction film mostly appeals to the emotion; we appeal to the intellect.” This is not the audience's fault per se; it has not been trained to think that way. But in addressing critics, she is arguing for space to make far-reaching, sophisticated, intellectual work in the hopes that they see the value of nonfiction.54 To be sure, that is not how it went. By the time of K.Sh.E.'s release, the critical climate had moved further from her position than she had anticipated. Her 1932 celebration of communist revolutionary energy was seen, in part, as an aesthetic rather than a political project. As a result, it is not too surprising that after K.Sh.E., Shub, like Vertov, struggled to obtain support for independent innovative projects. But at the same time, perhaps the range of its montage juxtapositions speaks more to Shub's artistic and intellectual commitments than previously thought. Even though her writings were often conciliatory
(p. 106) and surely K.Sh.E. had extensive sequences aligning with the new personalized approach of celebrating individuals as heroes and a willingness to stage events—the model favored by the cultural watchdogs—Shub demonstrated in K.Sh.E. that at times, like Vertov, she could not resist flying against the prevailing breeze.55
Christie, Ian. “Making Sense of Early Soviet Sound.” Screen (July/August 1982): 34-49.
Douglas, Charlotte. “Energetic Abstraction: Ostwald, Bogdanov, and Russian Post-Revolutionary Art.” In From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art and Literature, edited by Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, 76-94. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Gough, Maria. The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Gough, Maria. “John Heartfield, Gustav Klucis, and the Medium of Soviet Propaganda.” New German Critique 107 (Summer 2009): 133-183.
Kaganovsky, Lilya. The Voice of Technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.
Kaganovsky, Lilya, and Masha Salazkina, eds. Sound, Music Speech in Soviet and PostSoviet Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.
Leslie, Esther. “Art, Documentary, and the Essay Film.” Radical Philosophy 192 (July/Au-gust 2015): 7-14.
MacKay, John. “Film Energy: Process and Metanarrative in Dziga Vertov's The Eleventh Year (1928).” October 121 (Summer 2007): 41-78.
Margolit, Evgeny. “Heteroglossia in Early Soviet Sound Cinema.” In Sound, Music Speech in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema, edited by Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina, 119128. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.
Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Roberts, Graham. Forward Soviet! London: IB Tauris, 1999.
Shub, Esfir. “And Again the Newsreel.” Translated by Anastasia Kostina. Feminist Media Histories 2, no. 3 (2016): 21-24.
Shub, Esfir. Zhizn' moia—kinematograf (My Life—Cinema). Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972.
Taylor, Richard, and Ian Christie, eds. The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Wolf, Erika. USSR in Construction: From Avant Garde to Socialist Realist Practice. 1999. PhD dissertation, University of Michigan.
Wolf, Erika. Koretsky: The Soviet Photo Poster: 1930-1984. New York: The New Press, 2012.
Yampolsky, Mikhail. “Reality at Second Hand.” Translated by Derek Spring. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 11. 2 (1991): 161-71.
(1.) Abram Room's lost Five-Year Plan (1930), Nikolai Ekk's A Start in Life (Putevka v zhizn' [1930]), Vertov's Enthusiasm (1931), Dovzhenko's Ivan (1932), and Aleksandr Macheret's Men and Jobs (Dela i liudi [1932]) are some of the others.
(2.) Soyuzkino was the state film agency that replaced Sovkino, the leading governmental organization for cinema between 1924 and 1930. Soyuzkino was developed in 1930 to align with the First Five-Year Plan and reflected the Plan's emphasis on centralization and self-sufficiency. The various autonomous distribution networks and studios of the national republics fell, at this point, under Soyuzkino's control.
(3.) Ian Christie, “Making Sense of Early Soviet Sound,” Screen (July/August 1982): 3449. The Soviets did not make their first sound film until 1930, three years after the release of The Jazz Singer in the United States. For more on the connection between the technological development of sound cinema and the First Five-Year Plan, see Vincent Bohlinger, “The Development of Sound Technology in the Soviet Film Industry during the First Five-Year Plan,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 7, no. 2 (2013): 189-205.
(4.) Evgenii Margolit, Zhivye i mertvoe. Zametki k istorii sovetskogo kino 1920-kh-1960-kh godov (St. Petersburg: Seans, 2012), 84.
(5.) The Komsomol was the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League; the youth division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). It began as the Russian Young Communist League, or RKSM, but with the unification of the USSR in 1922, it was reformed into an all-union agency, the youth division of the All-Union Communist Party.
(6.) Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 8.
(7.) Charlotte Douglas, “Energetic Abstraction: Ostwald, Bogdanov, and Russian Post-Revolutionary Art,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art and Literature, edited by Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 76.
(8.) Ibid., 76-94.
(9.) Ibid., 80-81.
(10.) Ibid., 92.
(11.) For a detailed analysis of the context and work of USSR in Construction at Dne-prostroi, see Erika Wolf, USSR in Construction: From Avant Garde to Socialist Realist Practice (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1999). See especially 167-221.
(12.) Quote from Klucis, “Fotomontazh kak novyi vid agitatsionnogo iskusstva,” 124. Cited in Maria Gough, “John Heartfield, Gustav Klucis, and the Medium of Soviet Propaganda.” New German Critique 107 (Summer 2009): 138.
(13.) Wolf, USSR in Construction, 186-198.
(14.) On these debates, see Gough, “John Heartfield, Gustav Klucis, and the Medium of Soviet Propaganda,” and Erika Wolf, Koretsky: The Soviet Photo Poster: 1930-1984 (New York: The New Press, 2012), 2-6.
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(15.) For a wonderful discussion of this community and their efforts, see Yuri Tsivian, “The Wise and Wicked Game: Re-editing and Soviet Film Culture of the 1920s," Film History: An International Journal 8, no. 3 (1996): 327-343.
(16.) Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964), 9.
(17.) Alla Gadassik, “A Skillful Isis: Esfir Shub and the Documentarian as Caretaker," in A Companion to Documentary Film History, edited by Joshua Malitsky (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020). For more on Shub and gender in the postrevolutionary period, see Martin Stollery, “Eisenstein, Shub, and the Gender of the Author as Producer," Film History 14, no. 1 (2002): 87-99; and Esther Leslie, “Art, Documentary, and the Essay Film," Radical Philosophy 192 (July/August 2015): 7-14.
(18.) “Unplayed" (neigrovaia) film and “played" film were the preferred terms of debate at the time, over documentary/nonfiction versus fiction. The determining factor was the filmed material itself and whether it emanated from the real world (unplayed) or whether it was part of a world created with actors and sets (played). Being a proponent of “unplayed" film, however, did not imply a naïve realism, a failure to recognize how the image functioned as a sign, or the centrality of the image's role in larger montage sequences and structures.
(19.) For more on the trilogy, see my Post-Revolution Nonfiction Film: Building the Soviet and Cuban Nations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
(20.) Lev Tolstoy and the Russia of Nicholas II (1928) is considered lost.
(21.) Viktor Shklovsky, “Kuda Shagaet Dziga Vertov?" (Where Is Dziga Vertov Striding?), Sovetskii Ekran. In The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, edited by Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 152; and Sergei Tret'iakov, “Lef and Film," in Screen Reader 1: Cinema/Ideology/Politics, translated and edited by Ben Brewster (London: The Society for Education in Television, 1927), 307.
(22.) For more on this shift, see Mikhail Yampolsky, “Reality at Second Hand," translated by Derek Spring, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 11, no. 2 (1991): 161171; and my “Esfir Shub and the Film Factory-Archive: Soviet Documentary from 19251928," Screening the Past 17 (December 2004).
(23.) Shub and Vertov were understood as the most prominent nonfiction filmmakers of the period, sparking considerable critical conversation, and were the filmmakers who competed for the most prestigious nonfiction film commissions during the 1920s. Although their cinematic strategies and tactics were occasionally questioned (especially Vertov's), few questioned that they were ideologically aligned with Marxist-Leninist principles, the Bolsheviks, and the Communist Party.
(24.) Esfir Shub, “Neigrovaia fil'ma” (“Unplayed Film”), Kino i kultura 5, no. 6 (1929). See also Graham Roberts, Forward Soviet! (London: IB Tauris, 1999), 104. This approach perhaps reminds people of Jean Rouch's understanding of the camera as a catalyst in developing his thinking about cinéma-vérité. John MacKay unpacks the various historical works that locate Vertov as the forerunner to the cinéma-vérité movement in Dziga Vertov: Life and Works, Volume 2, 1922-1929, forthcoming from Academic Studies Press.
(25.) Quoted in Roberts, Forward Soviet!, 104.
(26.) See Roberts's discussion of the debates in Forward Soviet!, 92-107.
(27.) Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigorii Aleksandrov, “Statement on Sound,” in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, edited by Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 234-235. In a recently published collection on sound in Soviet cinema, Masha Salazkina argues that the book is part of an effort to move beyond the theory and debates of the time—many of which responded to the “Statement”—and account for the range of uses, the institutional practices through which they align, and the political pressures from which they, in part, emanate. See Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina, eds., Sound, Music, Speech in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), especially the introduction.
(28.) Dziga Vertov, “Mart Radioglaza,” Kino i zhizn 20 (1930): 20, 14, translated in Taylor and Christie, eds., The Film Factory, 299-301.
(29.) The Russian term “documentalizm” is translated differently by scholars. Richard Taylor in The Film Factory opts for “documentarism,” whereas Graham Roberts and Jeremy Hicks use “documentalism.” The latter seems to have taken hold.
(30.) “My prodolzhaem bor'bu,” Proletarskoe Kino 5 (1932): 1-2. In Taylor and Christie, eds., The Film Factory, 321-322.
(31.) Jeremy Hicks, Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film (London: IB Tauris), 83.
(32.) Lyobov Dyshlyuk, “Introduction,” Feminist Media Histories 2, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 13.
(33.) Gough, “John Heartfield, Gustav Klucis, and the Medium of Soviet Propaganda,” 134-135.
(34.) Esfir Shub, “Na podstupakh k vtoroi piatiletke” (“Approaches to the Second Five-Year Plan”) Proletarskoe Kino 4 (1932). Cited in Roberts, Forward Soviet!, 104.
(35.) John MacKay, “Film Energy: Process and Metanarrative in Dziga Vertov's The Eleventh Year (1928),” October 121 (Summer 2007): 41-78.
(36.) Ibid., 50.
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(37.) Esfir Shub, Zhizn' moia—kinematograf (My Life—Cinema) (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972), 281.
(38.) For more on the theremin, see Albert Glinsky, The Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
(39.) Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 2.
(40.) Shub, Zhizn Moia, 284.
(41.) Lilya Kaganovsky, The Voice of Technology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 124.
(42.) It's also important to keep in mind that, unlike for the trilogy, Shub is shooting her own material in K.Sh.E. and not working with found footage, a situation that likely gives her more flexibility in terms of experimentation.
(43.) Yuri Tsivian, “Turning Objects, Toppled Pictures: Give and Take between Vertov's Films and Constructivist Art,” October 121 (Summer 2007): 109-110.
(44.) Shub, Zhizn Moia, 281-284. To be fair, the sound that was not dubbed is of poor quality and doesn't evoke the experience Shorin hopes for in the earlier quote.
(45.) Ibid., 284.
(46.) Shub, “The Advent of Sound in Cinema,” in Taylor and Christie, eds., The Film Factory, 274.
(47.) For more on Cooper and Dneprostroi, see Anne Rassweiler, The Generation of Power: The History of Dneprostroi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) and Harold Dorn, “Hugh Lincoln Cooper and the First Détente,” Technology and Culture 20, no. 2 (April 1979): 322-347.
(48.) Evgeny Margolit, “Heteroglossia in Early Soviet Sound Cinema,” in Kaganovsky and Salazkina, Sound, Music Speech in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema, 119.
(49.) Ibid., 122. This “balance” speaks to Shub's goal of making an “organic” film, an idea she discusses at length in Zhizn Moia. Kaganovsky analyzes and extrapolates on this tendency in The Voice of Technology, 118-120.
(50.) Ibid., 124.
(51.) Shub, Zhizn Moia, 282.
(52.) Lev Shatov, quoted in Roberts, 68-69.
(53.) Shub, Zhizn Moia, 282.
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(54.) Esfir Shub, “And Again the Newsreel,” translated by Anastasia Kostina, Feminist Media Histories 2, no. 3 (2016): 22-23.
(55.) With this last metaphor, I'm referencing Tsivian's description of Vertov's career as a “line defined by the resistance of time—just as the resistance of air is said to be needed to keep birds and gliders airborne.” Tsivian, “Introduction: Dziga Vertov and His Time,” in Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 1.
Joshua Malitsky
Joshua Malitsky, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Indiana University
SovietWall Newspapers: Social(ist) Media of an Analog Age
Birgitte Beck Pristed
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Aug 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.5
The article examines Soviet wall newspapers (stengazety) as a nonelectronic, low-tech medium to discuss the social, material, and visual implications not of its ideological content, but of this genuine socialist medium as such. As a peer-to-peer network for social organization, it assembled readers/writers, educated their political vision, and forced them to act and react, but not always as the mass-printed press and editorial manuals imagined it. At its worst, the wall newspaper incarnated totalitarian socialism and contributed to a totalitarian communication system, not by forbidding citizens to express themselves but by forcing them to do so, not by denying citizens information access but by insisting that citizens should become informal informants themselves. At its best, its encouragement of underprivileged collectives of participatory readers/writers to reuse, appropriate, and remix any material at hand to co-create the unfinished and unfinishable picture of communism represented socialism in its most open and nonauthoritative form.
Keywords: Soviet Union, communism, wall newspaper, stengazeta, media history, print media, social media, visual culture, material culture
Nonprofessional user-generated content, co-created by local networks and groups of youngsters and adults sharing short texts and visual materials by posting them on the wall, was a living and debated Soviet communist media practice almost a century ago. In the years 1923-1926, the Worker and Peasant Correspondents movement (Rabsel'korovskoe dvizhenie) invented a new medium whose content was produced by poorly educated but literate workers and peasants who wrote and exchanged small entries (zametki) with plain and simple accounts of local meetings, social trivia, and events, taking up problems from the factory floor. They presented these issues not only as readers' letters in the “big” state-printed press but also, eventually, in the “little press” of selfmade, self-edited newspapers published directly on the walls of factories, clubs, and other institutions.1 If we are to apply a deliberately anachronistic formula to the medium of these Soviet wall newspapers (stengazety), we might paraphrase Lenin's famous quote
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“Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country” and say, “Soviet stengazety are Socialist social media minus electrification.”2 This chapter approaches the wall newspaper as a nonelectronic and, for its time, low-tech medium to discuss the social, material, and visual implications not of its obvious ideological content but of this specifically socialist and “social” medium as such.
In doing so, I do not intend to overstretch a comparison of two incomparable forms of media from very different sociocultural and historical contexts. A wall newspaper was not instantly published by a single click of a button; it was a laborious process to produce each issue, and both texts and images were subject to editing by hierarchically organized editorial boards increasingly controlled by local party cells and union committees. Despite occasionally celebrating quota-exceeding workers (Stakhanovites) or top-performing schoolchildren (nashi otlichniki) and providing a career step for individual Komsomol members of its editorial boards, the wall newspaper did not per se facilitate (p- 111) the creation of unique user profiles for its readers/writers but rather profiled local collectives. Nevertheless, recent research attention to the political, cultural, and economic significance of “new media” may help alter our perception of wall newspapers as simply an inferior, ephemeral, and amateur part of the history of print to being rather a central communist contribution to the global long media history of user-generated content.
Hence, this contribution aims to identify what type of progressive or regressive media technology, and thus technology of power, the wall newspapers represented, situated as they were at the intersection of communist print culture, poster art, and performance, and to discuss the question of political authority inherent in this medium. Were stengazety a repressive medium of a totalitarian state that forced its citizens to express themselves?3 Alternatively, were they an authority-sanctioned but regime-subversive, self-published source with a broad and regular outreach? With special attention to its social, material, and visual aspects, the study suggests that the wall newspaper was more than a tool for increasing literacy and linguistic skills and turning workers into writers. First of all, it was a medium for social organization of local networks. It assembled readers/writ-ers, educated their political views and vision, and forced them to act and react, but perhaps not always as the state-printed press and editorial guidebooks imagined it. From its outset, the medium of wall newspapers required its participating users to add to, appropriate, adjust, and remix the words and images of the party press. Even later, as wall newspapers became established as obligatory, omnipresent celebratory decorations of Soviet visual space, and editorial boards were guided to give more priority to reproductive copy-and-paste rather than destructive cut-and-paste methods, the user-created nature of its form and content contributed to a certain unpredictability, making its function as a social and political corrective fragile.
During the analog twentieth century, Soviet socialism saw the advent of a state press that was intended to ensure a primarily monolog transmission of political enlightenment from
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the Communist Party to the people. However, in the aftermath of the Revolution and Civil War, a complete breakdown of the paper and printing industry and a severe crisis in distribution and circulation of the party press resulted in “information rationing.”4 Partly to compensate for the lack of printing paper for individual copies, and partly to conquer the visual surface of public space, the party disseminated its messages by displaying sheets of printed newspapers on the walls of public institutions such as factories and workers' clubs for collective reading. Galina Starkova identifies a forerunner to the later wall newspapers as early as 1918, in the Russian Telegraph Agency's display of news items in the ROSTA wzndows-hand-duplicated, stenciled propaganda picture sequences that were displayed in the windows of train stations and kiosks and created by a network of artists and poets, in Moscow most prominently led by the likes of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Dmitrii Moor, and Aleksandr Rodchenko.5 These are the types (p- 112) of communication networks and difficult material publishing conditions from which the Worker and Peasant Correspondents movement grew, an initiative that aimed to increase Soviet media literacy and strengthen the political education of proletarians, peasants, and Red Army soldiers by turning them into not only readers but also writers, illustrators, and editors.
Initially, Bolshevik leader and Marxist theorist Nikolay Bukharin (1888-1938) and leftwing artists such as those in the Left Front of the Arts (LEF) hoped that the new amateur documentarists would bring both the party and literary writing closer to the realities of proletarian life.6 They celebrated the workers' correspondents (rabkory) as heroes who sacrificed themselves to reveal truth, as in the infamous 1924 case of Comrade Malinovsky, a rural correspondent who was killed after exposing the corruption of a local party official in the wall newspaper.7 However, as the invited criticism derailed, revealing openly anti-Soviet sentiments, Bukharin and his allies in 1926 strengthened the local party cells' control of the rabkory.8 Subsequently, Stalin regarded the wall newspapers as an effective instrument for local party influence. During the Great Terror, the wall newspaper became a medium for local public denunciations of coworkers, and in the postwar period the production of the stengazeta gradually turned into a chiefly celebratory obligation for Young Pioneers, with revival periods of its critical potential as seen during the Thaw.9
Existing research has approached wall newspapers specifically as a journalistic and linguistic genre. Michael Gorham has discussed the authority of rabsel'kor language and demonstrated the discursive ambiguity merging the colloquial and semi-intellectual registers of the Revolution in their writings; Jeremy Hicks has examined the shifting political attitudes to the Worker and Peasant Correspondents movement and literary representations of the rabkory, while Catriona Kelly has discussed the use of low style language and genres versus official discourse in wall newspapers, mostly of the early Soviet period.10 In addition to this, local archive studies of regional stengazety have been made, for example, by historians Dmitrii Safonov and Galina Starkova.11
This article seeks to supplement these studies by taking a media approach to Soviet wall newspapers, analyzing the diverse forms of their physical apparatus and visual layout. The self-made wall newspapers represent a dynamic medium that spans a broad spec
Page 3 of 28 trum of formats, hybrid materials, various images, and typefaces. Many factories' wall newspapers that began in the early 1920s as hand- and homemade one-off copies were established during the decade as partly machine-typed and even primitively duplicated copies. The newspaper branch of the Russian State Library contains a large collection of such local Soviet factory and village wall newspapers, but the issues have been systematically collected only from the dates when they changed status from handwritten ephemera to “print” issues, albeit in tiny numbers. Thus, in addition to the isolated examples of hand-drawn and handwritten issues that have been preserved, my reconstruction of the fragile wall newspaper medium also relies on the large number of published do-it-yourself manuals for their editorial boards (especially from the mid-1920s), with the obvious limitation that these official guidebooks discuss what wall newspapers should be like, and only indirectly, by criticizing problematic examples, do they offer an (p- 113) impression of how the wall newspapers were actually realized. However, together with the many visual representations of these newspapers in Soviet photography and painting and in exhibition catalogues from annual wall newspaper competitions, these editorial guides do offer insight into the spread and development of the medium.
Contemporary discussions of how the twenty-first-century advent of the digital has fundamentally changed the premises of communication tend to present social media as a phenomenon without precedents.12 For example, José van Dijck, besides offering a brief retrospection into the early 1970s Silicon Valley “geek” counterculture that combined liberal values of user empowerment and personal freedom with left-wing values of collectivity and connectivity, begins his “critical history of social media” with the invention of the World Wide Web in 1991.13 However, other scholars have observed analogies between contemporary uses of digital media and previous forms of information networks. One such attempt at a long history of “new” media technologies is Michael Zimmer's description of the evolution of the hyperlink, beginning with the renvois in Diderot's Encyclopedia, which subverted traditional knowledge organization and hierarchies by allowing for more active reader participation.14 In popular form, journalist Tom Standage has expanded the historical scope of “social media” in his 2013 Writing on the Wall: Social Media— The First 2,000 Years. However, his bestseller follows a traditional “media canon” of Western bourgeois-liberal society that begins with Cicero's Roman letter network, visits Martin Luther's wall theses and pamphlet circulation and news exchange in London coffeehouses, and concludes with the advent of APRANET as a “rebirth” of social media. Standage relates the twentieth-century rise of mass media (e.g., broadcast radio, TV and the repurposing of mass printed newspapers) to a centralization of the media system that occurred both in the capitalist world of media consumers and in totalitarian regimes (using Nazi Germany, but not the Stalinist Soviet Union, as his example). He thus regards the broadcast era's mass-mediated one-way, top-down directed news stream as an exception or bracket in the long history of two-way communication, dependent on social network exchange, which reoccurred with the advent of digital media.15
The perception of a binary opposition between twenty-first-century digital social media and twentieth-century analog mass media has contributed to a polarized discussion of the political potential of contemporary social media. The discussion initially involved a roman-ticization of social media as a revolutionary vehicle that empowers users, organizes mass protests, and unmasks corrupt authorities, from the 2010-2012 Arab Spring to the 20132014 Euromaidan in Kiev. Especially after these events, romanticization was replaced by a disillusioned reaction to the disinformation, manipulation, (p- 114) and surveillance of social media users. However, if globalization of media flows represents a key characteristic of the digital advent, we must also consider the historical media experiences of regions other than the Western world to avoid making false projections of the supposedly inherited “democratic” qualities of social media onto media landscapes without a long democratic tradition. In his study of the role of social media in contemporary Russia, Ilya Kirya examines the conditions of increasing governmental media control and attempts to disconnect and isolate oppositional media platforms from mainstream public discourse. Kiriya bases his pessimistic view of the public impact of oppositional Russian online media today on a historical parallel to the two allegedly disconnected Soviet-era information flows of official state media versus unofficial circulation of prohibited materials among an oppositional but isolated elite without access to and political impact on a broader public.16
The present study seeks to nuance the discussion of contemporary social media, by examining one socialist aspect of its “long history.” However, in contrast to Kiriya, this case study of Soviet wall newspapers does not examine an opposition between the official centralized press culture and the unofficial underground culture of samizdat, but rather reveals a continuum from the state-printed newspaper to the self-published wall newspaper, the messages of the latter both encouraged from above and, at the same time, open to appropriation—if not distortion—from below. Hence, at the local level, wall newspapers were both “semi-institutionalized” and “semi-informal,” and this may point to certain ripples of “media diversity” within rather than outside the centralized, totalitarian, socialist media system.
In his book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, which debates the impact of current digital reproduction technologies on the notion of copyright, law professor Lawrence Lessig also introduces an opposition between the two concepts of “Read Only” (RO) culture versus “Read/Write” (RW) culture, an analogy he derives from the permissions a user has to only read or both read and write a computer file. Lessig suggests that the twentieth-century advent of analog mass media such as the phonograph, radio, film, and television replaced a long tradition of participatory amateur culture. Hence, these new “RO” media technologies enabled large-scale mechanical reproduction and thus passive consumption of, for example, a particular piece of music that had hitherto only been possible to share through a live (amateur) instrumental or vocal performance, in which the participants co-created “RW” culture. Lessig refers to the fear
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of the American composer John Philip Sousa at the turn of the last century that the phonograph would destroy ordinary people's self-governing capacity to create culture, give less access to music instruments, and reduce culture to a product of the elite. But Lessig points out that the digital revolution of the twenty-first century has not only removed the constraints of analog technologies by enabling infinite consumer or user-generated copies that are not inferior to the original, but it has also produced “the writable web” and social media that sparked a potentially more democratic new hybrid “RO"/“RW" culture that is open to endless user additions, appropriations, and textual remixes.17
Soviet wall newspapers may be regarded as a nonelectronic Read/Write (RW) medium, potentially contributing to “ordinary people's self-governing capacity to co-create (p- 115) participatory amateur culture," and this “file-sharing" ambition of early Soviet communist cultural production is one of the features that makes it distinct from the twentieth-century development of a predominantly “RO" culture in the capitalist consumer societies. The Soviet Communist Party actively encouraged the development of a participatory amateur culture by granting new readers access to (some) texts, while prohibiting access to others. To what extent did it also grant Soviet stengazeta readers/writers permission to add, appropriate, remix, and ultimately, change the picture files and messages of the party in this medium? Or should the Soviet Communist “RW" culture rather remind us that the underexplored long media history of user-generated content, in fact, also encompasses a totalitarian past of violating the borders of public and private communication, and that user-generated content does not automatically involve or facilitate a “democratization" of content production and distribution?
Unlike the Tsarist regime, legitimized as an eternal God-given order, or governments of bourgeois-liberal societies, legitimized by people's regular votes, the early Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat was in a comparatively fragile position, but it sought to legitimize itself by constantly seeking confirmation by the formerly suppressed masses through its communication policies. One example is how the centralized party press invited readers' letters and responses, which were eventually culled to support a certain political and propagandist line, as argued by Matthew Lenoe, another—how Stalin's authority ambiguously depended on the echo chamber feedback of the infamous endless applauses to his speeches, as discussed by Kirill Postoutenko.18 The wall newspaper represented a way of socially organizing such an actively participating mass audience locally, but as a medium, it was potentially more open to distortion and destruction, because it not only invited an orchestrated response but also required that its users mediate and edit their messages themselves.
According to the memories of chief administrator of the Council of People's Commissars, V. Smol'ianinov, Lenin was supposedly an eager reader of the fresh issues of the Council of People's Commissars' and the Council of Labor and Defense's wall newspapers: “As
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soon as a new issue of the stengazeta had been put up, Vladimir Il'ich could be seen among the first readers crowded around it.”19 However, this Lenin legend is not sustained by the propaganda iconography, which tended to depict the singularity of Lenin in a privileged position not among the first, but as the first reader—but of the “big” newspaper, Pravda—bent over his writing desk and absorbed in solitary reading.20 In contrast, the large dimensions of wall newspapers, which were typically presented on 1- to 3-meter-long sheets of paper or board that would be 60 to 70 centimeters wide, forced the audience to stand up and form a crowd while reading. As compared to poster (p- 116) art, the relatively long decoding time needed for wall newspapers would accumulate a (preferably agile) group of readers surrounding each fresh issue. Hence, Soviet propaganda photos often depict wall newspapers as the center of attention of several anonymous readers crowded together in front of a wall panel, with their backs turned to the camera.21 A 1925 editorial guidebook emphasized the wall newspapers' new type of “social” reading; one chapter contributed by Aleksandr Zonin and V. Grunin argued that the new proletarian social sphere “needs its openness, its press, its critic, its free exchange of opinion and experience,” while another contributor, Iakov Shafir, referred to wall newspapers as a sign of a “broadening of social relations and the creation of a new proletarian public sphere.”22 The wall newspaper represented a reading format deprived of recreational comfort and private contemplation; instead, it aimed to confront, assemble, and organize readers.
While the major task of the state-printed press was to disseminate the party line and discuss major societal and ideological issues, the primary purpose of the wall newspapers was rather to reflect on local, daily life (byt) and work in production, culture clubs, and villages. Some guidebook contributions stressed readers' activism by remarking, for example, that the stengazeta should not only mirror the local factory floor, “since it is not issued for the viewer, but for the participant of a particular working collective.”23 Hence, Soviet wall newspapers were originally intended for social and participatory reading, with the potential of turning passive recipients into active users. In the villages, where stengazety were often the only newspapers available, this new Read/Write medium was considered a “weapon” for combating illiteracy by training users' reading and writing skills, but it was also an instrument for assembling peasants to shape their political vi-sion.24
However, the formation of a new and broader proletarian social sphere seemed to involve an unintended trivialization of content. In their efforts to create a press close to reality and daily life, the critics of stengazety complained about the difficulty local editors and correspondents manifested in distinguishing the relevant “personal and intimate” from the irrelevant “private,” since the readers/writers worked and lived together, knew each other, and thus communicated in a forum deprived of distance. Hence, one author's objection to the worker correspondents' bad habit of reporting about “who is going out with whom” suggests that though such trivia might have been considered a politically inappropriate topic by semi-intellectual stengazety activists, it might have been a widespread and maybe even the most read column of local wall newspapers.25 Though the soldier correspondents (voenkory) of the Red Army barracks wrote under more strictly “disciplined”
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editorship than other types of correspondents, stengazeta information about the other sex reportedly was the top category of interest to soldier readers.26 However, local correspondents (stenkory) could of course stylistically rephrase the simple but tabooed question of how to date girls “without bad consequences for them” and thus turn it into a burning political issue of modern family patterns and sex education, as quoted and ridiculed by one critic: “The question of young men and women's mutual relations is being hotly debated.”27
Though simple summaries of party messages and political news took up the primary, large-font columns of the wall newspapers, the social function of the medium as morale (p. 117) corrective should not be underestimated. Such correctives are especially evident in the wall newspapers of large collectives of poorly educated workers, as seen for example in the wall newspaper, The Red Textile Worker (Krasnyi tekstil'shchik: Stengaz rabochikh fabriki Bol'shaia Ivanovo-Voznesenskaia manufaktúra).28 Issues of this title from the late 1920s frequently rebuked episodes of drinking and swearing in the factory, along with violence and harassment against female workers by their husbands or coworkers, and other such topics that were certainly not included in the editorial guidebooks. In contrast, more graphically elaborate and professional-looking wall newspapers produced by technically skilled workers, such as The Light of Leninism (Luch leninisma), which explicitly identified itself as a party and Komsomol organ and was produced by worker correspondents and the in-house lithographers at the Leningrad State Tobacco Company, featured comparatively less critique of social incidents, and instead more “glossy” propaganda entries.29
However, both of these wall newspapers, though from opposite ends of a diverse spectrum, presented frank critiques of the actual working conditions and engaged, for example, in the ongoing fight to have proper ventilators installed at the factories.30 This was in keeping with the 1920s do-it-yourself manuals for stengazeta correspondents, which stressed that these newspapers enabled the social organization and political activism of a working collective by publishing facts and thus turning individual episodes and evidence into shared experience among workers, which prompted reaction and change at the facto-ry.31 Eventually, especially in the Young Pioneers' and schoolchildren's wall newspapers, this ideal of seeing and observing, articulating, sharing, and acting for change was replaced by a schematic notion that reduced the wall newspaper's functions to the dual tasks of “revealing insufficiencies” (vskryvat nedostatki) and “marking successes” (ot-mechat' uspekhi) in its reports of daily life and work, thus introducing a social regime of likes and dislikes for local denunciations and celebratory heroic discourse.32 Early stengazeta manuals recommended that the members of the editorial board (redkollegiia) maintain anonymous profiles in order to protect them against personal sanctions following controversial or too “courageous” content.33 In contrast, the postwar manuals required that each entry and colophon specify full names, professions, and affiliations of all participating correspondents to strengthen control over writers and the responsibility of editors.34 Importantly, however, stengazety never became subject to external, prepublication censorship, though scandalous issues could have severe consequences for the editors involved.35
By the mid-1930s, the stengazeta reached a mythical status as a force of socialist civilization, in the much propagandized aircraft rescue of all 104 passengers of the SS Chelyuskin 1933-1934 Arctic expedition, who after being stranded to winter on a drifting ice floe, began issuing a wall newspaper (what else would they do?), entitled We never give in! (Ne sdadimsia!).36 Hence, the wall newspaper came to represent a robust, low-tech, detached channel of social organization and collective discipline that was capable of upholding an independent information system under any—even spectacularly extremeconditions, and of reaching the most remote corners of the large Soviet Empire, making the Stalinist state newspapers and weak radio signal from Moscow look (p- 118) strangely inferior. During the Nazi occupation of World War II, Soviet partisans' underground wall newspapers further sustained this stengazeta mythos.37
The 1920s wall newspapers' initial function as an ersatz medium was reflected in the inexpensive materials of which they were made. Just as the content needed to be easy to decode, the wall newspaper also had to be simple to construct, even for poorly educated village residents without access to electronic infrastructures. In his 1925 do-it-yourself guide, A. Lobovskii considered the low-tech form only a temporary stage caused by industrial “backwardness” and the destruction of printing houses during the Civil War; he predicted that “the further development path of wall newspapers will lead them to typography.”38 His prophecy did not come true, as the manually produced wall newspaper remained a distinctive medium throughout the Soviet period. However, at the stengazeta competitions and exhibitions of the mid-1920s, the question of typography evoked lively discussions. While the majority of wall newspapers were handwritten, those in the largest factories of the urban centers, which addressed several hundred workers, were typewritten and sometimes manually duplicated, for example on a hectograph, a gelatin transfer tablet that, as the name suggests, produced up to one hundred copies.39 One exhibition reviewer, Boris Gorodetskii, enthusiastically embraced this development, noting that it was both faster and easier to distribute typed or printed stengazety news than to produce them through the toilsome process of writing in pencil and subsequently lining each letter with pen and ink.40 Another reviewer, A. Kurs, evaluated both typewritten and handprinted wall newspapers negatively, stating that such newspapers contained far too much text with letters far too small, making them unsuitable for wall display, and especially for inexperienced readers. Hence, the wall newspaper should not be just a poor imitation of the “big” state-printed newspaper, but a medium in its own right, and thus closer to the visual art of posters, but at the same time, borrowing from the printed press a clear layout with separate columns, rubrics, and headers.41 In the villages especially, where typewriters were not available, the manuals recommended a high proportion of illustrations, with short and simple texts for the semiliterate readers. The manuals stressed the necessity of recruiting contributors with legible handwriting to join the editorial boards but also recommended developing penmanship by imitating the separate letters of typewritten text, preferably using simple capital sans-serif letters (without decorative strokes) rather than using the illegible connected letters of script handwriting.42 Lying in between this binary of hand- versus typewritten variously advocated in the guidebooks, the actual preserved titles at the Russian State Library collection are characterized by all kinds of hybrid variations. Often they mix typed and handwritten entries within a single issue, or they contain handwritten (p-119) corrections or comments added to the frequent typos and spelling mistakes; some combine typewritten columns with handwritten/painted headers; in some it is the other way around: stenciled emblems and header fonts with handwritten columns. Despite the use of slogans, formulaic language, clichés, and established icons, the "RW" amateur ethos of wall newspapers thus adds to them, perhaps un-intendedly so, a rather heterogeneous expression.
In his 1926 book, Gorodetskii recommended white ivory paper for illustrations, arguing that one 25-kopek sheet would be enough for two issues, and advised against economizing on paper by adducing several examples of how insufficient paper quality had ruined entire wall newspapers.43 In reality, editors would reuse any available print materials at hand. For example, a solemnly elaborated 1924 special issue of a Moscow Young Pioneer group's wall newspaper Bonfire sparks (Iskry kostra) mourning Lenin's death was simply painted on the verso of a printed poster with expired 1920 statistics of the railway workers' achievements at their volunteer Saturday work, the subbotniki.44 This proletarian palimpsest pragmatism creates a certain tension between the elevated message and its medium, a flexible and reversible piece of wastepaper. Hence, the wall newspapers offer a different perspective on the visual propaganda language of printed poster art by reminding us that such posters were not simply passively received by a manipulated mob: they could be reused by amateurs who would potentially reverse them and rework their blank versos.
A material distinguishing the pasted-up wall newspapers from the medium of the ordinary press was glue. At the same time, the media politics of glue enabled a physical connectivity between the two information networks of wall newspapers and the state-printed press, with the latter being recirculated as fragmented collage clips in the first. As a substitute for the relatively expensive joiner's glue, some manuals contained do-it-yourself recipes for mixing a glue paste out of any kind of flour or potato starch and boiling water. Apart from the indispensable ink, the guides recommended watercolor paint and fine brushes for detailed illustrations, but the paint could also be home-made by mixing glue—alterna-tively, eggs and vinegar—with powdered pigments that, according to the guides, were available in any drugstore.45 Glue had to be applied with care not to soak the cheap sheets of ordinary writing paper or the thin paper of newspaper clippings being inserted, and it required some cooperative discipline and precision work on the part of the editors to paste illustration and text sheets straight onto the frame.46 Because of the organic material, most glued wall newspapers from the early Soviet period have not survived due to decomposition. Their large, unhandy format represented a further obstacle to their
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preservation, something the contemporary sources already reflected on: “The wall newspapers are very difficult to preserve. Almost always, after being taken down after a certain amount of time, they are destroyed.”47
In spite of the short-lived character of the medium, the process of production and layout for each issue of a wall newspaper was quite lengthy—an estimated twenty-five to thirty hours of work—and even when editors divided the tasks, it required a considerable extra effort on top of an ordinary working week, no less time consuming than social media is accused of being today. Preserved examples of this amateur medium do not (p- 120) leave the impression of hackwork, but often stand out by their fine and accurate hand-produced text and decorations. Due to the time costs, despite being called “newspapers,” stengaze-ty were usually not published daily but rather issued as a form of periodical, often on a monthly or fortnightly basis. Furthermore, as they were attached to a veneer frame or pinned directly on the wall, stengazety had the disadvantage of being a quite static medium. However, in 1924, a Red Army military correspondent (voenkor) named F. Mel'nikov developed a more flexible subtype of stengazeta, the so-called il'ichovka. (Although the name borrowed its legitimacy from Lenin's patronymic “Ilyich,” the Bolshevik leader never mentioned wall newspapers in his writings about the Soviet press.) The il'ichovka was made of veneer, (tent) canvas, or board, onto which one would attach a set of permanent rectangular frames, resembling little pockets, open at the top and with the three other sides reinforced by strips of leather or board. Small paper sheets with short news rubrics could be easily slid into the little frames, then removed and replaced with fresh news, thus establishing a reader interface of dynamic content within the fixed layout framework. A variation of the il'ichovka principle was invented by a group of metal workers from a machine factory in the Kostroma region, which introduced a kind of news archive when fresh news sheets were placed on the top of the old ones; thus, readers could flip through each stengazeta section like a wall calendar.48
As documented by the linguist Elena Markasova, the il'ichovka could be folded into a compact album or folded out for display not only on the wall but also placed on tables and elsewhere. Hence, it was a portable reading device that troop units could carry with shoulder straps on marches, and war correspondents praised the il'ichovka as the most suitable form of presenting front news during times of war. However, traveling agitators going from door to door in villages could also benefit from this portability; this may have borne a certain resemblance to the prerevolutionary tradition of selling popular prints, lubki.49 Multiple designs were developed in the following years: for example, the il'ichovka could be converted into a portable case (gazeta-sumka) or a folder (gazetaskladen') covered with oilcloth to protect from outdoor wind and weather. The mobility of the device became an end in itself, as is evident from examples of rotating il'ichovka stands that displayed the sheets on wooden mill wings and thus contributed to an exciting reading experience.50
Propaganda photos frequently depicted children carrying their wall newspapers around on parade displays.51 This dynamic aspect was taken even further in another subgenre of the wall newspaper, the Young Pioneers' “living newspapers” (zhivye gazety, zhivgazety),
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Each “show issue” combined movement and mass ornamented choreography with the display of visual banners and boards, dialogs and declarations, songs, and music by a “noise orchestra” (with spoons, pot lids, etc., as instruments). Despite the theatrical approach, two directors, A. Afanas'eva and L. Berman, stressed that zhivgazety were not spectacles: they refrained from drama, costumes, and decorations, and aimed instead to document and discuss current news and questions taken up by the participating children themselves. The authors argued that “seeing [something] with your own (p- 121) eyes is better than coming to know it from others' words ... . Things are not going to start with meetings and stories, but with a show,”52 and later they continued: “This is not just a wall newspaper hanging on the wall in silence.”53
Both these quotes point to the fact that the medium of wall newspapers tended to leap into the performative, because the ideology required that stengazety should have a perlocu-tionary effect on readers and change their behavior or—to recall the catchphrase of J. L. Austin's speech act theory—readers/writers should “do things with words.”54 To some extent, the rhetoric of the writing guides resembles the early millennial revolutionary romanticism associated with the emergence of mobile devices and the expectation that peer-to-peer virtual communication leads to face-to-face, “off-the-wall” political action by an enlightened (or “smart”) mob.55 However, as Lorenz Erren has argued, the staged and the performative are also totalitarian characteristics of the entire Stalinist communication system's “grand social drama,” in which “[a]ctors and audience were identical; uninvolved spectators did not exist.”56 Erren traces the spread of criticism and “self-criticism” (samokritika) and the related acts of public denunciation/confession as a Stalinist social norm (or abnormality) precisely back to the 1920s wall newspaper movement, and he singles out the journalist and later Glavlit chief censor Sergei Ingulov as one of the fathers of the self-criticism ideology.57 However, by 1925, there was not yet consensus on the notion of self-criticism. Hence, in a 1925 volume on wall newspapers, one contributor, the revolutionary pedagogue V. Bulgakova, brought up samokritika in the context of child editors' autonomy (samoupravlenie), initiative (samodeiatel'nost'), and self-control (samokontrol'), which she said should serve as the fundamental organizational principle of children's wall newpapers. However, the volume's editors, Aleksandr Efremin and In-gulov himself, strongly criticized Bulgakova in oppositional editorial footnotes to her contribution, stating that it was rather the other way around: the existing newspaper structure was an organizational force in itself, a prerequisite to “support” the children's own activities.58
Ingulov's editorial guidebook position is radical, because he suggests that the material medium is an agent organizing the editors, rather than the opposite. However, the actual preserved issues of wall newspapers reflect that stengazety were walls made of paper, not of monolithic stone, and, physically, they were easy to tear down. The aforementioned victims denounced in The Red Textile Worker did not simply succumb passively to self-critical remorse; but rather than expressing verbal opposition, they reacted physically against the hate speech by tearing apart, overpainting, overwriting, or gluing over compromising entries in the newspaper's shaming campaigns (see Figure 5.1).
Figure 5.1 Examples of complaints about the frequent destruction of wall newspapers. Krasnyi tekstil'shchik (Stengaz rabochikh f-ki BIVM) (a) no. 4 (91); (b) no. 8 (95); and (c) no. 2 (189), 1928. The caricaturist, whose signature is unfortunately indecipherable, appears quite professional for this large factory wall newspaper.
Collection of the Russian State Library
This forceful, even violent response had more in common with the ritual duel of nineteenth-century Russian aristocratic society than with the free exchange of opinions in an ideally open, modern newspaper debate. However, in the proletarian reversal of the upper classes' honor/offense spectacle, the combatants would not meet one to one, but rather as one target hitting back against a backstabbing mob. Obviously, such powerless attempts to obstruct wall news circulation, which could perhaps be characterized as a kind of “censorship from below,” was a type of media control similarly ineffective to contemporary attempts to delete or block unwanted social media posts, since the victim (p. 122) would risk being subjected to repeated exposure and ridicule in the following issue. Nevertheless, in comparison to the contemporary “undeletability” of social media data, the wall newspapers remained a destructible medium, and as a means of totalitarian communication they appeared strikingly fragile, despite their forceful presence.
The amateur ethos of “everyone can become a writer” also envisioned letting everyone become an artist. But in his review of the First Leningrad Governorate Exhibition of Wall Newspapers (1925), Gorodetskii critically remarked that a spectacular large illustration of a Young Pioneer boy pointing to the future with his right hand, in the impressive Pioneer wall newspaper Follow Il'ich's [Lenin's] Way (Po puti Il'icha), looked too good. It did not resemble children's drawings, the rubric content was too |(p- 123) (p. 124) reworked, and the headers appeared too professional and adult directed.59 Likewise, he scolded a village stengazeta in the competition for being more about peasants than by the peasants, and he suspected the Komsomol personnel of assisting too much. Instead, he recommended that writers provide their own amateur illustrations for their own articles, since this would ensure the closest relationship between illustration and content.60
Apparently, however, amateurism encountered some limitations when it came to the portrayal of party leaders. The child editors of the aforementioned Lenin obituary issue of Bonfire sparks seemed painfully aware of this when they inserted an iconoclastic disclaimer under their imperfectly hand-drawn portrait of Lenin with reference to a much-quoted contemporary poem by Nikolay Poletaev: “No artist has painted / A true portrait of Lenin / Ages to come will complete / Lenin's unfinished portrait.”61 This not-yet-delin-eated (nedorisovannii) character of not only communist iconography but of the entire socialist experiment is reflected in the wall newspapers' metareflective obsession with their Page 15 of 28
own shortcomings (nedostatki). In his review, Gorodetskii criticized another unsuccessful hand-drawn full figure of Lenin for distorting the image of the leader and disrupting the entire issue of the wall newspaper.62 The depiction was based on a cropped, widely circulated photograph of Lenin standing with his right hand in his pocket, which originally presented him in a relaxed conversation with his secretary Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich on a recuperative stroll after the August 1918 assassination attempt that left a bullet permanently in his left shoulder.63 However, the anonymous stengazeta imitation featured an outstretched arm (unconventionally, the left arm) pointing to the future achievement of full communism; this is a fine example of what Lessig would probably call a user addition, remixing the original iconic image.64
Gorodetskii recommended that instead of portraying Lenin through clumsy hand drawings, editors should use a cut-and-paste technique of simply appropriating official portraits of leaders, photographs, and illustrations clipped directly from the “big” newspapers. He called attention to what he considered a successful example in the Khalturinets Tribune (Tribuna Khalturintsa), the work of the Leningrad spinning factory named after the revolutionary 1880 Winter Palace bomber Stepan Khalturin: the issue included a sculptural depiction of a female worker with one arm raised—this time, the right arm— and a book under the other. The illustration had been neatly cut out of a printed newspaper and glued into the wall newspaper column, with a local slogan added below the diagonal arm of the inserted picture: “Female worker, write more to your stengazeta!”65 Both examples of pictorial remakes change the status of the original images from the official party press. The hand-drawn imitation ambiguously added more power to the pose of the convalescent Lenin, while at the same time depriving the left-handed gesture of its authority. The second example remade the official icon by demonumentalizing the static female figure of the worker, colloquially addressing it in the singular “you” form and enabling a dialogic identification with the sculpture.
In his comments on the exhibited wall newspapers, Gorodetskii does not use the word “photomontage” but rather “amateur ‘technique'” (kustarnaia "tekhnika”), even (p- 125) putting “technique” in quotes. He explains the widespread use of cut-and-paste illustrations from the printed press as an “interesting novelty” that addresses the lack of both professionals and paper:
Artists are difficult to find in the villages, but after all, journals and newspapers, though in small numbers, make their way there. It is difficult to imagine the sources from which one or another illustration has been cut out, but at times they have been so carefully selected, so accurately colored, that, from a first glance, they give the impression of drawings made for the topic of the particular article.66
Perhaps as a result of the communist rejection of private property, the visual culture of stengazety did not recognize what we would call the intellectual property rights of the appropriated images. Neither did it recognize the party's ownership of the official state press pictures that it amateurishly reworked into new expressions. While later critiques of the Soviet avant-garde filmmakers' advanced montage techniques or artists' complex poster collage techniques often accused such methods of being incomprehensible or illegible to the broad masses, the primitive pictorial devices of wall newspapers suggest a rather vigorous mutual influence between the artistic elite and participatory reader-writers.67 Gustav Klutsis, declaring himself the inventor of Soviet photomontage, claimed in his 1931 essay that photomontage as a mass method has “decisively influenced stengaze-ty” and “become a weapon of expressiveness in the hands of millions of workers, Komsomol members, and Young Pioneers.”68 What is more, he was potentially inspired by them in return, as his later photomontage posters of Lenin that present the leader as left-handed may suggest.69 The pictorial remixes gave wall newspapers a poster-like quality, one that was distinct, however, from the avant-garde photomontage poster art by its deprofessionalization of illustration. Even the examples of wall newspapers that were selected for exhibitions and competitions did not contain any artistically conscious experiments with, for example, color and perspective.
Decades later, by the 1960s, the visual production of stengazety was “rationalized” or serialized when the state art publishing house, The Soviet Artist (Sovetskii khudozhnik) began issuing a full series of visual albums under the title “Helping the Editorial Board of the Wall Newspaper.” These consisted of reproductions of official portraits of leaders and images of heroic motifs from the Revolution and World War II intended to decorate celebratory stengazeta issues, for example, on the occasion of May 1 or the Day of the Soviet Army.70 Other publishers issued albums with popular caricatures for wall newspapers.71 Such albums testify to the increasingly “stenciled” production of wall newspapers and the ritualized repetition of glorifying imagery in the late Soviet period. In contrast to Gorodetskii's early do-it-yourself manual, the 1960s series title clearly indicated that the professional editors in state publishing now insisted on assisting the editors of the “little” press with a set of ready-to-use imagery. At first glance, such centrally published, prefabricated clichés made local editorial participation in making wall newspapers obsolete, or they reduced the local editors' role to (p- 126) copy and paste preselected “stock photos” on the wall, rather than encouraging independent visualization.
In some cases, however, the picture albums contained quite ambiguous materials, such as a 1960 15 x 20 cm color reproduction of Anatolii Levitin and lurii Tulin's 1952 oil painting, Svezhii nomer tsekhovoi gazety (The Latest Issue of the Factory Newspaper; see Figure 5.2). In the painting, the artists explored the theme of wall newspaper denunciation, a quite unusual motif for a socialist realist painting of the High Stalinist period, when one would expect a focus on a “positive” worker hero. Instead, the main “protagonist” is a young man who, with his striking red shirt and golden belt buckle, stands out from the drably dressed crowd of workers who are reading a wall newspaper. Despite his seemingly relaxed pose, with one hand in his pocket and a cigarette in the other, he is caught in an unpleasant surprise that colors his ears and cheeks red, simultaneously reflecting the color of his shirt, of communism, and of shame, as his misdeeds are apparently revealed in the latest issue of the factory paper. He is facing the reproachful look of a young woman that tells a sentimental story of disappointed love, while another female colleague is giggling and enjoying her apple in the background.
Collection of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg
A younger factory boy stands right behind him with a smug smile on his face, and it looks as if he is stabbing the guilty fellow in the back with his raised, clenched fist, which holds a steel bar that he is carrying horizontally on his shoulder. Of similar size and shape is the paper roll carried vertically by the white-collar stengazeta editor, who (p- 127) observes the scene from the side, and this visual analogy sustains the idea that paper, like steel, can also be a tool or weapon. The visual blending of metal and paper, force and fragility, is highlighted in the foreground, where we see a worker bending over to nail a flyaway corner of the paper to its wooden frame. Hence, the painting plays with the metagenre of “the artist at his easel,” replacing the artist with a worker and the paintbrush with a hammer. The viewer cannot see the controversial revelations of the wall newspaper, but the strategic distribution of light, with the strong sunlight from the factory's ceiling-height windows illuminating the newspaper, creates an effect of a radiant screen that lightens up the maliciously amused face of the youngest boy in the reading group. Hence, the painting itself also mirrors the scene by subversively revealing “what the factory newspaper is really like” to the viewer, who is likely to identify with the central figure; his evoked martyrdom borrows from the tradition of religious crucifixion scenes by displaying the nailing of the accused to the board.
Despite the negative topic and potential subversiveness of their painting, Levitin and Tulin were awarded second prize at the Leningrad Union of Soviet Artists' exhibition in 1952. The artists were even nominated for the Stalin Prize, but they never received the award due to Stalin's death in 1953. However, several art critics reviled the “petty daily life motif” (melkoe bytopisatel'stvo) of the painting, which did not fit the monumental style of the time. Nevertheless, together with the stengazeta albums, postcard and poster reproductions of the painting in hundreds of thousands of copies shaped the late Soviet popular imagination of the wall newspaper.72
Apart from such albums of reproductions, professional artists created poster templates with decorative frames of established communist iconography that were mass printed as prefabricated wall newspaper backgrounds; the large blank spaces left in the center were ready for the editors' use. One such example is Vera Livanova's 1960 stengazeta poster frame “The Day of Labor Is a Step towards Communism!” (Den' truda—shag k kommuniz-mu!; see Figure 5.3) with a horizontal composition at the very bottom, displaying to the left, an industrial, and to the right, an agricultural Soviet landscape.73 Beyond the strikingly low vanishing point, a disproportionally large hammer-and-sickle rises as a yellow sun, lighting up an enormous empty sky, inviting the audience to fill in this space with their own imagination.
Private collection of Allan Gamborg, Digital Soviet Art, www.digitalsovietart.com
Though these visual sets of editorial complements established a conventional iconograph-ic base, they nevertheless contained an open “R/W” invitation to continue sketching out, participating in, and ultimately completing the unfinished project through collective construction.
The Soviet wall newspaper was a genuinely communist medium, because it represented not only a collectivist form of expression but also a social site for performative political (p. 128) acts and public assemblies intended to foster the new socialist community. At its worst, the wall newspaper incarnated socialism in its totalitarian form and contributed to a totalitarian communication system, not by forbidding citizens to express themselves but by forcing them to do so, not by denying citizens information access but by insisting that citizens should become informal informants themselves, thus requiring a constant and stressful self-exposure of the individual reader/writers to the social control of a local public. Not coincidentally, in the popular visual imagination of the high Stalinist period, the
Page 19 of 28 paper rolls of the stengazeta shame campaigns metamorphosed into steel bars, and in the verbal rhetoric of the editorial manuals, into “weapons.”
With that said, the stengazeta could not escape its own materiality. Despite its large dimensions, it did not represent a monumental medium in public space; it was made not of marble but of reused scrap materials such as wastepaper and home-made potato starch glue; it was easy to tear apart and almost impossible to preserve. The ephemeral nature of wall newspapers presents an obstacle to their proper documentation today. In comparison to the Soviet printed press, poster art, and photography, they are undercatalogued. It is likely that the issues preserved in archives and those presented in the editorial guidebooks were selected for their impressively elaborate style and celebratory content, and as such they do not represent the more ordinary issues that may not have been considered worth preserving. At the same time, the fragility of the wall newspaper was its strength. At its best, its encouragement of underprivileged collectives of readers/writers (including workers, peasants, women, and children) to grasp any material means (p- 129) available at hand to co-create the unfinished and unfinishable picture of communism represented socialism in its most open and liberal form. By instituting a participatory media literacy in its low-skilled users, the stengazeta taught its amateur editors how to reuse, appropriate, and remix existing mass media products in a rather nonauthoritative way, such as turning a propaganda poster over and working on its blank verso, or by cutting up the official organ Pravda, or even at the cost of making Lenin look left-handed. Hence, the wall newspaper educated citizens to become self-publishers. However, stengazety were not in unofficial opposition to the mass printed press; they were not a bottom-up, nonelectronic antipode to the state-circulated, top-down, analog “Read Only” press, but rather represented a continuum of or handmade extension to the official press, and reached audiences at the margins that the centralized press may have failed to reach.
In this respect, the Soviet wall newspapers significantly differed from their later visual and communist cousins that they inspired. Thus, in a wider totalitarian perspective, during the Chinese “Hundred Flowers” movement in 1957, Mao promoted elaborately handwritten “big character posters” (dazibao) to invite critique from below, which later fueled the 1966 Cultural Revolution. Dazibao functioned as a channel of direct communication between the leader and the people, thus circumventing the established elitist press that he deeply mistrusted.74 In a wider democratic perspective, the May 1968 French students' movement issued wall newspapers as a dialogic “vertical forum” for the street crowds, in explicit opposition to the printed press, with the slogan “The entire press is toxic: read the tracts, the posters, the wall newspaper” (Toute la presse est toxique: lisez les tracts, les affiches, le journal mural).75
In contrast, as a self-organized but also self-controlled and socially controlling, participatory amateur Read/Write medium, the low-tech Soviet wall newspaper is still related to modern mass media technologies, because its visual style imitated the layout of the party press. Its user-created illustrations strived to look like mass-produced photographs, caricatures, and official emblems. Its reader/writers played the roles of “professional” editors and reporters. With all their awkwardness, these wall newspaper images and texts repre
Page 20 of 28 sented neither advanced experimental montage nor a simplification of the “big” newspapers' visual language. Rather, they functioned as a complicating addition that was incapable of conforming to the discourse and images of the official press.
The attitudes of the emerging and increasingly centralized publishing industry toward the “little” press also seemed inconsistent. The state publishers issued an impressive number of mass-produced guidebooks on how to make one's own stengazeta, but, at the same time, they insisted on helping and assisting that process with gradually more standardized sets of templates ready for reproduction. However, by requiring that it be mirrored and confirmed by the wall newspaper participants, the state-printed press unavoidably became subject to ambiguity in the echo chamber.
The legacy of Soviet wall newspapers serves as one visual example of the long twentiethcentury socialist history of user-generated content. Peer-to-peer-based media and social network exchange were not born (or reborn) with the APRANET as solely profit-driven inventions within late capitalism, but rather with the revolution. The wall newspaper as a “Read/Write” medium did not stand in ideological opposition to other Soviet (p-130) analog “Read Only” mass media but rather modified, altered, distorted, and ultimately destroyed its materials and content. With a long and direct experience of the revolutionary potential and surveillance pitfalls of peer-to-peer information networks and user-generated content, Soviet wall newspapers may thus add an alternative perspective to the further discussion of social media today.
Brooks, Jeffrey. “The Breakdown in Production and Distribution of Printed Material, 1917-1927.” In Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, edited by Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites, 151-174. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Efremin, Aleksandr, and Sergei Ingulov, eds. Stengazeta: sbornik statei. Moscow: Rabot-nik prosveshcheniia, 1925.
Erren, Lorenz. “Selbstkritik” und Schuldbekenntnis: Kommunikation und Herrschaft unter Stalin (1917-1953). Ordnungssysteme Bd. 19. München: Oldenbourg, 2008.
Gorham, Michael S. “Tongue-Tied Writers: The Rabsel'kor Movement and the Voice of the ‘New Intelligentsia' in Early Soviet Russia.” The Russian Review 55, no. 3 (1996): 412429.
Gorodetskii, Boris P. Stengazeta: ee zadachi, metody i tekhnika (prakticheskoe rukovodst-vo). Leningrad: Rabochee izdatel'stvo “Priboi,” 1926.
Hicks, Jeremy. “From Conduits to Commanders: Shifting Views of Worker Correspondents, 1924-1926.” Revolutionary Russia 19, no. 2 (2006): 131-149.
Hicks, Jeremy. “Worker Correspondents: Between Journalism and Literature.” The Russian Review 66 (2007): 568-585.
Kaplan, Andreas M., and Michael Haenlein. “Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media.” Business Horizons 53, no. 1 (January-February, 2010): 59-68.
Kelly, Catriona. “‘A Laboratory for the Manufacture of Proletarian Writers: The Stengaze-ta (Wall Newspaper), Kul'turnost' and the Language of Politics in the Early Soviet Period.” Europe-Asia Studies 54, no. 4 (2002): 573-602.
Lenoe, Matthew. Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
(p. 135) Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.
Postoutenko, Kirill, ed. Totalitarian Communication. Kultur- und Mediensoziologie. Bielefeld: transcript, 2010.
Safonov, Dmitrii. “Stengazety kak element sovetskoi deistvitel'nosti 1920-1930-x godov.” Vestnik Orenburgskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta 13, no. 1 (2015): 136-155.
Standage, Tom. Writing on the Wall: Social Media—The First 2,000 Years. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Starkova, Galina. “Stennye gazety kak forma proiavleniia i sredstvo razvitiia sotsial'noi aktivnosti molodezhi udmurtii v 20-e gody XX veka.” Uchennye zapiski kazanskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 151, no. 5 - part 2 (2009): 191-201.
van Dijck, José. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Zimmer, Michael. “Renvois of the Past, Present and Future: Hyperlinks and the Structuring of Knowledge from the Encyclopédie to Web 2.0.” New Media & Society 11, no. 1-2 (2009): 95-114.
(1.) The term “little” press (malen'kie gazetki) as opposed to the mass-printed party press (bol'shie gazety) is ascribed to Maksim Gorkii in his article “O pechati,” here quoted by Valentin A. Kukushkin, Stengazeta v tvoem kollektive (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1977), 6-7.
(2.) Vladimir Lenin, “Report on the Work of the Council of People's Commissars,” December 22, 1920, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed. (Moscow, 1975-1979), Vol. 36, 15-16.
English translation from V I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), Vol. XXXI, 513-518.
(3.) In his critique of contemporary Western society, Gilles Deleuze uses the formulation: “Les forces de repression n'empêchent pas les gens de s'exprimer, elles les forcent au contraire à s'exprimer,” Pourparlers, 1971-1990 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990), 177; English translation by Martin Joughin in Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 129.
(4.) Jeffrey Brooks, “The Breakdown in Production and Distribution of Printed Material, 1917-1927,” in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, edited by Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 151-174. Matthew Lenoe, “NEP Newspapers and the Origins of Soviet Information Rationing,” The Russian Review 62 (2003): 614-636.
(5.) Galina Starkova, “Stennye gazety kak forma proiavleniia i sredstvo razvitiia sotsial'noi aktivnosti molodezhi Udmurtii v 20-e gody XX veka,” Uchenye zapiski kazan-skogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 151, no. 5 - part 2 (2009): 191-201.
(6.) Jeremy Hicks, “From Conduits to Commanders: Shifting Views of Worker Correspondents, 1924-1926,” Revolutionary Russia 19, no. 2 (2006): 131-149.
(7.) Jeremy Hicks, “Worker Correspondents: Between Journalism and Literature,” The Russian Review 66 (2007): 568-585, 580.
(8.) Both a resolution from the Second All-Union Assembly of the Worker, Peasant, Military and Youth Correspondents (December 5-13, 1924) and a party resolution on the Rabsel'korovskoe dvizhenie from June 1, 1925, stated that cooperation between the rabkory and the local party cells should be based on mutual trust, without censorship and invasive regulation. In contrast, an August 28, 1926, party declaration on the Rabsel'korovskoe dvizhenie ambiguously claimed that wall newspapers should be an organ of the masses' broad self-initiative (samodeiatel'nost') while also stressing the necessity of strengthening local party cell leadership of the rabkory. The resolution reprints are appended to, respectively, Boris P. Gorodetskii, Stengazeta: ee zadachi, metody i tekhnika (prakticheskoe rukovodstvo) (Leningrad: Rabochee izdatel'stvo “Priboi,” 1926), 121-126 and N. Pilatskaia and Vladimir Dokunin, Redkollegiia stennoi gazety i kruzhok rabkorov (Moscow: Izd. gazety “Pravda,” 1928), I-III. On the role of Bukharin, see Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 122-125.
(9.) Catriona Kelly, “ ‘A Laboratory for the Manufacture of Proletarian Writers': The Stengazeta (Wall Newspaper), Kul'turnost' and the Language of Politics in the Early Soviet Period,” Europe-Asia Studies 54, no. 4 (2002): 573-602, 591.
(10.) Michael S. Gorham, “Tongue-Tied Writers: The Rabsel'kor Movement and the Voice of the ‘New Intelligentsia' in Early Soviet Russia,” The Russian Review 55, no. 3 (1996): 412-429; Hicks, “From Conduits to Commanders;” Kelly, “ ‘A Laboratory for the Manufacture of Proletarian Writers.' ”
(11.) Dmitrii Safonov, “Stengazety kak element sovetskoi deistvitel'nosti 1920-1930-x godov,” Vestnik Orenburgskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta 13, no. 1 (2015): 136-155; Starkova, “Stennye gazety kak forma proiavleniia i sredstvo razvitiia sotsial'noi aktivnosti molodezhi Udmurtii v 20-e gody XX veka,” 191-201.
(12.) I use Kaplan and Haenlein's much-quoted definition of social media as “a group of internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content,” but defamiliarize this definition by pulling the plug. Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, “Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media,” Business Horizons 53, no. 1 (January-February, 2010): 59-68, 61. Despite paraphrasing the Communist Manifesto in their title, the two authors do not take into consideration any “socialist” implications of the ideological foundations of this collaboration-based media community but rather call for businesses to discover the profit potential of the up-and-coming media form.
(13.) José van Dijck, “Engineering Sociality in a Culture of Connectivity,” The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. 3-23.
(14.) Michael Zimmer, “Renvois of the Past, Present and Future: Hyperlinks and the Structuring of Knowledge from the Encyclopédie to Web 2.0,” New Media & Society 11, no. 1-2 (2009): 95-114.
(15.) Tom Standage, Writing on the Wall: Social Media—The First 2,000 Years (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).
(16.) Ilya Kiriya, “The Culture of Subversion and Russian Media Landscape,” International Journal of Communication 6 (2012): 446-466.
(17.) Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), esp. 23 and 50.
(18.) Lenoe, Closer to the Masses, 70-100; Kirill Postoutenko, “Prolegomena to the Study of Totalitarian Communication,” in Totalitarian Communication, edited by Kirill Postoutenko. Kultur- und Mediensoziologie (Bielefeld: transcript, 2010), 23-30.
(19.) As quoted by Kukushkin, Stengazeta v tvoem kollektive, 8.
(20.) See the Kremlin photographer Petr Otsup's famous series, “V. I. Lenin v svoem kabi-nete v Kremle” (Moscow, October 16, 1918), which was mass-reproduced after Lenin's death in 1924. Uncropped photos of the series further reveal the Pravda-reading Lenin surrounded by the wires of modern telephone technology in the background and an electric lamp on his desk.
(21.) See, for example, Soviet photographer Maks Penson's "Molniia" from the 1930s, depicting Russian railway workers in front of a panel with the wall newspaper “The lightning," accessible online at a digital gallery devoted to his works: http:// www.maxpenson.com.
(22.) Aleksandr Zonin and Grunin V., “Mesto zavodskoi stengazety v obshchei sisteme par-traboty," in Stengazeta: Sbornik statei, edited by Aleksandr Efremin and Sergei Ingulov (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1925): 5-15, 6; Iakov Shafir, “Stengazeta i prole-tarskoe obshchestvennoe mnenie. Vyvody iz opyta odnoi gazety," in Stengazeta: Sbornik statei, 25-30, 30.
(23.) Zonin and Grunin, “Mesto zavodskoi stengazety," 7.
(24.) O. Popova, “Stennaia gazeta v derevne," in Stengazeta: Sbornik statei, 42-51.
(25.) Shafir, “Stengazeta i proletarskoe obshchestvennoe mnenie," 26-27.
(26.) Vladimir Lugovskoi, “Stennaia gazeta v krasnoarmeiskikh chastiakh." in Stengazeta: Sbornik statei, 61-77, 74.
(27.) Shafir, “Stengazeta i proletarskoe obshchestvennoe mnenie," 29.
(28.) Krasnyi tekstil'shchik: Stengaz rabochikh fabriki Bol'shaia Ivanovo-Voznesenskaia manufaktura, see, for example, no. 13: 79 (1927); 10: 97 (1928); 12: 99 (1928).
(29.) Luch leninisma: Stennaia gazeta Litografii Leningr. gosud. tabach. tresta, no. 2: 14 (January 21, 1926).
(30.) Luch leninisma, no. 2: 14 (January 21, 1926); Krasnyi tekstil'shchik, no. 10: 76 and 12: 78 (1927).
(31.) Shafir, “Stengazeta i proletarskoe obshchestvennoe mnenie," 30.
(32.) See for example, Aleksei Tsvetov, lunii redaktor stennoi gazety: V pomoshch' samodeiatel'nosti pionerov i shkol'nikov (Leningrad: Detgiz, 1954).
(33.) Gorodetskii, Stengazeta: ee zadachi, metody i tekhnika, 11, 18.
(34.) Tsvetov, Iunii redaktor stennoi gazety.
(35.) Kukushkin, Stengazeta v tvoem kollektive, 24-27.
(36.) Il'ia Baevskii, “Stennaia gazeta," in Pokhod "Cheliuskina" (tom 2), edited by Otto Shmidt, Il'ia Baevskii et al. (Moscow: Pravda, 1934): 161-172.
(37.) Tsvetov, Iunii redaktor stennoi gazety, 65.
(38.) A. Lobovskii, Stennaia gazeta. Biblioteka raboche-krest'ianskoi molodezhi (Moscow: Novaia Moskva, 1925), 70.
(39.) A. Lobovskii, Stennaia gazeta, 58-59.
(40.) Gorodetskii, Stengazeta: ee zadachi, metody i tekhnika, 66.
(41.) A. Kurs, “Protiv shablona. (Mysli o tekhnike stennoi gazety),” in Stengazeta: Sbornik statei, 16-24.
(42.) Popova, “Stennaia gazeta v derevne,” 51; see also illustration of letter fonts in Gorodetskii, Stengazeta: ee zadachi, metody i tekhnika, 66.
(43.) Gorodetskii, Stengazeta: ee zadachi, metody i tekhnika, 64.
(44.) Iskry kostra no. 7 (1924), collection of the Museum of the History of the Children's Movement, the Moscow Pioneer Palace at the Vorobyovy Gory (GBPOU “Vorobyovy Gory”). For this I thank senior researcher Elena Efimova.
(45.) Iakov Bashilov, “Vneshnost' shkolnoi stennoi gazety,” in Stengazeta: Sbornik statei, 103-113: 111.
(46.) Gorodetskii, Stengazeta: ee zadachi, metody i tekhnika, 76.
(47.) Lobovskii, Stennaia gazeta, 72.
(48.) Gorodetskii, Stengazeta: ee zadachi, metody i tekhnika, 83-85; Lobovskii, Stennaia gazeta, 60-62.
(49.) Stephen M. Norris, “The Wartime Lubok and Soviet Visual Culture,” A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812-1945 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006).
(50.) For images and detailed descriptions of various constructions of the il'ichovka, see Elena Markasova, “Chto takoe il'ichovka?” Kul'tura pis'mennoi rechi (March 22, 2007), available online at http://gramma.ru/RUS/?id=15.1.
(51.) See, for example, the anonymous depiction, “Stennaia gazeta “Raketa” 18 otriada Moskovskogo uezda, kotoruiu derzhat 9 oktiabriat,” Baraban no. 16-17 (1924): 29.
(52.) A. Afanas'eva and L. Berman, Pionerskie zhivye gazety (Leningrad: Rabochee izdatel'stvo “Priboi,” 1928), 11.
(53.) A. Afanas'eva and L. Berman, Pionerskie zhivye gazety, 26.
(54.) J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962).
(55.) Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002), 169.
(56.) Lorenz Erren, “Stalinist Rule and Its Communication Practices," in Totalitarian Communication, ed. Kirill Postoutenko, 43-65. Kultur- und Mediensoziologie (Bielefeld: transcript, 2010), 48.
(57.) Lorenz Erren, “Die Geburt der “Selbstkritik" aus dem Geist der Wandzeitung," in “Selbstkritik” und Schuldbekenntnis: Kommunikation und Herrschaft unter Stalin (19171953), 100-114. (Ordnungssysteme Bd. 19. München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2008), 102.
(58.) V. Bulgakova, “Organizatsiia stengazety v nashei shkole," in Stengazeta: Sbornik statei, 94, 96.
(59.) For a catalogue illustration of the Young Pioneers wall newspaper, Po puti Il'icha: 6. baza Ts. G. R. Leningrad no. 6 (1925), see Gorodetskii, Stengazeta: ee zadachi, metody i tekhnika, 45.
(60.) Gorodetskii, Stengazeta: ee zadachi, metody i tekhnika, 69-70.
(61.) nopmpeTOB Rennua He hh;i.ho/I IoxO/Khx He 6bino h Hem/BeKa yx gopHcywr bh^ho/ HegopHCOBaHHbm nopmpeT.
(62.) For a catalogue illustration of the Leningrad wall newspaper Osnova Leninskaia. Fabrika “Rabochii” no. 6, October (1925), see Gorodetskii, Stengazeta: ee zadachi, metody i tekhnika, 68.
(63.) Photographer presumably Petr Otsup, from the series “Lenin s Bonch-Bruevichem vo dvore Kremlia na progulke po vyzdorovlenii posle raneniia." Moscow, October 16, 2018 (same date as cabinet series).
(64.) Adolf (Braslavskii) Strakhov's non-photo-based 1924 poster of a left-armed pointing red Lenin silhouette might have been an additional source of inspiration. See also Victoria Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 145-146.
(65.) For a catalogue illustration of the Tribuna Khalturintsa no. 27, October 1925, see Gorodetskii, Stengazeta: ee zadachi, metody i tekhnika, 10.
(66.) Gorodetskii, Stengazeta: ee zadachi, metody i tekhnika, 70.
(67.) For an introduction to the debate on “elitist" montage techniques versus mass audiences, see Denise J. Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992), 36-49.
(68.) Gustav Klutsis, “Fotomontazh kak novyi vid agitatsionnogo iskusstva," Izofront: Klassovaia boFba na fronte prostranstvennykh iskusstv, edited by Pavel Novitskii (Moscow: Ogiz-izogiz, 1931).
(69.) See, for example, Klutsis's posters, “Iz Rossii nepovskoi budet Rossiia sotsialistich-eskaia" (1930) and “K mirovomu oktiabriu" (1932).
(70.) Appearing in Sovetskii khudozhnik's series “V pomoshch' redkollegii stengazety” were, for example, E. P. Zhitkova, ed., 8 marta (Al'bom-reproduktsii) (1962); E. P. Zhitkova, ed., 1 maia (Al'bom-reproduktsii) (1963); A. S. Davydova, ed., Den' kosmonavtiki (Al'bom-reproduktsii) (1963); V. P. Kuznetsova, ed., Den' Sovetskoi Armii i Voenno-Morsko-go flota (Al'bom-reproduktsii) (1963).
(71.) See, for example, in the series “V pomoshch' redkollegiiam stennykh gazet,” collections of the caricaturists Vladimir Sychev, Ne tol'ko v shutku (Satira. Iumor: Al'bom) (Belgorod: Knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1963) and Evgenii Tsukanov, Karikatury s natury (Kursk: Knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1964).
(72.) Anatolii Levitin and Natal'ia Trigaleva, Portret khudozhnika na fone épokhi (St. Petersburg: Levsha, 2014), 111-113.
(73.) Private collection of Allan Gamborg. See also the catalogue Vera and Tatyana Livanova, Masters of Soviet Art, Vol. 6 (Moscow: Gamborg Gallery, 2014).
(74.) As a medium of dissent, dazibao posters reached their height in the 1978 “Democracy Wall Movement” when they were used to post public protests and call for human rights. In 1980, Deng Xiaoping interdicted the otherwise explicitly stated Chinese Communist constitutional right of free dazibao expression. See Hua Sheng, “Big Character Posters in China: A Historical Survey,” Journal of Chinese Law 4, no. 2 (1990): 234-256; for the relationship to user-created content, see Henry Siling Li, “The Turn to the Self: From “Big Character Posters” to YouTube Videos,” Chinese Journal of Communication 2, no. 1 (2009).
(75.) See journalist Julien Besançon's collection of wall newspapers and street graffiti, Journal Mural Mai 1968. Les Murs Ont La Parole (Paris: Claude Tchou, éditeur, 1968) and the collection of “Journal Mural” poster issues from May to June 1968 by l'Atelier Populaire des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the students' action group Groupe de Lettres Classiques Sorbonne, Collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. I thank book historian Sophie Noël for the reference.
Birgitte Beck Pristed
Birgitte Beck Pristed, Associate Professor of Russian Studies, Aarhus University
Red Stars, Biorhythms, and Circuit Boards: Do-It-Yourself Aesthetics of Computing and Computer Games in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia
Jaroslav Svelch
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Jul 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.6
This article traces the intersections of Western computer technology and everyday life in communist-era Czechoslovakia. It follows computer professionals and hobbyists who participated in bottom-up computing practices, and it discusses the improvised, do-it-yourself aesthetics of the artifacts they created. It focuses on three key examples: the printing of biorhythm charts, which provided the first personal encounters with computing to many ordinary citizens in the 1970s; hardware tinkering, which remedied the scarcity of computer equipment by salvaging and repurposing local resources; and production of local computer games, which built on Western templates but engaged with local themes, sometimes even subverting the authority of the communist party and ironically appropriating its propaganda. It concludes that computer enthusiasts were ahead of party officials in realizing that computers are not just data processing machines but also tools for making and dissemination of culture.
Keywords: Czechoslovakia, Soviet bloc, biorhythm, hobby computing, material culture, bricolage, do-it-yourself activities, informal distribution, computer games, hardware tinkering
The title of the present volume refers to “communist visual cultures,” but has there been a distinctly communist visual culture in the domain of computer technologies? At least in the Soviet era, such a visual culture may be difficult to identify. Perhaps the most striking and popular piece of Soviet Bloc computer software to cross over to the West was Tetris, a game devised by the Soviet research scientist Alexey Pajitnov, discovered by a British entrepreneur in Hungary, and eventually licensed to Western and Japanese companies.1 Both British and American versions of the game emphasized its unusual point of origin, styling the title as TETHIS or TETPHC and adorning the game's cover with a stylized illustration of St. Basil's Cathedral, the famous Moscow landmark. The 1987 British version's publicity blurb takes this Orientalist perspective even further, saying: “From the blasted plains beyond the Urals comes the most remarkable computer game yet. The
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same minds that produce chess champions have developed a cunning game that deceives through its simplicity.”2 Needless to say, the statement is geographically incorrect, given that the game was made in Moscow.
But if we look back at the early Soviet-made versions of Tetris, there was little apparently Soviet about them—save for the fact that one of them used Cyrillic. The very first version by Pajitnov was written for the Elektronika 60 computer, which was a clone of an American machine produced by the Digital Equipment Corporation. It employed an alphanumeric green-screen display typical of 1970s and some early 1980s computers; and the playing field consisted of letters and symbols, as was usual in Western games for similar platforms. In 1986, Pajitnov's collaborator Vadim Gerasimov rewrote the game for the IBM PC, another US-designed platform; it was Gerasimov's version with (p- 137) English-language interface that crossed over to Hungary.3 Although the gameplay of Tetris was indeed new and original, the markers of Sovietness that many Western players associate with the game were added by Western marketers. By itself, the game was not Soviet enough to exude the exotic appeal.
Since the late 1960s, most mainframe and minicomputer systems produced in the COMECON countries (The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance that united communist states under the leadership of the Soviet Union) were clones of Western standards—a tacit acknowledgment of the Bloc's technological inferiority in digital computing. Unlike in the fields of architecture, visual arts, or applied arts, there seemed to be no systematic effort to create a distinctly Soviet, socialist, or communist digital aesthetic. Eastern Bloc authorities tended to think of computers in terms of automation and administration, not culture or entertainment. However, the fact that communist leadership had little interest in the expressive power of computers does not imply that there were no specific regional trends in the utilization of computers and computer graphics. To unearth those trends, we must follow not the state-sanctioned culture, but the bottom-up, popular uses of Western technology in the local cultural, material, and political contexts. Like Pajitnov and Gerasimov, local users mostly worked with Western-made or Western-designed technologies but used them to their own ends, haphazardly combining scraps of Western and Eastern Bloc influences into unique practices and artifacts. Popular uses and enthusiast scenes emerged in several Eastern European countries, including the Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia.
In this chapter, I will focus on the case of Czechoslovakia, drawing from the interview and archival material I gathered for my recent monograph, Gaming the Iron Curtain.4 I am going to present three types of practices typical of the late communist period—biorhythm calculations, hardware bricolage, and amateur games—and situate them in the (audio)visual, cultural, and material context of the era. The chapter builds on existing research into popular cultural and everyday life in Czechoslovakia, especially the work of Paulina Bren, on Alexei Yurchak's analysis of hobby groups in late Soviet Union, and on the regional histories of home computing, in particular Melanie Swalwell's conceptualization of user activities on early 8-bit computers.5 I will seek answers to two key questions. First, how did users appropriate both Western and domestic resources to create local arti-
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facts and practices? To answer this question, I will employ the concept of bricolage, which will help emphasize the improvised, bottom-up nature of user activities.6 Secondly, I will ask how Soviet Bloc popular computing interacted with state institutions, and the official ideologies and iconographies. I will point out that icons such as Lenin's portraits or hammers and sickles were often excorporated from the official iconography and reused by computer enthusiasts without an explicit value judgement about the communist regime.7 However, in the late 1980s, amateur programmers started making games that were clearly in opposition to the ideology and policies of the communist party.
In the late socialist period of the 1970s and 1980s, following the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of the country, Czechoslovakia was governed by one of the region's most economically and culturally conservative communist establishments. The two decades are usually
(p. 138) referred to as the “normalization” era, as it represented a return to a dogmatic communist rule after reformist efforts of 1968, which were retrospectively defined by the post-1968 party elites as an abnormal “crisis development.”8 Reformers and their sympathizers were banished from the Party and removed from positions of power in a series of extensive purges. Censorship and secret police surveillance de facto obliterated public life, and career progress was subject to the whims of Party officials at various levels of governance. To prevent social unrest, the government maintained an acceptable living standard for its citizens, despite recurring shortages of consumer goods—including electronics. The resulting lifestyle has been described as “socialist consumerism,” and its peculiarities are key to understanding the practices described in this chapter. With limited career opportunities, many Czechoslovaks effectively retreated into the world of private hobbies and do-it-yourself activities, such as building weekend cottages or electronics equipment.9 Hobby activities were also subsidized by the state through organizations such as Socialisticky svaz mladeze (Socialist Union of Youth) or Svazarm (Union for the Cooperation with Army). At the same time, many hobbyists pilfered or misused state resources for their own hobby projects.
The normalization-era establishment's attitudes to computing were pragmatic rather than visionary. The regime relied on centralized governance and was supported by extensive bureaucratic and technocratic apparatus. Computers, both domestically produced and imported, had been used since the 1950s and were seen primarily as instruments to optimize and improve efficiency of industrial and administrative processes.10 Although the official agenda stressed the important role of computers in the country's future, these visions thus rarely featured their use by ordinary people in their ordinary lives. Computers were not meant for public consumption. This view prevailed even when Czechoslovak citizens started to call for 8-bit home computers, which had already started to penetrate Western households. Consumer-grade digital technologies were scarce, but the government tried to downplay the issue. In 1988, Ivan Malec, advisor to the Minister of Electrotechnical Industry and the Ministry's de facto spokesman, noted in an interview that “as a society we are not mature enough for the general use of microcomputers.”11 On the other hand, electronics and computer hobbies received some support from youth and paramilitary organizations. These hosted communities of microcomputer enthusiasts, who had often individually imported their machines from abroad. Computer hobbyists' rela
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tionship to official policies and ideologies was very pragmatic, and the day-to-day work at the clubs largely apolitical.12 Despite the clubs' dependency on state support, their affiliation with the state and its organizations rarely made it past superficial branding—such as the Svazarm logo imprinted on most of its publications. Much of the Czechoslovak digital visual culture was therefore unaligned with state policies but, in one way or another, took advantage of state resources.
Before I investigate the popular uses of computing, it should be noted that computers were simultaneously used in art. In literature, experiments with computers date before the 1968 Soviet invasion. Earlier that year, literary critic Oleg Sus published pieces of subversive computer-assembled experimental poetry, which mocked the language of conservative communist party ideologues.13 The utilization of computer graphics in (p- 139) Czechoslovak visual art has been previously traced in an English-language overview by Martin Sperka.14 First attempts took place in the mid-1960s; 1968's “Computer Graphic” exhibition in Brno featured—among several foreign artists—the works by Prague-based programmer Lubomir Sochor.15 The normalization era did not encourage experimental work, but neither did it bring it to a halt. However, as Sperka notes, Czechoslovak computer art consisted of isolated individual efforts and “there was no group cooperating and creating in one style or movement.”16 Out of Czechoslovak artists active in the 1970s and 1980s, Jozef Jankovic notably used computers to explore shapes, forms, and repetition in works that were exhibited both domestically and internationally.17 Jankovic's computer-assisted sculptural works were installed in public spaces and reached the wider public, but these were rather exceptional. In general, computer generated art targeted the cultural elite, and its popular impact was therefore quite limited.
The popular uses of computing in Czechoslovakia predate the home computer era of the 1980s. Even their larger and more expensive forebears—mainframes and minis—served for more than just the advancement of the socialist economy. In 1981, Technicky magazin (Technology Magazine), a popular science and technology monthly, published an article called “Playful Circuits,” which brought attention to a range of playful and entertaining uses of the big machines. Its author, telecommunications engineer and professional programmer Richard Bebr, lists experiments with computer graphics and poetry, early chatbots like Eliza, several games, as well as horoscopes and biorhythms. He mentions that these endeavors were officially “surrounded by silence or met with hostility” from the officials, but he hails them as a proving ground for programmers' skills and creativity, as well as a means to demonstrate the power of computers to the public.18
Out of Bebr's list, games and chatbots were perhaps the least accessible to the general public, because they required hands-on interaction with the machines, which were then still stationed in the exclusive environments of institutions, factories, and universities and their “computing centers” (“vypocetni strediska” in Czech). Instead, many people famil-
Page 4 of 22 iarized themselves with computer technology through printouts that computing professionals brought outside. When interviewed for my project, Bébr remembered that his department had programs for printing pictures of nude women, dogs, Christmas motifs, and Lenin, among others.19 These seemingly unrelated themes have one thing in common: they could be used as entertainment, decorations, or gifts for the programmers themselves but also their friends and family members. Even the Lenin image—which I will return to later—could be fun to inspect because one could compare Lenin's omnipresent propagandistic portraits with those rendered in character-based graphics.
(p. 140) Even more popular than printed images were biorhythms (kondiciogramy, singular kondiciogram in Czech). Based on the pseudoscientific assumption that physical and mental fitness follows periodic cycles starting at one's birth, biorhythm charts indicated “good” and “bad” days for the upcoming time periods.20 They married the appeal of horoscopes and numerology with a newfound fascination with computers. In the United States, biorhythms were a 1970s fad, which spawned a mini-industry producing self-help books and biorhythm machines for the arcades.21 However, their popularity in Czechoslovakia seems to predate this fad, giving credibility to Bébr's own hypothesis that—unlike many other trends in computer entertainment—they had arrived not from the West, but from the Soviet Union. Due to the informal nature of their use, it is difficult to document how exactly they arrived in Czechoslovakia, but future oral histories might give us an answer.
The charts were likely considered ephemeral, throwaway items and therefore have not been preserved. A possible version can be, however, reconstructed from media portrayals and subsequent home computer versions of biorhythm software. Biorhythm charts would be printed on perforated tractor feed paper and typically contain the person's date of birth (required for the calculation), and, sometimes, also their name. The chart consisted of symbols or numbers indicating one's prospects in three areas: physical, emotional, and intellectual. Later implementations may have added a graphical representation of the underlying sine waves.
To have a chart printed, one had to know somebody who worked in a computing center, usually in a factory or a research institution. As we can hear in the 1977 song “Kondiciogram," performed by Petra Janu, then a rising star of the Czechoslovak pop rock scene: “At a research institute, there is a friend of mine/He's made for me a biorhythm chart." The basic algorithm behind biorhythms was simple and could be implemented in virtually any programming language. In between serious calculation, operators and programmers thus spun the machines to create gifts for their friends or acquaintances. Like image printouts, biorhythms were a part of an informal economy of gifts and favors, bartered for chocolate or alcohol. Bébr even remembers bundling them with New Year cards to important partners of his computing center. According to Czech cybercrime scholar Vladimír Smejkal, state-owned hardware was massively—and illegally—misused for personal purposes, with the printing of biorhythms among the main culprits.22 In some computing centers, printing of biorhythms was even explicitly banned.23
What was the appeal of biorhythms? Some people might have genuinely believed their predictions; others might have wanted to give them a try. But their actual merit was hardly the only, or even the main, reason. The novelty value of computing was also likely to play an important role. For many, a biorhythm printout could have been the first document in which they could see their own personal data crunched and printed out by a ma-chine—their first encounter with personalized computation.
As the fad was booming, it attracted critical and satirical reactions. Already in 1974, biorhythms drove the plot of one of the biggest domestic blockbusters of the normalization era, Jáchyme, hod'ho do stroje (Jáchym, Toss Him into the Machine, (p-141) Dir. Oldrich Lipsky).24 In the film's opening scene, a truck appears in the small fictional village of Chvojkovice, carrying a minicomputer on its open platform. “Dear friends, science has come into your village,” a formally dressed operator proudly announces and offers the assembled villagers the chance to have their biorhythms printed. The film's main character, Frantisek Koudelka (Ludek Sobota), who is just about to leave for Prague, takes up the offer and dictates his birthdate, which the operator's assistant Jáchym “tosses” into the titular machine. The naïve but likable young man then closely follows the advice of the charts, fumbling through a series of hilarious adventures and mishaps in the big city (see Figures 6.1 and 6.2). He eventually finds his happiness—marrying the woman he loves and moving back into the village to live a bucolic dream—and believes that this was all thanks to biorhythms. However, at the end of the film, the computer operator reappears with a formal apology. Due to a faulty component, the charts that were being sent to Frantisek—and which he credited for his success—belonged to another person with the same name.
© Czech Film Fund
© Czech Film Fund
The film thus conveys a humanistic and techno-skeptical message—one's happiness does not depend on technology and cannot be calculated. In the process, it paints computer technology as an instrument of superstition, whose intrusion into the village life has been entirely pointless. Although the film was not a piece of outright propaganda, the message resonated with some of the country's ideological and educational policies. (p- 142) The film's producer at the state-owned Barrandov Film Studios suggested the topic to the screenwriters and commended the script for fighting superstition.25 Besides biorhythms, the film also poked fun at bribery, and the two combined into a warning against shadow economy and the misuse of state property.
The connection between computing, superstition, and trickery can be identified in several other normalization-era films and TV productions. The song "Kondiciogram" similarly ends with a relationship breakup, and the subject of the song throwing the biorhythm printout away. Narratives like these implied that the world of computers and the ordinary world should not mix; they discouraged the informal populist use of the technology. But despite the negative light that biorhythms were shown in, it is likely that these films and songs in fact boosted the fad even more, and the massive and lasting influence of Jachym, Toss Him into the Machine is thus impossible to separate from the "organic" popularity of biorhythms that preceded this film. In a multitude of versions, biorhythm software continued to be popular on 1980s 8-bit home microcomputers. The charts seen in the film signified computing to large parts of Czechoslovak audiences of the 1970s and 1980s, and signify 1970s computing to today's audiences still. The biorhythm has thus been both a genuine popular trend and an indexical shortcut used to refer to the mainframe and mini era.
Retro computing exhibitions have recently become popular in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, appealing to the nostalgia of adults and curiosity of children.26 In general, they present a somewhat sanitized image of the material culture of Eastern Bloc computing, focusing primarily on mass-produced machines. Many of these are Western or Japanese 8-bit computers, reflecting that most local users in the 1980s used models like the British Sinclair ZX Spectrum. These computers were usually self-imported, smuggled from abroad or bought on the black market, as legal bulk imports into the country were sporadic and limited. Czechoslovak machines are shown, too, among them the so-called school computers PMD 85 and IQ 151, whose production started around 1985. These machines never competed on a consumer market, instead being sold directly to educational institutions. Rather than exhibiting any coordinated design language, their bulky, noner-gonomic cases betray the limitations of the Czechoslovak electronics industry. Local engineers had to work with a limited number of (often faulty) COMECON-manufactured components, including power-hungry CPUs (central processing units) that necessitated the use of large power sources and chassis.27 But material culture of 1980s home computing consisted of much more than legitimate, factory-made computers. A more accurate picture would also contain a multitude of scruffy, incongruous do-it-yourself peripherals and add-ons, like the wooden knob joystick in Figure 6.3.
Photograph by Silvia Kolesarova
Most local home computer users procured their machines informally and did not have access to authorized service centers. As late as 1989, Prague had only one specialized computer store with more or less empty shelves.28 When users needed a replacement (p- 144) keyboard, a joystick, or a mouse, they had to take the soldering iron and make their own, usually with the help of someone in the local user community. While the country had no official hardware or software retail network, there was an extensive network of hobby computer clubs, which concentrated much of the hardware tinkering. Like any other clubs or associations in Czechoslovakia, these clubs had to be affiliated with an existing, centrally sanctioned socialist organization. Most clubs worked under the umbrella of Svazarm, the country's largest paramilitary organization. Svazarm had long been a home
Page 8 of 22 to the country's strong ham radio and hobby electronics communities. In addition, it published Amaterske radio (Amateur Radio), the country's number-one source of information for do-it-yourself electronics projects. In 1982, Svazarm officially declared its support for the computer hobby. The support may seem to run counter to the Federal Ministry's dismissive stance toward home computing, but at the same time, the communist leadership could not ignore the fact that computing would be indispensable for the economy and the military in near future, and they supported training of future cadres at schools, youth organizations, and Svazarm. Amateur tinkering was therefore an activity endorsed by at least some normalization-era authorities, helped by Amateur Radio, club newsletters, and popular science magazines, all of which promoted the idea that Czechoslovaks can overcome the shortage of devices by homegrown creativity and resourcefulness.
In Czech, the practice of building one's own devices was called bastleni, then a relatively new loanword derived from the German verb basteln (to tinker).29 It has since been used in reference to imperfect, but sometimes ingenious do-it-yourself solutions created by local enthusiasts. To tease out the improvisational nature of their practice, I will view it in the light of Levi-Strauss's classic account of bricolage. In his view, a bricoleur's “universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand.' ”30 Quite fittingly, Czechoslovak enthusiasts ran Western or Japanese computers, but the material culture they built around them was distinctly local. Figure 6.3 encapsulates this in a combination of an unpolished improvised joystick—likely a product of youth group tinkering—with the smooth and elegant design of the ZX Spectrum computer by Sinclair's Rick Dickinson.31 While the schematics, published in Amaterske radio or club newsletters, employed the abstract and rational visual language of electronics engineering, the finished artifacts were very much grounded in the idiosyncrasies of local material culture—combining various local components with household objects and salvaged parts. One could chance upon external keyboards assembled from doorbell buttons; mice built around a table tennis ball; or joysticks with grips made of drawer knobs and buttons salvaged from an old calculator.
Looking closer at Figure 6.3, we can see that the machine itself—an original Sinclair ZX Spectrum—has also been modified: a gray plastic connector protrudes from the side of the machine, allowing for hook-up with the DIY joystick. Building and adapting connectors and interfaces was essential to the hobby computing practice. Before the widespread adoption of industry standards, like today's USB connection, individual (p- 145) computer models differed in architecture and connectivity. In the Soviet Bloc, the general shortage of hardware encouraged people to use incompatible (or home-made) peripherals and adapt them to fit their machines. Unable to afford upgrades to newer models, local enthusiasts also found ways to extend the machines' memory or replace the operating system. These inventions spread fast through the community, as they were nonproprietary and publicly available through magazines and newsletters. Many local Spectrums and Atari machines were therefore not what they seemed to be.32
As large Czechoslovak electronics manufacturers like TESLA struggled to deliver any useful hardware, the country's amateurs further popularized bastleni by inventing two influential standardized kits—the ALFI-1 plotter (i.e., pen-based printing device for line drawings) and the Svazarm computer mouse. Although computer kits like 1974's MITS Altair 8800 had already been at the very start of home computer era in the United States, Czechoslovak kits came much later and they were differently framed. In line with support for computer education, they were positioned as didactic tools. The ALFI-1 plotter was designed using the Czechoslovak metal building kit Merkur. Somewhat reminiscent of the US Erector kit, the kit was sold as a toy, but it was also used by adults to build mechanical prototypes; the inventor of the modern contact lens Otto Wichterle had famously used it for the prototype of his lens casting apparatus.33 Instructions on how to build ALFI-1 from standard Merkur parts and off-the-shelf electronic parts were serialized in 1988 in the influential Veda a technika mladezi (Science and Technology for Youth) magazine. Merkur's manufacturer was impressed and soon started to produce kits that contained both the Merkur parts and the electronic components. It soon became one of the most popular printing devices among local hobbyists and remains a highlight of retro computing shows.
Svazarm's large-scale mouse project followed DIY mechanical mice built in Czechoslovak clubs, some of which had already been documented in the hobbyist press.34 The kit included a table tennis ball in place of a mouse ball, as well as plastic housing, and mechanical and electronic components. The accompanying booklet contained detailed instructions on how to build the mouse and connect it to one of the supported 8-bit machines.35 As clubs could not officially enterprise, manufacture, or sell products, the kit was promoted as instructional material in a long-distance educational program on computer peripherals. Five thousand pieces were manufactured and distributed, some of which have been preserved in personal collections.36
Despite all the effort on the side of Svazarm and individual hobbyists, the mouse's real-life utility was limited, as it was rather nonergonomic and there was next to no mousecompatible software to control with it. The most advanced tinkerers went even further and built light pens or converted the ALFI plotter to a scanner, but the practical use of these artifacts was limited, too. So, while hardware tinkering in Czechoslovakia did address the shortage of hardware, it also became an end in itself; and many projects—such as most mice, light pens, and scanners—were pursued not out of necessity, but rather to show off one's skills and participate in the culture of bastleni.
Communist authorities did not care too much for computer games beyond a few muted mentions of their didactic potential.37 No one was tasked with designing, promoting, or even censoring them—unlike, for instance, in East Germany, where the state funded the development of the Poly-Play arcade machine, or in the Soviet Union, which produced
Page 10 of 22 dozens of electromechanical and digital arcade games.38 Nevertheless, just like hardware tinkering, writing games became a popular activity at computer clubs, especially among younger fans. They had started out playing pirated versions of Western games, which were circulating on cassette tapes thanks to an efficient informal distribution network. In the latter half of the 1980s, more and more programmers started creating and distributing their own efforts, over three hundred of which have been preserved in online fan archives.
As in the case of hardware, bricolage was a frequent mode of creating software. Unaware of the intricacies of copyright, local programmers did not hesitate to lift graphics or code from Western commercial games. A good example is 1985's Exotron, whose very subtitle Speedy Stony Wizard Atac suggests that it is a Frankenstein monster of a game. It borrows some of its basic operations verbatim from the 1983 British title Aquaplane, but it replaces the graphic of the water skier with a witch from another 1983 title, Atic Atac; the debriefing screen seems to come from 1984's Knight Lore.39 While the game mashes up Western sources, its English—including the foreboding message “Game Over, You Are Death”—betrays its origin.40 Overall, local amateur games did not develop a strong visual identity. At best, they approximated the visuals of Western commercial works, and their aesthetic was likewise distinctly shaped by the limitations of each platform—the ZX Spectrum, for instance, had a resolution of 256 x 192 pixels and could display sixteen colors, out of which only two could appear in each 8 x 8 pixel block.
A part of the reason why Czechoslovak amateur game production tended to underutilize visuals was the fact that creating computer game graphics is labor intensive. In Western commercial companies since around early 1980s, screens and sprites (graphics of individual in-game objects) tended to be drawn by specialists, and animation required advanced coding chops. The prolific output of the domestic amateurs, who often lacked or were only just learning these skills, was often made possible by giving up on graphics. The library of Czechoslovak 8-bit titles includes action, puzzle, and quiz games, but most prominent are text adventures, comprising more than half of all preserved 1980s games. In text adventures, the program usually lists verbal descriptions of the game environment and lets the user input verbal commands to control the main character. By navigating a simulated world and solving puzzles, the player then advances the game's narrative.41 Although the genre had arrived from English-speaking countries, the (p- 147) language barrier motivated local users to create adventures in local languages for local communities—not only in Czechoslovakia but also in Poland or Yugoslavia.42 The fact that programming a passable text adventure was easier than making an action game contributed to the genre's popularity among amateurs. Presenting their content in text form, these games resembled interactive short stories and thus provided a publication platform of sorts—one that was not censored because it was shielded by the rhetoric of computer education and wholesome tinkering. Despite being mostly text based, adventures usually contained graphics on the title screen, and these acted as important framing devices.
Most authors of text adventures were at least loosely affiliated with computer clubs, but they did not credit their parent organizations. Instead, they signed the games with their English-sounding labels like Cybexlab, Demonsoft, or Blacksoft. There was likely just one game that earnestly promoted and credited a socialist organization—the 1989 science fiction adventure Mésto robotü (City of Robots), the only communist-era title that received an official commercial nationwide release through a prominent club, which offered prizes to first players who win the game.43 Although it is a de facto conversion of an older US title and its content is devoid of political statements, the game's title screen contains a dedication to the fortieth anniversary of the Pionyr (Pioneer) organization, a section of the Socialist Union of Youth dedicated to working with schoolchildren. Such dedications, often accompanied by logos, were quite common in official publications or at events. Communist or Soviet iconography also appeared in amateur games, some of which welcomed the user with larger-than-life red stars, hammers, and sickles. These symbols were, however, not included at the behest of the Party propagandists, but as a joke by cheeky teenagers.
Among the earliest surviving Czechoslovak text adventures was 1985's Space Saving Mission, an early effort by Tomás Rylek (born 1971), who would soon become one of the country's top ZX Spectrum coders.44 The game tells a stock science fiction story, which is by itself not particularly noteworthy. What stands out is the game's title and loading screen. The game was distributed as a file called "SSM," which is also the acronym of the Socialist Union of Youth (Socialisticky svaz mládeze), the country's principal youth organization. The loading screen features a full-screen rendition of the logo of the Pioneer organization, which administered the computer club that Rylek and his friends went to. Looking back, Rylek admits that the use of the logo could have been considered slightly provocative, although it is not accompanied by any message criticizing or making fun of the SSM.45 We can interpret its inclusion as an example of excorporation, a symbolic practice conceptualized by John Fiske. He defines it in opposition to incorporation as a process whereby “the subordinate [ ... ] steal the discourse of the dominant and use its signifiers for their own pleasures, their own identities."46 Those who excorporate need not explicitly denounce the dominant ideology, but they repurpose its elements into building blocks for their own, unrelated projects. As Yurchak has shown, in the late socialist era, young people did not accept the communist iconography at face value, but it remained an important component of their visual vocabulary.47
(p. 148) The 1988 text adventure Satochin (Shatokhin)—written by a group of high school students from Bratislava who called themselves Sybilasoft—welcomes the player with two different opening screens (see Figures 6.4 and 6.5).48 The first shows the portrait of the player character, Major Shaktokhin, along with his name written out in Cyrillic. The heroic Shatokhin originally appeared in the 1985 film OduHowoe nnaeaHue (Solo Journey, Dir. Mikhail Tumanishvili), a Soviet response to American films featuring John Rambo. The second screen contains nothing more than a full-screen hammer-and-sickle symbol. The game's embrace of the Soviet imagery and hero narratives, was, however, decidedly ironic. It pits Shatokhin against John Rambo and revels in grotesque and humiliating deaths of the Soviet hero (as well as his nemesis). Its main writer, Stanislav Hrda (born 1971),
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explains: “Shatokhin posed as an exemplary pro-regime game, but the jokes inside the game poked fun at it. And no one could reprimand me for making such a game, because the first visual impression is that of a Soviet hero.” The hammer and sickle was a part of the joke: “No one really respected that symbol anymore and it was there for laughs.”49 In fact, Hrda had already included a hammer and a sickle as a red herring in one of Sybilasoft's previous titles. It could be picked up, but it was purposefully designed as a junk item that had no use in solving the game's puzzles.50
© 1988 Sybilasoft
© 1988 Sybilasoft
In 1988-1989, the final two years of communist rule, amateur programmers started making games that were more explicitly subversive and openly commented on the political developments in the country. A notable title was P.R.E.S.T.A.V.B.A., a 1988 text adventure by Miroslav Fidler (born 1970), a Prague-based cohort of Tomás Rylek and a well-known coder. However, he did not release the game under his usual moniker Cybexlab Software, but—in order not to be traced—under the pseudonym ÚV Software, a play on the expression "ústredni vybor" (Central Committee, often shortened to "ÚV"), usually referring to the Communist Party or other state-controlled organizations. The game is ironically dedicated to "the twentieth anniversary of the liberation of Czechoslovakia by the allied forces" of the Warsaw pact. At the outset, the goal of the game is obscured, but soon it becomes clear that the player solves puzzles that involve defacing communist symbols. At one point, it is necessary to burn Marx's Capital, and the game ends with an explosion of a statue of Lenin. For ironic contrast, the game displays some of the notorious propaganda slogans, like "Workers of the World Unite" or "Left Foot Forward, Not a Step Back." Like most text on early computers, they are rendered in pixelated monochromatic graphics and lack proper diacritics. They are not only ironically appropriated but also aesthetically diminished and desaturated as opposed to their renditions on parade banners.
The subversive games discussed in this section comprised a small minority of domestic titles, but their authors tended to rank among the most influential amateur game creators; they were teenage hobbyists, not accomplished activists. Through playing with communist iconography, they became some of the first people in the country who realized that computer games could be a powerful medium of expression. (p-150) Games, together with leaflets, samizdat, and folk songs, became a part of oppositional media practices.
Throughout the 1980s, Czechoslovak authorities treated computer and information technologies as an industrial resource rather than an instrument of social or cultural policy. There was no top-down attempt to define a program of visual—or any other—culture within the realm of digital technologies, unlike in many other established media, such as television, which was used extensively as a tool of propaganda and social cohesion.51 In this chapter, I have instead examined three sets of bottom-up practices that used computer technology to fulfil local needs and preferences or express local sentiments, contributing to a local computing culture. They shared the following features:
1. Use of technology designed and/or produced in the West (or in Japan). From 1960s onward, most—if not all—professional and amateur computing was performed on platforms and in computer languages designed outside of the Soviet Bloc. All forms of computing were therefore necessarily hybrid, combining foreign and Soviet Bloc influences.
2. Utilization of state resources, subsidies, or patronage. Biorhythm charts were printed in state-owned facilities on state-owned paper; hardware tinkering and amateur programming converged around state-sponsored computer clubs. The depen-
Page 14 of 22 dence on the state is not surprising given the state monopoly on all industrial and even much of leisure activities—but one should also acknowledge the active support for computing through hobby groups, which energized the amateur scene.
3. Informal networks. All three practices discussed in this chapter thrived thanks to informal, shadow infrastructures and economies. Biorhythms were seldom sold for money, but instead exchanged for gifts and favors. Hardware bricolage revolved around informally or outright illegally imported computers; computer games circulated on cassette tapes thanks to exchanges between friends and acquaintances.
4. Amateur bricolage. Amateurs and, in the case of biorhythms, moonlighting professionals were instrumental contributors to local computing cultures. Many of the amateurs lacked the know-how, skills, or resources of professional hardware designers and programmers. They tended not to proceed along plans or design documents but performed bricolage, salvaging and repurposing existing technologies.
5. Excorporation of communist visual culture. When local computer enthusiasts interacted with officially sanctioned culture and communist iconography, they tended to excorporate it. Such was the case of logos in text adventures. The ASCII Lenin, too, can be interpreted as an instance of excorporation. Lenin's portrait was an image that was ubiquitous and available, and therefore lent itself for the purposes of collage and manipulation.
(p. 151) In local software and games, visual elements were often subdued because of the bottom-up, improvisational nature of local digital artifacts. As early computers were not designed as a primarily audiovisual technology, graphics were often too difficult and labor intensive for amateurs to make. The relative rarity of visuals makes the surviving graphics—such as loading screens—even more notable. Although Czechoslovak programmers were dependent on Western templates, they infused them with local inspirations and shards of local culture, creating an array of idiosyncratic artifacts—including homemade joysticks and cheeky text adventures tackling locally relevant topics. Domestic hardware and software, including their visual and design elements, therefore cannot be dismissed as just clones and copies of the more advanced Western or Japanese products. Their connections to the Soviet Bloc computer culture have proven to be much more analytically intriguing than the superficial orientalism of Western releases of Tetris.
Biorhythms, tinkering, and amateur games were not an exclusively Soviet Bloc or Czechoslovak phenomenon. The existing—albeit scarce—scholarship on Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union suggests that users in other Eastern European countries engaged in similar practices.52 All of these can also be found in the West, although they were somewhat obscured by commercial production. In the Soviet Bloc, these practices developed with little supervision or direction by authorities in the years when the legitimacy of Soviet-style regimes was eroding. This explains the subversive sentiment present especially in period computer games. In Czechoslovakia, amateurs (along with a handful of artists) seemed to be ahead of the political leadership in realizing that computers are powerful instruments for creating and distributing culture. As a result, they created a niche of doit-yourself media practices, which were under the radar of state regulation and censorship, and which they harnessed for both pleasure and subversion.
Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Ackerman, Dan. The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World. 1st ed. New York: PublicAffairs, 2016.
Andromeda Software. Tetris. ZX Spectrum. Mirrorsoft, 1987.
Bachmanová, Jarmila. “Bastlovat, bastlit." Nase rec 70, no. 4 (1987): 222-223.
Bébr, Richard. “Hravé obvody." Technicky magazin 24, no. 12 (1981): 16-21.
Bébr, Richard. Interview by Jaroslav Svelch. March 7, 2014.
Beregi, Tamás. “Hungary." In Video Games around the World, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, 219-234. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.
Bren, Paulina. “Weekend Getaways: The Chata, the Tramp, and the Politics of Private Life in Post-1968 Czechoslovakia." In Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, edited by David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, 123-140. Oxford: Berg, 2002.
Bren, Paulina. The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.
Bren, Paulina. “Tuzex and the Hustler: Living It Up in Czechoslovakia." In Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe, edited by Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, 27-48. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Budziszewski, P. Konrad. “Poland." In Video Games around the World, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, 399-424. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.
Demas, William. Forbidden Planet, Part II: Forbidden City. TRS-80. Fantastic Software, 1981.
Fiske, John. Television Culture. London: Routledge, 2007.
Hása, Miroslav. Elektronická mys: Stavební návod elektronické mysi a zpusob jejího pripo-jení k mikropocítaci. Prague: 602. ZO Svazarmu, 1988.
Havel, Ludek. “Hollywood a normalizace: Distribuce americkych filmu v Ceskoslovensku 1970-1989." Master's thesis, Masaryk University, 2008.
Hollis, John. Aquaplane. ZX Spectrum. Quicksilva, 1983.
Hrda, Stanislav. Interview by Jaroslav Svelch. October 4, 2016.
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Hrda, Stanislav, Michal Hlavác, and Martin Sústrik. Fuksoft. ZX Spectrum. Bratislava: Sy-bilasoft, 1987.
Hrda, Stanislav, Michal Hlavác, and Sybilasoft. Satochin. ZX Spectrum. Bratislava: Sybila-soft, 1988.
(p. 155) James, Arthur. “The Validity of ‘Biorhythmic' Theory Questioned.” British Journal of Psychology 75, no. 2 (May 1984): 197-200. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1984.tb01891.x.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966.
Libovicky Vít. Mesto robotu. ZX Spectrum. Beroun: Zenitcentrum, 1989.
Lipsky, Oldrich. Jáchyme, hod'ho do stroje! Bontonfilm DVD reissue with commentary. Praha: Filmové studio Barrandov, 1974.
Malec, Ivan. “Jestem sceptykiem aneb Jak jsem se stal skeptikem.” Elektronika 2, no. 5 (1988): 37-38.
Mastík, Tomás. “Mys: Externí pohyblivy ovládac kurzoru pro mikropocítac ZX-Spectrum.” Amatérské radio, rada A 35, no. 10 (1986): 377-379.
McDermott, Kevin. Communist Czechoslovakia, 1945-89: A Political and Social History.
European History in Perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Mikrobáze. “Akce mys.” Mikrobáze 4, no. 5 (1988): 27.
Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
MS CSR. “Program elektronizace.” Ucitelské noviny 89, no. 11 (1986): 11-12.
Muzeum umení Olomouc. “Jozef Jankovic.” Central European Art Database, Olomouc: Olo-mouc Museum of Art. 2017. http://www.cead.space/index.php/Detail/people/id:38/ view/biography/lang/en_US.
-pb-. “Na návsteve ve Spálené.” Mikrobáze 4, no. 5 (1988): 6-7.
Penczek, Fr. “Jsem skeptikem.” Amatérské radio, rada A 37, no. 5 (1988): 183.
Piorecky, Karel. “Ceská pocítacove generovaná literatura a otázka autorství literárního textu.” World Literature Studies 9, no. 3 (2017): 66-78.
Robotron Technik.de. “Spielautomat Polyplay.” Robotron Technik.de, Germany: Crimmitschau. 2018. http://www.robotrontechnik.de/index.htm?/html/computer/ polyplay.htm.
Rylek, Tomás. Interview by Jaroslav Svelch. January 15, 2015.
Says, Shiva. “Biorhythm Machines.” Retroland, Retroland, Inc. 2015. http:// www.retroland.com/biorhythm-machines/.
Smejkal, Vladimir. “Pocitacova a internetova kriminalita v Ceske republice.” Pravni rozh-ledy 7, no. 12 (1999): 1-4.
Sperka, Martin. “The Origins of Computer Graphics in the Czech and Slovak Republics.” Leonardo 27, no. 1 (1994): 45. doi:10.2307/1575949.
Stachniak, Zbigniew. “Red Clones: The Soviet Computer Hobby Movements of the 1980s.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 37, no. 1 (January 2015): 12-23. doi:10.1109/ MAHC.2015.11.
Svelch, Jaroslav. Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games. Game Histories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018.
Swalwell, Melanie. “The Early Micro User: Games Writing, Hardware Hacking, and the Will to Mod.” In Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2012 Conference: Local and Global— Games in Culture and Society. Tampere: DiGRA, 2012. http://www.digra.org/dl/db/ 12168.37411.pdf.
Turk, Ziga, and Matevz Kmet. “Tihotapci, pozor!” Moj Mikro 1, no. 7-8 (1984): 51.
Ultimate Play the Game. Atic Atac. ZX Spectrum. A.C.G., 1983.
Ultimate Play the Game. Knight Lore. ZX Spectrum. A.C.G., 1984.
Ultravideo Software. Space Saving Mission. ZX Spectrum. Praha: Ultravideo Software, 1985.
Valoch, Jiri, ed. Computer Graphic [Catalogue of the 1968 Exhibition in Brno, Jihlava and Gottwaldov]. Brno: Dum umeni mesta Brna, 1968.
(p. 156) Wasiak, Patryk. “Playing and Copying: Social Practices of Home Computer Users in Poland during the 1980s.” In Hacking Europe: From Computer Cultures to Demoscenes, edited by Gerd Alberts and Ruth Oldenziel, 129-150. London: Springer, 2014.
Wichterle, Otto. Vzpomnky. Praha: Academia, 2005.
Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Zapletal, P. Exotron: Speedy Stony Wizards Atac. ZX Spectrum. Carrium Software, 1985.
(1.) Dan Ackerman, The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World, 1st ed. (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016).
(2.) Andromeda Software, Tetris, ZX Spectrum (Mirrorsoft, 1987).
(3.) Ackerman, The Tetris Effect.
(4.) Jaroslav Svelch, Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games, Game Histories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).
(5.) Paulina Bren, “Weekend Getaways: The Chata, the Tramp, and the Politics of Private Life in Post-1968 Czechoslovakia,” in Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, ed. David Crowley and Susan E. Reid (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 123-140; Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Paulina Bren, “Tuzex and the Hustler: Living It Up in Czechoslovakia,” in Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe, ed. Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 27-48; Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Melanie Swalwell, “The Early Micro User: Games Writing, Hardware Hacking, and the Will to Mod,” in Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2012 Conference: Local and Global—Games in Culture and Society (Tampere: DiGRA, 2012), http://www.digra.org/dl/db/12168.37411.pdf.
(6.) Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966).
(7.) John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Routledge, 2007).
(8.) Kevin McDermott, Communist Czechoslovakia, 1945-89: A Political and Social History, European History in Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
(9.) Bren, “Weekend Getaways: The Chata, the Tramp, and the Politics of Private Life in Post-1968 Czechoslovakia.”
(10.) I have developed this argument in my monograph on the topic. See Svelch, Gaming the Iron Curtain.
(11.) The interview was conducted in Prague in 1988 after a seminar for international journalists. The article was published in the Polish magazine Bajtek and later translated into Czech and published in the Czechoslovak Amateur Radio magazine, likely without Malec's knowledge. Malec later disputed the interview as inaccurate. However, he did confirm that he made the statement about “immature society,” but only as a personal opinion, not an official statement. Fr. Penczek, “Jsem Skeptikem,” Amatérské radio, rada A 37, no. 5 (1988): 183; Ivan Malec, “Jestem sceptykiem aneb Jak jsem se stal skeptikem,” Elektronika 2, no. 5 (1988): 37-38.
(12.) Similarly to youth clubs discussed by Yurchak. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More.
(13.) Karel Piorecky, “Ceská pocítacove generovaná literatura a otázka autorství literárního textu,” World Literature Studies 9, no. 3 (2017): 66-78.
(14.) Martin Sperka, “The Origins of Computer Graphics in the Czech and Slovak Republics,” Leonardo 27, no. 1 (1994): 45, doi:10.2307/1575949.
(15.) Jirí Valoch, ed., Computer Graphic [Catalogue of the 1968 Exhibition in Brno, Jihlava and Gottwaldov] (Brno: Dum umení mesta Brna, 1968).
(16.) Sperka, “The Origins of Computer Graphics in the Czech and Slovak Republics,” 45.
(17.) Muzeum umení Olomouc, “Jozef Jankovic,” Central European Art Database, 2017, http://www.cead.space/index.php/Detail/people/id:38/view/biography/lang/en_US.
(18.) Richard Bébr, “Hravé obvody,” Technicky magazin 24, no. 12 (1981): 16.
(19.) Richard Bébr, interview by Jaroslav Svelch, March 7, 2014. Supplemented by followup email conversation, February 19-22, 2018.
(20.) Arthur James, “The Validity of ‘Biorhythmic' Theory Questioned,” British Journal of Psychology 75, no. 2 (May 1984): 197-200, doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1984.tb01891.x.
(21.) Shiva Says, “Biorhythm Machines,” Retroland, 2015, http://www.retroland.com/bio-rhythm-machines/.
(22.) Vladimír Smejkal, “Pocítacová a internetová kriminalita v Ceské republice,” Právni rozhledy 7, no. 12 (1999): 1-4.
(23.) Bébr, interview.
(24.) In box office terms, it was the seventh most successful film shown in the cinemas in the 1973-1989 period (including foreign productions), seen by around 2.5 million viewers. Ludek Havel, “Hollywood a normalizace: Distribuce americkych filmu v Ceskosloven-sku 1970-1989” (Master's thesis, Masaryk University, 2008).
(25.) Oldrich Lipsky, Jáchyme, hod'ho do stroje!, Bontonfilm DVD reissue with commentary (Filmové studio Barrandov, 1974). Screenwriters mention the interactions with the producer in the bonus commentary.
(26.) For example, the rotating exhibitions of the privately owned Alza Museum, hosted in the space of the Alza computer store in Prague; the exhibition ENTER—Computer Technology in the Czechoslovak Normalization Period, held in 2012 at the Museum of Play in Jicín; or Century of Information—World of Computing, held in 2016 at the Czech Technical University in Prague.
(27.) Didaktik, a Slovakia-based manufacturer, broke the mold in 1987, bypassing the rules and purchasing British chips to create its Didaktik Gama, a 1987 Sinclair ZX Spectrum clone that was the first domestic machine intermittently available in retail.
(28.) -pb-, “Na návsteve ve Spálené,” Mikrobáze 4, no. 5 (1988): 6-7.
(29.) Based on a period academic essay, which is not backed by empirical evidence, but generally credible. Jarmila Bachmanová, “Bastlovat, bastlit,” Nase rec 70, no. 4 (1987): 222-223.
(30.) Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 17.
(31.) The joystick was found in the collections of the Station of Young Technicians in Prague, which hosted one of the best renowned 1980s youth computer clubs.
(32.) Theoretically, it was even possible to build an entire machine from scratch, but only a few were built that way because of the unavailability of some of the more advanced components such as central processing units.
(33.) Otto Wichterle, Vzpomínky (Praha: Academia, 2005).
(34.) Tomás Mastík, “Mys: Externí pohyblivy ovládac kurzoru pro mikropocítac ZX-Spec-trum,” Amatérské radio, rada A 35, no. 10 (1986): 377-379.
(35.) Miroslav Hása, Elektronická mys: Stavební návod elektronické mysi a zpûsob jejího pripojení k mikropocítaci (Prague: 602. ZO Svazarmu, 1988).
(36.) The figure is based on a prelaunch announcement. It is possible that fewer than the five thousand planned pieces were produced. Mikrobáze, “Akce mys,” Mikrobáze 4, no. 5 (1988): 27.
(37.) MS CSR, “Program elektronizace,” Ucitelské noviny 89, no. 11 (March 13, 1986): 11-12.
(38.) Robotron Technik.de, “Spielautomat Polyplay,” Robotron Technik.de, 2018, http:// www.robotrontechnik.de/index.htm7/html/computer/polyplay.htm. The Soviet machines are exhibited in the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines, which has venues in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
(39.) John Hollis, Aquaplane, ZX Spectrum (Quicksilva, 1983); Ultimate Play the Game, Atic Atac, ZX Spectrum (A.C.G., 1983); Ultimate Play the Game, Knight Lore, ZX Spectrum (A.C.G., 1984).
(40.) P. Zapletal, Exotron: Speedy Stony Wizards Atac, ZX Spectrum (Carrium Software, 1985).
(41.) Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Nick Montfort, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
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(42.) P. Konrad Budziszewski, “Poland,” in Video Games around the World, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 399-424; Ziga Turk and Matevz Kmet, “Tihotap-ci, pozor!,” Moj Mikro 1, no. 7-8 (1984): 51.
(43.) Vít Libovicky, Mésto robotű, ZX Spectrum (Beroun: Zenitcentrum, 1989). It is a conversion of William Demas, Forbidden Planet, Part II: Forbidden City, TRS-80 (Fantastic Software, 1981).
(44.) Ultravideo Software, Space Saving Mission, ZX Spectrum (Praha: Ultravideo Software, 1985).
(45.) Tomás Rylek, interview by Jaroslav Svelch, January 15, 2015.
(46.) Fiske, Television Culture, 252.
(47.) Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More.
(48.) Stanislav Hrda, Michal Hlavác, and Sybilasoft, Satochin, ZX Spectrum (Bratislava: Sybilasoft, 1988).
(49.) Stanislav Hrda, interview by Jaroslav Svelch, October 4, 2016.
(50.) Stanislav Hrda, Michal Hlavác, and Martin Sústrik, Fuksoft, ZX Spectrum (Bratislava: Sybilasoft, 1987).
(51.) Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV.
(52.) Patryk Wasiak, “Playing and Copying: Social Practices of Home Computer Users in Poland during the 1980s,” in Hacking Europe: From Computer Cultures to Demoscenes, ed. Gerd Alberts and Ruth Oldenziel (London: Springer, 2014), 129-150; Budziszewski, “Poland”; Tamás Beregi, “Hungary,” in Video Games around the World, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 219-234; Zbigniew Stachniak, “Red Clones: The Soviet Computer Hobby Movements of the 1980s,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 37, no. 1 (January 2015): 12-23, doi:10.1109/MAHC.2015.11.r
Jaroslav Svelch
Jaroslav Svelch, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, Charles University
Machines, Nations, and Faciality: Cultivating Mental Eyes in Soviet Books for Children a
Serguei Alex Oushakine
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Children's Literature Studies
Online Publication Date: Jul 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.16
This article explores illustrated children's books that were published in Soviet Russia during the first five-year plan (1928-1932). Targeting mostly preschool and elementary school children, these books are creatively illustrated, offering their readers highly detailed accounts of economic and political development in the country. Soviet pedagogues perceived this literature as a tool for training “literate spectators,” able to discern social and political importance of images. The article follows this idea, using the books for tracing visual regimes that represented class and ethnicity in the 1920s-1930s. Picture books for children successfully reflected the dual nature of socialist transformations in the USSR, where building new sites of industrial production were closely linked with the building of new nations. Very early on, this literature also documented the bifurcation of this dual process. The detailed portrayal of ethnic distinctions was paralleled by the visual disappearance of the working class, producing a stream of illustrations in which technology and ethnic groups emerged as self-sufficient visual fields, ostensibly disconnected from class, labor, and history.
Keywords: Russia, Central Asia, industrialization, technology, productivism, class, ethnicity, socialism, iconography, visual regimes
We have divided our whole country into economic regions; now we are
carefully exploring how the faces of these regions might look.
—Gleb Krzhizhanovskii, The Great Construction Site (1929)1
When Krzhizhanovskii, the key Soviet expert on electrification, spoke his lines about a careful search for regional faces, he was in charge of GosPlan, the State Planning Agency that designed and supervised the transformation of the USSR. Popularizing the first five-year plan, which began in 1928, his speech was a keynote address delivered in front of a somewhat unusual audience—a group of young Pioneers who gathered in Moscow for their First All-Union Meeting.2
Of course, the “faces” that Krzhizhanovskii referred to should not be taken literally. Mostly, he was concerned with differentiation of economic profiles of individual regions. Their distinctiveness was supposed to result in a more precise division of labor and, correspondingly, in a stronger cooperation and mutual dependency of the Soviet Union's regions. Yet I find the choice of the facial metaphor rather symptomatic. In a peculiar way, the emphasis on faciality in Krzhizhanovskii's speech exposes the early Soviet obsession with the visual dimension of economic development. The economic status in general and the labor process in particular had to be translated into graspable and graphic forms. This early Soviet turn toward the optical was more than just a historically specific predisposition for the pictorial language in a country where mass literacy had yet to be accom-plished.3 In his address, Krzhizhanovskii highlighted a specific optico-ontological connection, too. Encouraging his young audience to study (p- 158) “the history of human labor,” he insisted that the industrialization of the country could not be understood without a particular educational training that “sharpens one's mental eye.” As the country's chief planning executive emphasized, “To see life as it is you have to cultivate your watchfulness, to cultivate your eye.”4
Within one sentence, Krzhizhanovskii turned “life as it is” into a spectacle that could reveal its meaning only to a sophisticated spectator. Krzhizhanovskii was not alone with his idea of cultivating mental eyes of the young generation. Soviet pedagogues of the time were similarly preoccupied with reorganizing Soviet school so that it would be able to produce “the literate spectator,” as Zlata Lilina, an important revolutionary and the head of the children's book division of Gosizdat (the major State Publishing House), put it.5 In her essay Demands of Life from 1928, she passionately stipulated that Soviet children might not know how to sing, act, or paint, but they ought to know how to perceive visual art: “It is necessary not only to provide children with the basics of pictorial literacy but also to train them how to view the picture.”6
In what follows, I explore this early Soviet pedagogy of images aimed at sharpening minds and eyes of literate spectators. I look closely at illustrated children's books that were published roughly around the time of Krizhizhanovskii's speech, during the first five-year plan (1928-1932) that so dramatically changed the social, economic, and cultural landscape of the Soviet Union. Targeting mostly preschool and elementary school children, these books are generously illustrated. Despite the age of their audience, writers and artists used the format of children's literature to tell stories about economic and political development in the country. Propagandistic to their core, these books, nonetheless, took seriously the abilities of their readers, offering them creative iconotexts that effectively merged the pictorial and the discursive together.7
With some rare exceptions, the existing scholarship on early Soviet children's literature tends to ignore the hybrid nature of these books, privileging either their iconography or their narratives.8 I will try to keep the visual and the textual sides of these publications together, discussing them within a larger sociopolitical context of the period. My overall concern is similar to Krzhizhanovskii's. I use this literature as my main source for understanding how the facialization of radical economic changes took place in the early Soviet Union, that is to say, how essential economic and regional differences were visually grasped and symbolically mediated. Certainly, children's literature might not look like a logical source for such a research agenda. And yet, as I showed elsewhere, these books were among the first to express trends and visualize processes that would be articulated by the literature for adults only later.9
Given the nature of its readership, children's literature had to be both informative and accessible, wrapping political concepts and messages in attractive slogans and striking images. Published before socialist realism established itself in the middle of the 1930s as the dominant aesthetic and representational framework, the picture books that I discuss here effectively became an indispensable platform for translating key communist ideas into idioms and tropes that shaped the worldview of the first generation of Soviet children.10 The facialization of Soviet industrialization was a part of this larger translation project. What kinds of "faces"—to use Krzhizhanovskii's language—could become (p- 159) emblematic in this situation? What were the pictorial options that allowed the early Soviet state to envision the process of radical economic and social transformations? The options, I suggest, were rather limited, and children's literature, perhaps like no other genre, graphically (if inadvertently) exposed the basic foundational problem with industrializing a country that had almost no proletariat.
Ideologically, the early Soviet state was committed to the language of class, privileging the imagery of the worker. However, this commitment was not easy to sustain sociologically and pragmatically. In 1922, Iakov Iakovlev, the founder of The Peasant Newspaper (Krestianskaiia gazeta), reminded the readers of Pravda that workers (with their families) could barely make up 15 percent of the country's population (and less than 10 percent of these workers belonged to the communist party).11 This sociological dilemma resulted in an interesting pictographic solution. As I show later, children's books shifted their pictorial focus from workers—to work, and then—to working tools. The portrayal of economic reforms quickly acquired an objectivist logic: economic changes were presented as transformations of means of production. The (almost) absent working class was demarcated metonymically, through a seemingly endless supply of industrial portraits of technological equipment, materials, or structures. This process of pictorial depopulation was compensated by the second major trend: the distinctiveness of regional “faces" was increasingly rendered in ethnic terms. Limited sets of characteristic ornaments, emblems, and/or signs were used to distinguish and represent regional groups. Detached from economic concerns, this representational strategy reduced ethnicity to ethnography and focused mostly on national costumes and objects of daily life (household items, clothing, housing, etc.).
Children's literature captured well the dual nature of socialist transformations of the 1920s-1930s, where building new sites of industrial production went hand in hand with the building of new nations. Yet, unlike the literature for adults, picture books for chil-
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dren documented very early on how this dual process swiftly bifurcated, eventually producing a chain of striking pictures in which technology (without working class) and ethnic groups (without technology) emerged as self-sufficient visual fields, ostensibly disconnected from class, labor, and history. Following these books, I trace visual regimes that this bifurcation generated and popularized.
The cover of a 1931 small picture book From Caoutchouc to Galoshes, designed by Olga Deineko and Nikolai Troshin, offers a laconic expression of the link between the economic regionalization and its embodiment pointed out by Krzhizhanovskii.12 A story about the technological production of rubber goods, this book was a part of the series of illustrated publications that became known as productivist (proizvodstevnnaia) literature for children.13 Many of these books followed a standard narrative template: a story would begin in the place where a particular raw material—such as caoutchouc, cotton, (p- 160) or cocoa beans—is harvested, and then it would proceed by describing the stages that transform a raw material into a consumable thing.
Courtesy of the Cotsen Children's Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Princeton University Library)
Deineko and Troshin conveniently condense this long and laborious process, showing on the cover only the beginning and the end of it. Structured as an enforced dialogue between two separate pictures, the left part of the cover depicts a dark-skinned adult making incisions in the bark of a caoutchouc tree, while the right half presents a white
Page 4 of 37 teenager who walks through the rain in rubber galoshes (Figure 7.1). The cover literary translates the title into images, moving from caoutchouc to galoshes, but it does so by building into this montaged arrangement a whole set of other binaries. The two humans are depicted as representatives of two radically different environments. A sunny tropical forest with its half-naked static native is opposed to the rainy urban setting, which is dynamically traversed by a boy fully clothed in "European-style" attire. Despite its sunshine and relaxing foliage, the tropical habitat is, nonetheless, a place of labor, a working station of sorts. In turn, the gray and rainy city (with barely distinguishable rectangles of buildings in the background) is a space for personal growth: the boy holds a book (or a briefcase) under his arm, probably hurrying to school. The juxtaposition of the two trees semantically completes the overall contrast: a mature rubber tree on the left is violently scarred by the human, while a young decorative tree on a city sidewalk is carefully protected by a metal fence wrapped around it. This visual journey from white latex (collected by a dark-skinned person) to black galoshes (worn by a white boy), then, is a story about an early Soviet visual regime of simultaneity that brings the world of the archaic and the world of the modern together. The collection of juxtapositions presented in the cover, however, avoided one crucial split: labor and race are still firmly intertwined here in the figure of the working native. It is precisely this split that many children's books would forcefully introduce in order to separate the iconography of labor from iconography of ethnicity.
In From Caoutchouc to Galoshes, the cover is the only illustration where the idea of the autonomous but connected coexistence of two different worlds is presented so graphically. Between the covers, the remote origin of the rubber is completely overshadowed by the meticulously described stages of the galoshes' production (Figure 7.2). To highlight the importance of technology, the authors rely on two major visual devices. Deineko and Troshin turn machinery into the dominant chromatic and volumetric element of the illustration; at the same time, they deindividualize workers, limiting their distinctive features to the colors and types of their uniforms. In their illustrations, gigantic technical structures dwarf the individuals, showing them as human appendices of the machine.
Courtesy of the Cotsen Children's Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Princeton University Library)
The strategy of pictorial dehumanization is important, but it should not be misread. One of the messages that this iconographic profiling of the machinery was supposed to convey for the young reader was the idea that industry in the Soviet Union was not meant to produce commodities only. Also, and more important, it was expected to generate new forms of cooperation and new types of collectivity. Krzhizhanovskii's speech is quite representative in this respect. Explaining the major difference between socialist and capitalist economies, he maintained that the main goal of the Soviet state (p- 161) was to design an alternative to the capitalist economy that was “built to satisfy private interests of separate individuals.” A socialist alternative would come in the form of a planned economy, “animated by the action of a large collective of workers, not of separate individuals.”14 The visual foregrounding of the machinery by Deineko and Troshin reflected this idea of the planned collective animation. In their book, technology, technological equipment, and technological processes are the main material (p- 162) tools for organizing people.15 Providing objectified metaphors, voluminous images of pipelines and cranes, towers and turbines appear as signs of industrial modernity, seemingly accessible to anyone.
Equally important is another visual gesture of the authors. As Figure 7.3 shows, the process of technological production helps organize the compositional structure of the page as well: the words on the page visually follow the spatial trajectory determined by the conveyer belt. | (p- 163)
Courtesy of the Cotsen Children's Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Princeton University Library)
In their Bread-Making Plant N3, which Deineko and Troshin also coauthored, the authors forced the material shape of the book to follow the structure of the production cycle.16 An impressive four-page foldout spread depicts an uninterrupted panoramic view of the bread-making process (Figure 7.4).
Courtesy of the Cotsen Children's Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Princeton University Library)
The process of technological production emerged in these books, then, as a comprehensive structuring template that molds the shape and flow of resources, labor, discourse, and mediums into a coherent whole.
(p. 164) From Caoutchouc to Galoshes is useful for understanding how representations of modern technology became an effective and impressive iconographic solution for objectifying collectivity and connectivity of workers in early Soviet Russia. Obviously, the pro-ductivist books did not invent this approach; the same visual tendency could be easily discovered in the industrial photography of Alexander Rodchenko and Max Penson, or in documentary films by Dziga Vertov, Esfir Shub, and Lev Kuleshov. Unlike these avantgarde artists, authors of children's books were usually less inclined to experiment with expressive means. Yet, as From Caoutchouc to Galoshes demonstrates, they could productively communicate the same message about the formative power of industry by relying on the strategic deployment of such basic devices as scaling and coloring.
The objectivist orientation of these productivist books might have been successful in highlighting the fundamental importance of industry and labor for the economic transformation of the country, but its pictorial dehumanization did little to contribute to the other part of the formula articulated by Krizhizhanovskii. The “facial” features that were supposed to render the distinctiveness of the economic regionalization were clearly eclipsed by techno-human assemblages. Another productivist picture book, Cotton by the writer Boris Shatilov and the artist Appolon Manuilov, brings the concern with faciality back.17
Cotton is also a story about a material that is framed as a story about material production. The young reader could learn very little about the types of cotton, its organic features, or the history of its discovery. Instead, the book draws the reader's attention to various productive interactions between humans and cotton. The use-value of the material is visibly surpassed by its labor-value, that is to say, by the amount and types of human energy invested in its production. Indeed, Cotton is a history of human labor, as Krzhizhanovskii wanted it, and it is instructive to see how this history is depicted in the book.
(p. 165) Shatilov and Manuilov structured their iconotext as a sequence of technological scenes, neatly broken into three main stages. At the initial, agricultural stage, peasants of Turkestan prepare the land,18 plant cotton seeds, and water and weed the plants, until, finally, they collect the cotton fiber in order to sell it to a local cotton gin factory. At the second, manufacturing, stage, local workers clean the fiber and pack it for transporting to a cotton mill in Russia. There, the real—industrial—modification finally takes place. Through a series of technological operations, shapeless piles of fiber are transformed into a white fabric, which can be adorned later with various ornaments by special calico printing machines.
As is common for the productivist genre, the book offers a highly detailed technological map: a history of labor is framed as a never-ending list of tools, locations, and specialists with various skills. Cotton, however, makes it clear that this process of differentiation of places, objects, and people is not a one-directional (colonial) chain of movements—away from the remote location of raw resources and toward the cosmopolitan center of consumption. Shatilov and Manuilov transfigure the usual linearity of colonial extractions as a socioeconomic loop of mutuality. The last page of the book explains the pragmatics of this universal connectedness:
There is a lot of cotton in Turkestan; but there is no grain. There is a lot of grain in the USSR but there is no cotton.19 If a Russian peasant wants to buy some calico so that his wife could make a new dress for herself and new shirts for himself and his son, he has to sell the surplus of his grain to a grain collecting station first. This grain will be sent to Turkestan so that an Uzbek could buy it, using the money that he got earlier from selling his cotton to a cotton gin factory.
These are the final lines of the book, spelling out how exactly faces of new economic regions might look: Russian/grain versus Uzbek/cotton. This is also a basic lesson in the political economy of socialism: economic differentiation creates insufficiency but also it strengthens mutual dependency.
It is crucial that there is no discursive or visual space for the market in this story. In fact, the loop of mutual dependency could be sustained precisely because there is no way to opt out of it. Correspondingly, this closed system could develop itself only through increasing the differentiation of its internal elements and modifying the types of their combinations. The minute specification of technological stages that Cotton documented was a logical outcome of this process. Proliferation of different professions and skills was another. Vladimir Bogoraz (1865-1936), a major Soviet ethnographer and anthropologist, in his review of the exhibit The Chukchi Society that took place in 1934 in Leningrad, provided an interesting documentation of this dynamics among this nomadic people in the Far East. As the ethnographer put it, in the past, the Chukchi (also known aa Lyg'oravetlans) used the same word to refer to shaman, priest, and physician, since they all did “the same thing—they healed people. Now, there are three distinctive terms.” The terminological evolution of “physician” (vrach) is especially revealing. As the ethnographer observes: “Ten years ago, the (p- 166) local equivalent for ‘physician' was ‘improver,' but now the locals switched to an international description—doktor.”20
Children's literature contributed to this process of professional differentiation and terminological standardization, too. In 1930, to increase the pictorial and terminological literacy of young readers, What We Are Building, a productivist book by Leonid Savel'ev and Vladimir Tambi, offered a detail map of new professions (Figure 7.5).21
Courtesy of the Cotsen Children's Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Princeton University Library)
(p. 167) Affirmatively titled Who I Will Be, the poster-like page depicted twenty-three iconic images of individual specialists. True to its objectivist logic, the map facialized professional differences by depicting somewhat distinctive professional outfits and iconic objects: a metalworker with a hammer, a food maker with a can, an educator with a globe, or a "Soviet trade expert” with an abacus.22 This diversity of people and things, the map clearly denoted, had the same educational origin—the center of the illustration was visually anchored by a large constructivist building with the sign Soviet Vocational School.
Cotton adopts a different visual strategy for representing economic distinctions. Just like in Tambi's poster of professions, sartorial differences retain in Cotton their key differential importance. Yet, in his narrative, Shatilov actively uses clothing to emphasize the ethnicity of the peasant. The very first paragraph of the book starts with this sentence: "In spring, when cherry, apricot, and peach trees begin to blossom, an Uzbek—wearing a colorful robe, a skullcap and pointy tall boots—harnesses his bullocks to a wooden plough and starts tilling the soil” for sowing cotton. To amplify the intensity of local flavor, Shatilov borrows a Turkic word omach to refer to the "wooden plough” (and the book immediately offers a footnote clarifying the meaning of the word in Russian). A couple of pages later, there is another ethno-sartorial comment about "an Uzbek with a turban, dressed in a robe” who uses his camel to transport the harvested cotton to a local cotton gin factory where it is processed by the "workers recruited from the Turkmen and Uzbeks.” Appolon Manuilov accompanied these texts with illustrations that are similarly detailed. Reminiscent of Persian miniatures, they scrupulously depict pieces of clothing, patterns of fabrics, or elements of labor tools (Figure 7.6).
Courtesy of the Cotsen Children's Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Princeton University Library)
This heightened attention to the ethnic detail could be easily seen as yet another example of intended or habitual Orientalism. But I think the situation is a bit more complex than that. If it is a form of Orientalism, it is a temporal rather than a geographic one. Figure 7.7 helps to make my point. The illustration accompanies a paragraph that explains the role of the spinning machine, contrasting it with the preindustrial manual (kustarnyi) way of spinning cotton.
Courtesy of the Cotsen Children's Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Princeton University Library)
The text mentions only “Uzbek women” who still rely on the kustarnyi method, but in addition to the image of an Uzbek spinner, the illustration also depicts her equally parochial Russian counterpart with a prialka, a manually operated spinning wheel. Both women are using traditional wooden tools. Both are dressed in recognizable ethnic garbs: a silk Uzbek robe and a Russian lacy dress. Yet, in the context of the book, the demarcation of their ethnicity indicates not so much their national belonging but rather the stages of development of their economic life.
Nikolar Marr, a highly influential linguist at the time, summarized well this approach in his essay from 1927. Claiming that any ethnicity is “an entirely social phenomenon” that reflects the individual's belonging to a particular phase of economic and political development, Marr insisted that ethnic differences should be seen first and foremost as class differences.23 In other words, ethnicity was perceived as a derivative of the mode of production in general, and of the tools of production in particular: hence the Uzbek peasant with his omach, or the Russian woman with her prialka. Therefore, it is not surprising that both handicraft workers are superseded by a different kind of woman in (p- 168) the bottom part of the illustration. Attending to a large spinning machine, this—modern—fe-male weaver handles more than a dozen spindles at once. She is also differently dressed: her nonconspicuous uniform (a white robe over a checkered dress) has no features that could give away her ethnic or geographic belonging. Despite their differences, all these women are united, albeit indirectly. Three close-up images of their spinning tools provide a visual hint for the mental eye of the viewer. These industrial portraits indicate significant differences, displaying a gradual evolution of the equipment. They point to a systemic commonality, too. Working tools here are specific manifestations of a more fundamental phenomenon: the history of human labor.
There is one particular aspect of this illustration that I want to emphasize (it would appear in more prominent forms later). While suggesting a teleology of economic development of the means of production—from a spinner to a spinning wheel, and then to an industrial spinning machine—Cotton, nonetheless, presents them as mutually (p-169) compatible. Emphasizing the simultaneity of differently organized labor, the illustration converts what might look like diachronic stages of development into their synchronic presence. Historical differences are transcoded as topographic ones.
The trend appears to be gender neutral, as another illustration from the book shows (Figure 7.8).
Courtesy of the Cotsen Children's Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Princeton University Library)
In this case, the artist visualizes a narrative about the calico printing process. Similar to the previous illustration, this production stage is also contextualized through its relation with the technology of the past. In the top left corner, two Uzbek men (wearing patterned robes and ornamented skullcaps), produce a hand-printed fabric, while the foreground of the illustration is occupied by a large working printing press on the right, and a man carrying buckets of paint on the left. The functional continuity with an earlier form of printing is retained; however, the manual labor is radically transformed into what seems to be an almost autonomously running machine.
(p. 170) On the level of the individual, the transformation of labor is depicted, again, as the transformation of personal appearance: from ethnic particularities of the artisans to the universal uniformity of the working class. Like the Uzbek printmakers in the top-left corner, the worker who services the machine wears a robe, too; but his is an unidentifiable monochromatic robe of the industrial worker. The transition from the manufacturing to the machine-based production, the image implies, brings with it the erasure of ethnic specifics, demonstrating that they are rooted, as Marr would claim, “not in some mystical nationalism, but in a real class.”24 Significantly, the book pointedly highlights the formative connection between the appearance and the mode of production, but it does not frame different classes as mutually exclusive. Their simultaneity is acknowledged, but so is their belonging to different technological stages. As the book puts it, “to color their fabrics, the Uzbeks rely on a primeval method even now.”
Articulated in images but barely specified textually, the correlation between the preindustrial mode of production and ethnic appearance of those who practiced it is important. It demonstrates how the early Soviet state tried to symbolize what was called at the time mnogoukladnost', that is, the heterogeneity of lifestyle and economic arrangements, the social coevalness of technologically incompatible—yet historically coexistent—modes of production and their agents. Within this framework, ethnicities, like outdated tools, would be replaced in a near future by more “efficient” forms of (industrial) belonging. For the time being, however, they were treated neutrally—as a technically obsolete but still unavoidable way to satisfy local needs. In 1929, Bogoraz emphatically outlined this political and academic vision of the future of nationalities. Speaking at a meeting of ethnographers of Moscow and Leningrad that would significantly shape the future of Soviet ethnography, Bogoraz maintained:
... we grant the right of self-determination to national minorities not because we overvalue [ethnicity] but because we ... have stopped seeing in ethnic differences a kind of cement. We have a different cement now, the industrial one. We grant national rights [to minorities] because we think that they are properties of secondary importance ... national rights is the only form of private property that we tolerate: the right to one's own language, one's own culture, and one's own folklore.
And a bit later:
I think it is totally wrong to think that we are looking forward to ... the elimination of all national characteristics. We are not building a barrack, not even a barrack for workers; we are building a garden-city for the flower bed of our ethnicities ... . when cleansed from the residues of chauvinism, [this flower bed] would make our culture more fragrant and more diverse. Happiness is in diversity.25
The development of nationalities in the USSR did not quite go in the direction envisioned by Bogoraz, but this does not make his view any less widespread. As I have been demonstrating, children's literature at the time adopted a very similar position, training the viewer to see—mentally—ethnicity in its dual form: as a fragrant flower bed of differences cemented by the industrial production of sameness. Yuri Gralitsa's poem Children's Internationale, was, perhaps, one of the most consistent attempts to articulate the importance of the foundational “cement” in a language accessible to the young audience.26 In this book, ethnic particularities were evoked neither to be celebrated nor to be erased. Rather, the book playfully engaged with ethnic differences in order to successfully transcend them: Children's Internationale tested the limits of ethnic differences through labor —only to reveal their utter obsolescence.
(p. 172) The poem focuses on the life of the actually existing orphanage Ants near Moscow. The book presents Ants as a self-governing institution, and the opening page describes (and depicts) children conducting their business meeting. Their agenda is not trivial: children are trying to address a crucial question: “How to organize a life of work and freedom that could make everyone happy?” Long discussions end with the unanimous decision to start a labor commune, where livelihood and labor could be shared equally or, to be more exact, fairly. However, the organizational decision stumbles upon an unforeseen problem. As one of the children, Volodia, points out,
Our circle will be too narrow
If the commune unites only Russians. < ... >
There are children all over the world,
Let's get them over here
To talk ...
About the way they work.
A representative of the orphanage goes to the Kremlin to talk about this plan with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who agrees to help. Following the Minister's telegram to “all the people who are ready to share their labor” with the members of Ants, the orphanage hosts a chain of foreigners—a Chinese, an African, a French, an American ... . The poem introduces each representative by listing a set of ethnic clichés: an Eskimos in a fur coat, a Turk with a fez, and a “tidy” German. But in each case, this sartorial ornamentalism quickly evolves into a description of labor. For instance, the entrance of a Persian boy is described as follows:
A Persian comes in, riding a camel,
Looking from above, he says:
I responded to your call, people, Arriving from my hometown—Tabriz.
My life is far from being a holiday: Hunger won't leave me alone for a minute. Working for other people's enjoyment I cook oriental delights for rich kids.
And to entertain their eyes, I have to weave Persian rugs.
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I spend my life, toiling.
With no hope for a rest.
A protracted succession of these appearances, however, ends rather unexpectedly. The same Volodia, who originally insisted on ethnic diversity, having experienced this diversity face to face, concludes that all these differences in fact only confirm a fundamental, universal, sameness. Different clothing, skin color, or eye shape could not hide that “We are all equipped/With the same pair of legs and pair of arms/ ... That enable us to work.” Faciality, in other words, might be good in reflecting differences, but it is also effective in obfuscating fundamental commonalties.
(p. 173) It is striking to see how closely children's literature matched here the normative concerns and conclusions articulated by the adults. For instance, in his pamphlet For the Cultural Building of Nationalities published in 1927, Gasim Mansurov, the chief ideologue of the Tatar Republic in the 1920s, basically repeated the message from Gralitsa's book, taking it to the logical end:
Even though workers of different nationalities speak different languages, they express identical thoughts and feelings. We are following the same path by developing the culture of multiple ethnicities in the Soviet Union. Developing national languages, we express identical thoughts and identical content, because in the final analysis the goals and tasks of national cultures are the same ... . 27
Difference was not rejected, either by children's books, or by politicians. It was perceived as functionally irrelevant in a society where people “work for one another,” to quote Gral-itsa. In his final illustration for Children's International, Georgii Echeistov even depicts a version of the “flower bed of ethnicities” of sorts (Figure 7.9).
Courtesy of the Cotsen Children's Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Princeton University Library)
In what looks like a local Garden of Eden, a “friendly commune of proletarians” made their original ethnic differences superfluous by their creative labor. Happiness is not about diversity, after all, the book seems to suggest. Happiness is about doing the same thing together.
(p. 174) Gralitsa's appeal to value sameness was elaborated further in a subgenre of children's books that Nikolai Agnivtsev aptly called “Comintern fairy tales.”28 Following the same plotline, they all demonstrated how ethnic and racial differences became overshadowed by much more important common concerns. Predictably, there was a fundamental optical problem with this vision in which the particularism of ethnicity was kept in check by the universal logic of economic production and political development. Echeistov's image illustrates well the crux of this visual dilemma: the processual, performative character of labor is in clear conflict with the static nature of its pictorial representations. At best, the unifying labor is rendered as a sequence of statuesque poses or is reduced to the depiction of working tools. As the illustration shows, these iconographic choices were easily outperformed by images of elaborate ethnic garments. Class solidarity and collective labor were easy to articulate, but they were hard to render in successful visual forms. As a result, the iconographic treatment of class solidarity would leave it as a visually silent background: as a commonplace that did not have to be articulated or even mentioned but that could be discovered, imposed, or inferred by the watchful viewer.
In his seminal 1927 article on literature and everyday life, Boris Eikhebaum, a Russian formalist, reminded his critics that “we cannot observe all the facts at once, nor can we always see the same facts, nor do we constantly need to discover the same relations again and again.”29 The early Soviet children's literature shows well what happens when the need to discover the same foundational relation again and again fades away, that is to say, when the concern with the cementing impact of industrial production falls out of the purview of the observer (and the author). In this section, I use only a couple of examples from a large body of Soviet books about ethnic minorities in order to highlight how the gradual vanishing of the “industrial cement” was replaced by fragrant flower beds of ethnicities. The visual approach that these limited examples exhibit, however, could be extended to the rest of the children's literature of the period.
The methodological core of the representational regime in this literature was overdetermined by the famous “dialectical” formula that Joseph Stalin articulated in his lecture for the students of The Communist University of the Toilers of the East in 1925. In his talk, Stalin vigorously refuted a seeming contradiction between the Party's plans to begin a wide-scale construction of national cultures, including the establishment of “schools ... in local languages, and the production of aboriginal cadres,” on the one hand, and the Party's overall goal of building socialism and the proletarian culture, on the other. As the country's leader expounded,
... proletarian culture, which is socialist in content, assumes different forms and modes of expression among the different peoples who are drawn into the building of socialism, depending upon differences in language, manner of life, and so forth.
(p. 175) Proletarian in content, national in form—such is the universal culture towards which socialism is proceeding. Proletarian culture does not abolish national culture, it gives it content. On the other hand, national culture does not abolish proletarian culture, it gives it form.30
Mostly due to their didactic quality, books for children became one of the key areas where the search for national forms was especially prominent. A cottage industry of publications on Soviet nationalities provided quasi-ethnographic accounts that usually placed ethnic groups in their native habitats, normally in a highly symbiotic relationship with nature. Covering predominantly daily life (food, housing, crafts), this literature performed the already familiar operation of coding particular objects and daily routines as distinctively ethnic. Quite unusually, these stories were not conceived within the framework of salvage ethnography, which takes on itself the noble task of documenting extinct cultures for the posterity. The future of minorities looked actually quite promising in Soviet publications, and their main motivation had to do with the desire to compile the vocabulary of “national forms,” which might, with time, become infused with socialist content.
Reindeer and the Lopars by Alexei Gladun is exemplary in this respect.31 The book introduces the reader to a small seminomadic group of reindeer breeders, Lopars (or Saami), who lived in the Soviet part of Lapland (Figure 7.10). The book offers the following description of the area: “You can look around there. But white snow and sparse trees are all there is to see. Occasionally, you might observe animal traces. There, people live far away from each other.” Scarcity of people determines a narrative shift toward animals, reindeer in particular. As the book explains, “reindeer is the only thing that the Lopars have to sustain their life in the severe tundra.” For the locals, reindeer is basically a walking natural deposit of raw materials: “To the humans who live there, the reindeer (p-176) gives food—its own meat; it gives them clothing—its own skin; and reindeer are used for traveling through deep snowbanks of tundra.” According to the book, there was not that much that the Lopars actually could do with themselves: they live in their chumy (tents) covered with reindeer skins; they wear warm malitsa (fur coats) and decorated pimy (fur boots), also made from reindeer skins. When they are not busy killing animals, they either ride deer and dogs around the tundra, or spend time in their tents, warming themselves up and cooking. Their kids, the book notices, prefer not to stay in “the smoky tents.” Rather, they play with their sleds, roll in snow, or simply stare at the East, “waiting for the sun to appear.”
Courtesy of the Russian State Children's Library (Moscow, Russia)
Pictorially, the book portrays this rather minimalist lifestyle through a repeated usage of a small number of emblematic images: aerial views of deer herds, triangles of chumy, and outlines of human figures in their bulky fur coats. Usually, these images would be completely disconnected from any context. This decontextualization was not accidental, though; it had a didactic purpose. It sharpened the mental eye of the reader by directing it to crucial objects that could represent (and substitute for) the individuals associated with them—be it a chum of the Lopar, a robe of the Uzbek, or a globe of the educator. Appearing against white empty backgrounds, these forms suggest themselves as readymade icons, waiting to be assembled in any configuration. One has to try hard to discover in them any socialist, let alone proletarian, content. Nevertheless, the book transformed objects into signs, offering them as elements of ethnic ornaments of sorts, as visual monograms that could be read as recognizable signatures of a distinctive ethnic group.
The folk origin of these icons, their deep connection with daily life and nature, made them politically not only acceptable but also progressive. Surprisingly, in this context their kus-tarnoe (domestic) genealogy did not look backward anymore. Separated from the cement of industrial production, their kustarnost' (domestic imperfectness) re-emerged as an expression of a highly contemporary attitude, which treated art as aesthetically pleasing but also practically relevant. For instance, in their introduction to an ethnographic album of decorated objects collected in the Soviet North in the early 1920s, the editors essentially rephrased the slogan “Art into Life!”, popularized by the Russian avant-garde artists at the time. Speaking about decorating practices of the Northerners, the editors emphasized that by decorating everyday objects with traditional ancient ornaments, the Northerners had in mind “neither markets, nor museums. A Northerner made them for his own, domestic consumption ... . His art serves his life.”32 Decorating was labor here.
The main difficulty with this approach was that it was not limited to decorated objects of daily life. For obvious reasons, life itself was turned in children's literature into a spectacle with a limited set of recognizable stylistic patterns: lines of deer herds, triangles of tents, or blobs of human silhouettes. The search for a recognizable “face of the region” converted local ornaments into flattening ornamentalism, into patterns divorced from the
objects they used to decorate. In 1927, in one of his essays on photography, Siegfried Kra-cauer made a useful observation about the way old photographs tend to disintegrate into their particulars. With time, the thinker commented, the costume of the person becomes more recognizable than the person herself: “even the landscape and all other (p- 177) concrete objects become costumes in an old photograph.”33 In a sense, the ornamentalization of ethnic forms in Soviet children's books shared the same logic. Signs that Reindeer and the Lopars associated with the lifestyle of a particular people were, to use Kracauer definition, “the sum of what can be subtracted from [it].”34 People and landscapes became visual “costumes”—transportable garbs with little personal content.
What is remarkable about this formalist approach, though, is that Soviet educators of the time were keenly aware of the depersonalizing objectification pointed out by Kracauer. Except they perceived it as an effective pedagogical device, not as a sign of representational deficiency. Similar to a map or a diagram, their method of the “artificial simplification” was supposed to highlight significant features and heighten meaningful aspects, focalizing the reader's attention on the typical and the indicative.35 The method was criticized occasionally for being excessively schematic. Predominantly, however, it was deployed as a productive “intellectual tool.” For instance, Elizaveta Shabad and Evgenia Flerina, the two key experts on children's aesthetic education at the time, stipulated in 1928 that picture books for preschool children must present objects as “typical,” with an emphasis on their key characteristics. “Details of the individual or particular nature,” the educators concluded, “should be thrown away.”36 These comments clarify the internal workings of the Soviet pedagogy of images: the technology of training the young reader's mental eye was based on teaching children how to move from the iconic to the indexical perception of signs. The literate spectator was expected not only to recognize the sign but also to read it systemically—as a reference to a group and as a representation of the type.37 In turn, the illustrated book was expected to supply the reader with a vocabulary of indexical images that could be learned in order to be quickly identified or reproduced later.
The obsession with educating the literate spectator reveals the double side of this pedagogy of images: the production of individuals able to decode visual signs successfully was inseparable from the production of a shared repertoire of expressive means. The cultivation of mental eyes was a flip side of the ongoing process of encoding. It would be wrong to assume that this production of the literate spectator through the production of “simplifying” ornamentalism was purely formal. Some authors did try to combine a search for emblematic ethnic patterns with attempts to associate a national form with specifically socialist content. For example, Mekkail's Thoughts, another picture book about Lopars, written by Fil Dudorov and lavishly illustrated by Anna Borovskaia, tells a story about the collectivization of this nomadic people (Figure 7.11).38 Dudorov styles his poem as an imitation of a Northern native song about two adult men, Mekkail and Oles', close friends who do not see each other too often. One day, Mekkail harnesses his reindeer, gets in the sled, and goes to see Oles'. There is a good reason for that. Somehow Mekkail has learned that all the Lopari are coming together for a meeting—to discuss a possibility of collectivization. Or, as the poem's narrator proclaims, its unavoidable arrival: “Tomorrow a reindeer kolkhoz will be created out of nomadic settlements.”
Courtesy of the Russian State Children's Library (Moscow, Russia)
On the way to Oles's place, Mekkail marvels at the expanse of the tundra, plenty with polar foxes and fish. But he also has a major concern. There is one thing that is missing: “there are too few literate people in the tundra!” The story about collectivization evolves, (p. 178) then, into a story about education, or its possibility. At their meeting, as Mekkail is told later, Lopars fantasized collectively how they all would move together into one location and build a city there—with many houses, and even with streetlights: “That would be a good life! That would be a lot of fun!” More crucially, as Oles' conveys to Mekkail in a chum, “a big house will be built, in which the Lopars will be taught grammar. Communists build a good life in Lapland.”
The poem never informs the reader who these communists are, but it does mention that they are from “the city.” Nor are these communists ever represented visually. There is no explanation what exactly the kolkhoz life in the North means. Similarly unclear is the nature of the collectivized labor. Told mostly in the passive voice, the book portrays collectivization as something that came from without, disembodied, with no faces to attach it to. Communism is strikingly spectral here, making itself known indirectly—through fetishes and totems of a new urban life.
Out of eighteen pages of this book, seventeen are illustrated. Fourteen illustrations depict different interactions of humans with reindeer, “the only thing they have to sustain their life,” as the poem concludes. The remaining three illustrations show deer in (p- 179) some version of a metonymic presence—as a deer drag sled, or a chum, or a fur coat. One of these deerless illustrations presents a very distinctive image. In front of a typical city landscape, with a linear street of multistoried buildings, a running tramway cart, and a tall working smokestack, there are two Lopars staring at an illuminated street lamp (Figure 7.12).
Courtesy of the Russian State Children's Library (Moscow, Russia)
There is nothing in the text that would make this particular rendition of the Lopars' urban fantasies inevitable. Out of all the elements, only streetlamps are actually mentioned in the poem. Yet Borovskaia's iconographic choice is hardly accidental. In fact, it is quite iconic, if misplaced: a city is always a European-looking city, even when it is built in tundra. The pictorial evolution of this iconography is even more indicative. Signs of European urbanity—no doubt brought about by the "communists from the city”—would reappear one more time, although significantly modified.
Courtesy of the Russian State Children's Library (Moscow, Russia)
The smokestack would be gone, together with the street itself. Instead of the tramway cart, the illustration forefronts a deer drag sled, placed against a large two-storied building in the background (with a banner above the main entrance, and a streetlamp on each side). At the bottom half of the page, one more image illuminates the national content of (p. 180) this socialist form: dressed in their fur coats, local children sit at their desks, looking attentively at their local teacher. Collectivization results in education. In turn, education is presented as enlightenment, figuratively and literally (Figure 7.13). Education emerges here as a new bonding force called upon to replace the nonexistent cement of industry. What is crucial to notice here is how properties of secondary importance, as Bogo-raz defined them, increasingly occupy the central location. In the absence of symbolic equivalents of labor, the semantic field becomes saturated with signs of ethnicity.
A perfect example of the hybrid nature of Soviet socialism, these illustrations envision socialist transformation as a peculiar regime of simultaneity in which modern forms are montaged with emblematic signs of premodern local life: a deer drag sled under a streetlamp in a settlement that has no streets. The pictorial juxtaposition of animals and electricity, darkness and light, nature and modernity in this illustration points to an important shift in the process of facialization of social transformations. The coevalness of different stages of technological development would be eventually defaced. Streetlights, so to speak, would become self-sufficient, emerging as symbols and agents of change. Illustrations from Relay, a book by Mikhail Ruderman and Alexei Laptev usefully visualize this progression.39
(p. 181) In the book, the diminishing presence of laboring humans in technological processes precipitates the activation of technology's own agentive capacities. It is instructive to read Figures 7.14 and 7.15 together.
Courtesy of the Cotsen Children's Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Princeton University Library)
Courtesy of the Cotsen Children's Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Princeton University Library)
Each page presents a song. Figure 7.14 displays what is supposed to be a humorous Song of the Builders of the Turksib, a major railroad project that linked Central Asia and Siberia during the first five-year plan. Set in the middle of the Turksib construction, the song is a comedy of misrecognition that features prominently a camel, the Southern analogue of the Northern reindeer. A camel approaches a newly built train station and sees a strangely deformed animal there. It somewhat resembles other camels, but instead of a hump, this one has a huge funnel. And in places of nostrils, there are two bright lights. “What an ugly monster,” the camel thinks to himself—until the driver of this steam locomotive scares the animal off by letting some steam out. Visually, the illustration emphasizes this dialogical relation between the locomotive (as a symbol of industrial modernity) and the camel (as a symbol of tradition) even more. There are no actual builders in the picture. Figure 7.15 takes this juxtaposition of nature and technology further. Wires of electric grids dynamically crisscross a depopulated space of the page, (p- 182) while a Song of Electric Wires rhapsodies about “a little electric animal,” a “powerful” and “cheerful” electric current, that runs, on its own, to all parts of the country, enlightening villages and cities.
“Electric animals” of various kinds would flood children's literature in the 1920s-1930s. Multiple books would tell stories about a bench-plane that made another bench-plane, or about a primus stove that decides to become a Ford, or about a tractor that did all kind of useful things.40 Animated, empowered, and seemingly independent from any human influence or supervision, these dynamic things appeared as real movers and shakers of the time. Technology did not just dominate humans, as was the case in productivist books discussed earlier. Here, technology replaced them—not with usual inanimate robots, though, but with animated things and vibrant substances. What We Are Building, a picture book that published a map of professions I discussed earlier, even provided a discursive equivalent of this approach. Emphasizing the agentive quality of matter, the book sections were titled as a series of questions—What does coal do? What does oil do? What does electricity do? At the same time, the book's visual narrative presented a utopian world cared for by machines. The two opening illustrations |(p- 183) (p. 184) by Vladimir Tambi are characteristic in this respect (Figure 7.16). The preindustrial past shows people working in the field, while in the industrial landscape of the present, the space is neatly organized by machines, rows of trees, and industrial structures—with no people in sight.
Courtesy of the Cotsen Children's Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Princeton University Library)
Depopulated pictures of machines and animated things certainly helped to convey graphically the message about the power of technology (Figure 7.17 and Figure 7.18). There was another, somewhat more positive, pictorial approach that delivered a similar idea. In this case, books featured multiple individual close-ups of working tools. Arguably, it was Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist, who actually described such images as "portraits of things" in his 1930 book Turksib.41 Clearly, though, the tendency emerged before that, evolving into a major iconographic tradition by the early 1930s. Vibrant and dynamic, these anthropomorphic things were, indeed, real faces of the economic transformation that Krzhizhanovskii was searching for: objectivist incarnations of the "industrial cement" that began their own life, independent and productive.
Courtesy of the Cotsen Children's Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Princeton University Library)
Courtesy of the Cotsen Children's Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Princeton University Library)
Multiple portraits of excavator buckets (and their diverse analogues) bring with them the obvious question: Why did the universal language of industrial modernity have to be ex
Page 27 of 37 pressed through the iconography of means of production? What was it about the division of labor envisioned and implemented by the Bolsheviks that determined this particular strategy of facialization? I already pointed out that the absence of “industrial cement” in many regions of the Soviet Union forced artists (and scholars) to look elsewhere for unique national forms and objects, with socialist content or without. As mentioned earlier, the alleged universality of industrial cement was far from being widespread. With a few exceptions, most national regions had neither factories nor working class. In 1929, Pioneer Truth (Pionerskaia Pravda) published a letter from a group of Chukchi Pioneers who explained to the rest of the country with a disarming sincerity: “We have no factories or plants around here. Actually, we've never even seen them.”42
Crucially, though, the working class that did exist was already ethnically coded: to be proletarian was a mark of being Russian. Georgii Safarov, a Russian revolutionary who was sent by Moscow to Central Asia to participate in its communist transformation, addressed this problem as early as in 1921. During the debates on “the national question” at the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party, Safarov explained:
To be proletarian in [Russia's] borderlands until now has been a privilege of the Russians ... . Subaltern nations produced no industrial proletariat [in these regions]. In places like Turkestan, to be a railroader is still the Russian man's privilege. To get rid of this situation, we need to get rid of the conditions that have been created by the colonial and imperial policies of the old [tsarist] regime.43
(p. 185) A couple of years earlier, a similar sensitivity about an uneasy relationship between the universal aspiration of the Bolshevik revolution and its Russian or, at least, Russophonic, manifestations, was articulated during the First All-Russia Conference of the proletarian cultural and educational organizations in September 1918 in Moscow. Addressing Russian cultural workers, Bernhard Mandel'baum, a representative of cultural organizations of Polish proletarians, pointed out that “Russian features of the proletarian culture should be established in such a way so that they would be channeled towards the common culture of the world's proletariat.”44
Differently expressed, this apprehension about “Russian features” was rooted in Russia's imperial past. Concerns about the possibility of new assimilationist policies and the worries about “the great Russian chauvinism” were real, being persistently raised at various debates on “the national question” in the 1920s.45 This might explain—at least to some extent—why in the examples that I have discussed so far the representations of the industrial worker looked so uniformly indistinctive. Natan Altman, an avant-garde artist,
(p. 186) usefully points to yet another—politico-aesthetic—reason that might have encouraged the visual defacement of the proletariat.
As early as 1919, in his polemical manifesto, Altman scorned with disdain artistic attempts to reduce the proletarian art to mimetic images, portraying “a worker in a heroic pose, with a red banner.” Writing in The Art of Commune, he insisted that “the art that depicts the proletarian is proletarian to the same degree as a [right-wing antisemitic] black-hundredist is a Communist when he demonstrates a [Communist] party card as his
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proof.”46 For Altman, the solution was not in a proper proletarian iconography, but in a proper—collectivist—method of creating the proletarian art. “Try to take an individual face from the proletarian procession,” Altman explained. “Try to understand this procession as a set of individual persons. All you could get from this would be sheer nonsense. Their power is in their togetherness, just as their meaning is.”47
Altman's views were certainly widely shared by authors of children's books but not without a twist. Altman's emphasis on the collectivist method of the proletarian art was bracketed off, while his rejection of mimetic portrayal of the proletariat was operationalized in a particular iconography of togetherness. Schematic and minimalist, these illustrations usually portray endless rows of people bound together by some invisible force (Figure 7.19).
Courtesy of the Russian State Children's Library (Moscow, Russia)
A lack of distinctive features in these illustrations helped to foreground the profound multiplicity of individual components that animated this collective body. It emphasized their organizing and formative capacity, too. Unencumbered by the weight of historical traditions, these bland figures pointed to the future that had yet to be imagined.
Obviously, the difficulty with finding appropriate faces to adequately represent new Soviet realities did not have a single or even the main reason. What is important for my discussion, though, is that this difficulty produced a peculiar pictographic outcome in which flower beds of blossoming ethnicities existed side by side with the iconography of faceless people of the communist future. Our Union, written by Mariia Klokova and illustrated by Georgii Echeistov, helps me bring my exploration of early Soviet regimes of faciality to its logical end.48
Among the books that I have discussed so far, Our Union has a somewhat unusual format. It is a poetic play, created for public celebrations of the October Revolution anniversaries. As the stage direction specifies, the scene should be filled “with a crowd of children of different nationalities of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. All children wear national costumes.” There are nine characters in the play. None of them has a name; nor does the play provide any individualizing requirements. All individual features are clearly brushed aside so that the reader's attention would be focused only on the typical: the characters' ethnicity. How and why these ethnicities are selected is never revealed; the book simply lists the children as two Samoyeds, two Crimean Tatars, a Russian, a Turk (from the Caucasus), a Ukrainian, a Georgian, and a Kyrgyz.
The content of the play is rather familiar; it is yet another modification of “the Comintern fairy tale,” created to display the array of ethnic differences and to highlight the underlying foundation that unites them. There is a certain variation, though. Unlike the international characters in Gralitsa's Children's Internationale, Soviet characters in (p-187) Our Union do not complain about their hard life. Instead, each child, one after another, brags about his or her native land. The Samoyeds praise their reindeer- and dog-drag-sleds, the Turk—the oil supplies in the Caucasus, the Ukrainian—the tasty watermelons, and the Crimean Tatars—their almonds and apricots. This bragging contest is finally interrupted by the Russian boy. He introduces some purposiveness and reason in the children's activi-ty—he suggests organizing a team. The children quickly form a line; distribute among themselves a flag, a bugle, and a drum; and march onward, singing a song about the friendship of the people.
Of course, it is not this highly predictable socialist content that makes the book noteworthy; it is the national forms that the book presents and distributes throughout its story. All the depicted characters are indeed wearing their “ethnic” costumes, |(p- 188) (p. 189) demonstrating both the sartorial diversity of the country and the particularity of their belonging (Figure 7.20).
Courtesy of the Cotsen Children's Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Princeton University Library)
The outfit of the Russian boy is differently coded, though. His ethnicity consists only of a basic combination of a white shirt and shorts. However, this lack of obvious ethnic belonging is counterbalanced with a sign of political consciousness: he is the only character who has the red Pioneer tie. To make sure that this point would not remain unnoticed, on the back cover Echeistov reproduces the national costumes of the characters, providing a caption for each of them, Russian included (Figure 7.21).
Courtesy of the Cotsen Children's Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Princeton University Library)
Echeistov's pictorial choice reflects a major iconographic trend of the time. To show the scale, I give only one example. The artist Olga Bonch-Osmolovskaia followed a similar path in her illustrations for the book Colorful Kids by the highly popular Nikolai Agnivtsev.49 Like Echeistov's, her “Russian boy” is spectacularly devoid of any ethnic distinction while being situated among a collection of international children in their ethnic garbs (Figure 7.22).
Courtesy of the Russian State Children's Library (Moscow, Russia)
In these examples, the two strategies of facialization employed the same method of decontextualizing ornamentalism that I have been tracing in this essay. Ethnic particularism and universality of internationalism were both represented sartorially. But in each case,
Page 31 of 37 the custumized identity suggested its own logic of reproduction. The pictographic proliferation of nations-as-costumes helped to introduce the idea of diversity, supplying a continuous flow of distinctive ornaments, objects, and features. In turn, rows of faceless and uniformly dressed bodies (marching toward the future) recast universality as sameness that cannot be diversified but can be easily multiplied. Instead of individualization and distinction, this universal uniformity helped to profile togetherness, effectively directing readers' eye to the instances of the mass and the collective.
These two visual regimes, I've been suggesting, are not just mutually co-constitutive; they are reflective of a larger phenomenon. There is a traceable link between the visual prominence of flower beds of ethnicity and the iconography of depopulated sites of industrial production. There is a direct connection between the nuanced portrayal of nations and the distant representations of the working class. And the resulting pictographic formula— a traditional ethnicity without “industrial cement,” or “industrial cement” with no obvious ethnic traits—might be pointing to a more general failure that Krzhizhanovskii hoped to overcome so much: a failure to envision a modern nation-state within the visual vocabulary of industrial modernity. Thanks to Communist Manifesto, we knew for quite some time that “the working men have no country.”50 Through their pedagogy of images, picture books for Soviet children made this absence visible.
Andrews, Richard, and Milena Kalinovska, eds. Art into Life: Russian Constructivism, 1914-1932. Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery, 1990.
Balina, Marina, and Larissa Rudova, eds. Russian Children's Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Blinov, Valerii. Russkaia detskaia knizhka-kartinka. 1900-1941. Moscow: Iskusstvo XXI vek, 2005.
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Bowlt, John E., and Olga Matich. Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-garde and Cultural Experiment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Brennan, Teresa, and Martin Jay, eds. Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Chapkina, Maria. Children's Book Illustrators of Moscow 1900-1992. Moscow: ContactCulture, 2014.
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Dobrenko, Evgeny. The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature. Trans. Jesse M. Savage. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Gerchuk, Yurii. Sovetskaia knizhnaia grafika. Moscow: Znanie, 1986.
Hellman, Ben. Fairy Tales and True Stories: The History of Russian Literature for Children and Young People (1574-2010). Leiden: Brill, 2013.
(p. 193) Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Jay, Martin, and Sumathi Ramaswamy, eds. Empires of Vision: A Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Kelly, Catriona. Children's World: Growing up in Russia, 1890-1991. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
Kon, Lidia. Sovetskaia detskaia literatura 1917-1929. Moscow: Gosizdat, 1960.
Leving, Yury. Vospitanie optikoi: Knizhnaia grafika, animatsiia, tekst. Moscow: Novoe lit-eraturnoe obozrenie, 2010.
Lissitzky-Kuppers, Sophie, ed. El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts. London: Thames and Hudson, 1968, 1980.
Nikolajeva, Maria. Children's Literature Comes of Age: Toward a New Aesthetic. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.
Nodelman, Perry. The Pleasures of Children's Literature. New York: Longman, 1991.
Pokrovskaia. Anna. Osnovnye techeniia v sovremennoi detskoi literature. Moscow: Rabot-nik prosveshcheniia, 1925.
Preiss, Byron, ed. The Best Children's Books in the World: A Treasury of Illustrated Stories. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.Reischl, Katherine M. H. Photographic Literacy: Cameras in the Hands of Russian Authors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018.
Tupitsyn, Margarita. Moscow Vanguard Art: 1922-1992. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.
(1.) Gleb Krzhizhanovskii, “Velikaia stroika,” in Rebiatam o piatiletke, ed. G. Krzhizhanovskii (Moscow-Leningrad: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1929), 6.
(2.) For more detail, see a report from this meeting: “Starye bolshiviki zovut nas k trudu,” Pionerskaia pravda, August 23, 1929.
(3.) I discuss at length the Soviet turn toward the optical in the 1920s-1930s in my essay “Realism with Gaze-Appeal: On Lenin, Children, and Photomontage,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 67, no. 1 (2019): 11-64. See also Galina Orlova, “ ‘Karty dlia slepykh': Politika i politizatsiia zreniia v stalinskluiu epokhu,” in Vizual'naia antropologiia: rezhimy vidimosti pri sotsializme, ed. Elena larskaia-Smirnova and Pavel Romanov (Moscow: Variant, 2009), 57-105.
(4.) Krzhizhanovskii, “Velikaia Stroika,” 16.
(5.) Zlata Lilina, “Zaprosy zhizni,” in Revoluitsiia—Iskusstvo—Deti. Materialy i dokumenty 1924-1929, ed. N. P. Starosel'tseva (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1968), 58.
(6.) Lilina, “Zaprosy zhizni,” 58.
(7.) For a useful discussion of iconotexts in children's literature, see Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott, How Picturebooks Work (New York: Garland, 2001), 6-7. For a general discussion of picture books, see Perry Nodelman's classical study Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children's Picture Books (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1988). For the Russian context, see Dmitrii Fomin's encyclopedic study Iskusstvo knigi v kontek-ste kul'tury 1920-kh godov (Moscow: Pashkov Dom, 2015). For current attempts to reconceptualize the role of the pictorial in early Soviet literature for children, see the website of the project The Pedagogy of Images at Princeton University (https:// pedagogyofimages.princeton.edu/).
(8.) For good examples of the visual art from children's books, see Mikhail Karasik, Udar-naia kniga sovetskoi detvory (Moscow: Kontakt-kul'tura, 2010), and Julian Rothenstein and Olga Budashevskaya, eds., Inside the Rainbow: Russian Children's Literature 19201935: Beautiful Books, Terrible Times. (London: Redstone Press, 2013). For visual analysis, see Evgeny Steiner, Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children Books, trans. Jane Anna Miller (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), and Birgitte Beck Pristed, The New Russian Book: A Graphic Cultural History (New York: Palgrave, 2017). For a historical treatment of the genre of the early Soviet children's books, see Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova, eds., Russian Children's Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008), and Sara Pankenier Weld's Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014).
(9.) For more discussion of the formation of this genre of literature, see my essay “Translating Communism for Children: Fables and Posters of the Revolution,” boundary 2, 43, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 159-219.
(10.) For useful historical accounts of the genre, see Marina Balina and Valerii V'iugin, eds., "Ubit' Charskuiu ... ” Paradoksy sovetskoi literatury dlia detei, 1920-1930-e gg (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2013); Irina Lupanova, Polveka: Sovetskaia detskaia literatura, 1917-1967, Ocherki (Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1969); Evgenia Putilova, Ocherki po is-torii kritiki sovetskoi detskoi literatury (1917-1941) (Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1982).
(11.) Iakov Iakovlev, “O ‘proletarskoi kul'ture' i o Proletkul'te," Pravda, October 24, 1922.
(12.) Olga Deineko and Nikolai Troshin, Ot kauchuka do galoshi (Moscow: OGIZ Molodaia gvardiia, 1931).
(13.) For a review, see S. Margolina, “Proizvodtsvennaia detskaia literatura," Pechat' i revoluitsiia 5 (1926): 107-115.
(14.) Krzhizhanovskii, “Velikaia stroika," 18.
(15.) On the formative power of industrial production in early Soviet Russia, see my essay “The Flexible and the Pliant: Disturbed Organisms of Soviet Modernity," Cultural Anthropology 19 (August 2004): 392-428.
(16.) Olga Deineko and Nikolai Troshin, Khlebozavod Ns 3 (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1931).
(17.) Boris Shatilov and Appolon Manuilov, Khlopok (Moscow: Izdanie G. F. Mirimanova, 1929).
(18.) Turkestan usually describes Soviet Central Asia as a whole before it went through a process of “delimitation" (razmezhevanie) that created several republics in the 1920s.
(19.) At the time, Turkestan was a part of the Soviet Union, even though the book is not quite clear about it.
(20.) Vladimir Bogoraz-Tan, Kratkii putevoditel' po vystavke “Chukotskoe obshestvo” (Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1934), 22.
(21.) Leonid Savel'ev and Vladimir Tambi, Chto my stroim (Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1930).
(22.) Interestingly enough, August Sander's famous Faces of Our Time that presented a series of photographic portraits of workers with their characteristic working tools came out a year before Savel'ev and Vladimir Tambi's book—in 1929. See August Sander, Faces of Our Time (Mosel: Schirmer Visual Library, 2008).
(23.) Nikolai Marr, “Znachenie i rol' izucheniia natsmen'shinstva v kraevedenii," in N. la. Marr, Izbrannye raboty, Vol. 1 (Leningrad: GAIMK, 1933), 235-236 [231-248].
(24.) Marr, “Znachenie i rol' izucheniia natsmen'shinstva v kraevedenii," 232.
(25.) “Stenogramma soveshchaniia etnografov Moskvy i Leningrada (5-11 aprelia 1929 g.)," in Ot klassikov k marksizmu: soveshchanie etnografov Moskvy i Leningrada (5-11 aprelia 1929 g.), ed. D. Arzuitov, S. Alymov, and D. Anderson (Saint Petersburg: Kunstkamera, 2014), 177-178.
(26.) Yuri Gralitsa, Detskii Internatsional (Moscow: Gosiz, 1926).
(27.) Gasym Mansurov, Za kul'turnoe stroitel'stvo natsional'nostei (Moscow: Narkompros, 1927).
(28.) Nikolai Agnivtsev and Konstantin Rudakov, O shesterykh vot etikh: skazka o Kom-interne (Moscow: Kniga, 1926).
(29.) Boris Eikhenbaum, "Literatura i literaturnyi byt,” Na literaturnom postu 9 (1927), 47 (-52).
(30.) Josef Stalin, "The Political Tasks of the University of the Peoples of the East. Speech Delivered at a Meeting of Students of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (May 18, 1925),” The Joseph Stalin Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/reference/ archive/stalin/works/1925/05/18.htm. The original text was published in Pravda on May 22, 1925.
(31.) Alexei Gladun, Oleni i lopari (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo, 1930).
(32.) S. Sokolov and I. Tomskii, Narodnoe iskusstvo Severa Rossii (Moscow: Iskra Rev-oluitsii, 1924), 6-7. A bit later, in 1940, Mikhail Lifshitz, a major Soviet Marxist philosopher, would push this line of thinking to the limits by claiming that at some historical moments, there are certain advantages in being "backward”: the underdevelopment of "primitive peoples” allowed them to avoid the deforming influence of the supposedly "progressive bourgeois society.” M. Lifshitz, "V chem sushchnost' spora?” Literaturnaia gazeta, February 15, 1940.
(33.) Siegfried Kracauer, "Photography,” in S. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 55.
(34.) Kracauer, "Photography,” 57.
(35.) Margolina, "Proizvodstvennaia detskaia literature,” 109.
(36.) Elizaveta Shabad and Evegnia Flerina, "Knizhka dlia doshkol'nika mladshego vozras-ta,” in Zhivoe slovo i knizhka v doshkol'noi rabote, ed. P. I. Prushitskaia, E. A. Flerina, and E. V. lanovskaia (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1928), 108-117, 113.
(37.) Osip Brik, a Russian formalist, would demand the same from the art of Soviet photography in 1928: it was to lay bare the social significance of an individual, an event, or an object by revealing systemic qualities underneath their physical appearance. For more detail, see Osip Brik, "From the Painting to the Photograph,” in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 231.
(38.) Fil Dudorov and Anna Borovskaia, Dumy Mekkaila (Moscow: GOSIZ, 1931).
(39.) Mikhail Ruderman and Alexei Laptev, Estafeta (Moscow: GOSIZ, 1930).
(40.) Samuil Marshak and Vladimir Lebedev, Kak rubanok sdelal rubanok (Moscow: Raduga, 1927); Nikolai Agnivtsev, Kak primus zakhotel Fordom sdelat'sia (Moscow: Raduga, 1927); and Lev Zilov, Chto sdelal traktor (Moscow: Novaia Moskva, 1925).
(41.) Victor Shklovsky, Turksib (Moscow: GOSIZ, 1930), 17.
(42.) “Pis'mo o pervoi bane,” Pionerskaia pravda, August 18, 1929.
(43.) Natsional'nyi vopros i Sovetskaia Rossia (Moscow: GosIzdat, 1921), 58, 60.
(44.) Protokoly pervoi Vserossiiskoi konferentsii proletarshkih kul'turno-prosvetitel'skikh organizatsii. 15-20 sentiabria 1918 g., ed. P. I. Lebedev-Polianskii (Moscow: Proletarskaia kul'tura, 1918), 14.
(45.) For more details, see Natsional'nyi vopros.
(46.) Natan Altman, “Futurism” i proletarskoe iskusstvo. Iskusstvo kommuny, December 15, 1919. The Black Hundred was an organization of right-wing extremists in 1900-1917, known for their monarchist, antisemitic, and xenophobic views.
(47.) Altman, “Futurism.”
(48.) Mariia Klokova and Georgii Echeistov Nash Soiuz (Moscow: OGIZ, 1929).
(49.) Nikolai Agnivtsev and Olga Bonch-Osmolovskaia, Raznostvetnye rebiata (Moscow: Raduga, 1928).
(50.) Karl Marx and Frederic Engels, Communist Manifesto (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1910), 38.
Serguei Alex Oushakine
Serguei Alex Oushakine, Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University
Who Doesn't Like Aleksander Kobzdej?: A State Artist's Career in the People's Republic of Poland a
Magdalena Moskalewicz
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Jul 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.7
This article looks into the extraordinary Cold War-era career of the Polish artist Aleksander Kobzdej in order to provide insight into the complexity of the emergence and demise of socialist realism in the People's Republic of Poland and its repercussions for today's discourses. The author reconstructs Kobzdej's smooth shift from a much-awarded socialist realist artist into an internationally recognized modernist abstract painter through the analysis of his artworks, travels, and participation in major art exhibitions, and discusses them in the context of the larger changes that took place in the official state policies and cultural diplomacy as Stalinism was giving way to the cultural Thaw in the mid-1950s. This case study serves to argue that not just socialist realism but also much of the later modernist art produced in Poland should be seen as de facto communist, that is, as art that emerged as a product of the delicate but stable, and mutually beneficial, consensus between artists and the communist state.
Keywords: Aleksander Kobzdej, socialist realism, Stalinism, modernism, cultural Thaw, People's Republic of Poland, Cold War, cultural diplomacy, art exhibitions, abstract painting
“Who doesn't like Aleksander Kobzdej?” asked the art critic Jerzy Stajuda in his essay for the catalogue of the artist's 1969 major monographic exhibition, held at the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions in Warsaw.1 The title of the essay was also its opening sentence, and this was not a rhetorical question: Stajuda proceeded to answer it by naming, in sequence, every possible art group present on the visual art scene in Poland in the 1960s. Kobzdej, we learn, was not liked by the avant-garde, which was “more difficult to join than the Jesuits” (this might have been a reference to the members of Galeria Foksal). Nor was he liked by the conservative circle of “colorists,” heirs to the interwar postimpressionists oriented toward École de Paris. Neither was he accepted by the “morally in
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clined,” who searched for mysticism and liked to suffer, nor the mainstream painters, who also did not like any of these groups. A contemporaneous reader did not need an explanation for that widespread lack of sympathy. In 1969, Aleksander Kobzdej was still commonly recognized as a former champion of socialist realism, the author of the 1950 icon Pass a Brick (Figure 8.1)2 and a much-awarded beneficiary of the communist state. And even though the artist transitioned away from the visual language of socialist realism as early as 1955, taking up modernist abstraction, his continuing popularity with the communist state apparatus and his resulting spectacular international career cemented the general hostility. Stajuda proceeded to explain why he personally liked Aleksander Kobzdej, but it is the antipathy that will interest me here.
© The National Museum in Wroclaw
My motivation for that interest comes from the fact that the antipathy accompanied Aleksander Kobzdej after his death in 1972 and carried over into the art historical (p-198) discourse as it is still shaped today. “Kobzdej is one of those artists of People's Poland, whose participation in the fight for socialist realism was the most personal and sincere, the most ardent,” Juliusz Starzynski, the artist's supporter and exhibitor, wrote in 1954. Many never forgave Kobzdej that ardency. Polish art history has for decades avoided the artist's work as a topic of serious analysis, while simultaneously offering Pass a Brick as a staple example of a socialist realist painting. The scholars who did write about the artist's oeuvre can be divided into two types: those interested in his socialist realist work of the early 1950s, who focused specifically on Pass a Brick—often to project onto it one's own aversion to communism (to the art historian Wojciech Balus, for example, the painting is an involuntary testament to the dehumanization of communist ideology);3 and those few who discussed Kobzdej's later abstract oeuvre but could only do so at the expense of that painting. The piece had become a synecdoche for the artist's engagement with communist authorities.4 Excuses for Kobzdej's socialist realist “episode” ranged from presenting it as a “disgraceful affair” that was “redeemed by the successes of his later, abstract work”5 or as “Kobzdej's lie towards his own art,” which was allegedly—and contrarily to the materialist foundations of socialist realism—deeply metaphysical.6 (p- 199) His “stunning career” “unfortunately” took place in “the dubious context of communist Poland.”7
This is not just a testimony to a few misguided interpreters, but a symptom of a larger issue that Polish art history has with communist visual culture: in existing discourse on art in Poland, communism—equated with the visual language of socialist realism—is almost always the negative actor. Socialist realist paintings and sculptures are seen more often as historical documents and cultural artifacts than as aesthetic objects. This can be confirmed by the fact that they are presented today either in museums of ethnography (as entertaining curiosities) or of history (as testimony to difficult political times) more often than in art museums.8 Just as with typical treatment of ethnographic artifacts, their authors are hardly remembered by names (unless they had a significant earlier/later career). Their works simply stand in for a broader culture of socialist realism, devoid of authorial agency or personal mastery. A brief period of scholarly interest in the mid-1980s brought a major revisionist exhibition, Faces of Socialist Realism (Oblicza socrealizmu) by Maryla Sitkowska and a crucial scholarly publication, Socialist Realism: Polish Art 1950-1954 (Socrealizm. Sztuka polska w latach 1950-1954) by Wojciech Wlodarczyk.9 However, major survey publications of Polish modern art published since still largely overlook the period.10 The same can be said about monographs of individual artists. An art historian of the period Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius explains this phenomenon as a trauma of “aesthetic castration,” where socialist realism is understood as nonart, as a communist farce, as a failure and regression within the hierarchies directed by the phallic power of modernism. The continuing fear of this aesthetic castration today relates, according to the scholar, to a complex aesthetic reconstruction of the Polish subject in the postwar society.11
I believe there is a particular reason for this exclusionary treatment: limiting the understanding of what constitutes “communist art” to the visual language of realism coupled with propagandistic topics—that is, practices that characterized state art produced in communist Poland between 1949 and 1954—allows historians to remove the label of “communism” from art created in the People's Republic of Poland in the following decades. Artists' personal, nonaesthetic choices and their resulting functioning within the communist society after 1955 have rarely entered the framework of such categorization— unless the artists openly declared their practice as political, which was only the case later, in the 1970s and 1980s. In other words, equating communism with socialist realism has been to many a sine qua non of affirmative writing about art produced between 1955 and 1989.
In an attempt to counter this trend, this essay proposes a nondiscriminatory look into Aleksander Kobzdej's work as much as into the official positions held by him in the People's Republic of Poland, into the international exhibitions in which he participated, and into the social role he held as an object of popular culture's attention. In other words, I will examine all the elements that constituted the figure of Aleksander Kobzdej for pub
Page 3 of 30 lic opinion both before and after the period of socialist realism and continue to create him for today's discourses. I will investigate not so much the development of an artistic language traceable through individual paintings—a task still awaiting completion—as the artist's numerous professional positions and exhibitions, local and international. (p- 200) Supported by a couple of visual analyses, this method allows me to see Kobzdej's works in the network of numerous social actors before and after the critical date of 1955, socialist realism's cut-off point. It also allows me to conclude that even though the artist's paintings underwent a radical transformation from heroicizing figurative compositions to later experimental modernist abstractions in the late 1950s and 1960s, his social positioning within People's Republic of Poland remained virtually the same.
My aim here is to provide a detailed case study that will help complicate the schematic but widespread image of socialist realism in the People's Republic of Poland. I wish to do so based on two types of materials. First, I conducted a detailed analysis of artworks, statements, and actions by Aleksander Kobzdej, together with the surrounding historical discourse: exhibition reviews and interviews, film reels, published recollections about the artist, official state documents from the archives of the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art, and materials from The Archives of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Second, I employed the rich but dispersed accounts on socialist realism and the Thaw-era modernity produced by a certain generation of Polish art historians, such as Wojciech Wlodar-czyk, Piotr Piotrowski, Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, Anna Markowska, and Piotr Juszkiewicz, in the 1990s and early 2000s, who, to various degrees, propose the understanding of postwar modernism in Poland not as a radical break from socialist realism, but a certain continuation of the same artistic paradigms in a new guise. These accounts provide a comprehensive critical image of the cultural context for the decisions, both political and aesthetic, that artists and cultural actors had to make in the 1950s. Even though firmly established in the Polish academic discourse by now,12 they had not affected narratives about individual artists continued in monographic exhibitions and publications. Additionally, I couple these art historical sources with some studies in social history of the period.
Through this widely annotated and contextualized case study of Kobzdej's career, I wish to offer insight—via a personal perspective of a single individual—into the complexity of the emergence and demise of socialist realism in Poland, with its institutional decisions, crucial exhibitions, and international cultural diplomacy, along with the period's repercussions that extended far beyond the 1950s. I provide that insight in order to argue that not just socialist realism but also much of the modernist art created in Poland in the late 1950s and 1960s needs to be seen as de facto communist; that is, art that emerged as a product of the delicate but stable, and mutually beneficial, consensus between artists and the communist state. Hardly any career other than Kobzdej's could be more symptomatic of these cultural transformations—and, as proven by the statement from Jerzy Stajuda, more polarizing.
This essay consists of two main parts, each with a reading of a painting/painting series discussed in the context of its first showing. The first part focuses on the period of socialist realism and opens with Kobzdej's (in)famous Pass a Brick exhibited at the National Museum in Warsaw in 1950. The second refers to the period of nowoczesnosc (Polish postwar modernity) in the second half of the 1950s and 1960s, and it begins with a look at the series of Kobzdej's paintings presented at the V Sao Paulo Biennial in 1959. Situated in-between, my close examination of the artist's professional promotion case of 1954/55 (p- 201) and 1958, based on unpublished archival materials, serves as the crucial link between these two seemingly divergent moments.
Three men work on a construction site toward a progressive future of the socialist state. Depicted in a medium-size oil painting titled Pass a Brick, the bricklaying trio collaborates on a single wall, illustrating a popular method of labor on construction sites in People's Poland.13 One of the team members, here depicted to the right, was responsible for preparing the bricks and passing them to the two others, who subsequently laid them into the wall. Bricklaying trios were formed in order to maximize production, and the method was particularly valued for its collectivist character, symbolizing the principles inherent in socialism. For that reason, friendly competition between various bricklaying teams was in Stalinist Poland a staple motif in the ideologically driven feature films, poetry, and prose.
The painting is uncomplicated in form, and with a relatively limited color palette of brick red (wall), gray-white (workers), and dirt-blue (sky). The composition is flat, with the horizontal brick wall positioned parallel to the image surface; no diagonal lines suggest any depth. Kobzdej selected the moment when one of the bricklayers, here to the left, is in need of material and communicates that need to the preparator by extending his arm toward the man, awaiting the next brick. The bricklayer's gesture, positioned in the very center of the canvas, serves as a visual equivalent of the title: pass a brick! This is a gesture of demand, maybe even of slight impatience (motivation?), as the visual interconnectedness of the three men communicates the interdependence of their labor. The gesture leads the viewer's gaze toward the preparator to the right, as he is hitting the brick with a hammer, and the direction of this swing has the gaze continue along the edge of the wall and turn onto the middle worker, who, in turn, points his trowel toward the standing bricklayer. This man's extended arm circles the gaze back onto the preparator, just to start the rotation again. The three workers appear here as cogs in a tight, efficient, bricklaying machine.
But if the title verbalizes what is readily visible, it can also be read, on the metaphorical level, as an imperative directed at the viewer. Pass a brick; that is, help out! Here, the eponymous brick could stand for any contribution to the collective process of constructing the new, socialist society, which the workers are illustrating and the viewer is invited to join.
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There is no evidence that Kobzdej meant his painting as anything else than the affirmation of that collectively achieved, communist future. However, if the composition is read within the logic of the flat canvas, rather than through its mimetic layer, the painting reveals another, possibly unintentional meaning: if continued, the work of the bricklaying trio will lead to a complete obstruction of the presented view, in other words—a dead end.14 Still, contemporary critics decided to ignore that potentiality (p- 202) and praised the painting for “addressing the romantic nature of our constructions.”15 A propagandistic documentary film from 1950 that included footage of a group of Warsaw bricklayers watching the painting had the voiceover inform that “the viewers are touched by the truth of the everyday life.”16
That footage was made on the occasion of the First All-Poland Exhibition of Art (I Ogolnopolska Wystawa Plastyki; I OWP),17 where Pass the Brick won the young artist from Sopot the third prize in the category of painting.18 Opened in March 1950 at the National Museum in Warsaw, the exhibition was the first practical embodiment of socialist realism's directives, as they were first laid out by Wlodzimierz Sokorski, Vice Secretary at the Ministry of Culture and Art, in February 1949. During his meeting with twenty-five artists in Nieborow, which was initiated by the Ministry shortly after communists consolidated political power in Poland in December 1948, Sokorski argued for connecting art with life.19 At that point, his and other sympathizing artists' speeches only formed a set of informal “recommendations” directed at art practitioners, but a few months later these were formalized as official by the Association of Polish Artists (Zwigzek Polskich Artystow Plastykow, ZPAP) at their IV National Delegates Meeting in Katowice, in June 1949. Significantly, the Association added to its charter document the official obligation (!) to produce art rooted in the doctrine of socialist realism. It was at the Warsaw show that the first implementations of these instructions were presented to the public. To assure prompt execution of that new rule, the following Second All-Poland Exhibition of Art (II OWP), opened in late 1951, had, in addition to the professional jury, also a political board.
“A very important quality of the First All-Poland Exhibition of Art is a complete bankruptcy of formalist aesthetic theories,” wrote the art critic and member of the Communist Party Helena Krajewska in her review of the show. “The artists' engagement with reality's live concerns exposed the complete ideological hollowness and technical incompetence of the bourgeois art's decadent era. The myth of modern formalist achievements, advertised by the agents of the dollar's cultural expansion, did not withstand the first life's test that was the subject of this exhibition.”20 The language she used was typical of the art criticism of the socialist realist era. In 1950, Krajewska became the editor in chief of Art Review (Przeglqd artystyczny), communist Poland's main art magazine published by the Association of Polish Artists.
The award that Aleksander Kobzdej received at the First All-Poland Exhibition of Art for Pass a Brick opened a career for him in Warsaw. The artist moved from Sopot to the capi-
Page 6 of 30 tal in the early 1951 in order to run the Department for Temporary Architecture Design at the Art Academy. This position corresponded to his education: Kobzdej held a degree in architecture, and he had coauthored a number of projects for public monuments submitted to numerous competitions. It is important to note that in the early (p- 203) 1950s designing “temporary architecture” in People's Poland meant the planning of event venues, parade stands, arenas, and other ideological instruments for the public performances of communist power. In a 1952 film newsreel, titled At the Academy of Art ( W Akademii Sz-tuk Plastycznych), we see Aleksander Kobzdej in a suit, seated behind a desk, and directing a group of students working on a three-dimensional model for a platform with a neoclassical colonnade and a number of tall flags. The voiceover explains that the model will serve to build a set for the May 1 official state parade, the most celebrated of all communist holidays.21
The same year he began work at the Academy, Kobzdej also joined the Principal Board (Zarzgd Glówny) of the Association of Polish Artists, of which he had been a member since 1946. At the time, this was the only professional organization in People's Poland that was both the guarantor and the sole provider of exhibition spots and state commissions for visual artists. It was only with the Association of Polish Artists membership card that an artist could have access to artistic materials, purchasable from a designated provider, and have their works acquired by a state institution after an official exhibit (just like Kobzdej's Pass a Brick was collected by the National Museum in Warsaw22). The Association had branches in all major cities in Poland, each responsible for organizing the local scene and managing their respective Bureau of Art Exhibitions (BWA), where both individual and survey shows of its members were regularly held.
In addition to his temporary architecture designs, Kobzdej continued to paint. The following Second and Third All-Poland Exhibitions of Art brought him, in both cases, another third prize: for Before the May 1st Parade-Berlin 1951, painted after his visit to the city,23 and for Stonecutters, respectively.24 Meanwhile, Pass the Brick was sent to Budapest, in 1951, and presented at the exhibition of Polish art in Moscow the following year, together with Kobzdej's portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Soviet Bolshevik revolutionary leader.25 The artist's trip to the opening marked his first visit to the USSR.26 These few paintings produced shortly after Pass a Brick kept in line with socialist realism's official directives of presenting heroic figures and crucial moments of the communist struggle in an elevating style. The artist achieved that through glorifying poses and the paintings' monumental scale. The massive Before the May 1st Parade celebrated youth's engagement in com-munism—the painting depicts a group of male and female pioneers decorating a huge portrait of a socialist hero they are about to carry in the parade—while Felix Dzerzhinsky on His Way to Siberia shows the leader standing in the snow, among his seated comrades, prudently looking into the horizon. A somewhat less typical full-size portrait of the work leader Bronislawa Urbanowicz of 1950 heroicizes the cleaning woman both by the vantage point and by putting a book in her hand, while broom and dustpan rest against the wall behind her.27 Art historians stress that Kobzdej's sophisticated use of color distinguishes his paintings from other socialist realist works created around the same time, revealing his colorist training.
Who is a state artist? Or, to use the Polish nomenclature, an official artist? Is that someone who is repeatedly decorated by the state with official honors? Someone who is given a high-ranking position in a state-sponsored institution? Someone who receives (p- 204) official commissions to represent the state on an international level? Someone who is granted social privileges not available to regular citizens? To ask about such status in regard to Aleksander Kobzdej is almost beside the point. In the Polish context his name serves almost as a stand-in for the official, state artist of the communist era. A brief review of a few of these honors will allow me to paint a semicomprehensive picture of the beginnings of his two-decade-long career.
Kobzdej received his first state honors the same day that the Constitution of the People's Republic of Poland—coauthored by Joseph Stalin—was officially passed. On July 22, 1952, the artist was awarded the Gold Cross of Merit, an honor granted to individuals for extraordinary service in their professional or social work. Kobzdej was thirty-two years old; it was only six years after his graduation. For the sake of comparison, one should know that in the People's Republic of Poland, the Gold Cross of Merit was typically awarded to industrial workers after twenty-five years of continuous work. In 1953, Kobzdej became the Secretary General of the Association of Polish Artists—the position cemented his already high status. In October of the same year, Kobzdej was nominated as the Deputy Head of the Polish Official Delegation to China and Vietnam, and set off, together with writer Wojciech Zukrowski, on a months-long trip, where he documented everyday life of communist comrades.28 Executed in ink on paper, his drawings from this journey depicted a number of communist fighters as well as regular farmers and workers, and a number of studies of nature, such as a new workers' settlement in Shanghai or landscape by the frontline in Vietnam. Immediately on his return from Asia, Kobzdej had the drawings exhibited at the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions in Warsaw (CBWA), the primary gallery run by the Polish Artists Association. Simultaneously, in March 1954, the artist was granted the Officer's Cross of the Order of the Rebirth of Poland (conferred for outstanding achievements in the field of culture, education, sports, society, etc.). He was also appointed dean at the Warsaw Art Academy's Department of Painting.
In the early 1950s, the People's Republic of Poland was a Stalinist country, which maintained a strict control over the mobility of its citizens. The privilege of international travel was given only to high-ranking communist officials or, for propagandistic reasons, to professional groups (such as factory workers or folk singers) for highly restricted group workplace visits or cultural diplomacy within the Soviet Bloc.29 Traveling outside of the Bloc was extremely rare.
There is no official statistical data available about the number of passports granted in the People's Republic of Poland in 1953, when Kobzdej went to Vietnam and China. The information was officially gathered, however, starting in 1954, when the artist traveled to Italy for a full month on the occasion of the 27th Venice Biennale, in order to present his drawings from that trip to Asia. That year, only 2,116 Polish citizens left Poland to visit a nonsocialist country. A vast majority (97.5 percent) of those trips were conducted for professional reasons. These passport holders constituted only 0.0078 percent of the country's population (that is seventy-eight out of every million).30 For comparison, in 1956 this number was over six times higher (13,993), and in 1970, fifty-one times higher (108,304).31 The Polish exhibition in Venice included prints and drawings by Kobzdej
(p. 205) and Tadeusz Kulisiewicz as well as sculpture by Xawery Dunikowski and textiles by Helena Bukowska, Eleonora Plutynska, and Anna Sledziewska (which served as a part of exhibition design)—but only Kobzdej and Kulisiewicz traveled to the opening. Together with the commissioner Juliusz Starzynski and other men involved with the Polish representation in Venice, Kobzdej was among these two thousand citizens who left Poland in 1954 to visit a nonsocialist country. His passport was issued upon a direct request from the Ministry of Culture and Art.32 This fact, by itself, could confirm the artist's privileged position within the Stalinist system.
Even though the official introduction of socialist realism in Poland as an obligatory artistic doctrine was a decision made in May 1949 by the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) in direct response to directives stemming from Moscow—that implemented accelerated Stalinization in its satellite countries—the process cannot be understood without considering the local cultural terrain. Examining the local legacy of prewar artistic avant-garde is essential to grasping the full complexity of the reception of this Soviet Union-developed style in People's Poland.33 As was argued by Wojciech Wlodarczyk, numerous confluences between the foundations of the avant-garde and of socialist realism, with their shared values, aided the relative smoothness of that reception. One such shared foundation was the Hegelian determinist understanding of history, and, consequently, the undisputed belief in the necessity of artistic progress.34 Another, the avant-garde artists' longing for the widespread influence that art should extend over society, which found its fulfilment (or, at least, a promise of such) in the conceptual underpinnings of socialist realism.35 The structural state support that prewar artists could only demand in vain, now finally found its realization in the form of robust state patronage: financial and symbolic state sponsorship in the form of stipends, exhibitions, and acquisitions as well as employ-ment.36 (Such as the support offered to the participants in the First All-Poland Exhibition of Art, whose production costs for the exhibited artworks were covered after the initial acceptance of presented sketches. Awarded artworks were subsequently acquired.) It also was not without significance for that transition that many of the artists active after the war had experienced political radicalism in the 1930s as members of socialist and communist parties (though political sympathies toward the USSR did not always translate directly into artistic choices).37
It would be a mistake, then, to assume that Polish artists simply accepted, in a submissive manner, the foreign sources and directives imposed onto them by Moscow. There were also numerous local actors. The aforementioned commissioner of the Polish Pavilion in
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Venice in 1954, Juliusz Starzynski, was the critical agent in the introduction and sustaining of socialist realism in Poland. A prewar director of the progressive Institute of Propagation of Art (Instytut Propagandy Sztuki) and a curator at the National Museum in Warsaw, after the war, in 1949, Starzynski became the director of (p- 206) the newly established state Institute of Art (Instytut Sztuki), a research institution in charge of studying and documenting art and architecture in Poland. A scholar of early modern art history and an avid supporter of current art, he also directed the Art History Department at the University of Warsaw, from 1950. Starzynski was a member of the communist party—Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR)—and offered his endorsement of socialist realism at the critical meeting of artists with Wlodzimierz Sokorski in Nieborow in 1949, and many times to follow. Subsequently, he acted as co-organizer of the First All-Poland Exhibition of Art in 1950 (he also authored its catalogue essay).38 His numerous publications from that time reveal a particular discursive tactic worthy of a dedicated and strategically oriented academic art historian: Starzynski strived to anchor the art of socialist realism deeply in the tradition of great nineteenth-century realism, both the European and the specifically Polish.39 His postwar ideas were also a direct continuation of the principles he had formulated in the 1930s, which found legitimization of modern art in local—often folk —traditions, emphasized the importance of national (versus international) art, and saw artistic creation as closely connected to social life.40
To complicate the image of the Polish reception of socialist realism even more, it has been convincingly argued that it was their orientation toward Paris, and not the capital of the Soviet Union, that provided Poles with the final push for the optimistic embrace of politically infused realism. Sources coming from the French communist painters such as Andre Fougeron, Boris Taslitzky and Pablo Picasso, broadly popularized in People's Poland, were instrumental in justification of socialist realism in the country, and the Eastern Bloc more generally.41
Soviet sources were important in the early stages of socialist realism, but, as argued by Wlodarczyk, the communist government was focused on imposing Soviet political control, rather than Soviet aesthetics.42 The goal of Stalinist authorities was the control of art and culture—of artists and people of culture—and not an imposition of a particular visual language. Besides, the authorities had no interest in sharing the actual political power with cultural producers and quickly gave up on those artists whose ambitions led them to believe they could directly participate in communist governance.43
Wlodarczyk distinguishes two acts of the socialist realist period in Poland, before the doctrine began to crack in 1954. The first started with the meeting in Nieborow in 1949, as described earlier. The second act was marked by changes introduced by the communist party in 1951, which included removing the dedicated communist Helena Krajewska from her position as editor of Przeglqd artystyczny as well as personal changes at the Warsaw Academy of Arts.44 Another group gained prominence in the process, a group of artists with roots in the prewar avant-garde circle from the Polish city of Lwow (Lviv), who—as a result of losing Lwow to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic when the borders were redrawn at Yalta—established a new art school at the Polish seaside town of Sopot. Equal-
Page 10 of 30 ly important for that group, known as the Sopot Group or the Lviv Group, was the tradition of the prewar “colorists,” the postimpressionists with strong ties to Paris and dedication primarily to the visual values of painting, who constituted much of the Sopot faculty. Aleksander Kobzdej, himself a native of Lwow, joined the (p- 207) faculty of the Sopot Academy in 1947 and was one of the artists who benefited from its growing influence. When he moved from Sopot to Warsaw in the early 1951, Kobzdej was following in the footsteps of his former provost, Marian Wnuk, who had relocated there two years earlier and became provost in Warsaw the same year Kobzdej was hired. Kobzdej's membership in the Sopot Group also helped him receive the support of the sympathetic Julisz Starzynski.
In 1954 even the main apologists of socialist realism started publicly voicing their doubts. Wlodzimierz Sokorski himself, now the Minister of Culture and Art, criticized the up-to-date realizations of the socialist realist doctrine as “trivial” and “antiaesthetic” (without dismissing its principles) and accused the cultural administration of limiting artistic creativity through imposition of certain subjects and crushing individualism. Art, he argued, “should remain an instrument of party's propaganda, but has to be open to experimentation and be better suited to the interests of the people.”45
Most art and cultural historians agree on the year 1955 as the end date of the socialist realism era in Poland.46 This was the year of a number of exhibitions of more expressive, sometimes openly abstract art. This was the formative moment for a number of groups of modernist artists (the self-proclaimed nowoczesni), who sprang up in multiple cities and the emergence of new art spaces as well as art magazines. With them surfaced a new generation of art critics, who developed a new language that became characteristic of artistic postwar modernism.47
A case study of Aleksander Kobzdej's promotion initiated in 1954, already after these critical voices began to surface and a few months after the opening of the Venice Biennale, interestingly shows the initial transformation and later consolidation of Polish artists' attitudes toward the fading socialist realism. In October 1954 Aleksander Kobzdej was recommended for the position of the extraordinary professor at the Department of Painting of the Warsaw Art Academy, where he already taught. A note on the Polish higher education system at the time would be apt here: an extraordinary professorship is below the rank of the ordinary professorship, the highest possible academic rank in the country. In the 1950s, both these titles were awarded at the state level, that is, by the appropriate ministry, after an institution of higher education conducted an initial internal review, and on the institution's request. The first, internal recommendation in Kobzdej's case came from Eugeniusz Eibisch, a colorist painter sympathetic toward the communist authorities, with whom Kobzdej had studied briefly in Krakow in 1945 before moving to the seaside.48 Interestingly, at that point Kobzdej's only degree (obtained at the Technical University in Gdansk in 1946) was in architecture, but he had already served as dean at the Department of Painting. Still, the recommendation passed unanimously at the department's faculty board and the school's senate, and it was directed to the Ministry of (p- 208) Culture in October 1954. (The same department would actually grant Kobzdej the official Warsaw Art Academy graduation papers in the field of painting only a few months later, possibly in order to facilitate the promotion process).49 The artist's unquestionable accomplishments and his widely recognized fame seemed to guarantee the success of the procedure.
However, by the time the professorship review board, called upon by the Ministry of Culture, assembled, it was already December 1955—and the post-Stalinist Thaw was in full bloom. The six-person board chaired by Tadeusz Kulisiewicz, Kobzdej's coexhibitor from the Venice Biennale, also included Juliusz Starzynski, the aforementioned Marian Wnuk, and painter Stanislaw Teisseyre, current provost of the sympathetic Art Academy in Gdansk (the Sopot art school in a new location) who accompanied Starzynski and Kobzdej on their 1954 Venice trip. (The two other members mentioned in the documents were professors Malkowska and Mrozewski, possibly from the field of theater studies). Interestingly, after a long discussion, dutifully recorded in writing, the board decided not to award the professorship to Kobzdej, citing an insufficient oeuvre. He was instead awarded a lower title of “docent,” which in the context reads like a consolation prize.50
I am reconstructing these discussions in detail here based on typewritten records from the proceedings saved in the Ministry of Culture and Art's archives, as they offer fascinating insight into the language and arguments used by art professionals at this culminating moment for Poland's postwar communist cultural politics. In the five-page report, the phrase “socialist realism” (or even just “realism”) was not used once—though the context is clear through the mention of other artists working in that style. The language used by the board members was a peculiar combination of bureaucracy and art criticism. They agreed on “great popularity and progress”51 of Kobzdej's oeuvre as they mentioned his works by their titles, but they also quoted various rules and previous/future board decisions to prove their point. Particularly telling is how the board members continued to compare Kobzdej to another artist, the sculptor Alfred Wisniewski, who, in their opinion, deserves the title equally, if not more. (Wisniewski was the author of the socialist realist sculpture The Border of Peace that won him the first prize in sculpture at the First AllPoland Exhibition of Art in 1950—the same that awarded Kobzdej for Pass a Brick.) Wisniewski almost overshadowed the actual content of the deliberations of Kobzdej's case. I see his presence in the discussion as a replacement topic (“if we are not promoting Wisniewski, we cannot promote Kobzdej”) that has provided a convenient excuse for denying the promotion.
“I think, with deep belief,” says Starzynski in the middle of the proceedings, “that the professorship for Kobzdej is premature. He is a talented artist who has made, in the last five years, great surprises (“wielkie niespodzianki”). I am personally not convinced whether the whole of his didactic-pedagogical activity deserves this type of recognition ( ... ) I agree that he would not survive a group exhibition.”52 This statement is unexpected, to
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say the least, from someone who had just a year prior included the artist in a major group exhibition in Venice. But maybe his was not a judgment of Kobzdej's works' diminishing value, but a statement of fact: Kobzdej's art was by that time incongruent with anything that has been most recently happening in the Warsaw (p- 209) salons—any public comparison could be deadly. And his pedagogy in the field of temporary architecture, with its heavy ideological grounding, was suddenly easy to discount. It is also unclear what Starzynski meant by the “great surprises” and whether the phrase was intended as a superlative. Did Starzynski have in mind Kobzdej's transformation into a socialist realist after the artist's earlier formalist, colorist paintings from the late 1940s? Considering Starzynski's own 1949 endorsement of socialist realism, he would surely have considered that a positive surprise at the time. Or, rather, was Starzynski already aware of Kobzdej's new painting series, “Thickets” (“Ggstwiny”),53 the brightly colored and fully abstract compositions clearly inspired by both gestural abstraction of Hans Hartung and drip paintings by Jackson Pollock? And if it was the latter, did he consider it, in the late 1955, a “great” positive or a “great” negative surprise? (Only a few months later, in his catalogue for the Polish Pavilion at the 1956 Venice Biennale, Starzynski pronounced the period of socialist realism concluded and spoke about the need to bring Polish art out of isolation.54)
The one thing that can be clearly read from the proceedings' transcript is hesitation. I would argue that this hesitation on the part of the committee can be understood as indicative of the Thaw-era changes in the field of communist visual culture. The fast-paced transformations, with new artistic forms exhibited in the galleries and the new set of theoretical deliberations printed in magazine pages, rendered Kobzdej's socialist realist top-ics—as well as his subject-dependent career—obsolete. The hesitation might simply have been the committee's critical judgment on that obsolescence. It might also be seen as a sign of a new paradigm, where a space for personal assessment was now introduced into the previously solely ideologically driven decision-making processes. In other words, the committee did not feel outside pressure to award a rank of national distinction to the already well-decorated artist. It might also simply have been, far from an actual judgment of value, a hesitation precipitated by the anxiety about own status that these changes produced in the well-established actors in the field of culture.
For Aleksander Kobzdej, this was an unforeseen decision. Based on common practice, he might have expected the confirmation of professorship on the ministry level to be simply a matter of paperwork. As was reported by his friends, the decision was also a painful one. Additionally, this course of events was paralleled by a slowdown in the artist's career —both seem to have been precipitated by the political Thaw. Kobzdej did not hold a single individual exhibition in Poland for six years, between 1955 and 1960, and was not included in a single group show in the country until 1959.55
In 1955 the Stalinist-era organization of cultural institutions, and with them Aleksander Kobzdej's future career, were put into question. It only took a few years, however, for things to resolve and resolidify. In 1957, Kobzdej returned to the position of the Dean of the Painting Department at the Warsaw Art Academy, the position he had previously held
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in 1954. In 1958, the Art Academy petitioned, again, for the extraordinary professorship, and this time the verdict was positive. Three of the five members (Wnuk, Teisseyre, and Malkowska) overlapped between the two review boards.
If this development might seem surprising, a statement from a reference letter supporting Kobzdej's second professorship case in 1958 will be helpful in clarifying (p- 210) the rapidly transforming attitudes: “The years 1950-1954 were not, in my understanding, the luckiest [happiest] period for Polish art,” wrote the referee, Kazimierz Tomorowicz.56 “Most artists conformed to the more or less imposed criteria and—if you can use that metaphor—sang with not entirely their own voice. Kobzdej was not an exception.”57 I wish to accentuate this particular declaration, since the opinion expressed here was echoed many times and became ubiquitous in the future interpretations of the artist's shift. In the later part of the Thaw, active engagement in socialist realism started to be described by many as “singing with not one's own voice,” as solely an execution of directives forcefully imposed by the communist party—directives far removed from artists' own aesthetic and ethical choices. Such a belief also soon became commonplace for the general understanding of socialist realism's significance for the Polish culture.
A series of ten large-scale canvases painted by Kobzdej in 1958-1959 bear existentialistsounding titles that could equally describe a certain human condition, such as Defined, Emerged, Solitary, Serene, Forgotten. The paintings, made with thickly layered oil paint of subdued, almost monochromatic colors, have a relief-like quality. Their surface is not marked with any illusion of depth but has forms delineated by texture rather than two-dimensional shape, hue, or gesture. Each of these paintings was executed in a dark tone of brown, purple, or reddish ochre—colors of ground, soil, mud, clay, of primary matter. Each contains a centrally positioned form, created with a set of thick, elongated impastos; an irregular geometric form, sometimes remotely anthropomorphic—a trunk without limbs—or oddly organic. These are composed solely with vertical and horizontal lines, slightly curved at times, with the stillness and serenity of the composition never disturbed by any diagonal tension.
This series is representative of the later moment of Polish informel. After a few years of raptures over gestural abstraction during the early years of the Thaw, Polish painters turned to texture already around 1958. This new type of painting was named malarstwo materii: a painting of matter.58 Similarly to France, where in the mid-1940s artists (Fautrier), critics (Tapie), and philosophers (Sartre) were rediscovering what a painting might, and should, be after the atrocities of World War II, Polish artists also understood their creations in existentialist terms. The acquiring of form, in-forming, was seen as a new beginning, as the formation of a new subject and his world—not only after the war but also after the experience of Stalinism and socialist realism. Informel, in both its gestural and textural version, was the foundational tradition for Polish postwar modernity (nowoczesnosc).
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Kobzdej's ten paintings were exhibited at the V Biennial of Sao Paulo, in 1959, the art event called by Mario Pedrosa the “tachiste and informel offensive in Brazil.”59 The Polish presentation also included a number of other modernist painters who emerged (p- 211) with the cultural Thaw: Tadeusz Brzozowski, Stefan Gierowski, Jan Lebenstein, Jerzy Nowosielski and Jerzy Tchorzewski, in addition to a separate presentation of the colorist patriarch, Jan Cybis. The exhibition was organized by Mieczyslaw Porgbski, a protégé of Juliusz Starzynski and professor at the Warsaw Art Academy, who already in 1952 took over the editor-in-chief's position of Art Review from Helena Krajewska. In Sao Paulo, Porgbski also sat on the international jury.
One of the ten Kobzdej canvases, a painting titled Escarpado in Portugese and Escarpe in French (the English translation would be Steep or Rugged), won the acquisition prize, which the Polish artist was awarded along with the Dutch Karel Appel, the Italian Alberto Burri, and the American David Smith, among others—a selection of names that provides a good insight into the international situation that Polish art suddenly entered.60 This spectacular success was even exaggerated in official Polish press reports, where journalists and critics spoke of (the only) “second prize” or even mistook this award for the grand prix. (The Grand Prix of the V Biennial of Sau Paulo was given to Barbara Hepworth.) This recognition from the international art scene opened the way for Kobzdej to a solo show in the Galerie de'l Ancienne Comédie in Paris, where he also held a studio in the summer of 1960, followed by a one-man exhibition in New York City's gallery French and Company, and another in Gres Gallery in Washington, DC. This is where Kobzdej's individual career was launched on a large, international scale.
A photograph reproduced in one of the Polish press reports from the New York show depicted him with his wife, Maryna, in front of the gallery French and Company at 978 Madison Avenue. 61 In the image, the artist is seen wearing a black suit and a tie. Maryna is wearing a fashionable light-color skirt-suit with elegant gloves and a hat. Both are smiling as she points to the sign that announces: “KOBZDEJ: Polish Abstract Art.” This exhibition brought the artist a review in The New York Times authored by Dore Ashton. The champion of the New York School, who had famously dismissed the Gutai artists two years earlier, wrote about Kobzdej's “major reputation abroad” and his “nearly consistent evolution towards abstraction.”62 “Mr. Kobzdej is an extremely able painter ... always aware of nuances ... [whose forms] suggest a balanced vision of life itself,” concluded Ashton.63 Her review was indicative of a broader interest. The Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum each acquired one of the twenty-five paintings presented in the show.64
Kobzdej's paintings returned to New York a year later, when he was one of the artists presented in the group show at the Museum of Modern Art titled 15 Polish Painters, curated by Peter Selz. (All his fellow younger generation Polish artists from Sao Paulo were also included.) This exhibition of contemporary painting from behind the Iron Curtain was without precedence in the cultural history of the Cold War. Featuring seventy-five canvases painted in People's Republic of Poland since the emergence of the post-Stalinist Thaw, and accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, the exhibition was subsequently sent on a
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grand tour through the United States and Canada under the auspices of the Museum's Department of Circulating Exhibitions—similarly to the many exhibitions of American art that MoMA traveled through Europe since the early 1950s.65
(p. 212) These international successes prompted Kobzdej's intensified presence in Polish popular culture. A report of his Paris summer of 1960 made it to the pages of the communist youth magazine Youth Banner (Sztandar Mlodych), where he was presented as a hard-working champion and a passionate enthusiast of Parisian light.66 The popular women's magazine Mirror (Zwierciadlo) featured him next to known actors, comedians, and writers in a chatty, illustrated piece titled “What are they doing tonight?” that showcased celebrity cafe-goers with their nightlife choices.67 (It is telling that the feature was published on December 25, when majority of Poland's population spent time attending a Christmas Mass.) A “hobby-apartment” section of another illustrated magazine publicized Kobzdej's home decoration skills—highlighting his collection of Mexican, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Polish folk artifacts.68 Reports on his actual art making, ubiquitous far beyond specialized press, sometimes took a form of a particular masculine heroization. A 1962 photo-essay, tellingly titled “Kobzdej: His Paintings—His Wife ... ”69 consisted of color photographs of the couple posing together in front of the artist's monumental canvases (Figure 8.2). The accompanying brief paragraph on Kobzdej's career did not mention Maryna—who held a degree in English studies and must have been a valuable partner in the artist's international journeys—even by name.
© Przekrój. The digital archive of Przekrój magazine, https://przekroj.pl/archiwum
In the mid- to late 1950s, Polish cultural diplomacy took a new turn. Juliusz Starzynski remained a critical actor on this stage, successfully initiating or organizing exhibitions of modern Polish art that were sent both to the East and the West. Almost immediately after showing Jan Cybis, Xawery Dunikowski, Eugeniusz Eibish, Adam Marczynski, Zbigniew Pronaszko, Feliks Szczgsny-Kowarski, Juliusz Studnicki, Waclaw Taranczewski, and Wojciech Weiss at the International Exhibition Art of Socialist Countries in Moscow, opened in December 1958, Starzynski traveled to Sao Paulo to accompany Porgbski's activity there. (Notice that only one name—that of the prewar colorist Jan Cybis—overlaps between the two exhibitions.) The concentration of these operations was aptly noticed by Porter McCray, the long-time director of MoMA International Program, who visited Poland in September 1959: “In my few days in Warsaw I reviewed four other exhibitions nearing completion which included a generally good group of painters select by Sandberg and Ur-banowicz for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the young group for the Biennale de Paris, another show opening this week at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and a group of prints going off to India.”70
It was this visit that provoked McCray's interest, which later culminated in the 15 Polish Painters, and the conception of the exhibition can be, at least partly, indebted to Juliusz Starzynski. Stopping in Warsaw on his way from visiting the American National Exhibition in Sokolniki Park in Moscow, McCray was reportedly the first Western museum professional to travel to Poland since World War II.71 Starzynski invited McCray to visit the recently closed exhibition of Polish art that he had curated at the |(p- 213) (p- 214) National Museum in Warsaw, From Fin-de-Siecle Poland to Our Days (Od Mlodej Polski do Naszych Dni), the inaugural show of the museum's newly established Department of Contemporary Art, from which socialist realism was now removed.72 The Polish director guided his American colleague through Warsaw as well as Krakow, Gdansk, and Sopot; they visited studios of numerous artists, whose paintings would be shown at MoMA two years later. McCray returned to New York with a handful of publications, photographs, and handwritten notes, but since he himself was not an exhibition maker, he convinced the curator of MoMA Department of Painting and Sculpture, Peter Selz, to follow his itinerary the next year.73
Kobzdej's work was displayed by Starzynski at the National Museum show, and the artist hosted McCray in his home studio in Aleje Jerozolimskie—not far from the museum. Interestingly, Starzynski had not invited Kobzdej to participate in the 1958 exhibition in Moscow, where, by the way, Polish abstract art caused strong negative reactions voiced by representatives of fellow socialist states.74 This tendency to show the older artists working in monumental tradition throughout the Soviet bloc, while exhibiting the new generation of modernist painters throughout the West, can speak to the specific strategy in Polish cultural diplomacy developed during the Thaw. Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius called this two-way orientation of Polish cultural diplomacy after 1955 “the double life” of Polish art. Exhibitions shown in the Soviet bloc countries were filled with realist art as late as the 1970s, while to the Western public “the history of twentieth-century Polish art was presented as an uninterrupted flow of modernism.”75
A few months after Kobzdej received the acquisition prize at Sao Paulo, his coexhibitor, Aleksander Lebenstein, was awarded the Grand Prix at a newly established Biennale de Paris (Starzynski was on the jury). These two events constituted what the Poles called, after one French critic, “un miracle polonais.” This Polish miracle, repeated in art history discourse, was a glamorous but also a short-lived moment of Polish artists' successes on the international scene. What the triumphant narratives tend to omit is that the “miracle” was in most cases an effect of a closely planned cultural diplomacy that served, more than anything, the official legitimization of the new, softened cultural policies of the postThaw era. It can be inscribed into the more general strategy of the so-called little stabi-lization—a certain liberalization of social life, dismissal of heavy indoctrination, and opening to international relations—that characterized politics in the People's Republic of Poland in the 1960s.
The end of the cultural Thaw is positioned by the scholars circa the year 1959, when the major Third Exhibition of Modern Art (III Wystawa Sztuki Nowoczesnej) was closed by the state only a few days after its opening, and when, in 1960, a new state rule banned art exhibitions from including over 15 percent of abstract works—a rule that was practically unenforceable. In the early 1960s, with the offensive of anti-Thaw forces in the Communist Party, and the criticism he had received in Moscow, Juliusz Starzynski was forced to resign from his position as the director of the Institute of Art. In 1962 Helena Krajews-ka briefly returned to the position of editor-in-chief of Przeglqd artystyczny. Modernism was by then firmly established as the new official art (p- 215) of the People's Republic of Poland, strategically used for cultural diplomacy, but it was also a closely controlled one.76
Kobzdej's international career, however, was well solidified at that point and continued to bloom. International recognition brought him a number of solo shows in Poland (1961 in Warsaw, 1962 in Krakow) in addition to group presentations in Paris, Pittsburgh (Carnegie International), Essen, Toronto, Kassel (Dokumenta III), San Marino (V Biennale), Mexico City, Bergen, Helsinki, Prague, London, and Bucharest, held throughout the 1960s. In the academic year 1965-1966, the artist held a visiting professorship at The Art School in Hamburg. A monographic exhibition at the Museum Folkwang in Essen followed in the spring of 1966. Kobzdej was also awarded the Gottfried Herder Prize, presented by the University of Vienna to “scholars and artists from Central and Southeastern Europe whose life and work have contributed to the cultural understanding of European countries and their peaceful interrelations.”77 This record compares to very few other artists active in Poland at the time. None of those few was also equally awarded and welltraveled between 1950 and 1954.
In conclusion, with a short moment of suspension and doubt at the verge of the Thaw, Kobzdej's career continued to thrive. His artworks were discussed by the major art critics active in Poland at the time and he himself published reviews from the many international art exhibitions he visited.78 While his career was celebrated by some and envied by others, the shift in visual language did not go unnoticed. A joke reportedly circulating at the artistic salons in the 1960s said that “the only thing remaining in his new paintings [from socialist realism] was the texture of the brick.”79 In 1969, three years before Kobzdej's death, large monographic exhibitions of the artist's works were held at the National Museum in Poznan and Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions in Warsaw. It was then that Jerzy Stajuda asked provocatively: “Who doesn't like Aleksander Kobzdej?”
Scholars of the post-Stalinist Thaw period in Poland underline that promoting the abstract, politically neutral art on international stage became convenient for the communist authorities, who tolerated and used artists' naïve conviction that their newly won artistic “freedom” to paint and sculpt as they please could be equated with political freedom.80 Even though the previous, repressive system of cultural management had been openly criticized and effectively reorganized during the Thaw, the new authorities did not have more liberal views than their predecessors. They simply replaced the direct indoctrination with more subtle, disciplining strategies of control, using modernist art as a platform to build new political identity.81 Contrary to popular belief, the Polish modernist movement of nowoczesnosc did not constitute an entirely new set of values and choices alternative to socialist realism. “Thaw did not extend any liberties, it was simply a different type of manipulation, created a different kind of exploitation.”82
(p. 216) While the modernist artists in the mid-1950 cheerfully rejected the earlier imperative of social engagement, this rejection resulted in the development of a model of modernist painting that was deeply anchored in the paradigm of artistic autonomy. (Function was delegated to the realm of architecture, design, and graphic arts.) Thus, the success of informel was largely the success of Polish prewar colorism, with its sole focus on an artwork's perceptual qualities.83 That paradigm ultimately hindered Polish artists from directly addressing any political topics for decades—a phenomenon that Piotr Piotrowski called a “revenge of socialist realism.”84 Additionally, nowoczesnosc did not only continue the prewar artistic paradigms but also revived the nineteenth-century romantic mythology, complete with principles of individualism, heroism, and honor.85 Thaw's consensus, as convincingly characterized by Anna Markowska, solidified the conciliatory and compensa-tional function of art together with the elitist concept of artist as genius. It allowed the rhetoric of universalism to hide harmful, patriarchal stereotypes.86
Aleksander Kobzdej's transformation confirms that thesis about the consensual character of the cultural Thaw coupled with the continuation of Polish romantic paradigms. From a socialist realist hero, the recipient of state orders and protagonist of propagandistic newsreels, Kobzdej turned into a modernist hero—a cosmopolitan globetrotter working from a number of Europe's metropolitan centers; a lifestyle trendsetter showcased in popular illustrated magazines; and a strong masculine subject, whose many achievements served as yet another confirmation of his greatness.
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The artist's international successes were undoubtedly linked to the high quality of his modernist painting, critically acclaimed on three continents—which I do not mean to negate. But, more important, the visibility that allowed having this quality noticed in the first place was a direct effect of that consensus and the institutional support that Kobzdej received from the communist authorities, with a very short break, throughout the 1950s and 1960s—both as a realist and, later, an abstract painter.
I argue that the study of Kobzdej's career transition proposed here provides a strong case for the new way of thinking about communist modernity in the People's Republic of Poland: one that extends beyond the clearly delineated framework of socialist realism versus nowoczesnosc. Rather than erase Kobzdej's “episode” as a communist artist, or ascribe it to external pressures, I prefer to see his later, modernist, and often spiritually inclined paintings as equally “communist.” After all, Kobzdej's informel paintings were as symptomatic of the Polish communist visual culture of the post-Thaw period as his socialist realist paintings had been for its Stalinist era. Both were equally auxiliary to the communist power, since the long-term goal of communist authorities was not an imposition of a certain artistic style as much as exercising control over art and culture—and the only thing left to dispute is the actual functional value of that assistance. Both socialist realist and modernist paintings by Aleksander Kobzdej can and should be seen as communist artworks, where the term is a statement of fact rather than an aesthetic judgment, as both of those types resulted from a reciprocal relationship between the artist and the communist state, which was advantageous to both parties. Importantly, this is not to extend the concept of aesthetic castration onto the later, modernist moment in order to deny it its artistry and dismiss it in the same fashion that Kobzdej's socialist (p- 217) realist art has often been dismissed. Quite the contrary, it is to reject the idea that castration happened altogether, to elevate the realism and ascribe to both the socialist realist and the modernist art the very same phallic power—as equals, only executed in somewhat distinct visual modes under slightly different political circumstances.
Aleksander Kobzdej. Malarstwo (exhibition catalogue). Warszawa: ZPAP and CBWA Zachqta, 1969.
Baraniewski, Waldemar. “Wobec realizmu socjalistycznego.” In Sztuka polska po 1945 roku. Materialy sesji Stowarzyszenia Historykow Sztuki, listopad 1984, edited by T. Hrankowska. Warszawa: Panstw. Wydawn. Naukowe 1987.
Baranowa, Anna. “Touches of Lustre and Shadow in the Career of Aleksander Kobzdej.” In Aleksander Kobzdej (exhibition catalogue), 12-19. Warszawa: ga ga galeria, 2006.
Baranowa, Anna. “Aleksander Kobzdej—The Open Work.” In Aleksander Kobzdej (exhibition catalogue), 15-21. Warszawa: ga ga galeria, 2008.
Baranowa, Anna. “Malarstwo materii—proba opisu.” In Grupa Zamek: Konteksty—wspom-nienia—archiwalia, edited by K. Kitowska-tysiak, M. Lachowski, P. Majewski, 28-50. Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, 2009.
Chiny i Wietnam w rysunkach Aleksandra Kobzdeja (exhibition catalogue, introduction by Wojciech Zukrowski). Warszawa: Zachpta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, 1955.
Fifteen Polish Painters [MoMA Exh. #690, August 1-October 1, 1961]. The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records 1960-1969, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
Gola, Jolanta, ed. Aleksander Kobzdej 1920-1972 (wystawa w 20-lecie smierci) (exhibition catalogue). Warszawa: ASP w Warszawie, Galeria ZPAP na Mazowieckiej, 1992.
Grabski, Jozef, ed. Aleksander Kobzdej. Zmagania z materiq =Aleksander Kobzdej: Struggle with matter. Krakow—Warszawa: IRSA, 2002.
Groys, Boris. The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, aesthetic dictatorship, and beyond. London: Verso, 2011.
Juszkiewicz, Piotr. Od rozkoszy historiozofii do gry w nic. Polska krytyka artystyczna cza-sow odwilzy. Poznan: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2005.
“Kobzdej Aleksander, ur. 12 IX 1920 r. Akademia Sztuk Plastycznych w Warszawie. Profesor nadzwyczajny.” Folder 7420. Ministerstwo Szkolnictwa Wyzszego w Warszawie Collection 2/317/0/26.6. Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw.
Kordjak, Joanna, and Agnieszka Szewczyk, eds. Zaraz po Wojnie. Warszawa: Zachpta— Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, 2015.
Kurylek, Dominik. “Rysunki Kobzdeja z Wietnamu.” Panoptikum 7 (2008): 191-204.
Lahusen, Thomas, and Evgenij Dobrenko, eds. Socialist Realism Without Shores. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
Majewski, Piotr. Malarstwo materii w Polsce jako formula nowoczesnosci. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Naukowe KUL, 2006.
Markowska, Anna. Definiowanie sztuki—objasnianie swiata. O pojmowaniu sztuki w PRLu. Katowice: Wyd. Uniwersytetu Slgskiego, 2003.
Markowska, Anna. Dwa Przelomy: Sztuka polska po 1955 i 1989 roku. Torun: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikolaja Kopernika, 2012.
Moskalewicz, Magdalena. 15 Polish Painter (MoMA, 1961) Fifty-Five Years Later. In Reconstructions, Restagings, Re-enactments: Exhibition Histories in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Natasha Adamou and Michaela Giebelhausen. New York: Routledge, 2020 (forthcoming).
Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna. “Curator's Memory: The Case of Missing ‘Man of Marble,' or the Rise and Fall of Socialist Realism in Poland.” In Memory and Oblivion: Proceedings of the XXXIXth International Congress of the History of Art held in Amsterdam 1-7 September 1996, edited by W. Reinink and J. Stumpel, 905-912. Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999.
(p. 223) Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna. “Paris from behind The Iron Curtain.” In Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900-1968, edited by S. Wilson and E. de Chassey, 250-261. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2002.
Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna. “Trauma of Aesthetic Castration or the Forbidden Pleasures of Socialist Realism? Psychoanalysis in/of Wajda's Man of Marble.” Blok 4 (2005): 68-90.
Nader, Luiza. “Shame! Socialist Realist Historiography in the 1980's. (Case Study)” http://artmuseum.pl/en/publikacje-online/luiza-nader-co-za-wstyd-historiografia-o-socrealizmie-w
Pietrasik, Agata, and Piotr Slodkowski, eds. Czas debat: antologia krytyki artystycznej z lat 1945-1954. Warszawa: Fundacja Kultura Miejsca, Akademia Sztuk Pigknych w Warsza-wie, 2016.
Piotrowski, Piotr, ed. Odwilz. Sztuka okolo 1956 roku. Poznan: Muzeum Narodowe, 1996.
Piotrowski, Piotr. Znaczenia Modernizmu. W strong historii sztuki polskiej po 1945 roku, Poznan: Rebis, 1999.
Piotrowski, Piotr. In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe. London: Reaktion, 2011. (First published in the original Polish in 2005)
Porgbski, Mieczyslaw. Les artistes polonais à la V-e Biennale du Musée d'Art Moderne de Sáo Paulo 1959. Varsovie, 1959.
Reid, Susan, “The Exhibition Art of Socialist Countries, Moscow 1958-1958, and Contemporary Style Painting.” In Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in PostWar Eastern Europe, 101-132. Oxford: Berg, 2000.
Sitkowska, Maryla. Oblicza Socrealizmu. Warszawa: Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, 1987.
V Bienal do museu de arte moderna de S. Paulo: catálogo geral. Sao Paulo: Bienal de Sao Paulo, 1959.
Wlodarczyk, Wojciech. “Po co byl socrealizm?” In Doswiadczenie i dziedzictwo totalitaryz-mu na obszarze kultur srodkowoeuropejskich, edited by J. Goszczynska, J. Królak, and R. Kulminski, 44-56. Warszawa: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 2011.
Wlodarczyk, Wojciech. “Przestrzen i wlasnosc." In Grupa "Zamek." Konteksty—wspom-nienia—archiwalia, edited by M. Kitowska-bysiak, M. Lachowski, and P. Majewski, 11-27. Lublin: Towarzystwo naukowe KUL, 2009.
Wlodarczyk, Wojciech. Socrealizm. Sztuka polska w latach 1950-1954. Paryz: Libella, 1986.
Wlodarczyk, Wojciech. “Socrealistyczny epizod. Warszawa 1933-Moskwa 1958." In Warszawa—Moskwa 1900-2000, edited by M. Poprzpcka and L. Jowlewa, 63-69. Warszawa: Zachpta—Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, 2004.
(1.) Jerzy Stajuda, “Kto nie lubi Kobzdeja?," in Aleksander Kobzdej. Malarstwo (Warszawa: ZPAP and CBWA Zachpta, 1969). Simultaneously published in Miesipcznik Literacki 8 (1969). For English translation, see Aleksander Kobzdej. Zmagania z materiq =Alek-sander Kobzdej: Struggle with Matter, edited by J. Grabski, 65-68 (Krakow-Warszawa: IRSA, 2002).
(2.) Pass a Brick, 1950, oil on canvas, 133 x 162 cm. Collection of the National Museum in Wroclaw.
(3.) Wojciech Balus, “Budujemy nowy dom...," Konteksty 2-3 (2010): 233-241.
(4.) A noteworthy exception to that rule is an essay by Dominik Kurylek about Kobzdej's drawings from Vietnam. Dominik Kurylek, “Rysunki Kobzdeja z Wietnamu," Panoptikum 7 (2008): 191-204.
(5.) Piotr Majewski, “Magiczne malarstwo Aleksandra Kobzdeja," Znak 3 (2003): 146-150. All translations from Polish by the author unless English version of the title is included in the note.
(6.) Anna Baranowa, “Aleksander Kobzdej—Malarstwo jako cena zycia =Aleksander Kobzdej—Painting as the Price for Life," in Aleksander Kobzdej. Zmagania z materiq, 1323; similar arguments can be found in her “Blaski i cienie kariery Aleksandra Kobzdeja = Touches of Lustre and Shadow in the Career of Aleksander Kobzdej," in Aleksander Kobzdej (exhibition catalogue), 16 (Warszawa: ga ga galeria, 2006).
(7.) Baranowa, “Touches of Lustre," 12.
(8.) Socialist realist art objects collected by national museums were after 1989 delegated to one special storage facility in Kozlowska, where a Gallery of Socialist Realist Art opened to the public in 1994. See Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, “Trauma of Aesthetic Castration or the Forbidden Pleasures of Socialist Realism? Psychoanalysis in/of Wajda's Man of Marble," Blok 4 (2005): 87-89.
(9.) Maryla Sitkowska, Oblicza Socrealizmu (Warszawa: Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, 1987); Wojciech Wlodarczyk, Socrealizm. Sztuka polska w latach 1950-1954 (Paryz: Libella, 1986).
(10.) Even Piotr Piotrowski in his Znaczenia Modernizmu. W strong historii sztuki polskiej po 1945 roku. (Poznan: Rebis, 1999) largely skips over socialist realism. An exception to this rule is Ewa Toniak's highly original book Olbrzymki. Kobiety i socrealizm (Kraków: Korporacja ha!art, 2008), where the author analyses stereotypical representations of women in socialist realist visual culture and juxtaposes them with contemporary art examples. My review of the book: Magdalena Moskalewicz, “Kobiety bez traktorów,” Kresy 4 (2008): 155-159.
(11.) Murawska-Muthesius, “Trauma of Aesthetic Castration,” 75-77. On socialist realism as trauma see also Luiza Nader, “Shame! Socialist Realist Historiography in the 1980's” (Case Study), http://artmuseum.pl/en/publikacje-online/luiza-nader-co-za-wstyd-historiografia-o-socrealizmie-w.
(12.) With the exception of writings by Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, all these were published exclusively in Polish, remain untranslated, and have, sadly, received little reception in English-language scholarship.
(13.) A note on nomenclature: postwar Poland only officially acquired the name of “People's Republic of Poland” (Polska Republika Ludowa) with the new constitution of July 22, 1952. However, to address the clear political changes that occurred in the country after the war, historians use the unofficial term “People's Poland” (Polska Ludowa) to discuss the period extending from 1944 to 1952. Another term, “Stalinist Poland,” refers to years before the political Thaw, that is, 1944-1955.
(14.) Wlodarczyk, Socrealizm, 121-122.
(15.) Helena Krajewska, “Zmienne pojgcie pigkna, Na marginesie Pierwszej Ogólnopol-skiej Wystawy Plastyki,” Nowa Kultura 2 (1950).
(16.) “Nowa Sztuka” by Tadeusz Makarczynski and Franciszek Fuchs, 1950, 16 min. See also “Wystawa Plastyki,” Polish film chronicle (newsreel) number 40/50, issued on September 27, 1950. Film reel in the collection of National Film Archive. Available for viewing online on Repozytorium Cyfrowe Filmoteki Narodowej: http:// www.repozytorium.fn.org.pl/?q=pl/node/6601.
(17.) The title of the exhibition is sometimes translated into English as “National Exhibition of Art.” I follow terminology used by Katarzyna Murawska Muthesius, which is more accurate.
(18.) Pass a Brick was at the First All-Poland Exhibition of Art accompanied by another painting, Ceglarki (Female brick-makers), which is far less known today, but which Maryla Sitkowska convincingly identified as a pendant to the former. Sitkowska exhibited the paintings together at Oblicza Socrealizmu at the National Museum in Warsaw in 1987, re
Page 24 of 30 uniting them for the first time since 1950. For an in-depth analysis of both paintings conducted through the lens of gender, see Toniak, Olbrzymki, 11-39.
(19.) For earlier debates about artistic realism, characteristic for the late 1940s, see Dorota Jarecka, “Tym, co walczyli o realizm," in Zaraz po Wojnie, edited by J. Kordjak and A. Szewczyk, 166-179 (Warszawa: Zachgta—Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, 2015).
(20.) Krajewska, “Zmienne pojgcie pigkna."
(21.) W Akademii Sztuk Plastycznych. Polish film chronicle (newsreel) number 17/52, issued on April 15, 1952. Film reel in the collection of National Film Archive. Available for viewing online on Repozytorium Cyfrowe Filmoteki Narodowej: http:// www.repozytorium.fn.org.pl/?q=pl/node/7342.
(22.) Acquisitions were made after the First All-Poland Exhibition of Art, even though the National Museum did not officially collect contemporary art at the time. See Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, “Curator's Memory: The Case of Missing ‘Man of Marble,' or the Rise and Fall of Socialist Realism in Poland," in Memory and Oblivion: Proceedings of the XXXIXth International Congress of the History of Art held in Amsterdam 1-7 September 1996, edited by W. Reinink and J. Stumpel, 906 (Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic, 1999).
(23.) Before the May 1st Parade-Berlin 1951, 1951, oil on canvas, 110 x 148 cm. Collection of Muzeum Sztuki, Eodz. For image see https://zasoby.msl.org.pl/arts/view/6252.
(24.) Stonecutters, 1952, oil on canvas, 146 x 110 cm. Collection of the National Museum in Warsaw. For image see http://cyfrowe.mnw.art.pl/dmuseion/docmetadata?id=29030.
(25.) Felix Dzerzhinsky on His Way to Siberia, 1951, oil on canvas, 110 x 210 cm. Collection of the Museum of Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
(26.) For Kobzdej's own reflections, see “Wrazenia plastykow z podrozy do Zwigzku Radzieckiego," Przeglgd Kulturalny 10 (1952). Reprinted in Czas Debat: antologia krytyki artystycznej z lat 1945-1954, edited by A. Pietrasik and P. Slodkowski (Warszawa: Fun-dacja Kultura Miejsca, Akademia Sztuk Pigknych w Warszawie, 2016), vol. 3, 135-140.
(27.) Portrait of Bronislawa Urbanowicz, 1950, oil on canvas, 120 x 70 cm. Collection of the National Museum in Warsaw. For image see http://cyfrowe.mnw.art.pl/dmuseion/ docmetadata?id=29021.
(28.) Wojciech Zukrowski, Rysunki z Wietnamu Aleksandra Kobzdeja (Warszawa: Sztuka, 1955); Kurylek, “Rysunki Kobzdeja."
(29.) Pawel Sowinski, Wakacje w Polsce Ludowej. Polityka Wladz i ruch Turystyczny 19451989 (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo trio, 2005), 51-80; Krzysztof Podemski, Socjologia Po-drozy (Poznan: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2004), 120-126.
(30.) Poland officially counted 27,012,000 citizens in 1954.
(31.) Podemski, Socjologia, 123. The numbers are based on the number of successfully issued passports.
(32.) Letters between the Office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture and Art, and the Committee for Cultural Collaboration with Abroad, box 3, vol. 2, series IV Ministers two Kultury i Sztuki Collection 2/366/0, Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw. My thanks to Joanna Wasko for sharing this research.
(33.) Wojciech Wlodarczyk, “Socrealistyczny epizod. Warszawa 1933-Moskwa 1958,” in Warszawa—Moskwa 1900-2000, edited by M. Poprzgcka and L. Jowlewa, 63-69 (Warszawa: Zachgta—Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, 2004). Wlodarczyk traces three dominant art movements of the interwar Poland and their transformation into the three main artistic attitudes toward socialist realism in the late 1940s.
(34.) Wlodarczyk, Socrealizm, 23-24. For detailed discussion of the confluence between Soviet socialist realism and the Russian avant-garde see: Boris Groys in The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (London: Verso 2011).
(35.) Wojciech Wlodarczyk, “Upolitycznienie modernizmu. Geneza problemu,” in Sztuka a wladza. W 50 lat po wielkiej wystawie "Krqg Arsenalu 1955-2005,” edited by G. Balcerzak and A. Dgbska (Gorzow Wielkopolski 2005), 13.
(36.) Wlodarczyk, “Socrealistyczny epizod.”
(37.) Ibid. Wlodarczyk gives a fascinating example of Erna Rosenstein, a member of the Polish Communist Party, who before WWII lobbied for the inclusion of Poland into the USSR as one of the Soviet republics but could not convince herself to produce socialist realist paintings for the First All-Poland Exhibition of Art in 1950.
(38.) Juliusz Starzynski, introduction to I Ogolnopolska Wystawa Plastyki (Warszawa: Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, 1950). Other co-organizers were Mieczyslaw Porgbski and Juliusz Krajewski.
(39.) Juliusz Starzynski, “Formalizm i rzeczywistosc (David—Goya—Ingres—Delacroix— Daumier,” Nowiny Literackie no. 13/14 (1948); Juliusz Starzynski, “O realistycznej trady-cji malarstwa polskiego,” Odrodzenie no. 18 (1949). Both reprinted in Czas Debat 3: 257279 and 297-307, respectively.
(40.) Paulina Kucharska, “Klopotliwy gosc. Polska ekspozycja na migdzynarodowej wystawie w Moskwie (1958/1959),” culture.pl 30.06.2005, http://culture.pl/pl/artykul/klopotli-wy-gosc-polska-ekspozycja-na-miedzynarodowej-wystawie-w-moskwie-19581959.
(41.) Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, “How the West Corroborated Socialist Realism in the East: Fougeron, Taslitzky, and Picasso in Warsaw.” Biuletyn Historii Sztuki LXV no. 2 (2003): 303-329.
(42.) Wojciech Wlodarczyk, “Po co byl socrealizm?," in Doswiadczenie i dziedzictwo totali-taryzmu na obszarze kultur srodkowoeuropejskich, edited by J. Goszczynska, J. Królak, and R. Kulminski, (Warszawa: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 2011), 44-56.
(43.) Ibid.
(44.) According to Wlodarczyk, this constituted the first crack in the formula of socialist realism. To the scholar, this moment is more important than 1955, which is where he disagrees with most researchers. “Socrealistyczny epizod."
(45.) Wlodzimierz Sokorski, “O rzeczywisty zwrot w naszej polityce kulturalnej," Przeglqd Kulturalny 16 (1954). Reprinted in Czas Debat, vol. 2, 516-527.
(46.) Wlodarczyk moves that end date to 1953 or even as early as the winter of 1951/1952, equating the whole period of socialist realism with what he also described as its first act. “Socrealistyczny epizod."
(47.) For a detailed analysis of Thaw-period art criticism in Poland, see Piotr Juszkiewicz, Od rozkoszy historiozofii do gry w nic. Polska krytyka artystyczna czasów odwilzy (Poznan: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2005).
(48.) “Wycigg z protokolu wydzialu rady malarstwa z dn. 22.X.1954" (excerpt from a report of Painting Department's board meeting on October 22, 1954), document dated December 10, 1954, folder 7420, Ministerstwo Szkolnictwa Wyzszego w Warszawie Collection 2/317/0/26.6, Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw.
(49.) Confirmation dated June 10, 1955. Ibid.
(50.) Typewritten report from the board meeting of the Central Qualifying Committee of the Ministry of Culture and Art, Section of Higher Education in the Arts, dated December 19, 1955. Ibid.
(51.) Ibid., p. 48 of the report.
(52.) Ibid., p. 49 of the report.
(53.) The title of this series, which Kobzdej started in 1955—possibly inspired by paintings of Jackson Pollock that he had seen in Venice in the summer of 1954—is sometimes translated into English as “Arrays."
(54.) Joanna Sosnowska, Polacy na Biennale Sztuki w Wenecji 1895-1999 (Warszawa: In-stytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk 1999), 93.
(55.) Kobzdej's works were included in some international traveling exhibitions of Polish art in 1955 (USSR) and 1956 (India), but the scale was incomparable to his earlier successes. His inclusion in the group show of five Thaw-era painters that traveled through Italy in 1958-1959 can be read in this context as forecasting his comeback.
(56.) “Opinia o dzialalnosci artystycznej i pedagogicznej docenta Aleksanda Kobzdeja," a reference letter by Kazimierz Tomorowicz, dated February 17, 1958. Folder 7420.
(57.) Ibid.
(58.) See Piotr Majewski, Malarstwo materii w Polsce jako formula nowoczesnosci (Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, 2006).
(59.) Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho and Agnaldo Farias, Bienal de Säo Paulo, 50 anos, 1951-2001 = 50 years of the Sao Paulo Biennial (Sao Paulo: Fundagäo Bienal de Säo Paulo, 2001), 104.
(60.) There were eleven altogether. See ibid. for a complete list.
(61.) “Polak w Nowym Jorku," Za i Przeciw, July 17, 1960.
(62.) Dore Ashton, “Art: Avant-Garde Pole: Warsaw Painter Shows and Discusses Work," New York Times, April 12, 1960.
(63.) Ibid.
(64.) MoMA acquired “Conflict," 1959; see Alfred H. Barr Jr, “Painting and Sculpture Acquisitions, 1960," The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 28, no. 2/4 (1961): 54; Guggenheim acquired “Forgotten Pastures," I960; see “Deaccessions from the Guggenheim Museum Collection: December 10, 2013," document available online at https:// media.guggenheim.org/content/pdf/new_york/ Collection_Stewardship_SRGMdeaccessions_12.10.2013.pdf.
(65.) Peter Selz, 15 Polish Painters (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1961); Fifteen Polish Painters [MoMA Exh. #690, August 1-October 1, 1961]. The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records 1960-1969, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York; Magdalena Moskalewicz, 15 Polish Painter (MoMA, 1961) Fifty-Five Years Later, in Reconstructions, Restagings, Re-enactments: Exhibition Histories in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Natasha Adamou and Michaela Giebelhausen (New York: Routledge, 2019); see also Jill Bugajski, “Tadeusz Kantor's Public," in Divided Dreamworlds?: The Cultural Cold War in East and West, edited by P. Romijn, G. Scott-Smith, and G. Segal (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 53-72. In this otherwise thorough essay, which includes a section about “15 Polish Painters," Bugajski mistakes State Institute of Art directed by Starzynski with Warsaw Art Academy.
(66.) M. Derbien, “Kobzdej maluje w Paryzu," Sztandar Mlodych 31 (February 6-7, 1960).
(67.) Zbigniew K. Rogowski, “Co robiq dzisiaj?," Zwierciadlo, December 25, 1960.
(68.) Jerzy Olkiewicz, “U profesora Kobzdeja," Ty i Ja 9 (September 1964).
(69.) Wojciech Plewinski (photographer), “Kobzdej: jego obrazy—jego zona na pierwszej wielkiej wystawie tego malarza," Przekroj 8, February 25, 1962.
(70.) Porter McCray's letter to Louise Smith dated October 30, 1959, folder 690.2, The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records 1960-1969, MoMA Archives.
(71.) Ibid.
(72.) Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, “Curators' Memory,” 908.
(73.) After long negotiations between MoMA and Polish authorities, the Polish side denied loans to the United States. As a result, the New York exhibition was composed solely of paintings loaned from private collections in the West. See letters in folder 690.2.
(74.) Susan Reid, “The Exhibition Art of Socialist Countries, Moscow 1958-1958, and Contemporary Style Painting,” in Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 101-132.
(75.) Murawska-Muthesius, “Curator's Memory,” 909.
(76.) Ibid.; Juszkiewicz, Od rozkoszy; Markowska, Dwa Przelomy.
(77.) Awarded between 1964 and 2006, the Gottfried Herder Prize was usually given to seven annual awardees.
(78.) For English translations of those texts, see Struggle with Matter.
(79.) O. Jgdrzejczyk, “Dwie krakowskie wystawy,” Gazeta Krakowska, February 17-18, 1962.
(80.) Markowska, Dwa Przelomy, Sztuka polska po 1955 i 1989 roku (Torun: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UMK 2012); Piotrowski, Znaczenia; Juszkiewicz, Od rozkoszy.
(81.) Piotrowski, Znaczenia, 40-41; Markowska, Dwa Przelomy, 12, 57-93.
(82.) Wojciech Wlodarczyk, “Po co byl socrealizm?,” in Doswiadczenie i dziedzictwo totali-taryzmu na obszarze kultur srodkowoeuropejskich, edited by J. Goszczynska, J. Krolak, and R. Kulminski, 44-56 (Warszawa: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 2011).
(83.) Piotr Piotrowski, “Odwilz,” in Odwilz. Sztuka okolo 1956 roku (Poznan: Muzeum Nar-odowe, 1996), 30-31.
(84.) Ibid.
(85.) Anna Markowska, Dwa Przelomy, 72-73.
(86.) Ibid.
Magdalena Moskalewicz
Magdalena Moskalewicz, Lecturer of Art History, Theory and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
"How-To" Make Art in Communist China: Professionalizing Amateur Artists a
Vivian Y. Li
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Oct 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.8
This article explores the prominent role of the amateur artist in the conception of communist visual culture in China during the Maoist years (1949-1976). Focusing on two groups of amateur art manuals for the promotion of producing visual arts and meishuzi by the nonartists of the general public, this study reveals the dynamic process of changing authorship and the public nature of the amateur arts in the People's Republic. In offering detailed explanations of core artistic concepts, techniques, and model examples, the manuals reflect an institutional management of the amateur artists and their creative impulses. Authored by professional artists, but intended for amateurs, the manuals speak of ideological tensions at play in the communist effort of bringing the arts to the people.
Keywords: authorship, amateur art, People's Republic of China, Maoist period, painting manuals, copybooks, public art, meishuzi, calligraphy, Wu Zuoren
Since the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, the state popularization of art has become the defining characteristic of China's communist visual culture. While the majority of studies on the visual culture of the Maoist period (1949-1976) look at the new popularizing tendencies in the context of existing artistic institutions and practices, such as the selection of subject matter with only wide public appeal, the curious creation of an entirely new cultural producer, the amateur artist, is often overlooked.
Farmers, soldiers, and workers who would never have had the chance to receive training in theater, printmaking, or painting were, in the decades immediately following the Chinese Communist Revolution, offered not only extracurricular art classes and workshops taught by professional artists similar to other communist countries, such as Russia and Estonia, but also major exhibition opportunities for their artwork.1 As A. S. Kargin, a pioneering historian of amateur art in Russia, surmised, the importance of amateur art in Soviet society cannot be overlooked. While socialist realism represented the proletariat, Soviet amateur art was by the proletariat.2 Yet, whereas in other communist countries
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amateur art activities are usually viewed in the context of “informal” or “unofficial” art compared to “official” activities promoted by the state, in China amateur arts were given ample state support. The most famous example of amateur artists produced in communist China was the group of Huxian County peasant painters of Shaanxi province in northwest China. They came to prominence in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), an ultimately disastrous national experiment of hasty industrialization.
The Huxian peasant painters' works were nationally and internationally exhibited, and published as far as Paris, when they reappeared in the early 1970s during the latter
(p. 225) half of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Several amateur artists of Huxian County, such as Li Fenglan and Wang Fulai, were singled out for the exceptional visual quality of their works. Other groups of amateur artists, who usually publicly exhibited together in their work units, also enjoyed national attention, such as the army amateur artists in the Second National Exhibition of the People's Liberation Army at the Palace Museum in Beijing in 1960 and the jointly exhibiting factory and shipyard workers from Shanghai, Luda, and Yangquan in Beijing in 1974.
Though the state's support of amateur artists, along with the training provided to them by professional artists who traveled to factories and the countryside, is generally known, the amateur art movement in China is rarely studied or understood for its unique role in the construction of Chinese communist visual culture. The promotion of amateur art in communist China is rather commonly cast as a politically expedient activity of the Maoist era, in which all art producers, regardless of whether artists or nonartists, were conscripted to participate, especially when mass cultural production became prioritized in certain political campaigns. In scholarly writing, the development of the amateur artists has been disparaged for its dependence on professional artists and the low artistic quality of amateur artworks.3
Rather than an eccentric and inconsequential aspect of visual culture in Mao-period China, this chapter considers the amateur art movement as a serious attempt to execute the communist utopian vision of applying the ideals of social equity and egalitarianism to the arts. Amateur art's purpose was to shift the notion of artistic authorship away from the valorized skilled artist, who merely represents, to the working-class amateur artist, who— through his or her familiarity with everyday social reality—infuses the artwork with a sense of authenticity.
Though the official exhibitions of amateur art proclaimed the state's successful elevation of popular culture to the status of fine art, the proliferation of art manuals for amateur artists that began appearing in the first decade of the People's Republic reveals the government's consolidated effort as well as its struggles conflating the concepts of art and popular culture in the making of the amateur artist.4 In the first decades of communist China, the young People's Republic witnessed the emergence of an amateur art movement (yeyu meishu huodong) to widely popularize artistic training and artmaking among nonartists of the general public.
One early art manual series produced in the first decade of the People's Republic included a manual on painting still lifes by Wu Zuoren (1908-1997), a prominent painter of the previous Republican period (1912-1949) and a professor as well as the new director of the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing. His How to Paint Still Lifes (Zenyang hua jingwu) (see Figure 9.1) was part of a sixteen-volume series of do-it-yourself art manuals, the Fundamental Art Techniques Series (Chuji jifa congshu), published in 1958 and 1959 by the major art publisher People's Fine Art Publishing House (Renmin meishu chubanshe) in Beijing, for the expressed benefit of the amateur artist.
In the series, each lightweight and concise book of ten to thirty pages, written by an established artist, often a teacher at CAFA, would focus on explaining the basic concepts, styles, and techniques unique to each medium along with visual examples. |(p- 226) (p. 227) Such briefly written and illustrated how-to art manuals were common reference books during the early years of the Chinese communist nation since its founding in 1949. By the early 1970s there was also a publication influx of copybooks prepared by professional artists that demonstrated how to draw figural types labeled by their socioeconomic categories, such as a workman's face or a young girl's face.5
The spirited project of publishing and disseminating art manuals to professionalize amateur artists may seem counter, even ironic, to the spontaneous nature of amateur art. More than professionalizing, however, the art manuals' overwhelming focus on elementary techniques and skills, without offering subsequent instructions on advanced skills, suggests that the goal was not to transform the masses into professional artists, but to create a new breed of artists—semiprofessional amateur artists who could continue to be politically identified as workers, soldiers, or farmers. The advent of the institutionalized amateur artist served to demystify the specialized aura of the artist by advancing the notion that artmaking does not require professionalizing beyond a grasp of basic techniques and skills. By the 1970s, named individual professional and amateur artists were showing together in national shows, further arguing their equivalence.6
The paradox of art manuals indicates the ambivalence between spontaneous and studied creativity in the discourse of the amateur artists. As Lynn Mally, historian of Soviet amateur theater, has astutely pointed out, the amateur artist in the Soviet context diverges significantly from the amateur artist in the capitalist context. While in both kinds of modern societies the amateur artist is celebrated for his or her spontaneity over the learned techniques and values of the professional artist, they have notably different social functions. The amateur artist in capitalist societies creates art for pleasure in his or her private sphere of leisure, unlike the one in the Soviet context who works in the public realm and is often publicly elevated as an exemplar of the edifying pursuits of the working class during their leisure time. Operating in the public sphere, the unpredictable content and artistic quality of the amateur artist, though, was a constant issue for the communist cultural regulators to manage.7 The resultant contradiction between the welcomed spontaneity of amateur art, as an antidote to existing hierarchies in art and artistic authorship, and the Communist Party's desired control of artistic production to reflect an enlightened, classless visual culture and society is embodied in the notable publication phenomenon of art manuals in China after the Communist Revolution.
The positioning of the amateur artist in the matrix of Chinese communist visual culture endeavored to see the artist as someone akin to Foucault's author function, which defines the author rather as a function of discourse.8 Therefore, meaning would arise from both the cultural and the social context of the collective author and the audience, rather than from the genius of the author alone. Through reshaping the notion of the author, or artist, via the formation of the amateur artist, communist visual culture agents attempted to reframe the discourse of art and artmaking around popularizing art in service of the masses rather than around formal and aesthetic issues. Yet, by elevating and inserting the amateur artist into the pre-existing art system of public exhibitions and publications, rather than changing the system of art discourse itself, the amateur (p- 22«) artist has ultimately become a footnote to the visual culture of the early People's Republic of China.
In this chapter, I first explore the professional artists' management of the unpredictable artistic quality of amateur artists, as addressed by the important sixteen-volume Fundamental Art Techniques Series published during the late 1950s, and then turn to the special public role of amateur artists as reflected through a group of art manuals dedicated to a newly prominent, public-facing art form of the Maoist period—meishuzi. Meishuzi, or literally “artistic characters,” refers to the handwritten artistic lettering of Chinese characters, which stood in stark contrast to the longtime veneration of literati calligraphy. Through such seemingly simple manuals, the context as well as the motivations for upending the social hierarchies around the power of authorship reveal many new developments in the visual culture of early communist China: the complex relationship between professional artists and amateur artists, the national dispersion and reproduction of new
Page 4 of 24 artmaking practices and imagery, and ultimately the question of what is now the definition of artistic authorship.
The roots of the modernizing impulse to popularize the arts can be traced not just to the Chinese Communist Party or the Communist Revolution of 1949, but to the May Fourth Movement three decades earlier. By the 1930s, led by intellectuals who believed that the country's uneducated, rural majority and their popular culture were key to modernizing Chinese art and culture, the popularization movement endeavored to broaden the recipients of the newly reconstituted culture.
It was only under the Chinese Communist Party's philosophy, however, that a remarkable number of institutional resources and attention were mobilized to widen the scope of producers of culture. Since the early years of the young communist nation, professional artists were tasked to lead this initiative. At the Second Congress of Literary and Art Workers in Beijing in 1953, the vice-minister of culture and vice-director of propaganda, Zhou Yang, issued, among other cultural directives, the need for the art and literary workers to promote amateur art. In his address at the subsequent Third Congress of Literary and Art Workers in 1960, Zhou reiterated the point to encourage leisure art activities among farmers and workers as one of the six key tasks of the assembled group.
The art manuals articulate the intertwined relationship between professional and amateur artists in the creation of communist visual culture in China. While professional artists were encouraged to engage more directly with the everyday life of the general public, such as through organized working and sketching trips to the countryside, amateur artists were receiving after-work training and workshops from professional artists. Starting in the early 1950s, amateur art movement activities—after-work training classes, exhibitions, or amateur art symposia—were frequently promoted through a person's work unit and mapped according to the communist socioeconomic identities (p- 229) of farmers, workers, and soldiers. Urban workers' cultural palaces and cultural halls, modeled on the Soviet paradigm, were also established to encourage the masses' engagement in cultural activities and amateur artmaking.
One of the earliest officially publicized announcements directly addressing the empowerment of the uneducated masses to become artists appeared under the headline “Everywhere to Hold Workers Amateur Study Classes” in the May 1955 issue of Meishu (Art), the journal of the national professional artist organization—the China Artists Association (CAA).9 In the previous month, on April 28, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (Zhonghua quanguo zong gong hui), in partnership with the CAA, had also opened the first nation-wide exhibition devoted to showing workers' art that was held in Beijing's Worker's Cultural Palace.
Promoted as made during their leisure time, more than 320 works in the exhibition of mostly cartoons but also watercolors, paintings, propaganda art, sketches, and ink paintings were hailed as representing workers from fourteen provinces and three provinciallevel municipalities as well as from a diverse range of industries. A review of the show by the art critic Chen Su for Meishu also approximated that 7,000 workers nationwide were involved in the amateur art movement (yeyu huodong) in the preceding few years, and that the movement encompassed over 870 amateur art clubs for workers across the country. The national show and its related symposium were publicized with several positive articles and reviews that appeared in Meishu.10
A number of how-to art books and manuals thus supported the growing ranks of amateur artists. In the same publisher's foreword that appears at the beginning of each volume in the Fundamental Art Techniques Series, the People's Fine Arts Publishing House states that the purpose of the series is to address the increased interest in art by providing a beginner's manual of techniques for those who have not had any professional training. Like art manuals, or huapu, since the thirteenth-century Ming period, they made the technical aspects of the esteemed arts accessible to everyone. According to J. P. Park, in his comprehensive study of art manuals in premodern China, manuals claimed that “literati taste” can be mastered by the reader. Art manuals served to make accessible the social prestige of art to the general public.11 Yet, whereas the readers and users of earlier hua-pu did not have to worry about the quality of their works, as they were intended for private viewing and recreation, the how-to art manuals of the early People's Republic made explicitly for amateurs suggest an anxiety around the quality of their works intended for public use and consumption.12
The discourse of amateur arts and the question of artistic quality produced a tenuous relationship between professional artists and amateur artists. Due to the persecution of intellectuals and artists during the Anti-Rightist campaign (1957-1958), there was an increase in amateur artist activities in part to discount the distinction of professional artists and to advance the prioritizing of art's function as propaganda. Reviews of amateur art shows from this time period frequently lauded how the amateur artists' works were even hard to distinguish from professional artists' works. In Guang Zhi's review of an exhibition of Beijing workers' amateur art in February 1958, for instance, he argued that many of the cartoons that comprised the majority of the show looked like they (p- 230) could have been done by professional cartoonists.13 Though the emphasis on the amateur artists was to erode the existing rubric of artistic quality and authorship, the continued praising and valuing of those qualities in evaluating amateur artists' works inadvertently positioned amateur artists as artistic rivals to professional artists.
The complicated discussion of the value of artistic quality and authorship when assessing amateur art resurfaced at a major amateur arts symposium in Beijing in 1959. Some of the artists who contributed to the Fundamental Art Techniques Series, such as Wu Zuoren, Wang Qi, and Li Pingfan, attended as invited speakers. Organized by the CAA in Beijing, the symposium brought together professional artists with the amateur artists of the People Liberation Army Navy, many of whom were participating in a large exhibition at the time of over a thousand works.
The renowned printmaker Li Qun (1912-2012) opened the event by delineating the different material responsibilities of the artist and the amateur artist. While amateur artists can learn skills such as lighting, anatomy, and perspective, and amateur artists are needed to popularize the arts and create everyday art in public spaces, such as blackboard newspapers, he argued that the imperative to raise the quality of their artwork is the duty of the professional artist. In conclusion, Li said, “Some people overlook the role of the professional artist to guide the amateur artist in creating his art, even thinking that amateur artists' works can replace professional artists' work, which is wrong.”14 Other artists mentioned in the published symposium report gave advice to the amateur artists on how to improve in areas of form and technique. Li and the other professional artists, therefore, distinguished their role and sovereignty over artistic quality and authorship, while delegating the role of publicly creating and widely disseminating art to the amateur artists.
The year 1958, when the series was first published, was also a challenging year for professional artists, especially at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where most of the series' writers were employed. The Anti-Rightist campaign was in full force from the latter half of 1957 to the first half of 1958. During this period of turmoil, CAFA's president, Jiang Feng, was purged and a reorganization of the national art academy system to decentralize the dominant position enjoyed by CAFA was implemented. A criticism was issued of the school's existing policy for overemphasis on technique, talent, and reputation.15 Therefore, on one hand, the Fundamental Art Techniques Series can be understood in the context of the contributing artists' support for the amateur artist movement. On the other hand, the series also was a platform for the professional artists to reassert the value of their institutional expertise and identity vis-à-vis that of the amateur artists.
The promotion, mentorship, and institutional regulation of the amateur art movement were, in fact, placed in the hands of the professional artists, like those who composed the Fundamental Art Techniques Series. Implicitly, in its publisher's ambition to be comprehensive in scope and authoritative in its roster of leading contemporary artists, the series in addition offers a unique view into the professional artists' practices at the time. Established professional artists legitimized through such series of art manuals the restructured artistic taste of the young communist nation to prioritize more popular forms for the pronounced benefit of amateur artists. The sixteen titles included in the (p- 231) Fundamental Art Techniques Series, for instance, covered accepted modern art forms that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, such as oil painting, watercolor, and prints, but also more recent forms such as cartoons, meishuzi, and sketch.16 Besides Wu Zuoren's book, the other books in the Fundamental Art Techniques Series were written by other renowned artists of the time, such as How to Make Oil Paintings (Zenyang hua youhua) by Ai Zhongxin (1915-2003), head of the oil painting department at CAFA, and How to Make Prints (Zenyang zuo banhua) by Li Pingfan (1922-2011), printmaker and the arts editor of the People's Fine Arts Publishing House.
Four new volumes were also added to the final sixteen in the Fundamental Art Techniques Series in 1958. By November 1958, books to teach four new themes—watercolor, figural painting, cartoon, and meishuzi—were added to the list of the series, while the already published volumes that were on the list, How to Sculpt (Zenyang zuo diaosu), written by the prominent sculptor Fu Tianchou (1920-1990), and How to Make Etchings (Zenyang zuo tongbanhua), written by Chen Xiaonan (1908-1993), were removed. This revision of the subjects in the series reflects communist visual culture's prioritizing of media that could be quickly executed and easily legible for direct communication over those that required greater technical mastery and planned execution. The art manuals of the early People's Republic thus worked not only to instruct but also to define new parameters of the young nation's culture along populist lines.
The common approach to artmaking that dominates each book in the Fundamental Art Techniques Series implies the prevalent conception of realism in the early communist China as derived from primary experience. As would be expected in a technical overview organized according to medium and/or subject matter, relevant tools and materials are introduced and specific practical advice is offered (e.g., how best to mix colors and arrange the composition). However, regardless of whether the volume was covering oil painting, woodblock prints, or graphic design, at the beginning of each volume its author would emphasize the primacy of direct observation and sketching.
For example, after introducing the pencil and its range of drawing effects in How to Make Pencil Drawings, Ge Weimo then turns to sketching as the beginning of the artmaking process. Rather than copying (linmo) existing artworks, he promotes first-hand experi-ence—“if the eye does not see what the object is, how would the hand be able to draw it?”17 Likewise, in How to Make Graphic Designs, the author Lei Guiyuan begins by talking about how to appropriately situate oneself in front of a variety of real leaves and flowers, then carefully observe and sketch them before attempting to draw from memory.
By 1958, when the Fundamental Art Techniques Series was published, the concept of sketching that was present in China already since the early twentieth century was generally accepted not only as a basis for artistic representation, but mainly as the politically sanctioned mode of artistic creation. The emphasis on sketch is indicative of the newly adopted practice of artists to work for an extended period of time outdoors, specifically in the countryside or in the factory. Developed in the mid-1950s, it became promoted as the standard practice for artists in an attempt to bridge the distance between art and life in the process of realist artmaking.
(p. 232) Although the state-mandated practice of sending art students to the countryside and factories to observe first-hand and create works depicting farming and industrial labor was borrowed from the Soviet art curriculum, the Chinese official adoption of this practice nationwide in the late 1950s went a step further by requiring art students also to experience the life of their subjects in what became popularly known as the “three-to-
Page 8 of 24 gethers”—eat together, live together, work together (tongchi, tongzhu, tonglaodong). This conflation of real-life experience with artistic realism reinforced the urgency of cultivating the amateur artist during this period. The contemporaneous amateur art classes offered nationwide were likewise founded on this dominant belief that farmers, workers, and soldiers—“the people”—would be able to represent their own local reality more spontaneously and naturally, and hence more realistically, than professional artists.
Sketch, referred to by the interchangeably used Chinese terms sumiao, xiesheng, and sux-ie (literally “rapid drawing”), was first associated with artists traveling to the countryside and gaining experience with “the people.” Cai Ruohong, writing for Meishu, first introduced the idea of suxie and realist depiction in its January 1954 issue. At the time Cai was the vice-chairman of the CAA and previously a teacher at the Lu Xun Art School in the pre-revolution communist base camp at Yan'an and arts editor for the People's Daily. In his essay Cai writes, “[We] must continuously enter all forms of life, and must recognize that the foundation of our art production is the sketching of these forms of life ... .In my opinion, to be called a realist painter we should see how many sketches the artist has made.”18
Exhibitions devoted to sketch began appearing in 1954. A national exhibition organized by the CAA originally was planned to only exhibit watercolors, but at the last minute it was transformed into an exhibition of watercolors and sketches that opened in the former Forbidden City in August 1954.19 The Second National Art Exhibition in Beijing, in the following year, formally established sketch as a significant and independent art form rather than a mere preparatory stage in the artistic process. The Second National Art Exhibition was originally planned to open in February 1955 but was delayed until March 1955 to allow for the inclusion of sketches. One section of 51 pieces was devoted to sketches alone, out of the exhibition's total 996 works.
The inclusion of an independent category of sketch was unprecedented in any of the previous national art exhibitions held during the preceding Republican period (1911-1949) or in the first national art exhibition in 1949 after the Communist Revolution.20 Though live sketching had been practiced in the early twentieth century, it was not rigorously elevated to the prominence of an independent art form on a national scale as it was starting in 1954 through publications and exhibitions under the auspices of the CAA and the leadership of Cai Ruohong.21 As the strong public promotion and institutional codification of sketch demonstrates in the early People's Republic, exceptional value was placed not just on formal innovation or artistic representation, but on the primary experience of the artist as an eyewitness.
Four years after the institutional advancement of sketch as essential to artmaking in the People's Republic, the Fundamental Art Techniques Series helped affirm sketch's (p- 233) prominent position in the new art hierarchy. Yet it also imparts a multiplicity of views on sketch's direct relationship to artmaking. While for Ai Zhongxin, in How to Make Oil Paintings, sketching is fundamental to the realist practice (xieshi), or “objectively representing a specific time, place, and context,” for Lei Guiyuan in his How to Make Designs the purpose of sketching is to build a rich library of reference images for creating patterns and designs.22 According to Ge Weimo in his How to Make Pencil Drawings, sketching develops independent and specific thinking of an object that is not reliant on other people's artistic rendering, as well as trains a sophisticated coordination between the eye and hand.23 Thus, sketch was treated by the series' authors as having wider applications to artmaking, such as artistic objectivity, image collection, and originality, than its social and political contexts describe.
Though sketch was lauded as superior to the traditional practice of copying existing works, the majority of the art manuals in the Fundamental Art Techniques Series nevertheless provide at the end about twenty illustrated examples of relevant works worthy of study. This section includes major works from a remarkably varied range of time periods, cultures, and styles. At the end of Ai Zhongxin's How to Make Oil Paintings, for instance, the illustrated examples include works by Chinese and Russian modern and contemporary artists, like Wu Zuoren, Xu Beihong, and Ilya Repin, as well as European Old Masters like Rembrandt and Ingres. In Wu Zuoren's How to Paint Still Lifes, he also includes bird and flower ink paintings by important premodern Chinese artists, such as the Song period master Li Song (1190-1230), along with an anonymous painting of a flower also from the Song period.
These Chinese bird and flower paintings are therefore shown as precursors of the same history and tradition as the other examples of still lifes included, such as by Wu Zuoren, Qi Baishi, Jean Siméon Chardin, Eugène Delacroix, Vincent van Gogh, and Aleksandr Gerasimov. Intriguingly, no amateur artists are included in the examples, implying that the existing discourse of artists and art history remained intact. Such an ahistorical and international presentation of artists serves to impress onto the audience of amateur artists certain accepted art concepts of that time, such as in this case the European still life tradition over the Chinese bird and flower tradition, and the boundless possible artistic approaches to depicting the specified subject or medium covered by each book. The selection of canonical works to serve as exemplars of each manual's theme also maintains the relationship between artistic quality and authorship in the discourse of art. The series thereby underscores rather than diminishes the authorship of the artist as defined by acquired artistic skills and training.
The types of illustrated reference examples chosen for each book, though apparently random, upon closer study, convey a certain politically driven pattern of selection. European art is included but only up to the post-Impressionists, while much more Chinese and Russian modern and contemporary art than premodern art are included. The exclusion of certain artistic traditions, such as premodern Chinese literati paintings or nonrepresenta-tional European modern art, like French Cubism, also alludes to the tacit historical boundaries of taste that professional as well as amateur artists in the early People's Republic were to consider.
Art manual series that were aimed at supporting the training of amateur artists in communist China should be understood in the context of the numerous other compact guidebooks that were being published at the time. Concise guidebooks ranged from How to Decorate Blackboard Newspapers (Zenyang meihua heiban bao, 1956) to How to Create a Communal Kitchen (Zenyang ban hao gonggong shitang, 1958), during the Great Leap Forward when communal kitchens were being promoted.24
These nationally distributed guidebooks were intended to spread the concepts of new socialist practices in public spaces, such as the blackboard newspapers (heiban bao), which developed after the founding of the People's Republic as a way for ordinary people to publicly receive local news without buying a newspaper. Blackboards were often placed at the entrances to work or housing buildings to inform workers and residents about news, upcoming meetings, or public information on policies and political campaigns. The art manuals, as part of this proliferation of such other concise guidebooks in circulation, thus served as setting forth new standards and practices in the cultural life of communist China. They also ensured not only that these new standards can easily be understood, but also were replicated by nonprofessional artists and art workers for public spaces across the nation.
Of all the new quick and legible mediums that emerged at the time, the unique and most unlikely artistic category of meishuzi deserves special attention. More than any other artistic category, countless art manuals devoted to meishuzi began appearing in the decade following the Chinese Communist Revolution because of the urgent need for amateur artists to spread written political messages and to fill the public spaces with complementary visual imagery. Despite its name that implies the importance of aesthetics, meishuzi in Communist China operated as a method of quick, textual communication instead of self-expression or artistry. In the 1950s alone, over forty guidebooks and reference books on meishuzi were published. The growing importance of meishuzi and amateur art's public role can be seen in meishuzi's elevation to an art form worthy of inclusion in the Fundamental Art Techniques Series with the volume How to Write Meishuzi by Qiu Ling published in 1958. Arguably, it is these many anonymous and amateur authors of mass-produced visual art on the streets who realized the Foucauldian author function of the communist discourse.
Although meishuzi only appeared after 1949 as an independent art form for artistically presenting the written word, it developed in the Republican period from modern art discourses around calligraphy and design. Specifically, meishuzi emerged from within the prosperous commercial market and publishing industries, as well as the young field of modern design that were all flourishing in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai around the 1930s.25 Seen as a combination of Chinese characters with modern design, examples of meishuzi abounded in the mastheads, headlines, and advertisements of periodicals as well as on food packaging, textile labels, and other commercial products. Meishuzi was also used in political signs and slogans. In the 1920s and 1930s, premodern (p- 235) methods of disseminating information, such as a barker or poster announcements, gave way to new formats allowed through advances in printing technology. Meishuzi in such mass-produced printed formats prioritized instant legibility with visual appeal over the former literati values of artistic self-expression, the indelible presence of the artist, and the brushstroke as appreciated in Chinese calligraphy (shufa).
The development of meishuzi during the Republican period also reflects a larger movement in early twentieth-century China to reevaluate and update the Chinese character form and style for modern times. Written Chinese and its formally accepted scripts were in fact being fiercely interrogated at the time. In the 1920s and 1930s, calligraphy was roundly criticized for being tied to dated ideas of moral standards and virtue along with being inaccessible to the general public because of its frequent illegibility. “China's Script Problem Today,” a scathing letter written by Qian Xuantong in 1918 to Chen Duxiu, cofounder of the Chinese Communist party, offers a glimpse into the scope of the reformists' argument.26 In his letter, Qian proposes that in order to abandon Confucianism and have a true cultural revolution, “we must first abolish the Chinese written language” (bu ke bu xian fu hanzi). Qian also raises the two current approaches for reforming the Chinese written character: through formal means by adopting its Romanization or through its sound by making Chinese characters phonetic like the English alphabet.
Lu Xun (1881-1936), renowned writer and father of modern Chinese literature, was another reformer and educator who actively looked for ways to modernize the Chinese script. He was also an early proponent of adopting European modern typographic practices, as well as newly discovered ancient Chinese scripts that were also becoming known through archaeological digs. In his oft-quoted essay section, “Writing Characters Is Like Drawing Pictures,” Lu criticized the difficult construction of Chinese characters and promoted instead blurring the boundaries between text and image.27 He actively studied modern and ancient typography, and designed, or else commissioned others to design, the book covers for his multiple literary projects using meishuzi.
Book covers since the Ming period (1368-1633) had conventionally been unadorned except for a simple handwritten title slip pasted on the front cover.28 Lu, inspired by modern print culture in Europe and art and design movements in vogue at the time, such as Art Deco and Art Nouveau, as well as Chinese archaic scripts, included meishuzi not only as words but also aesthetically as design motifs in the cover's overall composition. This can be seen, for example, in his self-designed cover for the first issue of the Left-Wing Writer's formal Shanghai publication, Sprouts (Mengya yuekan), which he also edited (see Figure 9.2). To many such activists and reformers, the assumedly restrictive qualities of the standard Chinese script posed a major obstacle to China's modernization.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth century also witnessed an increase in the diversity of calligraphic styles with the termination of the imperial service system in the late Qing (1644-1911), which required mastery of the formal script forms. The formal standards of writing and calligraphy additionally became more lax for various reasons: the increased popularization of the fountain pen over the traditional brush that made (p- 236) (p. 237) writing more like drawing; the popularization of photography that allowed a variety of calligraphy to be widely circulated; and the increased archaeological finds discovered at the turn of the twentieth century, such as the manuscript library at Dunhuang that holds manuscripts with ancient script forms from the fifth to early eleventh century.29
The rise of the study of modern typography and design interacted closely with the development of meishuzi in China. During the Republican period, meishuzi was known as tu'an zi, or literally “design characters.” The first style of meishuzi was heavily influenced by Euro-American typographic practices introduced into China via Japan. The Japanese written language, which includes many Chinese characters, kanji, had adopted san serif, which minimized or eliminated embellishments in printed Chinese characters. Previously, ever since the sixteenth century, the standard Chinese song ti script adopted for print referenced the brushstroke, such as the tapering of lines that strove to emulate the modulating line of the brush and hooks at the end of certain lines to simulate the mark left when lifting the brush off the paper.
San serif made the Chinese characters more eye-catching, simple, and consistent to accommodate the industrial aesthetic of the times, and it became the preferred type in print for slogans, advertisements, publications, commercial logos, and political propaganda.
Page 13 of 24
With the elimination of its references to the brush, the line between drawing and writing also blurred so that writing became increasingly more an element of the modern design ecology and less associated with the traditional arts of the brush, such as calligraphy and ink painting. This ambiguity introduced by meishuzi further distanced the written word from its longtime association with the expressive brush, and the singular talent and virtuosic authorship of the calligrapher.
Meishuzi thus developed out of the intersection of the rising commercial press and its appeal to the modern consumers of cosmopolitan Shanghai, as well as international modern design trends in the early twentieth century. After 1949, and until the early 1980s, however, meishuzi changed little as its use became focused on promoting ideology and politics.30 After 1949, meishuzi was no longer referred to as design characters (tu'an zi). With the proliferation of new guidebooks, manuals, and resource books (cankao ziliao) to standardize official propaganda forms nationally, meishuzi appeared in mastheads, headlines, and titles, as it rose in importance as the essential vehicle to communicate the written word to the masses.
According to the section on meishuzi in the manual How to Decorate Blackboard Newspapers, the purpose of meishuzi is not to have viewers appreciate the formal beauty of the words as in calligraphy, but to hold their interest and ease in reading its message.31 Other concise manuals on meishuzi, such as Meishuzi for Countryside Use (Nongcun yingy-ong meishuzi) (see Figure 9.3), published in 1964 by the Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House, demonstrates further the national aspirations for spreading the practice of meishuzi to all areas of the country and for those with even little to no artistic exposure.
With the ever-shifting nature of news and politics, there was a quickness of manual labor involved in propaganda work that should be accounted for in the writing of meishuzi. Ostensibly, during the early People's Republic, meishuzi encompassed |(p- 238) (p. 239) bringing printed Chinese characters into public spaces. Wall newspapers required regular updating and many local amateur artists to help maintain them. In The Practice of Writing Meishuzi (Meishuzi zuofa), one of the first post-1949 books on meishuzi published in 1952 for the explicit purpose of introducing to the general public meishuzi for propaganda work, the author claimed that meishuzi can be practiced by everyone, even those with bad handwriting.32
The manual labor required in creating meishuzi, unlike calligraphy, is not contingent on knowing the movement of the brush, but more so the overall structure and design of the character. The meishuzi manuals, as a beginner's introduction to meishuzi, thereby emphasized how to construct characters in slogans and in wall newspaper headlines by hand, with uniformity and consistency using a simple house painter's brush, and how to enlarge images and text. The manuals all instruct on and provide illustrated details covering a range of issues, from how to space out characters to how to use also chalk to write meishuzi.
By the 1970s, when propaganda images became more standardized, meishuzi had become a mainstay of general propaganda reference books published both by art and nonart publishers, such as the extensive 203-page Army Arts Reference Book (Liandui shiyong meishu ziliao), edited by the Nanjing army's political propaganda group and published by the Jiangsu People's Publishing House in 1975. Appearing since the early 1960s, such books supported propaganda work according to specific work units or areas of employment, and amateur artists were encouraged to depict subject matter related to their socioeconomic identity. The Army Arts Reference Book was meant to aid amateur artists in the army in their propaganda work, although its editors in their foreword state that the contents are “provided for all the worker, peasant, and soldier amateur artists and professional art workers to study,”33 arguing that the manual has universal artistic appeal and application.
Whereas earlier manuals on meishuzi from the 1950s, such as Meishuzi's Technique (1952), described in great detail a vast assortment of meishuzi scripts and fonts—from the conventional san serif print character (song ti) to three-dimensional characters—the range of meishuzi script styles in the 1960s and 1970s had standardized. The industrialized san serif script became the preferred script for propaganda purposes in China. The ornate or complexly rendered meishuzi, such as earlier ones that were inspired by Art Deco and Art Nouveau, were avoided to support the ease of readability as well as the constant need to quickly write new messages.
The Army Fine Arts Reference Book includes pages of templates with various types of imagery, which could be copied and enlarged for a public space of any size. Empty text boxes were also inserted into some images instead of text to allow the amateur artist to adapt the image with his or her own content (see Figure 9.4). An appendix at the end gives summaries of basic elements and techniques for creating propaganda art in different public spaces and circumstances, such as how to make illustrations with chalk, how to proportionally render the Chinese flag, how to enlarge images and text using grids (see Figure 9.5), common layouts for wall newspapers, and various examples of (p- 240) graphic and floral motifs for decorative borders. Also included are instructions on how to write meishuzi for blackboard, wall newspapers, and propaganda bulletins boards.
In this highly scripted, copybook manner of presentation, amateur artists were encouraged by the many detailed instructions and generous library of visual options to reproduce these recommended examples and norms rather than follow their own creative impulses. Additionally, the author, or designer, of the images in the book is separated from
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the actual making and presentation of the work that is to be executed instead by the amateur artist, further displacing traditional notions of authorial agency where the author and maker are revered as one. Amateur artists hence become the expected participants in the process of manufacturing public art on the streets.
Meishuzi continued in importance well into the 1980s, but with the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, and the turn toward economic rather than ideological growth, meishuzi became recontextualized and integrated into the long history of Chinese writing and calligraphy, most notably in the comprehensive meishuzi reference book by Yu Bingnan published in 1980. In the introduction to his book, Yu describes the history of Chinese writing, starting with Neolithic Shang dynasty (c. 1600-1046 bce) inscriptions on bronze vessels, and its relationship with contemporary meishuzi. Moreover, meishuzi was recast through an international lens to aid China's economic outreach to Europe and America in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Meishuzi, Yu posits, is important for (p- 241) promoting today's economic as well as political ambitions, or as he describes, “cleverly combines market and political propaganda all at the same time.”34
The changed concern for the public written word in the context of the nation's new economic and global outreach of the 1980s is most obvious in Yu's inclusion of more decorative and entertaining styles of meishuzi for commercial use, as well as the inclusion of examples of the Romanization of the Chinese language—pinyin—in meishuzi. Yu promotes the use of the Roman alphabet in pinyin, rather than the Chinese characters, as a way to further international economic development and communication. Meishuzi's political currency of three decades was short lived as the focus swung back to its commercial design and communicative power in the economic realm.
Although handwritten meishuzi continued to be painted on walls and structures in public spaces during the 1980s, by the 1990s its popularity had waned due to the less intense political agenda, along with the impact of computer technology on the design and graphic arts, and new advancements in large-scale printing and news dissemination. The legacy of the public nature of the amateur arts and its prominent place in Chinese communist visual culture can still be seen, though, in the ubiquitous faded Maoist hand-painted slogans and wall newspapers written in meishuzi that adorn building walls and surfaces throughout China today.
The communist visual culture's goal to professionalize, or rather semiprofessionalize, amateur artists through manuals is important to study not only because of how it challenged the authority of professional artists in the early decades of the People's Republic, but even more so for its efforts to shift the discourse of art and cultural production and authorship to the masses.35 Manuals show the attempt to regulate and standardize the spontaneous quality and content of amateur artists, while also diminishing the specialized knowledge and authorship of professional artists. As seen through the art manuals' intent to impart onto amateur artists quality control and the responsibility of its public role, the Page 17 of 24
semiprofessionalization of amateur artists eventually had limited impact on changing the notion of cultural production and authorship in the arts. However, ironically, the political and social policies of the late Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) unintentionally cultivated a new generation of amateur artists, or what art critic Gao Minglu calls the “amateur avant-garde,” who did make quite an impact.36
In the 1970s, urban, educated youth were forcibly sent down to live and work in the countryside, creating what would be known as the lost generation of youth who missed their formative years of schooling. Those with artistic interests, though, still were able to pursue artmaking through the amateur art classes offered in their rural exile, which led to salon-style gatherings and drawing groups with varying political leanings and degrees of rebelliousness. On September 27, 1979, a group of one of the most radical young amateur artists, the Stars, famously hung their work on the fence outside of the Chinese National Gallery in Beijing.37 By this time, professional art as well as amateur art chosen for official exhibitions was suspected as being corrupted by the intense political propaganda of the Cultural Revolution.38 The event of the Stars group exhibition became a turning point in Chinese contemporary art, and some of the participants would later become the pioneers of the avant-garde art movements in the 1980s and 1990s. By installing and exhibiting their amateur artworks in an unofficially sanctioned space, they reappropriated amateur art as a form of private, spontaneous self-expression to defy the art establishment and the government.
The ideal of a grassroots amateur authorship was never fully realized, as demonstrated by the massive semiprofessionalization effort that is well documented in the archive of how-to manuals discussed in this chapter; however, the lasting appeal of the archetypal, artless amateur artist can still be glimpsed in works such as Cai Guo-Qiang's Peasant da Vincis (Nongmin da fen qi) from 2010. The installation, curated by Cai, is an ensemble of multiple homemade devices created by about fifty rural amateur inventors from different parts of rural China, such as airplanes, a wooden helicopter, a submarine made from oil drums, and an aircraft carrier made from propane tanks. Through the diverse ensemble of amateur artworks—and the creativity and invention represented therein—Cai's eclectic display also asks the basic question that the communist visual (p- 243) culture in China strove to pose: What is the special criterion of an artist today? Yet, unlike the artists who were offered the unprecedented extracurricular art workshops and wide-reaching exhibition platforms during the Maoist period, Cai's contemporary amateur artists are publicly celebrated not for their participation in the grand forging of a new model for art and society, but more for their own individual, raw creativity.
Andrews, Julia F. “Commercial Art and China's Modernization.” In A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-century China, edited by Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, 181-192. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998.
Andrews, Julia F. Painters and Politics in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1979. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Cai, Ruohong. “Opening a Broad Path for Artistic Creation” (Kaipi meishu chuangzuo de guangkuo daolu). Meishu (1954): 12.
Chen, Su. “Improve Workers' Amateur Artmaking” (Jin yi bu kaizhan zhigong yeyu meishu huodong). Meishu (April 1955): 17-19, 25-26.
“Everywhere to Hold Workers Amateur Art Study” (Ge di xiangji juban gongren yeyu meishu xuexi ban). Meishu (May 1955): 52.
Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, 113-138. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977.
Gao, Minglu. Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.
Guang, Zhi. “A New Flower Opens—Reflections on ‘Beijing Workers Amateur Art Exhibition'” (Hao hua zhengzai kai—“Beijing shi zhigong yeyu meishu zhanlan hui” guan-hou). Meishu (February 1958): 2.
Ho, Christine I. “The People Eat for Free and the Art of Collective Production in Maoist China.” The Art Bulletin 99, no. 3 (2016): 348-372.
Laing, Ellen Johnston. “Chinese Peasant Painting, 1958-1976: Amateur and Professional.” Art International 27, no. 1 (January-March 1984): 1-12ff.
Laing, Ellen Johnston. The Winking Owl: Art in the People's Republic of China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Mally, Lynn. Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.
Mally, Lynn. Revolutionary Acts: Amateur Theater and the Soviet State, 1917-1938. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016.
Mullaney, Thomas S. The Chinese Typewriter: A Global History of the Information Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017.
Park, J. P. Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012.
Qian Xuantong. “Zhongguo jinhou de wenzi wenti.” New Youth (Xin qingnian) 4, no. 4 (1918).
Ren, Wei. “The Writer's Art: Tao Yuanqing and the Formation of Modern Chinese Design (1900-1930). PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2015.
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Wu, Xueshan. “Ideology of Form: 1950s ‘Sketch Movement' (Meijie yishi xingtai: 1950 nian dai de ‘Suxie yundong').” Art Research (Meishu yanjiu) 1 (2015): 62-70.
(p. 247) Yu, Bingnan. Meishuzi. Beijing: People's Fine Arts Publishing House, 1980.
Zhang, Xiaoyun. “All-China Federation of Trade Unions” Convenes Worker Amateur Art Symposium” (Zhonghua quanguo zonggong hui zhaokai gongren yeyu meishu gongzuo zuotan hui). Meishu (May 1955): 16.
Zhao, Xinyue, “Configuration of Meishuzi during the Period of Republic of China (19121949).” PhD dissertation, Chinese National Academy of Arts, 2012.
Zuo, Xianglan, and Qingyang Liu. “Diversification of Calligraphy during the Republican Period” (Lun minguo shiqi shufa fengge de duoyuanhua). Arts Exploration (Yishu tansuo) 25, no. 4 (August 2011): 135.
(1.) Most scholarship on amateur art in Cold War communist countries tends to focus on the performing arts, such as theater, singing, and dancing, which encouraged group participation. The cultivation of the amateur artist, however, was an important component of the cultural policy common across many communist countries and included the visual arts as well as other artistic pursuits. Their visual art activities remained largely local unlike in communist China. See Mari Ristolainen, Preferred Realities: Soviet and Post-Soviet Amateur Art in Novorzhev (Helsinki: Aleksanteri Institute, 2008); Robin LaPasha, “From Chastushki to Tchaikovsky: Amateur Activity and the Production of Popular Culture in the Soviet 1930s,” PhD dissertation, Duke University, 2001; and Philipp Herzog, “‘National in Form and Socialist in Content' or rather ‘Socialist in Form and National in Content'?: The ‘Amateur Art System' and the Cultivation of ‘Folk Art' in Soviet Estonia,” Narodna umjet-nost 47 (2010): 115-140. For information about the Soviet amateur art studios in the early days of the Soviet Union, see Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).
(2.) A. S. Kargin, Amateur Artistic Work: History, Theory, Practice (Samodeiatel'noe khu-dozhestvennoe tvorchestvo) (1988), 26.
(3.) Ellen Johnston Laing was the first and primary art historian to have seriously considered amateur artists in China. See her classic essay “Chinese Peasant Painting, 1958-76: Amateur and Professional,” Art International 27, no. 1 (January-March 1984), 1-12ff; and her book The Winking Owl: Art in the People's Republic of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
(4.) In the 1970s the Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishers (Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe) produced a similar series of how-to art manuals called the Worker, Farmer, and Soldier Art Techniques Series (Gongnongbing meishu jifa congshu) for the same explicit purpose of making artmaking accessible to amateur artists. Each volume was devoted to a different subject or medium.
(5.) Laing, Winking Owl, 83.
(6.) Some of the famous named artists of the Huxian peasant painters were Bai Tianxue, Li Fenglan, Liu Zhide, and Liu Zhigui.
(7.) Lynn Mally, Revolutionary Acts: Amateur Theater and the Soviet State, 1917-1938 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 14-15.
(8.) Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113-138.
(9.) “Everywhere to Hold Workers Amateur Art Study” (Ge di xiangji juban gongren yeyu meishu xuexi ban), Meishu (May 1955): 52.
(10.) Chen Su, “Improve Workers' Amateur Artmaking” (Jin yi bu kaizhan zhigong yeyu meishu huodong), Meishu (April 1955): 17-19, 25-26; Zhang Xiaoyun, “‘All-China Federation of Trade Unions' Convenes Worker Amateur Art Symposium” (Zhonghua quanguo zonggong hui zhao kai gongren yeyu meishu gongzuo zuotan hui), Meishu (May 1955): 16. For a comprehensive listing of other amateur art exhibitions, see Laing, “Chinese Peasant Painting,” 48.
(11.) See J. P. Park, Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China (Seattle: University of Washington, 2012), 45.
(12.) For examples of the role of amateur artists in premodern societies, see James Cahill, The Distant Mountains: Chinese Painting of the late Ming Dynasty, 1570-1644 (New York: Weatherhill, 1982); Kim Sloan, 'A Noble Art': Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters, c. 1600-1800 (London: British Museum Press, 2000) and Kim Sloan, “Industry from Idleness?: The Rise of the Amateur in the Eighteenth Century,” in Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, 1750-1880, ed. Michael Rosenthal et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 285-306; and Perrin Stein, Artists and Amateurs: Etching in Eighteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
(13.) Guang Zhi, “A New Flower Opens—Reflections on ‘Beijing Workers Amateur Art Exhibition'” (Hao hua zhengzai kai—“Beijing shi zhigong yeyu meishu zhanlan hui” guan-hou), Meishu (February 1958): 2.
(14.) “You xie ren hushi zhuanye zhedui yeyu chuangzuo de fudao zuoyong, shenzhi ren-wei yeyu chuangzuo keyi daiti zhuanye zuozhe le, zhe shi bu duide.” From Huan Ru, “How to Improve Amateur Art—Summary of the Navy Art Symposium” (Yeyu chuangzuo zenyang tigao—haijun meishu zhanlan zuotan hui jiyao), Meishu (April 1959): 38.
(15.) For more information about the Anti-Rightist Movement at CAFA, see Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1979 (Berkeley: University of California, 1994), 208-209.
(16.) The sixteen titles in the series included How to Make Pencil Drawings by Ge Weimo; How to Make Pen Drawings by Wang Qi; How to Make Watercolors by Zheng Zongsan; How to Make Oil Paintings by Ai Zhongxin; How to Make Portraits by Zuo Hui; How to Make Sketches by Chen Bingxin; How to Paint Figures by Liang Yulong; How to Depict Figural Anatomy by Wen Jingyang and Chen Weisheng; How to Paint Still Lives by Wu Zuoren; How to Paint Landscapes by Li Duannian; How to Paint Perspective by Wen Jinyang; How to Make Cartoons by Li Cunsong; How to Paint Animals by Bai Lang; How to Make Woodblock Prints by Li Pingfan; How to Make Designs by Lei Guiyuan; and How to Write Meishuzi by Qiu Ling.
(17.) Ge Weimo, How to Make Pen Drawings (Zenyang hua qianbi hua) (Beijing: People's Fine Arts Publishing House, 1958), 5.
(18.) Cai Ruohong, “Opening a Broad Path for Artistic Creation” (Kaipi meishu chuangzuo de guangkuo daolu), Meishu (1954): 12.
(19.) “Zuopin de neirong keyi biaoxian zuguo zhuangli de shanhe, fanying wo guo de jingji jianshe, miaoxie laodong renmin de shenghuo, kehua renwu de xingxiang ... fan yiqie neng fanying jintian xin shenghuo xin qixiang de renwu, fengjing, jingwu ji zuowei chuangzuo zhunbei de huagao, wulun shuicai, shuimo, suxie.” From “Chinese Artist Association Organized Watercolor and Sketch Exhibition's Call for Participation” (Zhongguo meishu xiehui zhuban shuicai he suxie zhanlanhui zhengji), Meishu (1954): 36.
(20.) Of the 996 works in the Second National Art Exhibition, 51 were of sketches and drawings. See Wu Xueshan, “Ideology of Form: 1950s ‘Sketch Movement' (Meijie yishi xingtai: 1950 niandai de ‘Suxie yundong'), Art Research (Meishu yanjiu) 1 (2015): 65.
(21.) There was increased politicization of live sketch during the late 1950s and early 1960s in the politically sensitive periods of the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957-1959) and the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961).
(22.) Ai Zhongxin, How to Make Oil Paintings (Beijing: People's Fine Arts Publishing House, 1958), 17; Lei Guiyuan, How to Make Designs (Beijing: People's Fine Arts Publishing House, 1958), 5.
(23.) Ge Weimo; How to Make Pen Drawings (Zenyang hua qianbi hua) (Beijing: People's Fine Arts Publishing House, 1958), 6.
(24.) Tian Zibing, Ways of Arranging Conference Halls (Huichang buzhi fa) (Shanghai: Wan ye shu dian, 1952); Xin Yin, How to Decorate Blackboard Newspapers (Zenyang mei-hua heiban bao) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 1956); How to Create a Communal Kitchen (Zenyang ban hao gonggong shitang) (Jinan: Shandong People's Publishing House, 1958).
(25.) Design textbooks and manuals, comprised mainly of pages of templates for students to copy and reference, started to appear in the late 1910s, the earliest of which was made for training art teachers in middle schools. Zhejiang Official Secondary Normal School in Hangzhou (today the Hangzhou Normal University) was the first to offer design courses in China.
(26.) Qian Xuantong, “Zhongguo jinhou de wenzi wenti,” New Youth (Xin qingnian) 4, no. 4 (1918).
(27.) Xiezi jiu shi huahua. See Zhao Xinyue, “Configuration of Meishuzi during the Period of Republic of China (1912-1949),” PhD dissertation (Chinese National Academy of Arts, 2012), 29.
(28.) Julia F. Andrews, “Commercial Art and China's Modernization,” in A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-century China, 181-192, ed. Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998), 181.
(29.) Zuo Xianglan and Liu Qingyang, “Diversification of Calligraphy during the Republican Period” (Lun minguo shiqi shufa fengge de duoyuanhua), Arts Exploration (Yishu tan-suo) 25, no. 4 (August 2011): 135.
(30.) A few manuals devoted to meishuzi appeared in the late 1940s, such as in 1946 when the Shanghai New Asian Bookstore published Black and White Picture Characters.
(31.) Xin Yin, How to Decorate Blackboard Newspapers (Zenyang meihua heiban bao) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 1956), 57.
(32.) The Practice of Writing Meishuzi (Meishuzi zuofa) (Hangzhou: publisher unknown, 1952), 9.
(33.) “Gong guangda gongnongbing yeyu meishu aihaozhe he zhuanye meishu gongzuozhe xuexi cankao.”
(34.) Yu Bingnan, Meishuzi (Beijing: People's Fine Arts Publishing House, 1980), 132.
(35.) For more information about the relationship between popularization and collective artmaking in Maoist China, see Christine I. Ho's “The People Eat for Free and the Art of Collective Production in Maoist China,” The Art Bulletin 98, no. 3 (2016): 349.
(36.) Minglu Gao, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 82.
(37.) The Stars event may have been inspired by Moscow's dissident “bulldozer exhibition” five years earlier. Artists associated with the Stars group include Ai Weiwei, Huang Rui, Li Shuang, Ma Desheng, and Wang Keping.
(38.) At the first official art exhibition during the Cultural Revolution, the National Exhibition of 1972, most of the successful submissions were by amateur artists selected for being politically correct, even if they were technically weak. “Painting correction groups” of prominent young oil painters were enlisted to improve the problematic areas, sometimes even completely repainting them, though the final painting would still be exhibited under the name of the amateur artist. See Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1979 (Berkeley: University of California, 1994), 359-360.
Vivian Y. Li
Vivian Y. Li, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art, Dallas Museum of Art
Visions and Visualization of Sustainability: Leningrad Designers in Search of Soviet Recycling System, 1981-
1984
Yulia Karpova
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures Edited by Aga Skrodzka, Xiaoning Lu, and Katarzyna Marciniak
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Jul 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.9
Throughout the 1970s, Soviet designers were increasingly concerned with environments rather than separate objects. By the end of the decade, they came to recognize sustainability as a crucial problem not only of market economies but also of socialist planned economies. This article brings to light an early attempt to practice environmentally affirmative design in the USSR: a design program for nationwide recycling infrastructure, launched in Leningrad in 1979. Drawing on archival sources, it shows how a team of Leningrad designers expressed a distinctly socialist approach to sustainability through a comprehensive visual form: the approach based on citizen responsibility as much as on the role of material objects as agents of social change. This never-implemented design program is considered here not as yet another socialist utopia, but as an original vision of mass mobilization through design, informed by the legacy of Russian avant-garde as much as by current Western design trends.
Keywords: Soviet design, objects, environments, recycling, visualization of sustainability, avant-garde legacy
Sustainability is not the first notion that comes to mind in connection with Soviet economy and infrastructure. Starting during the Stalinist industrialization of the 1930s, giant construction projects and the emphasis on heavy industry made the Soviet Union anything but an environmentally friendly power. Describing the rich and diverse natural resources of the Soviet territory, Paul Josephson et al. explain that the Soviet government, like the preceding government of the Romanov Empire, largely mismanaged and wasted these resources. The Soviet leaders rarely considered the climatic and environmental limitations for implementing their ambitious industrial projects. Even though, after Stalin, the greater openness to international cultural influences allowed for better awareness of environmental thinking, Khrushchev's policy was largely based on the Cold War competition in production and technical progress that prompted the expansion of the military-industrial complex and research on nuclear and chemical weapons, which, of course, posed
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a serious threat to the environment. Many engineers shared the government's optimistic vision of technical and scientific progress.1 Scientists were more often concerned about the environmental hazards and destruction of biodiversity, and conservation activists, through the official societies they controlled, managed to protect special territories (za-povedniki) from industrial and other exploitation.2 Yet the state kept the monopoly on sacrificing the environment for political and economic goals. The new profession of industrial designer, a product of Khrushchev's cultural liberalization, joined the state's technocratic optimism in the belief that clear design methodologies, coupled with advanced technology, would help (p- 249) facilitating rational consumption and consumer satisfaction.3 Preoccupied with elaborating the order of things for a modern socialist society, designers gave little attention to environmental issues. Natural environment was considered primarily as a décor theme for household items or as the background for spectacular modernist buildings and complexes.4
Since environmental problems only expanded in the Brezhnev era, ecology entered the governmental agenda. As Douglas R. Weiner argues, “Brezhnev wanted to be known as, among other things, the ‘environmental general secretary.'”5 Accordingly, the Brezhnev government initiated antipollution measures and attempted to limit the harmful effects from industry and agriculture through instituting specific legislation. This process expanded after the USSR joined the Helsinki Accord in 1975, and in succeeding years, the Soviet government passed a series of environmental laws. Its motivation, however, was to keep the face with the international community, reinforce the positive image of “developed socialism,” and keep up with environmental legislation in Western countries. As a result, the “legalistic language of environmental protection,” as Josephson et al. call it, was in many cases a façade behind environmentally costly development programs.6 However, at the same time, the environmental protection movement thrived and included not only governmental officials but also a wider circle of scientists and other intellectuals.7 Designers, too, began to recognize the negative environmental consequences of their profession and their responsibility to develop more sustainable design approaches.
Starting in the early 1960s, the employees of Soviet design institutions had an opportunity to follow the international design practice, theory, and critique through their privileged access to special periodicals and through international design symposia and exhibitions within and beyond the Soviet Union.8 Therefore, they could be familiar with the seminal book by an Austrian-American cosmopolitan designer Victor Papanek, one of the first critics of design as a means of economic competition, the design based on styling and planned obsolescence. Published in 1971, Papanek's book, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, which advocated low-tech projects and the work with people in non-Western countries, appeared quite utopian to the community of industrial designers and made little impact on actual practice in the 1970s.9 However, Papanek's provocative arguments and proposals did generate the stream of environmental thinking in design, which would disseminate around the globe in the following decades,10 including the Soviet Union.
In the book's opening paragraph, Papanek famously claimed: “[B]y creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed.”11 While such outright self-criticism was unthinkable for Soviet designers after more than a decade of ardent design advocacy, the problem of garbage and other wastes did enter their professional agenda in the late 1970s. Before Soviet design community began reconsidering their choice of materials and industrial processes (this would happen in the mid-1980s), it joined the governmental program for recycling. More (p- 250) precisely, in 1979 the team of Leningrad designers took responsibility for creating a universal and flexible model of the countrywide consumer recycling. This project, launched under the title “Vtorichnye material'nye resursy” (“Secondary material resources”), and popularized by the acronym “Vtormar,” provides the convenient lens for exploring the late Soviet visual culture, material culture, as well as the related environmental and economic concerns and consumption in a socialist society. In other words, the designers attempted to create a universal and flexible system of visual aids and tangible objects, using the legacy of the Russian avant-garde together with borrowings from contemporary Western graphic design. This system allowed expressing a distinctly socialist approach to sustainability through a comprehensive visual form: the approach based on citizen responsibility as much as on the role of material objects as agents of social change.
I will begin by providing the conceptual and historical context to the topic. First, I will outline the attitudes to sustainability in late socialism, discuss the recent trend toward writing histories of sustainable design, and explain the main characteristics of Soviet design theory that paved the way toward complex design programs. Then, I will focus on the Vtormar project and analyze its conceptual, material, and visual elements as an example of the late Soviet order of things.
While late Soviet industrial projects were definitely hazardous to the environment, we should be cautious presuming that all social practices under state socialism were outright unsustainable. The image of state socialism as wasteful—not only literally but also sym-bolically—owes a lot to the Western narrative that emerged soon after the formation of the Soviet bloc and matured around the time of its collapse. Sociologist Zsuzsa Gille, after her emigration from Hungary to the United States, noticed the persistency of the metaphor of waste in representations of socialist economic and political order. Gille reminiscences: “Visual representations of state socialism invoked the image of the state socialist landscape most familiar in the West—a grey still life composed of shoddy goods; people wearing poor, idiosyncratic clothes surrounded by houses that looked like they could fall apart at any time; and piled-up garbage.”12 As she adds, Western scholars of the late 1980s-early 1990s explained the wastefulness of state socialism by the drawback of the Marxist labor theory of value that viewed natural resources as free and inexhaustible. These Western arguments and representations, however plausible, did not match Gille's memories of her youth in socialist Hungary, such as collecting paper waste and metal
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scrap in competition among schoolchildren, queuing in a shop for returning empty glass bottles and getting a deposit, using your own bags when shopping, or coping with electricity-saving campaigns or scarcity of consumer goods.13
Similar memories often emerged in my personal conversations with people growing up in the USSR, which suggest that thrift marked the socialist regimes as much as (p- 251) wastefulness. Everyday care about resources under state socialism is not just anecdotal evidence: recent historical and sociological studies have demonstrated that reuse, recycling, and saving were common practices in socialist societies both in industry and in consumer sphere.14 Sociologists Ekaterina Gerasimova and Sofia Chuikina characterized Soviet society as a “repair society,” where objects had prolonged life spans. Since, unlike the market economy, planned economy was not self-regulating, it underwent “constant improvement, experiment, and mandatory anticrisis campaigns implemented by the authorities, meaning that it was perpetually under repair.”15 Shortages of goods, typical for the socialist economy, facilitated people's intimate relationships with objects and reluctance to dispose of them. Repair techniques in the Soviet society included “fixing the item, adapting it to a secondary use, using it as material from which to make something else, redefining its symbolic status, changing the context in which it is utilized, and the like.”16 Building on these authors' arguments and on interviews with the last Soviet generation, sociologist Olga Gurova suggested that the idea of disposability was barely known in the Soviet culture. Coping with shortages, people constantly reused objects, remade them, or exchanged them with friends and relatives (particularly children's clothes passed to younger siblings or younger children from friends' families). As a result, the “life of objects in Soviet culture was virtually endless.”17 The do-it-yourself (DIY) practices for prolonging this life were encouraged by the state through advice books and publications in popular journals.18
One can trace the Soviet reusing mentality back to the Russian tradition of peasant thrift and the resourcefulness of rural life, comparable with other preindustrial societies.19 This tradition was reinterpreted by the Soviet government in the 1920s, who engaged architects, designers, pedagogues, and other specialists in developing material forms of the new rational everyday life (byt).20 While many traditional peasant habits were deemed unhygienic, backward, and inappropriate for the modern proletarian society, certain elements of peasant crafts and aesthetics would be incorporated into the new life, while the crafts themselves came under the patronage of the Soviet research institutes and museums.21 Dress is the area most vividly demonstrating the interconnection of traditional aesthetics, reuse mentality, and the challenges of reorganizing a traditional rural society into a modern industrial and socialist one. Repudiating bourgeois Western fashions that threatened to spoil Soviet tastes in the period of New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921-1929), Soviet designers, most famously Nadezhda Lamanova, offered simple cuts decorated by traditional ornaments. For Lamanova, relying on folk aesthetics was also the way to handle the problem of the shortages of materials, resulting from the Civil War and exacerbated by the unstable NEP economy. Because the state-owned stores failed to provide the adequate offer of clothes, whereas private tailors charged high prices, affordable by a few, Lamanova designed DIY kits for remaking curtains, bed linens, or towels, which already
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existed in households, into clothes that were practical and recalling geometric cuts, then fashionable in the West.22 For example, in 1925 Lamanova contributed to the government-published how-to booklet Art in Everyday Life (Iskusstvo v bytu) with two reuse suggestions: a house dress from a headscarf and a frock from two handicraft towels. Both models incorporated geometric silhouettes with drop waists (p- 252) and folk ornaments.23 From the mid-1926, the DIY dress instructions increasingly emerged in Soviet popular journals not just as a response to shortage but also, according to Emma Widdis, as the celebration of resourcefulness that resonated with the labor-centered Soviet ideology. 24
The encouragement of DIY grew in the 1930s with the official repudiation of the revolutionary austerity and celebration of domesticity, comfort, and tactile pleasure. Further, during and after World War II, the DIY, understandably, turned again into a necessary response to shortages and scarcity of recourses. In the period of late socialism, home-made things and DIY retained their importance at the level of state-sponsored compensation of the continuing pitfalls of the command economy and at the level of personal consumer desires. However, as Alexei Golubev and Olga Smolyak demonstrate, late Soviet DIY was much more than a pragmatic solution to the short supply of desired commodities at the time when appeal of Western consumer culture grew. These authors explain that by the 1970s home-making of things became a widespread and important activity through which Soviet people materialized their identities and social relationships, defined their private space and time, created communities (e.g., through mail correspondence or on the basis of garage cooperatives), and even imagined geographies—when, for example, Soviet women copied dress designs spotted in Western films.25 In this context, reuse appeared as the performance of the “mastery over the material world,” so that even the newly bought commodity—be it a scarf or a motorboat—often went through the process of creative remaking.26
Due to this long history of DIY thinking, a late Soviet object, before ending in a trash bin, would be repaired and reused many times. A typical Soviet home in the 1970s-1980s would likely display “rugs made of old tights and scraps, sweat pants cut up into dusters, seedlings planted in cardboard milk containers, and the like.”27 Thus, if the recycling of industrial wastes since the 1970s was regulated by the special sectors of the State Committees for Planning and Provision (Gosplan and Gossnab),28 consumers, in fact, performed their own kinds of recycling structures, motivated by thrift and the understanding of resourcefulness as a virtue.
Gerasimova and Chuikina compare the Soviet “repair society” to preindustrial societies, where owners developed intimate relationships with things and attributed numerous symbolic meanings to them, and where “the material environment changed little over the life of one generation; things had permanence and could long outlive their makers and first owners.”29 However, as recent studies of recycling demonstrate, similar relationships to things were characteristic to Western industrial societies up to and, to some extent, beyond the 1950s. Refuting the generalization that capitalist societies are always throwaway societies, Ruth Oldenizel and Heike Weber remind us that, in fact, recycling of waste played a great role in twentieth-century social history both in the West and beyond.
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While mass consumerism started in the United States in the interwar period, in most European countries it did not develop until the late 1950s and 1960s, and thrift in reuse was never abandoned there entirely.30 Therefore, the 1970s environmental movement meant for West European consumers not a radical change of practices but reconsideration and optimization of the habitual ones. For example, Finn Arne (p- 253) Jorgensen demonstrates that in Norway different forms of recycling existed throughout the twentieth century, but by the 1970s the state became more involved in regulating them.31 As I will try to demonstrate, the Soviet Union experienced a different transformation in recycling policy. While “repair society” was largely a product of the inefficient planned economy, the state attempted to take seriously the recycling of household refuse only by the end of the 1970s— quite possibly, relying on the Western experience. Therefore, the Vtormar project was not a critical response to a throwaway culture—that never fully developed under planned economy—but the answer to the state's campaign for tightening the control over waste that it viewed as a resource. Acting as experts on the state's behalf, the designers participated in forming a new “waste regime”—to use the term proposed by Gille. A “waste regime” is a configuration of institutional activities related to waste—its production, representation, and politics.32 The designers were responsible for the representation part: they determined the society's perception of waste not as a matter of individual domestic management but as a site of citizenship and relationship with the state.
As a part of a specific waste regime, the Vtormar project was not solely an aesthetic phenomenon. It emerged at the intersection of visual culture, material culture, economics, and everyday life. Therefore, I frame it not within a traditional history of design that had focused on celebrated designers and their spectacular creations, but within “histories of sustainable design.” The author of this concept, design historian Kjetil Fallan, uses the plural form “histories” to stress that studying sustainable design requires interdisciplinary collaborations between historians of ideas, technology and the environment, and design historians. Since Papanek's seminal publication in 1971, designers have offered different attitudes and approaches to sustainability. However, studies of this process in its historical development have been scarce so far. Therefore, Fallan calls for a rigorous joint venture of exploring histories of sustainable design, or, as he also phrases it, producing “design history of sustainability,” which would reveal the ecological concerns and related practical measures of different actors with different motivations.33 Such research would challenge the claim of design historian Victor Margolin that “[w]ith the exception of Papanek, [Buckminster] Fuller, and a few other critics and visionaries, designers have not been able to envision a professional practice outside of the consumer culture.”34 In particular, I would argue, the history of sustainable design under state socialism provides a convenient ground for studying design ideas and practices outside of market-generated consumer culture. While consumer culture was not unfamiliar to the Soviet society, and, in fact, cultivating rational consumption was an important means of the government to reinforce its legitimacy and demonstrate the superiority of a socialist system,35 the Soviet waste regime was quite different from those of Western Europe and the United States.
(p. 254) Could a planned economy that, by the expression of Gerasimova and Chuikina, “was perpetually under repair” provide a better room for sustainable design than a selfregulating market economy? The proper answer to this question requires an interdisciplinary research of the kind Fallan suggests. As a design historian, I am making the first step in this direction by following Fallan's suggestion to focus on “how sustainability has been envisioned and visualised.” In the case of Vtormar, visualization was the tool of socially responsible design and the means of involving the public in a design project. Rather than “greening” consumption through designing recyclable goods, Leningrad designers' target in 1979-1984 was the afterlife of the existing pool of consumer goods—the afterlife in state-managed recycling processes. The designers approached the problem on three levels: by creating the infrastructure for waste separation, collection, and transportation to recycling plants, by providing visual identity to this infrastructure, and by developing the means of propagating it in different geographical locations and social strata. Therefore, Vtormar combined the elements of industrial, graphic, and urban design, and considered the symbolic meaning and visual representation of materiality. It presupposed an effective network of the tangible and the intangible.
Vtormar was a product of the Leningrad branch of the All-Union Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics (VNIITE), the central institution setting the guidelines for the Soviet design theory and practice and monitoring the work of all the design bodies throughout the USSR. VNIITE was a brainchild of young and enterprising designer Iurii Soloviev, well connected to the governmental officials and, thanks to his access to foreign travel opportunities, familiar with the latest developments in European, especially British, design.36 On April 28, 1962, the USSR Council of Ministers issued the Decree No. 394 that sanctioned the opening of VNIITE under Soloviev's directorship.37 But the VNIITE was not a one-man initiative. Soloviev's request happened in the right moment, after applier artists, art critics, and theorists had discussed the rising role of “everyday art” in modern socialist society for a decade.38 These discussions often declared the necessity to create a coordinating center to improve the quality of capital and consumer goods and meet the growing needs of the people.39
VNIITE can be viewed as a laboratory of new, socialist objects, which would embody the Russian avant-garde's idea about a “comradely object” that does not seduce a consumer like a Western commodity but, instead, helps to facilitate harmonious social relations. A particular stream of the 1920s Russian avant-garde known as “productivist art” focused on the role of the material objects in the socialist society. The “productivists”—Varvara Stepanova, Liubov Popova, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and others—anticipated a proper socialist object to be modest, utilitarian, and clearly manifesting the way it was produced, that is, the invested labor. In contrast to a seductive Western commodity, a socialist object
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would honestly “declare” its purpose.40 As theorist Boris Arvatov (p- 255) explained in 1926, by exposing the methods of making, an artist-producer would preclude the “mystery” that surrounded both art and commodities in a capitalist society and obscured the importance of technical skills. A socialist commodity, according to Arvatov, must be an active participant in social life, “an instrument and a co-worker.”41 The writings of Arvatov and other avant-garde theorists, such as Nikolai Tarabukin and Nikolai Chuzhak, were available at the VNIITE library and, despite the semiprohibited status of the avant-garde up to the 1980s, could be discussed in press as precursors to socialist design.42 The idea of a comradely objects gained new relevance as the state promoted public optimism in relation to the “scientific and technological revolution” and promised the citizens increasing prosperity as a reward for the loyalty and work. VNIITE was responsible for promoting and materializing this idea.
The “TE” of the institution's acronym, “technical aesthetics,” was promoted as an interdisciplinary science defining the “laws of artistic activity in the sphere of technology”43 and optimizing the production of consumer goods. The VNIITE employees therefore shared the scientific establishment's interest in cybernetics44 that, in the Soviet context, was envisioned as the science of “managing national planning and economy, administering perfectly calculated goods and services, collecting and interpreting data, and establishing and meeting production quotas.”45 Equipped with sophisticated methodology, VNIITE designers in the 1960s strived to produce fundamentally useful objects, not susceptible to arbitrary changes of fashion yet also adequate to current progress of science and technology. VNIITE emerged as modern institution par excellence, staffed by an interdisciplinary team of two thousand specialists, not only designers but also engineers, scientists, economists, architects, art historians, philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists.
By the end of the 1960s, VNIITE had ten regional branches in the USSR: in Leningrad, Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), Khabarovsk, Kiev, Kharkov, Minsk, Vilnius, Tbilisi, Yerevan, and Baku. The Leningrad subsidiary was one of the largest and specialized in consumer goods, electronics, optics, scientific equipment, industrial equipment, and trans-portation.46 It was mostly staffed by the graduates of the Vera Mukhina Higher College of Art and Industry, which had been the leading applied art school in the USSR and from the late 1950s included industrial design training in its curriculum.47 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Leningraders actively participated in promoting a Soviet version of what was known in postwar Western countries as “good design”—a universal set of standards that could fit the needs of different social groups and help cultivate democratic values.
At the same time as the Soviet government expected designers to improve the quality of consumer objects, VNIITE employees were realizing that thinking in terms of separate objects was inadequate for socially responsible design. Following the theorists of the
(p. 256) Ulm School of Design (Hochschule fur Gestaltung, 1953-1968, a school critical of
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American styling and promoting interdisciplinary approach to design)—Tomas Maldonado, Gui Bonsiepe, and Abraham Moles48—VNIITE designers tended to see environments, and not objects, as ideal end products of their work. A team of Leningrad designers argued in 1973 that a singular object is the measure of an environment's order, and a designer's task is to define the qualities of objects, evaluate them in terms of compatibility, select compatible objects, and harmonize them. The result would be an “object ensemble” with distinct “functional, technological and aesthetic characteristics”; next, on a metastructural level, such ensembles would be combined to constitute a diverse environ-ment.49 In such vision, obviously, a designer occupied the position of a rational observer and actor, external to the environment in question. In a similar way, architect Alexander Riabushin, employed at the department for household goods design at the central VNIITE, spoke of “living environment” (zhilaia sreda) as a proper end product of a designer's work. The environment as an “object-spatial unity” was presented here as a necessary framework for optimizing the interrelations between planning, design, and industrial production in the whole country and thus overcoming the chaotic production of poor-quality, undesired commodities. Riabushin characterized the environment as “the material body (predmetnoe telo) of human activity” and, accordingly, argued that the designer had a power to organize an integral, well-balanced environment.50 This argumentation echoes the idea of an artist as organizer of production and everyday life that was promoted in the 1920s by such avant-garde theorists as Boris Kushner, Nikolai Tarabukin, and Boris Arvatov.51 However, Riabushin's vision was not rigid: it allowed room for flexibility, variation, and spontaneity in designing the environment, as a means to counter the alienation of humans from the world of industrially produced things.
A more complex vision of the environment followed in the 1970s. An important role in this development belongs to the Central Educational and Experimental Studio of the Artists' Union that had been functioning since 1964 as an artistic alternative to VNIITE and its orientation to the practical tasks of planned economy. The studio, known by the name of the nearby lake Senezh (Moscow oblast), aimed to foster collective creative work of designers, with its founders presented as “the cultural self-critique of industrial design.”52 The founders, philosopher Karl Kantor and designer Evgenii Rozenblium, made the notion of environment an instrument of such critique. In search of an alternative to the rigid city planning, Rozenblium employed a group of young architects knowledgeable about the latest Western critiques of modernism.53 They developed the “environmental approach” to urban planning that one of them, Andrei Bokov, later characterized as flexible in contrast to the Soviet system of building, planning, and regulations. The environmental approach was sensitive to a multiplicity of concrete, tangible, and instantly changing situations and granted equal importance to the general and the particular. Its main method was “cultivation” (vzrashchivanie) that relied on prognosis rather than a fixed plan, and therefore depended on “comprehension and visualization of the nature of each specific site—the procedures very close to visual art.”54 By “nature,” Bokov meant both natural and built environment, a unique combination of historical urban structures and natural areas. The “environmental approach” developed (p- 257) concurrently with the Soviet intelligentsia's interest in historical legacy and preservationist activism, which influenced the work of
Senezh designers as well as those architects who wished to make modernism more open to the diversity of human needs and natural sites.55 According to theorist Aleksandr Rappaport, it opened the opportunity both for detached admiration of an environment's vibrancy, irreducible to a modernist plan, and for highlighting the social tensions and ecological problems.56
The notion of environment generated the idea of design covering a multiplicity of sites, objects, and processes. This type of design gained currency at VNIITE in late 1978 and received the name of “design programs” (dizain-programmy). It was based on the systemic approach to design—that is, on the vision of design as the complex system of objects, built environments, graphic elements, and processes involving all these. According to leading VNIITE theorist Selim Khan-Magomedov, design programs were a sort of intellectual fashion. However, they were also the response to the Soviet government's growing interest in cybernetics as the means to optimize economy.57 Design historian Margareta Tillberg suggests that mathematical modeling and computer networks—the important components of cybernetics—appealed to the Premier Aleksei Kosygin as “tools for raising the efficiency of the socialist production system without giving way to the evils of the capitalist market.”58 The model of “industrial cybernetics,” developed in the 1950s by Stafford Beer for the steel industry in England, was well known in the USSR through Russian translation of his 1959 book Cybernetics and Management. Beer's model replaced standard market mechanisms of supply and demand with feedback loops bringing data about sales rates, available materials, costs, and so on, in managing complex companies. Within this model, the Soviet economy would appear “as an enormous organism that could be optimized by way of computer networks through the channeling and management of information flows.”59 Design programs would assist this management.
lurii Soloviev stressed the importance of design programs not just for optimizing the assortment of goods but also for interconnecting the work of different research organizations and industry.60 I would characterize this type of designing as at once totalistic and flexible, as the integrated vision of material and visual cultures, of design, production, and consumption.
The first design program was developed by VNIITE from 1973 to 1979 by the commission from the Ministry of the Instrument Industry for All-Union Industrial Association of Electronic Measurement Instruments—“SoiuzElektroPribor.” The program embraced production, logistic and material infrastructure of the whole electrical and electronic industry. It aimed at standardizing all the industry's elements—from shop floors to electronic instruments (more than 1,500 types) and packaging, as well as optimizing logistics and developing corporate identity. After a preliminary test, ElektroMera (p- 258) would achieve a national scale: it would affect thirty-two factories, with a staff of roughly 20,000 workers in each.61 In this way, as Tillberg explains, it would compete with Western companies like Siemens and General Electrics on the world market.62 Even though only a small part of
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the program was realized (and, according to designer Vladimir Runge, it still had positive effect on the industry),63 it demonstrates the VNIITE's orientation at integrating different sites of production and consumption and managing large complex systems. Design programs that followed in the 1980s were dedicated to the optimization of both consumer goods (like watches, domestic audio-devices, bicycles) as well as production tools (for example, equipment for healthcare institutions).64 Still in 1979, the Leningrad subsidiary of VNIITE launched the design program that united elements of production and consumption through the notion of recycling.
Even though, to a good extent, the image of wasteful socialism is true, the Soviet authorities, in fact, increasingly regarded the problem of waste as crucial throughout the 1970s. From the start of the decade, five state agencies—the State Planning Committee (Gos-plan), the State Committee of the USSR for Material and Technical Supplies (Gossnab), the Industrial Cooperation (Tsentrosoyus), and the Ministries of the Ferrous Metal Industry and the Non-ferrous Metal Industry—took control of the collection, processing, and delivery of wastes.65 In 1975, the government founded VIVR—the All-Union Institute for Secondary Resourses—within the Gossnab, specifically for managing these tasks.66 This initiative was not completely alien to the culture: collection of consumer and industrial wastes (mostly paper and metal scraps) as recycling was practiced in the USSR even before World War II, with the twin economic and didactic purpose of educating the citizens in contributing to the state's prosperity.67 However, as Birgitte Pristed explains, from the late 1950s the environmental concern emerged within the official agenda for recycling paper.68 One can suppose that a similar tendency developed in regard to other materials, such as metal and textiles.
In the 1970s, industrial enterprises were obliged to take care of the recycling of the wastes they produced, and the costs of recycling were included in the general plans of production costs.69 However, consumer wastes were more difficult to manage. As designers expressed it, “wasteless production” was a technical matter, solved within industry, whereas “wasteless consumption” required a very complex solution. In the 1970s, the task of collecting recyclable wastes was shared by different organizations—sections of the Gossnab, the Tsentrosoyuz, and municipal engineering services—that lacked proper coordination.70 The administration of VIVR, responsible for solving this problem, believed that it should be done by the means of design and commissioned Leningrad VNIITE to develop the relevant design program. A team of five designers from the sector of complex studies, led by the sector's head, Dmitrii Kochugov, developed (p- 259) the concept of the program within a year. In the report on the preliminary research, they stated that the proliferation of different bodies dealing with household wastes is counterproductive: “there are too many cooks in the kitchen.”71 However, these designers did not attempt to develop an ultimate solution to the problem and take full control over recycling—or, as they called it, VR-activity (VR as “vtorichnye resursy” —secondary resources). Kochugov's team admitted that radical redesign of the recycling system required a global update of administrat-
Page 11 of 27 ing, technology, and personnel policy, which was beyond designers' capacity. A design program for Soviet recycling could grow only upon the existing social, economic, and technological basis and therefore could not closely follow Western recycling models, which had very different bases. Therefore, the Leningrad team was careful to limit the scope of the design to adjusting the everyday habits of an average Soviet citizen to the state's economic and ecological concerns. This adjustment, in turn, required a system of visual and material elements.72 To use Gille's terminology, instead of designing a new waste regime, Leningrad designers took over a more modest and manageable task: to provide current waste regime with an effective material and informational infrastructure.
Kochugov's team targeted two areas: the household as a source of waste and public services that mediated between household and recycling industry. The household, as the designers argued, was a growing source of waste due to the increasing urbanization, while the volume of production waste was, on the contrary, decreasing due to the inclusion of recycling within specific industrial processes. Unlike industrial enterprises, the population was an “inconvenient,” disorganized partner of the state in managing resources. Two main factors of this “inconvenience” were territorial dispersion of ordinary consumers and their poor motivation for separating and collecting wastes. The first problem could be solved by creating a flexible network of recycling services; the second, by finding effective means of motivation.
In contrast to recent sociological arguments about virtually endless life of Soviet things,73 Kochugov and his team stated that consumption “inevitably ends with the phase when objects lose all their value for them [the consumers] because of moral or physical deterioration.”74 At this stage, things turn into waste that a consumer, naturally, tries to get rid of and chooses the easiest way to do it: throwing all the waste out together. The technology for industrial separation of mixed wastes was a matter of the future, while at the moment it was essential to motivate people to do it at home. The state could do it in several ways. First, there was the “citizen obligation” (grazhdanskaia obiazannost). By analogy with industrial facilities, citizens would be obliged to separate and collect wastes by special regulations. However, this approach “would contradict the basic principles of a socialist society, whose development depends on the gradual disappearance of controlling and compulsory measures of the state and on the broad cultivation of the communal forms of economy, voluntary social initiatives of the masses, and democratic social forms of administer-ing.”75 Compulsion led to extremes, like, for example, forcing school children (or, in fact, their parents) to submit a monthly amount of scrap paper with punishments for noncompletion. Therefore, the designers considered compulsion as an emergency measure, to be avoided if possible. Secondly, opposite (p- 260) to “citizen obligation,” was the formation of “citizen consciousness”—the understanding of waste separation and collection as crucially important for ecology and economy. Here the Leningrad designers outlined a social stance that an environmental historian Finn Arne Jorgensen characterized as “green citi-zenship”—an active participation in the society through one's consumption habits—“by choice and/or design, often motivated by an awareness of the full life cycle of any consumer products purchased.” Recycling is a proper example of such green citizenship.76 While Kochugov and his team did not use exactly this term, they believed that conscious
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consumption was one of the bases of a socialist society. And yet, they admitted, it was not enough to be a strong motivational force, because a full understanding of the importance of recycling required a long-term ecological education. The third motivation type, then practiced in the USSR, was material reward in different forms: for example, money deposits paid out for glass bottles returned to a grocery store, ice cream or cinema tickets offered to schoolchildren who won a competition in collecting metal scrap, or vouchers for collecting at least 20 kilos of scrap paper that could be exchanged for books from special "makulatura" series.77 The Leningrad designer team viewed this practice not as a reward for consumers' labor, but as reascribing value to things that had lost their value, which resulted in the "fetishization of waste." In addition, such material stimulation was based on the "temporary" flaws of the Soviet economy and the resulting shortages of goods. An offer of certain limited goods in return for waste provoked unhealthy consumerist attitudes and, moreover, stimulated corruption and smuggling of materials within the waste-collecting organizations.78
Whereas in a market economy green citizenship could accommodate material incentives, as Jorgensen demonstrated on the example of state-sponsored recycling infrastructure in Norway since the 1970s,79 a Soviet green citizen had to, ideally, transcend any mercantile interests. And this process had to be furthered not by coercion but by design: creating an effective material and informational infrastructure would smoothly integrate recycling in people's daily routine. The disinterested population would consider recycling only if it required minimal effort.
Further elaboration of the design program presented waste separation/collection both as an automatized process and as conscious contribution to the economy and environmental protection. A combination of industrial and graphic design would produce what Jorgensen calls "recycling junction"—the point of the interaction between consumer and recycling agencies, "the place and time at which the consumer choses to recycle or discard something." This decision, as Jorgensen specifies, "depends on more than individual values; it is determined by competing sets of knowledge and information, disposal infrastructures, availability of new resources and goods, and time commitments, among other factors."80 The Soviet recycling junction, in order to be functional, had to adjust to the material structure of daily life and at the same time strongly affect the visual environment.
In 1981, Kochugov's team developed the first proposal for the design program that now got the acronym name Vtormar ("Secondary material resources"). Its initial version targeted only urban areas, but it was to be later adapted to rural areas, too. The basic
(p. 261) method for defining the objects of Vtormar was the so-called scenic modeling— imagining possible situations of a consumer's involvement in a recycling project. With this method, the designers exercised "environmental approach" to recycling: they drafted different environments where ordinary people could interact with waste through the mediation of material objects and visual signs.81 The key points of these interactions were then illustrated in graphic sketches, which defined the totality of the means of recycling.
This totality can be divided into two categories: material objects and informational graphics.
The material means of recycling were presented as a nomenclature of collectors, containers, and transportation, suitable for different environments (apartments, staircases with or without garbage chutes, courtyards, streets, parks, as well as catering organizations, grocery stores, motor depots, etc.) and for different types of wastes (paper, glass, metal, plastics, textiles, car tires, and bones). From paper bags, delivered to every household by mail for free, to large steel containers in neighborhood courtyards, to specially equipped trucks, to, finally, the uniform for recycling service employees and souvenirs with the Vtormar logo—all these objects would maximally simplify consumers' contribution to the recycling system. Receiving paper bags by mail, having separate collectors on staircases and in courtyards, being assisted by the familiar municipal housing services (who now accommodated the functions of recycling services) and surrounded by eye-catching logos and slogans, a citizen would easily adopt “green” behavior. Manufactured from recycled materials themselves, the material elements of Vtormar would also act as demonstrations of the feasibility of recycling.
I would argue that Vtormar objects promised an alternative to what design theorist Rebecca Houze calls the “new mythology” of green consumption. Drawing on Roland Barthes's famous concept of myth as the process of naturalizing socially constructed notions by visual and linguistic means,82 Houze identifies “new mythologies” of the post-1960s consumer culture as increasingly “nuanced, globalized and diffused.” One of such mythologies, the green, addresses our emotions and desires: “we might agree that to purchase a product branded ‘green' is less about that product's functional potential to reduce our exposure to environmental toxins, or to prove that it was produced without exploiting the workers who made it, than it is about the way it makes us feel as consumers.”83 Whereas Vtormar objects were meant to be attractive to the eye and to showcase the usefulness of recycled materials, they were conceived not as market commodities but as freely and universally distributed tools for efficient waste separation and collections. The Vtormar collectors, containers, and transport vehicles would be metaob-jects—the objects for organizing the exhausted domestic goods—and in this capacity, they would facilitate the resurrection of the value of Soviet consumer objects without fetishiz-ing them as sources of profit. In this respect, the Vtormar objects would embody the 1920s productivist idea of things as comrades and the agents of social life.
At the same time, Vtormar can be read as a radicalization of the productivists' stance against commodity fetishism. In the 1920s, Arvatov and Tarabukin lauded disposable objects as rational and leading toward the full emancipation from material possessions. Tarabukin saw a clear path from single use and disposability to the disappearance of a (p. 262) consumer object and its replacement by a smart infrastructure channeling immaterial resources such as electricity and gas directly toward consumers. He positively remarked about the increasing rejection of repair in favor of disposability in the United States—what Papanek would later call the “Kleenex culture.”84 This approach to objects was superior to repair and reuse, Tarabukin believed, because it could diminish the sig-
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nificance of possessions and facilitate the progress toward the full elimination of commodity relations. As he sarcastically noticed, the industrially produced object was turning “from a fundamental elephant to a day-fly.”85 Thus, the visions of a comradely object and of a quickly disappearing “day fly” coexisted, united by their opposition to the Western commodity fetish. In the 1960, the idea of the possessions-free future acquired the new popularity among VNIITE-affiliated theorists and philosophers such as Karl Kantor and Evgenii Rozenblium, who found it resonant with the contemporary Western critiques, for example, the vision of a synthetic built environment free of habitual objects, suggested by the British architectural critic Reyner Banham.86 However, in the 1970s the growing environmental awareness made the 1920s productivists' excitement about disposability highly problematic. The avant-garde's ignorance about sustainability was never explicitly addressed in late Soviet design press; yet, I suggest, the designers did attempt to correct and modify the productivist beliefs in accordance with the contemporary social and environmental situation. Vtormar objects, therefore, exemplify such modified avant-gardist approach to consumption: they emerged as sustainably produced, active agents of the new Soviet waste regime together with the employees of recycling services.87
The informational means of recycling, too, echoed the concepts and aesthetics of the Russian avant-garde. At the same time, they demonstrated the influence of the contemporary Western development of graphic design—for example, the Vtormar designers chose Helvetica typeface, developed in 1957 by a Swiss designer Max Miedinger.88 However, the Leningraders proceeded not from the Western examples of corporate identity, but, again, from “scenic” (or, as they also called it, “situational”) modeling. Different everyday situations presupposed different degrees of comprehending the information on recycling —“VR-messages,” in the terminology of Kochugov's team. For example, in leisure time at home, an ordinary citizen would best comprehend the VR-messages through mass media, while in a waiting lounge at an airport, she or he would need an element of entertainment to get caught by the message. Therefore, the Vtormar program presupposed the involvement of a diversity of information channels: not only “traditional” ones like the press, radio, and TV but also outstanding, attention-catching elements: “informational game machine, agitational bloc, or mobile exhibition.”89 In fact, this multimedia approach echoed the agitation and propaganda practices of the 1920s, with the use of different media— from newspapers and radio to multifunctional street furniture that could combine kiosks, loudspeakers, and information stands to urban festivities.90 However, unlike the 1920s avant-garde experiments, Vtormar program did not transmit explicitly political messages. Its main informational goal was to (p- 263) dissociate waste from filth and exhaustion of things and to present recycling as both a profitable and environmentally conscious activity.
This new image of waste was expressed in rhymed slogans “Waste into profit” (“ Otkhody v dokhody”) and “Secondary means excellent” (“Vtorichnoe-znachit otlichnoe”). The slogans, in turn, would enter urban environment in the form of supergraphics—a system of graphic elements (banners, posters, façade decorations, street furniture) applied to the architectural structure. But whereas the avant-garde supergraphics presented a striking contrast to the traditional architecture of the early Soviet cities,91 the Vtormar visuals
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would harmoniously integrate into the environments. The choice of green and blue colors unambiguously referred to natural resources that recycling helps preserving. The neutral character of Helvetica typeface allowed more visibility for individualized styling of the Vtormar logo (Figure 10.1) that included two Russian letters "R" ("P"). While the dynamic inclination of the two R-letters caught attention, it also transmitted a symbolic meaning. The opposition of two identical graphic elements by different color signified the change of material's quality in the recycling process, while the repetition itself referred to the possibility of secondary use, thus illustrating the slogan "Waste into profit!"92 The curved semioval outline of Rs, too, alluded to change, rather than mere repetition, as the essence of recycling; quite possibly, the Leningraders reinterpreted the famous 1970 recycle logo by American designer Gary Anderson.
© Central State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation at St. Petersburg, f. 146, op. 2-2, d. 141, l. 52
The sophisticated and potentially flexible infrastructure of Vtormar program deserves a separate analysis. One element worth a special mention is the scenario for a mobile exhibition that would constitute the core of recycling propaganda. In accordance with the contemporary tendency of Soviet designers to view consumers as interested partners, the Vtormar exhibition would induce "active perception and instant comparison of the impressions with personal views and experience and, eventually, generate conscious attitudes to the [recycling] problem in general and the delivery of secondary resources in particular." For this purpose, the Leningrad team proposed an exhibition in the form of an "activity book" or large-scale origami, representing an "expressive world of secondary resources and objects made from corrugated fiberboard." Proceeding through the four parts of the exhibition—"Consumption," "Pollution," "Vtormar services," and "Results of
Page 16 of 27 recycling,” a visitor would assimilate the state's economic and ecological objectives: that would be a soft, implicit propaganda. The emotional effect of this “journey” would be achieved through special color dynamics: moving from dark stands to a dull gray cube, to a “sterile white-and-green volume” to, finally, a vivid, color-bursting environment, a visitor would assume a role of a folk hero, successfully overcoming complicated situations (i.e., environmental threat, economic disaster) and “pleasantly discovering their awareness of the right solution and joyfully realizing its many benefits.”93 The exhibition design could direct people to the only correct path: the freedom of consumer choice had to be sacrificed for the sake of the natural environment—and planned economy. The Soviet recycling junction would have only one open road.
In 1985-1986, the Vtormar design program eventuated in a recycling experiment in Beltsy, the third biggest city of the Moldovan Soviet Socialist republic (with population
(p. 264) (p. 265) of 143,000). This city, with well-developed industry and transport infrastructure and with stable heterogeneous population, supposedly responsive to innovations in public service, was considered a convenient ground for testing the new approach to recycling. The project was approved by VIVR, the Administration of Secondary Resources of the State Provision Committees of the USSR and Moldovan SSR, and the AllUnion and Moldovan trusts of secondary resources managements. Whereas, according to VIVR, the material rewards for paper recycling resulted in the delivery of a mere 25 percent of paper scraps to collecting stations, the Vtormar program would raise the figures by providing the population with all the conveniences for separate collection of scrap paper and other wastes. Post officers and volunteer schoolchildren would distribute paper or plastic collectors to households. Some of the collectors were designed in the forms of calendars to be dispatched monthly to outdoor containers. Differentiated waste containers would be set permanently at garbage dumps (in older districts) or, periodically, near staircase entrances (in the areas with high-rise buildings), as well as at different urban junctions: in parks, on bus stops, near kiosks and department stores (Figure 10.2). These containers would stand out from the familiar landscape by their color and logos, and, as the designers believed, “their constant presence in sight will be an additional visual reminder of the scale and significance of the experiment.”94 Before integrating these everyday recycling facilities in the domestic and urban fabric, the organizing institutions planned a broad advertising campaign through mass media and a city festival with the active use of supergraphics.95 In addition, the designers developed special equipment for collecting stations and uniforms for collecting services. The Leningrad designer team enthusiastically anticipated the results of the Beltsy experiment, where citizens would be active participants and show disinterested enthusiasm for recycling. However, so far I have found no published or archival evidence of success—or failure—of this ambitious initiative.
© Central State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation at St. Petersburg, f. 146, op. 2-2, d. 146, l. 74a
If late socialism was not entirely wasteful, it was obsessed with waste. In particular, waste as an inevitable element of consumption affected not only everyday life and material culture but also aesthetics. The case of Vtormar design program shows that the Brezhnev government strived to cultivate not just rational consumption but also environmentally conscious consumption. Rather than letting consumer objects continuously resurrect through individual DIY practices, the state attempted to involve citizens as well-organized partners in turning devalued things into new materials: waste into profit. For this purpose, it employed neither stick nor carrot, but design and aesthetics. Drawing on the avant-garde legacy of visual agitation that was well known at VNIITE, Leningrad designers shifted the emphasis from loyalty to the regime to the care about the planet and its exhaustible resources. And instead of calling to follow the state's request, the (p- 266)
(p. 267) Vtormar supergraphics invited each and every one to make an impact, to become a part of the solution to an ecological problem, without, however, spending too much extra time or effort. Everyone can voluntarily be a hero of recycling if collectors and containers are always conveniently at hand.
The case of the Vtormar design program demonstrates that Soviet designers' move toward sustainable design occurred outside of the so-called green consumerism—a set of marketing strategies to raise the appeal of goods through “green” labeling.96 Rather than creating a “new mythology” of green products that cultivate self-righteousness among
Page 18 of 27 consumers, the Leningrad designers proposed to create environmentally responsible citizen communities through friendly, comprehensible, and even festive material structures. Notably, Vtormar developed simultaneously with the Western critiques of “green consumerism.”97 But while Western proponents of sustainable design in the 1980s addressed the catastrophic consequences of a full-blown consumerism, the Leningrad designers targeted the irresponsible attitudes stemming from the challenges of the growing socialist urban culture and retail infrastructure. Selectively drawing from the avant-gardist theoretical heritage, the Vtormar authors envisioned a specifically socialist model of sustainable design and consumption, based on comradeship between people, objects, and the environment. However, the near approaching collapse of the Soviet Union and the onrush on Western consumer goods would render this model totally ineffective: in the confused and disappointed society, struggling with survival and aspiring for prosperous life, only a small number of activists would care about sustainability. It would take about two decades for sustainable design to become a visible social, economic, and aesthetic issue in Russia.
Alekseyeva, Anna. “Constructing Soviet Domesticity and Managing Everyday Life from Khrushchev to Collapse.” In Material Culture in Russia and the USSR: Things, Values, Identities, edited by Graham H. Roberts, 57-58. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Azrikan, Dmitry. “VNIITE, Dinosaur of Totalitarianism or Plato's Academy of Design?” Design Issues 15, no. 3 (October 1, 1999): 45-77.
(p. 273) Central State Archive of Scientific and Technological Documentation in St. Petersburg, fond 146, opis' 2-2, delo 141-143, 146.
Deviatkin, Viazheslav. “Upravleniie Otkhodami v Rossii: Pora ispol'zovat' otechestvennyi i zarubezhnyi opyt.” Otechestvennye Zapiski 2 (2007), http://www.strana-oz.ru/2007/2/ upravlenie-othodami-v-rossii-pora-ispolzovat-otechestvennyy-i-zarubezhnyy-opyt.
Fallan, Kjetil. “Our Common Future: Joining Forces for Histories of Sustainable Design.” Tecnoscienza 5, no. 2 (January 29, 2015): 15-32.
Gerasimova, Ekaterina and Sofia Chuikina. “The Repair Society.” Russian Studies in History 48, no. 1 (July 1, 2009): 58-74.
Gille, Zsuzsa. From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.
Golubev, Alexey, and Olga Smolyak. “Making Selves through Making Things: Soviet Do-It-Yourself Culture and Practices of Late Soviet Subjectivation.” Cahiers Du Monde Russe. Russie—Empire Russe—Union Soviétique et États Indépendants 54, no. 54/3-4 (July 1, 2013): 517-541.
Gurova, Olga. “The Life Span of Things in Soviet Society,” Russian Social Science Review 50, no. 4 (July 1, 2009): 49-60.
Houze, Rebecca. New Mythologies in Design and Culture: Reading Signs and Symbols in the Visual Landscape. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
Jorgensen, Finn Arne. “Green Citizenship at the Recycling Junction: Consumers and Infrastructures for the Recycling of Packaging in Twentieth-Century Norway.” Contemporary European History 22, no. 3 (August 2013): 499-516.
Khan-Magomedov, Selim. Pionery Sovetskogo Dizaina. Moscow: Galart, 1995.
Margolin, Victor. “Design for a Sustainable World.” Design Issues 14, no. 2 (1998): 83-92.
Oldenziel, Ruth, and Heike Weber. “Introduction: Reconsidering Recycling.” Contemporary European History 22, no. 3 (August 2013): 347-370.
Papanek, Victor J. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (2nd ed.). London: Thames and Hudson, 1991.
Razrabotka dizain-programmy “Vtorichnye resursy" Zakliuchitel'nyi otchet po teme 1969-1. Leningrad: LF VIITE, 1980, www.waste.ru/uploads/library/design-programm-vr.pdf
Tillberg, Margareta. “Made in the USSR: Design of Electronic/Electrical Systems in the Soviet Union from Khruschev's Thaw to Gorbachev's Perestroika.” Baltic Worlds 3, no. 2 (2010): 36-40.
(1.) Paul Josephson et al., An Environmental History of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 141-144.
(2.) For a detailed account on zapovedniki, see Douglas R. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
(3.) Victor Buchli, “Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against ‘Petit-bourgeois' Consciousness in the Soviet Home,” Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (1997): 161-176; Dmitry Azrikan, “VNIITE, Dinosaur of Totalitarianism or Plato's Academy of Design?,” Design Issues 15, no. 3 (October 1, 1999): 45-77, https://doi.org/10.2307/1511884. Susan E. Reid, “The Khrushchev Kitchen: Domesticating the Scientific-Technological Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (April 1, 2005): 289-316; Anna Alekseyeva, “Constructing Soviet Domesticity and Managing Everyday Life from Khrushchev to Collapse,” in Graham H. Roberts, ed., Material Culture in Russia and the USSR: Things, Values, Identities (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 57-58.
(4.) Research for this article was funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 700913. The author thanks Alyona Sokolnikova, Aga Skrodzka, Kasia Marciniak, and Xiaoning Lu for valuable information and suggestions for preparing the manuscript. The author also thanks the staff of the Central Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation at St. Petersburg for providing high-quality images for this chapter.
(5.) Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom, 402.
(6.) Josephson et al., An Environmental History of Russia, 184-185.
(7.) Ibid., 239-250.
(8.) On Soviet design exchanges and diplomacy, see Azrikan, “VNIITE, Dinosaur of Totalitarianism or Plato's Academy of Design?”; Tom Cubbin, “The Domestic Information Machine: Futurological Experiments in the Soviet Domestic Interior, 1968-76,” Home Cultures 11, no. 1 (March 1, 2014): 5-32; Katarina Serulus, “‘Well-Designed Relations': Cold War Design Exchanges between Brussels and Moscow in the Early 1970s,” Design and Culture 9, no. 2 (May 4, 2017): 147-165.
(9.) Victor J. Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, 2nd ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991).
(10.) Victor Margolin, “Design for a Sustainable World,” Design Issues 14, no. 2 (1998): 83-92.
(11.) Papanek, Design for the Real World, ix.
(12.) Zsuzsa Gille, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 1-2.
(13.) Ibid., 3.
(14.) Paul R. Josephson, Resources under Regimes: Technology, Environment, and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 186-188; Ekaterina Gerasimova and Sofia Chuikina, “The Repair Society,” Russian Studies in History 48, no. 1 (July 1, 2009): 58-57; Olga Gurova, “The Life Span of Things in Soviet Society,” Russian Social Science Review 50, no. 4 (July 1, 2009): 49-60; Milena Veenis, Material Fantasies: Expectations of the Western Consumer World Among the East Germans (Amsterdam University Press, 2012); Jakob Calice, “Garbage recycling rhetoric in the GDR: an environmental historic perspective,” Trans -disciplinary Journal of Emergence, 3, 2 (2005), online at http:// textfeld.ac.at/text/713/; Birgitte Beck Pristed: “Reading and Recycling: Soviet Paper Debate and the Makulatura Books, 1974-1991,” forthcoming in Russian Review.
(15.) Gerasimova and Chuikina, “The Repair Society,” 59.
(16.) Ibid., 60.
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(17.) Olga Gurova, “The Life Span of Things in Soviet Society,” Russian Social Science Review 50, no. 4 (July 1, 2009): 58.
(18.) Ibid.
(19.) Ruth Oldenziel and Heike Weber, “Introduction: Reconsidering Recycling,” Contemporary European History 22, no. 3 (August 2013): 347-370, https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0960777313000192.
(20.) Selim Khan-Magomedov, Pionery Sovetskogo Dizaina (Moscow: Galart, 1995), 245250;
(21.) Sergei Temerin, “Izucheniie dekorativnogo iskusstva v sovetskom iskusstvoznanii za 40 let,” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR 1 (January 1958): 30-36; Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 50-87.
(22.) Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 126-127; Djurdja Bartlett, FashionEast: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 47.
(23.) Iskusstvo v bytu (Moscow: Izd. “Izvestii TSIK SSSR i VTSIK,” 1925), 6, 19. The digital copy of the booklet is available at https://digital.wolfsonian.org/W0LF046688/00001/ pageturner#page/39. For the short analysis of this publication, see Alison Kowalski, “Art in Everyday Life and the Do-It-Yourself Soviet Fashion of Nadezhda Lamanova,” Design History Society blog, November 1, 2014, https://www.designhistorysociety.org/blog/view/ art-in-everyday-life-and-the-do-it-yourself-soviet-fashion-of-nadezhda-lamanova.
(24.) Emma Widdis, “Sew Yourself Soviet: The Pleasures of Textile in the Machine Age,” in Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style, edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Maria Balina, 115-132 (London: Anthem Press, 2009).
(25.) Alexey Golubev and Olga Smolyak, “Making Selves through Making Things: Soviet Do-It-Yourself Culture and Practices of Late Soviet Subjectivation,” Cahiers Du Monde Russe. Russie—Empire Russe—Union Soviétique et États Indépendants 54, no. 54/3-4 (July 1, 2013): 517-541, quotation from p. 520.
(26.) Ibid., 39-40.
(27.) Gerasimova and Chuikina, “The Repair Society,” 68.
(28.) Viazheslav Deviatkin, “Upravleniie Otkhodami v Rossii: Pora Ispol'zovat' Otech-estvennyi I Zarubezhnyi Opyt,” Otechestvennye Zapiski 2 (2007), http://www.strana-oz.ru/ 2007/2/upravlenie-othodami-v-rossii-pora-ispolzovat-otechestvennyy-i-zarubezhnyy-opyt.
(29.) Gerasimova and Chuikina, “The Repair Society,” 60.
(30.) Oldenziel and Weber, “Introduction: Reconsidering Recycling,” 349, 354.
(31.) Finn Arne Jorgensen, “Green Citizenship at the Recycling Junction: Consumers and Infrastructures for the Recycling of Packaging in Twentieth-Century Norway,” Contemporary European History 22, no. 3 (August 2013): 499-516.
(32.) Gille, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History, 34-35.
(33.) Kjetil Fallan, “Our Common Future: Joining Forces for Histories of Sustainable Design,” Tecnoscienza 5, no. 2 (January 29, 2015): 15-32.
(34.) Margolin, “Design for a Sustainable World,” 86.
(35.) lurii Gerchuk, “The Aesthetics of Everyday Life in the Khrushchev Thaw in the USSR (1954-64),” in Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 81-100; 98; Mark B. Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010); Steven E. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Washington, DC: Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Centre Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 2; Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years, 1st ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Anna Alekseyeva, “Constructing Soviet Domesticity and Managing Everyday Life from Khrushchev to Collapse,” in Graham H. Roberts (ed.), Material Culture in Russia and the USSR: Things, Values, Identities (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
(36.) Through the Head of the Soviet government's State Committee for Science and Technology, Soloviev met Sir Paul Reilley, a PR officer at the Council of Industrial Design (CoID) in London (and a cousin of the British ambassador of the USSR, Patrick Reilly), in 1957 in Moscow. This encounter resulted in Soloviev's interest in the work of ColD, a governmental institution that emerged in 1944 with the aim to facilitate British economic recovery and to promote “by all practicable means the improvement of design in the products of British industry,” and in Reilly's anticipation of the more vigorous development and institutionalization of design profession in the USSR. In the beginning of 1961, on the wake of Soviet-British exchange of Trade Fairs (where capital and, to a lesser extent, consumer goods were showcased), Soloviev traveled to England for learning design ideas and practical approaches to industrial design. Upon his return, he managed to convince the stubborn Soviet authorities that industrial design was worthy of patronizing as “a powerful tool to improve the standard of living without substantial investment,” stressing its utilitarian usefulness. On April 28, 1962, the USSR Council of Ministers issued the Decree No. 394 that sanctioned the opening of VNIITE under Soloviev's directorship. Azrikan, “VNIITE, Dinosaur of Totalitarianism or Plato's Academy of Design?,” 48; lurii Soloviev, Moia zhizn' v dizaine (Moscow: Soiuz dizainerov Rossii, 1994), 113; “Our History,” the website of the Design Council, https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/about-us/our-his-tory. The British Trade Fair, jointly sponsored by the Association of British Chambers of Commerce and the All-Union Chamber of Commerce of the USSR, and organized by Industrial Trade Fairs Ltd, was opened in May 1961 in Sokol'niki Park in Moscow, where
Page 23 of 27 the American National Exhibition had been held in 1959. The Soviet Trade and Industrial Exhibition was held in Earl Court in London on July 7-29, 1961. “Selling to Russia,” Design 145 (January 1961): 67; “USSR at Earl Court,” Design 154 (October 1961): 42-49. Because of his power to influence the authorities, and his privileged social position, Soloviev is a controversial figure in the history of Soviet industrial design. Both experienced and young designers still express this ambiguity, revealing the desire to dissociate the activities of designers from power games (see the comments on the review of Soloviev's 2004 autobiography: http://kak.ru/columns/designet/a1517/). (The comment section to which I am referring was removed since I consulted it in 2014). Nonetheless, his outstanding role in developing Soviet industrial design is undeniable. He appeared as the agent of institutional change at the time when Soviet art theory was ready to embrace industrial aesthetics.
(37.) RGALI, f. 2082, op. 2, d. 2171. l. 3.
(38.) Susan E. Reid, “Destalinization and Taste, 1953-1963,” Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (January 1, 1997): 177-201. Yulia Karpova, “Accommodating ‘Design': Introducing the Western Concept into Soviet Art Theory in the 1950s-60s,” European Review of History: Revue Europeenne D'histoire 20, no. 4 (2013): 627-647, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13507486.2012.763160.
(39.) TsGALI SPb, f. 78, op. 4, d. 385, l. l. 20; “Nuzhen institut khudozhestvennot kul'tury,” DI SSSR, no. 2 (February 1960): 1.
(40.) On the thorough avant-garde's theories and designs of objects, see Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions.
(41.) Boris Arvatov, “Byt i kul'tura veshchi,” in Al'manakh proletkul'ta (Moscow, 1925), 75-72. The quotes are taken from Christina Kiaer's translation: Boris Arvatov and Christina Kiaer, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Toward the Formulation of the Question),” October 81 (1997): 119, https://doi.org/10.2307/779022.
(42.) Azrikan, “VNIITE, Dinosaur of Totalitarianism or Plato's Academy of Design?”
(43.) Iurii Soloviev, “O tekhnicheskoi estetike,” Tekhnicheskaia Estetika 1 (1964), 1.
(44.) Cybernetics is an interdisciplinary field, founded by the American scientists Norbert Wiener, Warren Sturgis McCulloch, and others in the late 1940s and focused on elaborating theories of control and communication in animal and machine behavior.
(45.) Diana Kurkovsky West, ‘CyberSovietica: Planning, Design and the Cybernetics of Soviet Space, 1954-1986 (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2013), 18.
(46.) Azrikan, “VNIITE, Dinosaur of Totalitarianism or Plato's Academy of Design?,” 6061.
(47.) Svetlana Mirzoian and Sergei Khelmianov, Mukha: Sankt-Peterburgskaia Shkola Dizaina (St. Petersburg: Iunikont Design, 2011).
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(48.) On Western discussion of design of environments, see Victor Margolin, “Expanding the Boundaries of Design: The Product Environment and the New User,” Design Issues 4, no. 1/2 (1988): 59-64, https://doi.org/10.2307/1511388. Larry Busbea, “Metadesign: Object and Environment in France, C. 1970,” Design Issues 25, no. 4 (2009): 103-119.
(49.) Central State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation in St. Petersburg (TsGANTD SPb), f. 146, op. 2-1, d. 131, l. 11-12.
(50.) Aleksandr Riabushin, “Sreda - mera vsekh veshchei,” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, no. 10 (1973): 43-46.
(51.) For example: Boris Kushner, “Organizatory proizvodstva,” LEF, no. 3 (1923): 97103; Nikolai Tarabukin, Ot mol'berta k mashine (Moscow: Rabotnik Prosveshcheniia, 1923); Boris Arvatov, Iskusstvo I proizvodstvo. Sbornik statei (Moscow: Proletkul't, 1926).
(52.) Russian State Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI), f. 82, op. 2, ed. khr. 2209, l. 50.
(53.) Tom Cubbin, “Postmodern Propaganda? Semiotics, Environment and the Historical Turn in Soviet Design 1972-1985,” Journal of Design History 30, no. 1, 16-32.
(54.) Andrei Bokov, “Sredovoi podkhod 10 let spustia,” DI SSSR 6 (June 1986): 7.
(55.) Daria Bocharnikova, “Inventing Socialist Modern: A History of Architectural Profession in the USSR, 1954-1971” (PhD diss., European University Institute, 2014), 255-257.
(56.) Aleksandr Rappaport, “Ne utopia li eto? K istorii ‘sredovogo videniia',” DI SSSR 6 (June 1986): 10-13.
(57.) V. F. Runge, Istoriia Dizaina, Nauki I Tekhniki. Kniga Vtoraia (Moscow: Arkhitektura-S, 2007), 262-263.
(58.) Margareta Tillberg, “Made in the USSR: Design of Electronic/Electrical Systems in the Soviet Union from Khruschev's Thaw to Gorbachev's Perestroika,” Baltic Worlds 3, no. 2 (2010): 36-40, quotation from p. 38.
(59.) Ibid.
(60.) lu. B. Soloviev, “Problemy i perspektivy sovetskogo dizaina,” Tekhnicheskaia Estetika 10 (November 1984): 3-5.
(61.) Runge, Istoriia dizaina, nauki i tekhniki, 263-264; West, CyberSovietica, 179-180.
(62.) Tillberg, “Made in the USSR,” 36.
(63.) Runge, Istoriia dizaina, nauki i tekhniki, 264.
(64.) Ibid.
Page 25 of 27
(65.) Staly V. Dudenkov, “The Recycling of the Wastes of Production and Consumption as an Aspect of the Environmental Protection in the USSR,” in K. Kuri (ed.,) Appropriate Waste Management for Developing Countries (New York: Plenum Press, 1985), 95-100.
(66.) Viazheslav Deviatkin, “Upravleniie otkhodami v Rossii: pora Ispol'zovat' otech-estvennyi I zarubezhnyi opyt,” Otechestvennye Zapiski, no. 2 (2007), http://www.strana-oz.ru/2007/2/upravlenie-othodami-v-rossii-pora-ispolzovat-otechestvennyy-i-zarubezhnyy-opyt.
(67.) Birgitte Beck Pristed, “Reading and Recycling: Soviet Paper Debate and the Maku-latura Books, 1974-1991,” forthcoming in The Russian Review.
(68.) Ibid.
(69.) Deviatkin, “Upravleniie otkhodami v Rossii.”
(70.) Razrabotka dizain-programmy “Vtorichnye resursy" Zakliuchitel'nyi otchet po teme 1969-1 (Leningrad: LF VIITE, 1980), www.waste.ru/uploads/library/design-programm-vr.pdf.
(71.) Ibid., 5.
(72.) Ibid., 5-37.
(73.) Gerasimova and Chuikina, “The Repair Society”; Gurova, “The Life Span of Things in Soviet Society.”
(74.) Razrabotka dizain-programmy “Vtorichnye resursy,” 11.
(75.) Ibid., 12.
(76.) Jorgensen, “Green Citizenship at the Recycling Junction,” 500.
(77.) Pristed, “Reading and Recycling”; “Kak sobirali vtorsyr'e v SSSR,” blog of the Association of St. Petersburg bloggers, entry from February 5, 2017, https:// goodspb.livejournal.com/673912.html
(78.) Razrabotka dizain-programmy “Vtorichnye resursy," 12.
(79.) Jorgensen, “Green Citizenship at the Recycling Junction.”
(80.) Jorgensen, “Green Citizenship at the Recycling Junction,” 501.
(81.) Central State Archive of scientific and technical documentation in St. Petersburg (TsGANTD SPb), f. 146 op. 2-2 d. 141, ll. 5-6.
(82.) Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972).
(83.) Rebecca Houze, New Mythologies in Design and Culture: Reading Signs and Symbols in the Visual Landscape (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Kindle Locations 202-204.
(84.) “Our Kleenex Culture, in Papanek, Design for the Real World, 96-106.
(85.) Nikolai Tarabukin, Ot Mol'berta k mashine (Moscow: Rabotnik Prosveshcheniia, 1923), 21-23.
(86.) Reyner Banham, “A Home Is Not a House,” Art in America 2, no. 4 (1965), http:// mindcontrol-research.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/4_banham:home_not_house.pdf. For the Soviet responses to the Western design critique, see Cubbin, “The Domestic Information Machine.”
(87.) TsGANTD, f. 146, op. 2-2, d. 141, 142. The rest of this section is based on these documents and the one cited in endnote 78.
(88.) Classic Cyrilic version of Helvetica was developed in 1981-84 by a VNIITE designer Anatolii Kudriavtsev, https://www.paratype.ru/help/designers/designer.asp?
code=AD_KDA. I am grateful to Alyona Sokolnikova for bringing this information to my attention.
(89.) TsGANTD SPb), f. 146 op. 2-2 d. 141, l. 17.
(90.) Khan-Magomedov, Selim Khan-Magomedov, Pionery Sovetskogo Dizaina (Moscow: Galart, 1995), 108-134.
(91.) Ibid., 110.
(92.) TsGANTD SPb), f. 146 op. 2-2 d. 141, l. 17.
(93.) TsGANTD SPb, f. 146, op. 2-2, d. 143, ll. 38-39.
(94.) “Eksperiment Vtormar v deistvii,” Tekhnicheskaia estetika 7 (1986): 13.
(95.) TsGANTD SPb, f. 146, op. 2-2, d. 146, ll. 8-13.
(96.) Pauline Madge, “Ecological Design: A New Critique,” Design Issues 13, no. 2 (1997): 46-47, https://doi.org/10.2307/1511730.
(97.) Ibid., 48-54.
Yulia Karpova
Yulia Karpova, Assistant Archivist at Open Society Archives at Central European University
Shaping the Avant-Garde: The Reception of SovietConstructivism by the American Art Journal October u
Pablo Müller
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Aug 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.10
Soviet Constructivism is a central reference for the American art journal October (founded in 1976 and still in print today). This article discusses the ways in which October refers to that historical art movement, while overlooking some of its key political aspirations. Especially during the journal's founding years, the discursive association with Soviet Constructivism served to bestow criticality, urgency, and sociopolitical relevance on the American art journal. Furthermore, with the reference to Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, in particular, the October protagonists have positioned themselves in a specific manner within mid-1970s art critical discourse in the United States. In addition to framing and positioning, the article examines how Soviet Constructivism (alongside Dadaism and Surrealism) becomes for October a key reference for rooting and evaluating the expanded, cross-genre art production post-1945 historically.
Keywords: October, self-representation, Constructivism, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, neoliberalism, art criticism, art journal, United States
In 1976, the film critic Annette Michelson, the art historian Rosalind Krauss, and the artist Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe founded the art journal October. The New York-based journal, which is still in print today, has had a canonical impact on the discipline of art history in the United States. October did not only offer a new type of art-historical writing but also enforced certain art-historical narratives, setting a benchmark for scholarly work until today.
At its outset in the late 1970s, October was one of the first art journals in the United States that was devoted to the then-upcoming French structuralism and poststructuralism (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan) alongside debates on film, video, and photography (see Figure 11.1). In the literature, the October approach is usually characterized as a postmodern one.1 With this in mind, it is remarkable and even surprising to find the journal named in reference to one of the defining events in the
Page 1 of 20 history of communist movements, the Russian Revolution of 1917, echoing Sergei Eisenstein's film October (1927), which itself was a commissioned work for the tenth anniversary of the revolution. The name October suggests that we are dealing with a somehow communist publication and that something revolutionary is happening in this journal. Yet a closer look at the thematic focus of October does not confirm this first impression. Soviet Constructivism is only occasionally the subject of in-depth discussion. And October is also not interested in an analysis of the specific ways in which Constructivism was involved in the sociopolitical processes of the time.
The reference to postrevolutionary Russia becomes even more surprising when we compare the journal October to similar publication projects in the United States in the 1970s. For instance, October's architectural sister-journal, Oppositions, published from (p- 275) (p. 276) 1973 to 1984,2 while invoking a notion of antagonism or struggle in its title, was careful to do so without any explicit historical or political reference. Similarly, Semiotext(e), the independent publisher and journal founded in 1974, unlike October, made its reference to French theory explicit.
Now, the question arises why the founding editors were so attracted to the Russian Revolution and, by implication, the Soviet avant-garde that they subsequently named their journal October? What did it mean in 1976, in what was still a Cold War ambience, to name a journal based in New York after the Russian Revolution? How does this revolutionary rhetoric go together with a postmodern aspiration? And, furthermore, why, of all the various artistic approaches emerging in the period after the October Revolution, was Constructivism, in particular, of such great interest to the founders of October?
I would like to propose that Soviet Constructivism essentially serves two functions for October. First, Soviet Constructivism serves the purpose of projecting a certain image for the new art journal. By referencing Soviet Constructivism, the founders of October bestow criticality, urgency, and sociopolitical relevance on their journal and the discourse they pursue. At the same time, the choice specifically of Soviet Constructivism for the symbolic framing of the new journal aims at a strategic positioning in its discursive environment (i.e., contemporary art criticism in the United States). The second function of Soviet Constructivism for October concerns the way in which the editors write about this artistic movement. The analysis of works of Soviet Constructivism is deliberately integrated into a developmental history and, in the process, used to substantiate particular art historical narratives. Or, to be more precise, the historical art movement (alongside Dadaism and Surrealism, in particular) becomes a key point of reference in providing a critical underpinning and reading of an expanded, cross-genre art production post-1945. The reference serves to establish an “ideological” pedigree for postmodern art in the West—geographically, October is largely confined to Europe and North America. In terms of visual culture, October's reference to Soviet Constructivism is even more telling, considering the fact that visual material from the early postrevolutionary Soviet Union was being appropriated. Particularly emblematic elements were used for the journal's own visual representation. The following study reveals the various reasons behind the art journal's reference to Soviet Constructivism which, within art critical discourse of the 1970s in the United States, point to a certain concept of the function of art and the critic in society and the particular understanding of historiography. Additionally, the very selective reference of Soviet Constructivism reveals October as a product of its age. After a time of rupture and hope in the late 1960s, the mid-1970s marked the beginning of a period characterized by a crisis of political agency, an expansion of capitalist accumulation, and a restoration of the class power of the rich, that is, neoliberalism.
Some have already pointed to the importance of Soviet Constructivism for October journal. Peter Muir, in Against the Will to Silence, considers the specific combination of artistic production and simultaneous critical reflection found in Constructivism a model for October. The journal October, he writes, aims to realize a similar combination. Muir also mentions the “grounding” function of Constructivism for the neo-avant-garde, albeit without further examining or explaining it.3 Gwen Allen sees the homage to (p- 277) Sergei Eisenstein's film as a strategic positioning, interpreting this choice in terms of differentiation from a media-specific formalism.4 Despite these observations, with which I concur, no one has thus far explained the prominent reference to Soviet Constructivism in detail and examined its function.
The journal October associates with Soviet Constructivism a proper founding narrative. This narrative is repeated on multiple occasions by the editors and again invoked especially at anniversaries. The story is first told in “About October,” a programmatic self-description published in the inaugural issue. The editors emphatically reiterate the uniqueness of the period immediately following the Russian Revolution: “We have named this journal in celebration of that moment in our century when revolutionary practice, theoretical inquiry and artistic innovation were joined in a manner exemplary and unique.”5 October's founders see this combination of art, theoretical reflection, and revolutionary political practice epitomized by Sergei Eisenstein's film October (1918). For the new journal, “October” becomes a key point of reference for the future: “ ‘October' [here meaning both the film and the October Revolution] is a reference which remains, for us, more than exemplary; it is instructive.”6 In the manifesto-like text “About October,” one gets a sense of the overlap of actual historical events and their visual representation in Eisenstein's film. Intellectually, both appear to be an important point of reference. In the introduction to the collection of essays published to mark the journal's tenth anniversary, the founding story is repeated with some small enhancements. “But why October?” the editors rhetorically ask and then promptly provide the answer: “Briefly, October is named after Eisenstein's film celebrating the tenth anniversary of the revolution. More fully, October is emblematic for us of a specific historical moment in which artistic practice joined with critical theory in the project of social construction.” In the introduction to the collection of essays, Eisenstein's film—the visual representation of the revolution—becomes the central point of reference for the journal. While still relevant as a historical event in “About October,” the October Revolution has now faded away albeit. This shift in emphasis shows a consolidation of October's focus on representation within the first ten years. In this perspective, the idea of revolution is primarily understood, interpreted, and explained through and within the framework of aesthetics. This is complemented by a subsequent clarification regarding the function of this reference to a period in the past. And it is here that Constructivism is mentioned for the first time: “Naming the journal October was not, however, a nostalgic gesture. We had no desire to perpetuate the mythology of the revolution. Rather we wished to claim that the unfinished, analytic project of Constructivism (...) was required for a consideration of the aesthetic practices of our own time.”7 In this shift from a notion of “the real” to a “critique of representation,” Gail Day sees a particularly significant aspect of October's orientation.8
(p. 278) In view of this central importance, as repeatedly underscored in the self-description, of the Soviet avant-garde and specifically of Constructivism, the journal published only a few essays on the subject in its first years. The first issue includes essays on film, a translation of Michel Foucault's review of René Magritte, Rosalind Krauss writing on contemporary video art, and Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe comparing the novel Gravity's Rainbow to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. Not one of the texts is devoted to Soviet Constructivism. The second issue includes two relevant contributions: Sergei Eisenstein's work notes on his unfinished film Capital and an accompanying essay by Annette Michelson. The next es-
Page 4 of 20 says on the subject appear only in the seventh issue. Even in the special issues—October published eleven of them in its first ten years—Soviet Constructivism is discussed only in passing. Just two of the special issues of the first decade are devoted to cultural production in the former Soviet Union. Tellingly, the focus of those two special issues is mainly on the reception of post-revolutionary art in the United States. Issue no. 7 on Soviet Revolutionary Culture (published in the winter of 1978) focuses on the Russia diaries Alfred H. Barr kept during a journey to the Soviet Union in 1927-1928, and the second special issue, Essays in Honor of Jay Leyda (no. 11), published in the winter of 1979, is a Festschrift for Jay Leyda, the American filmmaker and film historian. An expert on Soviet revolutionary film, Leyda advised October on the subject on multiple occasions during its first years, supporting the magazine with his expertise. Yet he never published in October himself. Given its prominent role in the self-description, one only sporadically finds essays offering new research on Soviet Constructivism and its embeddedness in the sociopolitical situation of postrevolutionary Russia in October.
To this day in the self-representation the reference to Soviet Constructivism holds emblematic significance for October. Accordingly, the “celebration of that moment in history” supposedly signified by the name “October” is still regularly revived and reiterated today. In 2017—on the occasion of the centennial of the October Revolution—the significance of that historical moment for October is once again reiterated.9 “About October,” the self-description published in the first issue, is reprinted along with two essays originally published in Artforum: Annette Michelson's “From Magician to Epistemologist: Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera” (1972) and Rosalind Krauss's “Montage October: Dialectic of the Shot” (1973). Repeated again and again, still it remains unclear what exactly distinguishes this “moment in history” and what, specifically, is supposed to be “instructive” about Constructivism. Instead, the October Revolution and the constructivist movement emerging in its wake become an actual founding myth for the magazine and provide a particular symbolic framework. This framing function becomes even more obvious in the magazine's own visual representation. Along with Eisenstein's film, the film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov is an important resource for the magazine's visual representation. In its very first issue (spring 1976), the back cover features the image of the eye with the emphatic, demanding gaze superimposed on the camera lens (a film still from Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera). Vertov's “eye” also adorns the cover of the The First Decade—a collection of essays published by the magazine in its first ten years—and serves as the central graphic (p- 279) element in a large poster with the heading “October. Twenty Years on the Cutting Edge,” produced to mark the magazine's twentieth anniversary.
By referencing Soviet Constructivism, the founders of October bestow criticality and sociopolitical relevance on their magazine and the discourse they pursue. Symbolic references to radical ideas are a common practice of distinction in the visual arts. Radical ideas provide a symbolic surplus value and lend a player in the art field critical credibility.10 By taking the revolutionary film of the young Soviet Union and giving it pole position in the symbolic framing of the new journal, the October protagonists secure the increased attention of their contemporaries—for one thing, because in critical theory a
Page 5 of 20
persistent hope was linked to the medium of film and its potential for mass agitation to become a vehicle for revolutionary transformation; and for another, because in the 1960s (especially in France) revolutionary Soviet film served as the starting point for an actualization of aesthetics and radical politics.11 Furthermore, by holding onto the legacy and concept of the avant-garde, October makes clear that meaningful art cannot be light-footed. Something is at stake in it, and its concerns are political and groundbreaking. Finally, October uses this founding narrative to excessively celebrate itself and its discursive project—to this day. Under the banner of a revolutionary spirit, the journal itself is staged and idealized as an art critical revolution.12
In the United States in the 1970s, Soviet Constructivism was received predominantly in terms of formal-aesthetic aspects. In his 1967 book Constructivism: Origins and Evolution, George Rickey read Constructivism as a movement primarily concerned with formal aesthetic questions. Rickey's intention was—similar to Alfred H. Barr's before him —to integrate the constructivist works into a Western canon of artistic developments and accord them a place in modern art history alongside their familiar European and American counterparts.13 Just how uncommon a nonformalist, sociopolitical reading of Constructivism was in the mid-1970s is indicated by the fact that Christina Lodder's 1983 monograph on Russian Constructivism still presented the formalist interpretation as the dominant perspective against which to argue.14 October's change of focus—at least on a rhetorically representative level—to the sociopolitical embeddedness and the revolutionary ambitions of this artistic movement must therefore be seen as an attempt at dissociation from what at the time was still a widespread, purely formal-aesthetic approach. Among the artists of the Russian avant-garde, Sergei Eisenstein was, moreover, a controversial figure, viewed with skepticism both by Stalin in the Soviet Union and by Soviet dissidents in the West. Stalin saw Eisenstein as a formalist and his works as informed by subjectivism.15 At the same time, Eisenstein remained in the Soviet Union even during Stalin's authoritarian rule. For this reason, liberal Soviet dissidents in the West accused him of collaborating with the totalitarian regime and having betrayed emancipatory val-ues.16
(p. 280) By glorifying this filmmaker, in particular, and declaring the film October as “the summa of the silent Soviet film,”17 the October founders forcefully opposed, as we will see, a schematic understanding of realism. At the same time, they dissociated themselves from what at the time was a dominant formalism. The programmatic affinity with the film October is part of a strategic distinction within the art critical field in the United States in the 1970s.
Under editor-in-chief John Coplans (1972-1977) and the increasing influence of Max Ko-zloff (who served as executive editor from 1975 until 1977), Artforum, for which Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, and Jeremey Gilbert Rolfe worked before founding October, took a turn to the “left.” Max Kozloff wanted Artforum to adopt a more political focus, es-
Page 6 of 20
pecially by promoting a sociocritical realism. For Krauss, Michelson, and Gilbert Rolfe, this shift in the editorial direction was a principal reason to leave Artforum and found October.18 This opposition against Kozloff's vision may have also led to the snide remark in “About October” that “For us, the argument regarding Socialist Realism is nonexistent.”19 On the other hand, the reference to Eisenstein's film October serves the purpose of dissociation from a self-referential formalism in the tradition of Clement Greenberg, which prescribed a strict set of media-specific rules of making and viewing art and excluded any reference to political or popular culture content. Clement Greenberg was, moreover, a passionate advocate of the medium of painting. The technically mediated and reproducible medium of film that, through the reference to Eisenstein, came to provide the name for the journal is therefore diametrically opposed to the idea of original, unmediated artistic expression championed by Greenberg. At the same time, the cross-media perspective implied in this reference would be inconceivable for a formalistic approach a la Greenberg. An art magazine could not also discuss film, photography, literature, theater, video, dance, performance, and theory. Finally, in referring to Eisenstein's film, the October founders aligned themselves with a work commissioned to celebrate a specific political event. From a formalist point of view, such a direct political use of art would mean the loss of artistic autonomy.20 Rosalind Krauss accordingly views Eisenstein's film as also dialectically transcending both a purely documentary and a formal-aesthetic approach. To the magazine's founders, Eisenstein's film October is thus exemplary for a socially oriented art that transcends realism and formalism and shows a third way. Then, according to Krauss, it is only in this dialectal transcendence that a truly revolutionary aesthetic is possible. One that disengages from factual reality and, in doing so, allows for a utopian perspective.21
The October founders repeatedly draw parallels between the late 1920s, the period that saw the making of Eisenstein's October and Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, and their present, in the process identifying an ideological and political battlefield for the 1970s in the United States. Both moments—the late 1920s in the Soviet Union and (p- 28i) the late 1970s in the United States—were said to be characterized by a fundamental transformation. Progressive social forces came under increasing pressure and were pushed back by reactionary tendencies. In the Soviet Union of the late 1920s, Stalin asserted his exclusive claim to power, and the United States in the 1970s were, as Annette Michelson saw it, increasingly dominated by the interests of large private corporations.22 In making this analogy, October magazine saw itself in alliance with the Soviet constructivists and at odds with those reactionary developments: “we considered it [the art journal] the necessary response to what was once again a consolidation of reactionary forces within the political and cultural field.”23 As part of the analogy, a comparable turning point for art was assumed. To the October founders, the Russian Revolution and the movement of 1968 led in similarly fundamental ways to a wide range of artistic innovations. Yet both of those de-velopments—of Soviet Constructivism, on the one hand, and the neo-avant-garde, on the other—remained unfinished: “We founded October as a forum for the presentation and
Page 7 of 20 theoretical elaboration of cultural work that continued the unfinished project of the 1960s."24
Eisenstein's film October paradigmatically epitomizes this "unfinishedness" and incompleteness with regard to Soviet Constructivism. For Eisenstein, October was, in fact, just a first step toward a much more comprehensive and ambitious project, as he was looking to make a film about Karl Marx's Capital. As Michelson writes, the envisaged but never realized project would have established "the level and the mode of a truly revolutionary cinematic consciousness,"25 representing a new stage in the continual radicalization of "a program for the development of the cognitive instrument in the service of revolutionary change."26 The film October thus stands for an artistic vision not yet fully realized. This vision—the Capital film project is elaborated only in notes—is nowhere further specified by Michelson and Krauss, and it is especially in this open-ended, merely hinted-at form that it represents a potentiality for the future. They view art of the 1960s and their journal as following in the mold, and in terms of a, once again, merely partial realization of the potentiality inherent in Eisenstein (and, consequently, in Constructivism). On top of this, Eisenstein's film October marks a turning point, as it stands for the end of the artistically innovative postrevolutionary period and the onset of Stalin's authoritarian rule, which coincided with the expulsion of Leon Trotsky from the Communist Party in November 1927. Josef Stalin thereby once and for all decided the internal power struggle in his favor, a shift that also had a direct impact on the film October. As a result of Stalin's power grab, Eisenstein was forced to re-edit the film once more. He changed some scenes and scaled back the role of Trotsky in the revolutionary events. This is also why the film was only completed the year after the anniversary celebrations.27 The film October thus represents, on the one hand, an artist's revolutionary aesthetic program that remained unfinished, while, on the other, it coincides with the onset of incipient repression by the state, thus marking, from the point of view of the journal October, the end of a period of innovative artistic efforts taken as a whole. Those efforts also remain "unfinished."
In drawing the parallel between the present and the situation in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, the October founders contend that their position following Eisenstein is
(p. 282) endangered and under threat. With this analogy, they add a sense of urgency to the discursive project they pursue with their journal and lend the project a certain dramatic quality. At the same time, they see themselves in the same mold as Soviet Constructivism and claim to be part of the progressive cultural avant-garde of their time. The journal October thus views its mission as providing a historical foundation for, and at the same time supporting, an expanded 1960s artistic practice that has been identified as the new avant-garde. In this construction, the October editors also secure a due place in art history for themselves and their magazine, as art history is understood in terms of a development driven by avant-garde transgressions. Consequently, the avant-garde is also invariably in conflict with its own present—which it must transcend, after all. Precisely by portraying itself as beleaguered and marginalized, October once more confirms its own claim to being part of the new avant-garde.
The reference to Soviet Constructivism by the October protagonists reveals a deep ambivalence. On the one hand, it shows a longing for a moment of social change and transgression on a historic scale. The October protagonists are convinced they have political agency and are part of a larger progressive project. Such a belief in the possibility of shaping and making history is rooted in what at the time was still a relevant experience of the political mass movement of the late 1960s in the United States and elsewhere. Therefore, in “About October” the reference to an actual revolution was still an option. On the other hand, a deep skepticism regarding any concept of “the real” pervades October. This has led to the abandonment of the possibility of actual radical change, as the main reference of the journal's name after ten years is to the representation of the revolution.
This shift in emphasis is symptomatic of a deep sociopolitical change in the United States and beyond. The October protagonists already pointed to first indications of the transformation that would shape Western society for years to come: “We are now five years from that beginning [the launching the new journal], and the crisis which soon brought Carter to Washington has intensified, installing corporate might and its imperatives even more firmly in power. There are few among us who do not read the immediate future as a demonstration of the naked, brutal force of unrestrained corporate greed.”28 In the 1970s, the neoliberal offensive started. Neoliberalism has led to an expansion of capitalist accumulation, a conservative backlash, and an increasing concentration of power in the hands of the dominating class. One core action of neoliberal politics is to abolish all forms of institutionalized solidarity and attack and break all forms of united political action, especially organized labor. Official politics focus on supporting the private and the individual.29 In New York, the effects and reality of neoliberal transformation were perceptible early on, as the city became a test case for what followed under the Reagan administration.30 In a climate where governmental politics degenerates into serving private interests and where any form of organized political action is under attack, the possibility of radical change becomes utopian. That's why a radical political change was not a real option for the October protagonists like for many other critical intellectuals in the West at that time.
The October protagonists also write about Soviet Constructivism in a way that shows they are interested less in the historical art movement in itself than in defining a starting point for their discursive project and establishing certain art historical narratives. In these narratives, the October authors interpret and assess the art of their time in back-referencing historical artistic approaches. Their main focus is on the art of their time, meaning the art of the 1960s and 1970s, with historical art—which, for October, means above all the historical avant-garde movements of Surrealism, Dada, and Soviet Constructivism—serving as a benchmark of sorts. The October authors do identify contemporary art in its unique character, and they explain it as part of a historical development, by relating it to art of the past. What precise purpose Soviet Constructivism serves in those art historical narratives is to be examined later.
To mark the twentieth anniversary of the journal October, a large poster was created by Alexander Ku. Intended for promotional purposes, the poster announces in all capital letters: “Twenty years on the cutting edge.” Written above this in red lettering is the name of the journal. Listed further down, underneath the slogan “October explores new frontiers,” are all publications edited by the October team. These include seventy-eight issues, the two anthologies The First Decade and The Second Decade, two portfolios with artists' editions (October portfolios), and, finally, all books published in the October book series. This list of October brand products is followed by the contact information of MIT Press (which is responsible for the marketing and distribution of October journal and October books) and the call to “Get in on the conversation” with a subscription request form. This language-based solicitation is supported visually by a large-scale photomontage in the shape of a crescent or a sickle. On one side, the contour is broken up and the shape frays. The montage consists of fragmentary black-and-white images of artworks. It is a seemingly random selection of artistic practices discussed in October. Prominently featured in the center and looking straight at us is the wide-open eye superimposed on the camera lens from the Soviet revolutionary film Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov. Right above the eye are a conceptual work I am unable to identify, a sculpture by Robert Gober, and, further up, a photograph showing Andy Warhol with another person, and Gordon Matta-Clark's Splitting (1974). Below Vertov's eye are several film stills, a press photo of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, and a woman with a mask. The film Man with a Movie Camera is placed center stage in this arrangement (see Figure 11.2). It is the focal point and the central point of reference in the poster. While the other pictorial references are cropped and the individuals and essential image features are sometimes difficult to identify, Vertov's cine-eye (kino-glaz) in the middle can be conclusively identified. In terms of size, it is the largest element in the photomontage and serves as the starting point from which the montage is built upward and downward.
Frame capture.
Clearly serving a promotional communicative function, the photomontage supports the matter-of-fact listing of October publications in a visually appealing way. The eye with its emphatic, frontal gaze directly addresses the viewer, immediately drawing (p- 284) attention to itself. At the same time, the montage also reflects the art historical approach of October: the historical avant-garde, represented here by Soviet Constructivism as embodied by Dziga Vertov and his film Man with a Movie Camera, becomes the central point of reference for the analysis and explanation of expanded, cross-genre art production in the postwar period. The second particular hallmark of October's art historical approach, which is featured in this poster, concerns Vertov's eye itself. This same eye is repeatedly and prominently used in October's self-presentation—unlike other works of central importance to the October discourse, such as Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917) or Alexander Rodchenko's similarly pivotal three-part work Pure Colors. Red, Yellow, Blue (1921). To Annette Michelson, the film Man with a Movie Camera, from which the superimposed eye is taken, represents a “final” methodical leap. In this film, Vertov radicalizes for Michelson the analytical, constructivist film practice.31 The design and the rhetoric of the anniversary poster symbolically link the eye from Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera to the judging art critical eye as represented by the journal October. What is implicitly asserted here is the model function of the process developed by Vertov in Man with a Movie Camera for the art critical practice of October.
The central importance, to October, of the historical avant-garde for art history in general and for the interpretation of art post-1945 is evident in the numerous essays on the subject that have been published in the journal. In “Grids” (issue no. 9, summer 1979) Rosalind Krauss focuses on the grid and shows how this structuring device introduced into art by the historical avant-garde (in this case, cubist painting and Mondrian) is appropriated and reinterpreted in postwar art (in this case, Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin). In “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting” (issue no. 16, 1981), Benjamin Buchloh examines the return of figurative representation in late 1920s and, especially, 1930s painting and its reduplication in the 1970s. The special issue titled The Duchamp Effect (issue no. 70, autumn 1994) focuses on Marcel Duchamp and his influence on expanded art production after 1960 (particularly conceptual art). In general, October protagonists see that certain approaches and aesthetical concepts developed by the historical avant-garde were taken up by art after 194 5.32 For some theorists (among others Peter Bürger) that postwar repetition of the artistic approaches developed by the historical avant-garde marks the end of a radical questioning of aesthetic and social conventions and the beginning of the historical avant-garde's integration into the institutions of art. The October protagonists instead criticize such a one-sided history of decline, calling into question the notion of an original, genuine, authentic avant-garde (i.e., the original one) and its false imitators (poor copies) after World War II. From the point of view of the October protagonists, the concept of the original needs to be challenged anyway and repetition may also be understood in the sense of a productive reworking and actualization of certain aesthetic issues.
In this historical rooting Soviet Constructivism is just one of a number of points of reference—in sharp contrast to its central role in the journal's self-presentation and the anniversary poster described earlier. Only in a few essays, Soviet Constructivism and its relation to postwar art is discussed explicitly. Two of these essays are “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde” (issue no. 37, summer 1986) by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh33 and “What's Neo about the Neo-AvantGarde?” (issue no. 70, autumn 1994) by Hal Foster.34 In their approach, both these authors reduce Soviet Constructivism to a very particular aesthetic paradigm, which they see developed in Alexander Rodchenko's Pure Colors. Red, Yellow, Blue (1921). And both Buchloh and Foster base their analysis on Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) and accept his distinction between historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde.35
In “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-AvantGarde,” Buchloh focuses on the “paradigm of monochrome painting” and examines its reception and transformation in postwar art. Monochrome painting, to (p- 286) Buchloh, is among the essential aesthetical paradigms developed by the historical avant-garde— along with the readymade, collage, serial grid compositions, and open construction. Rodchenko's triptych in the primary colors, Pure Colors. Red, Yellow, Blue (1921), is, to Buchloh, the first actual realization of the paradigm of the monochrome in art history. In monochrome painting there is no longer any discernible figure-ground relation, no color gradation, and no relational composition. As Buchloh argues, this reduction and the qua-si-empirical laying bare of the medium's primary elements—pigments of the three primary colors on three discrete supports—amount to a radical demystification of aesthetic production, indeed, “the elimination of art's esoteric nature.”36 Buchloh suggests that by reducing the medium of painting to its primary physical properties, the monochrome paradigm also develops a radical critique of a bourgeois, idealistic understanding of art. Then Buchloh compares Rodchenko's Pure Colors with Yves Klein's Monochrome und Feuer (Triptych) (1961) and detects a structural shift in Klein's work. In Klein's Monochrome und Feuer (Triptych), Buchloh argues the real meaning no longer resides in the work itself but is attributed to the work from outside, that is, by its reception, and projected onto it. To Buchloh, Klein's monochromes are—with regard to Yves Klein, Buchloh does agree with Bürger's history of decline—the diametric opposite of Rodchenko's approach of a conceptual transparence apparent in the work itself. Quite to the contrary, they invite being charged with symbolic and ideological significance, and Buchloh argues that, due to this idealizing character, they are a manifestation of the culture industry.37
As opposed to this history of decline, Hal Foster optimistically regards the project of a critique of art as an institution starting with the historical avant-garde as, in fact, having been realized for the first time in the neo-avant-garde. The historical avant-garde laid bare art's beholdenness to conventions, thereby putting it up for discussion. Foster sees this exemplified by Marcel Duchamp's Fountain and the very three canvases painted in primary colors by the Soviet constructivist Rodchenko. Following Buchloh's argument,
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Foster points out that Rodchenko had laid bare the very foundations (i.e., the conventions) of the medium of painting in this work. However, this critical reflection on mediaspecific conditions did not include the institutional context. To Foster, the latter came to be addressed only in the 1960s and is embodied in particular by four artists—Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, and Hans Haacke. They are said to have expanded the critique of conventions put forward in the historical avant-garde to include the institutional dispositif. According to Foster, it was only with this expansion that the inherent critique of art as an institution in the historical avant-garde was properly realized.38
As the two essays show, Buchloh and Foster conceptualize the historical avant-garde based on particular aesthetic paradigms. As a result, the art movements are isolated from theirs specific historical and sociopolitical context and, turned into ahistorical, aesthetic-theoretical concepts, made available for a history of the development of art. In the case of Soviet Constructivism, this isolation from its historical circumstances is all the more problematic, as its goal was precisely to actively engage in the changed sociopolitical situation and participate in building a new communist society with their art. (p- 287) Art and communism were thought of together and the central issues for Soviet Constructivism were questions like: What is the function of art in a communist society? Does communist art exist and what does it look like?
Such questions are not of interest to the journal October. In October's interpretation the focus lies on individual works and artists (almost all of them men) and collective aspects of the constructivist project have been left out. This very narrow understanding of Soviet Constructivism is the precondition for its incorporation into conclusive art historical narratives. The discussion of communism would go far beyond such a closed disciplinary perspective. Such a selective approach illustrated earlier on the basis of Buchloh's and Foster's essays is in clear contrast to the central placement of the film still from Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera in the photo montage described earlier. However, the illustration shows some key features of the particular historiography of art pursued by October: its insistence on discussing contemporary art in a historical perspective, holding on to the notion of the development of art and the possibility of fundamental shifts. The function of the art critic is thus to have the bigger picture in mind and, with his expertise and historical knowledge, to be able to distinguish between backward and progressive art. While entertaining its own idea of development in art, the October historiography of art wants to distance itself from a causal logic in history. Compared to traditional genealogies of art, the arrangement in the photomontage remains unsystematic.39 The individual works are put together in a collage-like manner. There is no chronology. Nor can artistic influences, affinities, and strands of tradition be inferred. The montage does, however, make clear that the historical avant-garde—in the case of October, above all, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Constructivism—is the benchmark for the interpretation and assessment of postwar art. Only with the achievements of the historical avant-garde in mind can the postwar art be defined and explained in its uniqueness. And it is also in comparison to the former that it becomes possible to classify postwar art into “progressive” and “backward/reactionary” tendencies. The montage thus shows that the October protagonists are not really interest
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ed in Soviet Constructivism but, rather, in writing their own art history and, by extension, in securing its very place within history. Instead of holding on to the communist horizon and believing that actual historical change is possible, the October protagonists shifted their ambition. The belief in “making history” that was still relevant in the 1960s movement was now transformed into a “writing history” in a very literal sense.
Along with Eisenstein's film October, the eye superimposed on a camera lens from Vertov's film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) plays a prominent role in the self-representation of the journal. It can be found in the very first October issue (spring 1976), where it appears on the back cover. It also adorns the cover of The First Decade, October's best-of anthology. And it is the central graphic element in the poster. To the October
(p. 288) founders, this eye is a counterpart of sorts to Eisenstein's film October. In this symbolic framing, Eisenstein's film represents the idea of historical break and with the resulting radical innovations in art. Vertov's eye, on the other hand, stands for a new methodological approach developed by Constructivism. This approach consists, as Michelson puts it, in a reflection on the medium and the use of linguistic concepts. With this interpretation, the October protagonists abandon Vertov's belief in an objective reality and ignore the deeply materialist embedment of his filmic approach. Only through such a de-Marxification of Vertov, his analytical and at the same time emphatic fervent gaze could be used in October's self-presentation and linked to its critical art-assessing eye.
For Michelson, Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera is a sophisticated and multilayered reflection on the medium of film, thus marking a qualitative leap in the history of film. In Michelson's interpretation, Vertov wasn't interested in a mere “mimesis” of the world but, rather, aspired to show the truth lying behind the appearances visible to the human eye and to visualize the “world of naked truth.” But that underlying truth can only be made visible by taking a step back from the world and focusing on the possibilities and inner logic of the medium.40 This exposing of the truth, according to Michelson, is therefore realized by the constant disruptions of the filmic illusion.41 Such disruptions are achieved by means of reverse motion, a chronological storyline reversal (i.e., what happens subsequently is shown first), through the use of trick techniques, and by showing moments of the production process of the film itself. By constantly crushing the illusionary space, for Michelson, a process of critical thinking, understanding, and political emancipation is activated. To Michelson, it is this decidedly medium-reflective approach that makes Vertov's film innovative and radical.
Additionally, in Man with a Movie Camera, the use of linguistic concepts in Soviet revolutionary film becomes obvious for Michelson. Such a linguistic understanding of the medium of film, which is of prime importance among Soviet filmmakers and film theorists, is particularly evident in Vertov's 1929 film. In it, Vertov made use of literary devices such as metaphorical references, similes, synecdoche, rhyming images, parataxis, and hys-teron proteron. The seemingly random order of individual sequences and scenes, more-
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over, is viewed by Michelson not as a missing conceptual and thematic arc (this is what Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera was widely criticized for among contemporaries), but as a strategic use of anacoluthon, meaning a deliberate break of narrative strands. In Michelson's interpretation, Vertov understands the medium of film in terms of language and accordingly treats it subversively with linguistic means.42
Michelson's interpretation moves Vertov's approach away from the world and locates it in the medium itself. In doing so, Michelson is not interested in discussing what the film actually shows. In her approach, what is shown is negligible, as it only serves to lay bare the medium's potentiality. What is shown is considered to be just a means to an end. Something essential is left aside in such a perspective. The film Man with a Movie Camera is an emphatic call for filmmakers to go out into the world and get involved in everyday life: “We engage directly in the study of the phenomena of life that surround us. We hold the ability to show and elucidate life as it is, considerably higher than the occasionally diverting doll games that people call theater, cinema, etc.”43 Man with a (p- 289) Movie Camera brings together countless everyday situations, processes, and actions. For Vertov the deliberate use of the medium's possibilities is not, in fact, an end in itself. Instead, it is meant to provide a deeper understanding of the spirit, the dynamics, and the optimism prevailing at that time. Through his elaborated montage technique, he would try to convey a sense of the collective, communist spirit: “To see and hear life, to note its turns and turning points, to catch the crunch of the old bones of everyday existence beneath the press of the Revolution, to follow the growth of the young Soviet organism, to record and organize the individual characteristics of life's phenomena into a whole, an essence, a conclusion—this is our immediate objective.”44 Such an endeavor reveals a positive view of the masses. In Man with a Movie Camera, the masses are shown neither in their chaotic and uncontrollable form (like in the scenes of the workers' uprising in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis) nor in their homogenized and heteronomous form under a totalitarian order (like in Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 Triumph des Willens). In Man with a Movie Camera (like in Eisenstein's October), the masses are shown as a force capable of defining and creating a new order.45
Furthermore, Man with a Movie Camera provides insights into a different understanding of the relation between human and things, the worker/artist and the means of production. In the dynamic of collective aspiration, humans are working with the machines, things and resources side by side. It is no longer a relation of domination. The humans do not dominate things and nature, imposing their will on them. Nor do the machines give the beat and the workers have to follow, as is the case in capitalist society. The communist relation between people and things/machines visualized in the film Man with a Movie Camera is an emancipated one. Man and machine are no longer alien to one another, as their relationship becomes one of trust and reliance. The eye superimposed on a camera lens perfectly captures this idea. The interlinking of the artistic/human eye and the technical apparatus/machine is all about giving up domination and cultivating the mutual trust. In this kind of emancipated relationship between artist and means of production, Vertov sees a powerful resource for aesthetic innovation: “Aiding the machine-eye is the kinok-pi-lot, who not only controls the camera's movement, but entrusts himself to it during exper
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iments in space. And at a later time the kinok-engineer, with remote control of cameras. The result of this concerted action of the liberated and perfected camera and the strategic brain of man directing, observing, and gauging—the presentation of even the most ordinary things will take on an exceptionally fresh and interesting aspect.”46 The entire film is a representation of mutual understanding and cooperation of humans and machines in communist society.
Michelson's interpretation of Man with a Movie Camera—that is, the medium-reflective approach and understanding of art in terms of language—reveals the intellectual constellation from which the October journal arises. Media-specific self-reflection, which for Clement Greenberg had still led to the self-sufficiency of pure painting, becomes for October an inquiry into media conditions, with the aim of disrupting the illusionistic or auratic space of art. The October protagonists construe this disruption from a logic intrinsic to the work itself. This is exemplified by Michelson's reading of Vertov as well as by the essays of Buchloh and Foster. Still clearly recognizable for all its (p- 290) expansion, the individual and distinct artwork remains the central point of reference. Singularity is the leading idea. The concept of the collective is not of relevance in their analysis. Furthermore, though the analysis offers occasional glimpses of the specific contemporary social and cultural context (especially in the case of Buchloh and Foster), there is no more belief in the possibility of a radical change of the given status quo. The second aspect, the linguistic focus Michelson discerns in Man with a Movie Camera, is central to October itself, as the art journal is representative of a linguistic turn in American art criticism. That turn has been described as the element that makes the October a postmodern project and allows it to call into question the Greenbergian idea of pure visuality and the autonomy of the work.47
In all these respects—no idea of a collective, detaching cultural production from its specific historical embedment, understanding art as an autonomous sign system—the October journal exemplifies the ideological shift that took place in the 1970s. Under the then emerging neoliberal order, “ephemerality and fragmentation take precedence over eternal truths and unified politics, and explanations have shifted from the realm of material and political-economic groundings towards a consideration of autonomous cultural and political practices.”48 Under these historical conditions in which October was constituted, revolution and communism became unthinkable. Instead, the capitalist accumulation (in October often understood as corporate interests and the art market) seems to extend and gradually pervade various aspects of life, while the ruling classes reestablish their power and privileges.
In conclusion, we can state that Soviet Constructivism is received in a very selective manner by the journal October. To October, this reception is more about itself than about a new understanding of the historical artistic movement or a reevaluation of the issues it raised for art post-1945. Accordingly, the apparent crescent or sickle shape of the photomontage on the anniversary poster is not a reference to the hammer and sickle of communism, but actually one half of the letter "O"—an "O" whose shape actually resembles the typography of the name of the journal, October. This means that the historical refer-
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ence is made to fit into the journal's own point of view/name. Everything is linked to the journal's own discursive project and the objective is, in fact, to construct an art history of its own. Thus, Soviet Constructivism is literally cut to fit October.
Allen, Gwen. Artists' Magazines. An Alternative Space for Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.
Buchloh, Benjamin. “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde." October 37 (1986): 41-52.
Copjec, Joan, Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, and Douglas Crimp, eds. October. The First Decade 1976-1986. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
Day, Gail. Dialectical Passions. Negation in Postwar Art Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Foster, Hal. “What's Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?” October 70 (1994): 5-32.
German, Lukas. Die Wirklichkeit als Möglichkeit. Das revolutionäre Potential filmischer Ästhetik. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2016.
Harris, Jonathan. The New Art History. A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2001.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Krauss, Rosalind. “Montage ‘October'. Dialectic of the Shot.” October 162 (2017): 133144. First published Artforum 11, no. 5 (January 1973): 61-65.
Lodder, Christina. Russian Constructivism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983.
Michelson, Annette. “From Magician to Epistemologist. Vertov's ‘The Man with a Movie Camera.' ” October 162 (2017): 112-132. First published in Artforum 10, no. 7 (March 1972): 60-72.
Michelson, Annette. “Reading Eisenstein Reading ‘Capital.'” October 2 (1976): 26-38.
Muir, Peter. Against the Will to Silence. An Intellectual History of the American Art Journal October between 1976 and 1981. Liverpool, UK: John Moores University, 2003.
Schmidt-Burkhardt, Astrit. Stammbäume der Kunst. Zur Genealogie der Avantgarde. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005.
Vishmidt, Marina. “The Cultural Logic of Criticality.” Journal of Visual Arts Practice 3 (2008): 253-269.
(1.) Peter Muir, Against the Will to Silence: An Intellectual History of the American Art Journal October Between 1976 and 1981 (Liverpool, UK: John Moores University, 2003). Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
(2.) In its first years the journal October was institutionally affiliated with the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York. With the magazine Oppositions, IAUS also published an important discussion platform for postmodern architectural theory.
(3.) Muir, Against the Will, 26 and 71-73.
(4.) Gwen Allen, Artists' Magazines. An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011), 28.
(5.) The Editors, “About October,” October 1 (1976): 3-5, 3.
(6.) The Editors, “About October,” 4.
(7.) Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, and Joan Copjec, “Introduction,” in October: The First Decade 1976-1986 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), ix.
(8.) Day, Dialectical, 132-149.
(9.) Rachel Churner, “October before ‘October',” October 162 (2017): 108-111.
(10.) Marina Vishmidt, “The Cultural Logic of Criticality,” Journal of Visual Arts Practice 3 (2008): 253-269.
(11.) Trevor Stark, “ ‘Cinema in the Hands of the People': Chris Marker, the Medvedkin Group, and the Potential of Militant Film,” October 139 (2012): 117-150. James Roy MacBean, “Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group: Film and Dialectic,” Film Quarterly 26 (1972): 30-44.
(12.) This self-stylization by the magazine is at times also gladly accepted by research. See, for example, Gerald Geilert, October-Revolution in der amerikanischen Kunstkritik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2009).
(13.) George Rickey, Constructivism: Origins and Evolution (New York: G. Braziller, 1967).
(14.) Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983).
(15.) Rosalind Krauss, “Montage ‘October': Dialectic of the Shot,” October 162 (2017): 133-144, 134. This essay was first published in Artforum 11, no. 5 (January 1973): 61-65.
(16.) Annette Michelson, “A Specter and Its Specter,” October 7 (1978): 3-6, 5.
(17.) Editors, “About October,” 3.
(18.) Gregory Gilbert and Richard Paley, “An Interview with Rosalind Krauss,” Rutgers Art Review 11 (1990): 53-68, 58.
(19.) Editors, “About October,” 4.
(20.) Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 5-22.
(21.) Krauss, “Montage ‘October',” 143.
(22.) Annette Michelson, “The Prospect before Us,” October 16 (1981): 119-126, 119.
(23.) Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, and Joan Copjec, “Introduction,” in October: The First Decade 1976-1986 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), ix-xii, ix.
(24.) Ibid.
(25.) Annette Michelson, “Reading Eisenstein Reading ‘Capital',” October 2 (1976): 26-38, 29.
(26.) Ibid., 35.
(27.) Krauss, “Montage ‘October',”134.
(28.) Michelson, “The Prospect,” 119.
(29.) David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
(30.) Ibid., 44-48.
(31.) Annette Michelson, “From Magician to Epistemologist: Vertov's ‘The Man with a Movie Camera',” October 162 (2017): 112-132, 119. This essay was first published in Artforum 10, no. 7 (March 1972): 60-72.
(32.) Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
(33.) Benjamin Buchloh, “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” October 37 (1986): 41-52.
(34.) Hal Foster, “What's Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?,” October 70 (1994): 5-32.
(35.) Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 53-63.
(36.) Buchloh, “The Primary Colors,” 44.
(37.) Buchloh, “The Primary Colors,” 50.
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(38.) Foster, “What's Neo,” 31.
(39.) For genealogical mappings in art and art history, see Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt,
Stammbäume der Kunst. Zur Genealogie der Avantgarde (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005).
(40.) Michelson, “From Magician to Epistemologist,” 120.
(41.) Ibid., 128.
(42.) Ibid., 124.
(43.) Dziga Vertov, “Artistic Drama, and Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 47.
(44.) Ibid.
(45.) Lukas German, Die Wirklichkeit als Möglichkeit. Das revolutionäre Potential filmischer Ästhetik (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2016), 68-73.
(46.) Vertov, “Artistic Drama,” 19.
(47.) Muir, Against the Will, 17.
(48.) David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 328.
Pablo Müller
Pablo Müller, Senior Research Associate, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
The Time Lag of Defa-Futurum: A Socialist Cine-Futurism from East Germany d
Doreen Mende
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Jan 2020 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.11
On April 23, 1975, at Karl Marx University in Leipzig, the East German filmmaker Joachim Hellwig (1932-2014) and scriptwriter Claus Ritter (1929-1995), both initiators and authors of the artistic working group defa-futurum, defended their collectively written practice-based PhD on the “artistic forms for imagining a socialist future by the means of film under specific consideration of the experiences of the working group defa-futurum.” Strongly influenced by Hellwig's antifascist projects and nonfictional documentary practice, defa-futurum demonstrates a specific concern for a Marxist cybernetics with regard to creative thinking, labor, love, and political work. The latter is elaborated in greater detail by engaging with the forgotten writings of the philosopher Franz Loeser. Defa-futurum allowed the idea of film-as-theory to endorse the GDR as a sovereign statepromoting also an East German socialist internationalism-under the conditions of the global Cold War by the means of cinema. By using methods from visual culture and cultural studies to facilitate a decolonizing analysis of defa-futurum's films, Stasi files, archival material, and original writings, the article aims to argue that decolonizing socialism is necessary in order to break through the Cold War's binary limits for understanding technopolitics, art, and social realities in the post-1989 world.
Keywords: defa-futurum, cinema, cybernetics, socialism, GDR, internationalism, Cold War, futurity, decolonizing analysis
You may manage not to adhere to the passage of time. But you definitely have to adhere to reality.
—Anna Seghers1
A moment of unease—in late March 2018, the book titled Small Political Dictionary (Kleines politisches Wörterbuch), published by Dietz Verlag, in East Berlin, in 1973, arrived in my mailbox. I ordered it online along with other bibliographic references mentioned in the doctoral dissertation Insights and Problems, Methods and Results from the
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Artistic Visions for the Socialist Future Film under Special Consideration from the Working Group defa-futurum from 1975.2 The practice-based dissertation was written collectively by the East German filmmakers and scriptwriters Joachim Hellwig (1932-2014) and Claus Ritter (1929-1995), and it was based on their research and experience gained through organizing the artistic working group defa-futurum at the publicly owned film production company DEFA in East Germany (GDR). The price of the book was less than the postage and spoke of its devalued existence. Certain unease disturbed my enthusiasm for defa-futurum while unwrapping the book from its protective packaging: I could not help but leave the already well-thumbed copy of the Dictionary lying on the terrazzo floor.
My apprehension was caused by the fact that the book now appeared as a document of the officially approved vocabulary of East German state ideology from 1973, which legitimized state-terror repression against those who would disobey the party. My parents, neither of them a member of the party, would never have had such a book in their house. Quite the opposite, in fact: they made a great effort to keep the house (p- 294) uncontaminated by the one-party state ideology. By doing so, the domestic space was de facto politicized by the right to speak candidly about events of social-political injustice, for example, when classmates were favored because of their parents' membership in the party. The domestic space provided a politically safe space amid state surveillance. However, the book, that obstinate thing, now was sitting on the floor, watching me as if I had betrayed my political becoming. I needed to place the Dictionary at a distance from my community of books in order to let its aged smell settle. Gradually, a process of decontamination began through the Dictionary's proximity to a different dictionary of thoughts that would strive to decolonize socialism from its Cold War mission within the dominant regimes of power. The following chapter aims to break the “embarrassed silence,”3 which Fredric Jameson describes as characteristic of the sociopolitical attitude common among many West German leftists toward voices, projects, and lived experiences under socialism, as it actually existed in East Germany. Engaging with this unease as well as the ambitions and particularities of the artistic working group defa-futurum offers means to disentangle a paralyzing knot caused by unfinished histories, conflicting narratives, silenced memories, and disqualified knowledge that, in addition to creating a feeling of unease, also provoke a transgenerational rupture.4
Beside the aforementioned collectively written doctoral dissertation, a document testifying to the work on film theory as film praxis and vice versa in the context of creating the socialist future film and providing an entire library of (forgotten) references to Soviet, East German, Czech, and Polish as well as West German authors from the fields of film, logic, futurology, and Marxist-Leninist philosophy, this essay will engage with several films produced by futurum, starting with Narrations from the New World (Erzählungen aus der Neuen Welt, Dir. Joachim Hellwig, 1968), which anticipates—in an impressive internationalist manner—the principles of the socialist future film from the GDR. Profoundly built on the experiences of Joachim Hellwig as a documentary filmmaker and Claus Ritter as a film theorist and journalist, defa-futurum itself was first officially inaugurated in July of 1971 by decree of the GDR Ministry of Culture. After going through a deliberate political sequence of cinematic productions, as Narrations from the New World
Page 2 of 29 demonstrates, Hellwig and Ritter's collective films after 1971 focus more on the formation of a socialist society through cybernetics regarding labor, love, food supply, and creative thinking. Love in the Year 2002 (Liebe im Jahr 2002, Dirs. Joachim Hellwig and Claus Ritter, 1972) and specifically Workshop Future I (Werkstatt Zukunft I, Dir. Joachim Hellwig, 1975) and Workshop Future II (Werkstatt Zukunft II, Dir. Joachim Hellwig, 1976) indicate futurum's multiple investment in the debate on how cybernetics can build a socialist society. The usage of specific terminologies in Hellwig and Ritter's dissertation suggests the highly relevant influence of the writings of Jewish-German philosopher and Paul Robeson-activist Franz Loeser, who taught ethics at the Philosophy Department of Humboldt University in Berlin and authored several publications on deontic logic, mathematics, moral development, and Marxist cybernetics.
(p. 295) Furthermore, the essay will engage with different cinematic formats ranging from the agit-prop tract The World of Ghosts (Die Welt der Gespenster, Dirs. Joachim Hellwig and Claus Ritter, 1972), to the futurum-specific “disco film,” and to the feature format of In the Dust of the Stars (Im Staub der Sterne, Dir. Gottfried Kolditz, 1976)—with the objective of mapping out futurum’s unique invention and use of the “inter-genre film.” In order to investigate the conditions of production, specifically with regard to the double-bind of the macro-politics of state socialism (including Stasi terror) and the micro-politics of a filmmaker's desire for an autonomous voice as well as the motivations of national cinema and international recognition, this research will involve a close reading of the Stasi records of Joachim Hellwig archived at the Stasi Records Agency in Berlin.5 The Stasi records provide a relevant source for my approach to visual culture due to precise (and often bizarre) protocols about travel, meetings, and work situations. The Stasi records reveal the nervous system of a state defining the politics of production for this artistic group, as well as others, operating in the GDR.
Composed of filmmakers, authors, and scriptwriters associated with Joachim Hellwig and Claus Ritter, who developed the cinematic vision and theory for defa-futurum with the ambition of creating a cybernetic model for the East German socialist future film, defa-futurum stands for many silenced, forgotten, domesticized or privatized cultural projects from the GDR.6 Active mainly between 1968 and 1979, its objective was to address the automation of labor, collective reasoning, and space colonization through a Marxist lens, connecting cinema with cybernetics and politics.7 Today, their “ghostly matters” create a “life [which] is more complicated than those of us who study it,”8 writes sociologist Avery Gordon, who argues in favor of new methods of understanding research beyond academic reasoning. To argue for the complex banality of “life,” including its rational voids, unpredictable confusion, and rebellious ghosts, is therefore urgently needed in order to offer a vocabulary to give voice to a silence that seems to scream louder than ever these days. On August 31, 1990, less than one year after a popular revolution peacefully tore down the Wall, the German-German joint signature of the Unification Treaty erased not only the political system but also its decades-long promised futures. It not only erased the ultimate promise of the arrival of an actualized communism, it also erased the East German people's institutions, cultural centers, protest cultures, pedagogies, economic models, and state health system, which were absorbed into a West German-orchestrated and mar-
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ket-oriented jurisdiction. The treaty also erased East Germans' biographical legitimacy that spoke of their complicated lives, continuously balancing between macro-political protocols and micro-political creativity. Paradoxically and disquietingly, today the archived documents from the Stasi Records Agency are the only publically maintained comprehensive resource tracing the social, cultural, and infrastructural history of people living under one-party socialism, written by its people against its people,9 while many archives of worker-owned factories, cultural centers, and educational institutions have been dissolved after 1990, thrown away, or stored in domestic places (now hardly accessible without family connections).
The year 1990 created the conditions for a haunted social figure to emerge. Gordon articulates the process as: “when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what's been in your blind spot comes into view.”10 Such a sociopolitical and psychological state caused by the post-1989 condition demands new methods for producing a series of vocabularies accommodating the loss of direction in the trajectory of the imagined future. In the 1960s, defa-futurum was already in the process of fulfilling a “systematically planned work for designing visions of a socialist future” as a cross-sectional hub within DEFA.11 Largely conceptualized by Joachim Hellwig in the late 1960s,12 as of July 1, 1971, the group was officially led by party functionary Gert Springfeld, vice minister of culture and head of film in the GDR, which included responsibilities over “the directors of the DEFA studio for feature films, the DEFA studio for short films and the DEFA studio for animation.”13 Defa-futurum is therefore no intermezzo or curiosity of film history.14 Rather, the visual culture it produced allows us to observe the foundation of cine-futurism in the GDR and its specific entangling of cinema with cybernetics, socialism, entertainment culture, and the Cold War.
Considering the trouble with archives, the unresolved social violence, and the historical fragmentation that possibly resonate from futurum's “ghostly matters” into our reality with the capacity to unsettle the “embarrassed silence,”15 using the postcolonial thought, vocabularies, and methods, I am specifically engaging with the concept of the location of culture proposed by Homi K. Bhabha. My analysis will concern a politics of location beyond control, meaning sites of dwelling that are inhabited by the experience of displacement in political, social, temporal, and cultural terms. The objective is not to copy and paste a postcolonial theory from one region to another. Rather, learning from vocabularies of marginalized “border lives” with regard to culture, biography, and history,16 it must be possible to develop a method of speaking about the East German political project of state socialism without categorizing its actors, agents, or projects in binary positions of either victim or perpetrator, but to open a horizon beyond control for the matter to complicate our current reality.17
A possible symptom of the “embarrassed silence”—which can also be understood as a political failure of reunifying Germany through the enforced legal integration of the East in
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to the system of the West (Unification Treaty, 1990)—might be detected in the ongoing neofascist outbreaks in German cities, specifically peaking with the opposition to the “welcoming culture” (Willkommenskultur) policy toward non-Europeans escaping war since 2015.18 Its agitating forces circulate around Pegida,19 whose advocates have been described as “the variously left-behind, namely, former perpetrators and victims of the former GDR,” as the singer-songwriter and former GDR-dissident Wolf Biermann (p- 297) observes.20 Suggesting the unbearable intensity of a broken life, he speaks of “life broken up into brutal fragments,” which cannot be studied, only experienced.21 The “variously left-behind” and their lives reverberate in Fredric Jameson's writing on the silenced legacy of the GDR:
[a]nyone with a commitment to socialism needs to take an interest in the history and fate of the German Democratic Republic (DDR), up to now the object of systematic neglect by West-of-the-Rhine liberal and radical intellectuals alike, who have scant knowledge of its achievements in painting and film, and assume its economic and political lessons to be exclusively negative. This is yet another instance in which Cold War dismissals in the name of Stalinism and totalitarianism— essentially political judgments—continue to be tacitly accepted by today's Leftists in embarrassed silence.22
Jameson indicates a general problem regarding not only the silencing of many artistic voices, but also the institutional and intellectual dismissal of GDR-initiated projects. The “GDR project” vanished from historical knowledge within the post-1989 institutions (politically), but also in West-dominated international contemporary art circuits (culturally). In other words, voices from East Germany are dismissed for their supposed allegiance to Stalinism and totalitarianism and as such are subjected to an “embarrassed silence” in the fields of art, research, and politics. The extreme binary patterns of the Cold War typecast artists, architects, and scientists from “the East” as either dissidents (“the underground artist”) or conformists (“the State artist”). It seems as if the Cold War continues, discursively and unconsciously.
Researching defa-futurum,23 therefore, demands that we unearth a vocabulary for particularizing the “age of extremes” (as Eric Hobsbawm describes the binary global order of the Short Century) by unsettling its extremes. Its visual cultures provide the point of entry occupying and cultivating an entangled space in between macro-political forces and micro-social movements. While macro-political forces can be found in decisions of the GDR Ministry of Culture and the DEFA administration or in the ideological language that Hellwig and Ritter apply in their dissertation, the micro-social movements can be traced —absurdly, but logically—in the Stasi reports of division XX/7,24 which collected the filmmakers' outbursts, their reported conflicts, and Hellwig's obligatory travel reports to his superiors. The micro-social dimension can also be detected in the invention of the “intergenre film,”25 which at the DEFA included short films, documentaries, animation, essay films, and the so-called disco films. They offer their own unique cinematic language with a specific emphasis on logic and cybernetics related to politics and creative work informed by the lived experiences of GDR socialism. Despite all of its promising futuristic
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horizons on social improvement, however, futurum's cinematic language is composed with a distinctly male gaze on the female body, proving the myth that gender equality in the GDR might have existed as a political concept summoned against gender relations in the bourgeois West, but not as a social reality.26 Each futurum film stages female protagonists in roles as captains, photographers, workers, or (p- 298) interviewers. However, the films do not avoid using the female form as erotic spectacle. The interview in Workshop Future II, with Günter Rössler (1926-2012)—one of the most important photographers and pioneers of nude art photography from the GDR—suggests that Hellwig and Ritter aimed for situating gender, women's rights, and sexuality in the East German culture of eroticism.27
My work builds on the methodologies of visual culture that consider the image as an infrastructure processing the entanglement of chronopolitics, technologies, political systems, distribution networks, and absent documents.28 In other words, an article on a project from a state whose political purpose has ceased to exist must reach beyond a historical understanding of the GDR's overlooked, or repressed, communist visual culture. Considering the intentional disappearance of the GDR's state socialism in 1989-1990, while generations of people carry the still-powerful lived experience of micro-social movements with them, it will be a challenge to “historicize the event of the dehistoricized.”29 The GDR's political system dissolved in the 1990 Reunification Treaty, but its social figures, turbulences, knowledge, and memories continue to live, mutate, and transform beyond the collapse of the state that supported them. Such a split condition, politically and culturally, is closer to that of societies struggling after decolonization and political movements for liberating people from dominant, colonial, or dictatorial rule to become “the people.”30 In contrast to postcolonial societies, however, whose revolutionary agents often became—if only for a short period—new political leaders, who rename streets and squares and reform health and education systems, the political leadership and economic infrastructures after 1989 in the GDR were not inherited by its civil rights activists or revolutionaries, but by the managers, politicians, and re-educators of West Germany.
Founded in 1949 on the ruins of World War Il's horrors, the German Democratic Republic claimed to be democratic in its name, despite its very recent Nazi past, by aligning itself with antifascist and anti-imperialist struggles before, during, and after the war. Considering the intra-European situation at that moment, the political euphoria surrounding its foundation should not be underestimated, and thus, the GDR cannot be directly compared with Poland, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary or, of course, Yugoslavia.31 The GDR was the only state in Europe to be newly created after 1945, and it would have been absolutely impossible to position its foundational concept of state socialism against the Soviet model as Josip Broz Tito did in Yugoslavia in 1948. At the same time, the GDR was an operational force in the Soviet-led part of the global battle for the new world order after 194 5,32 or the “Global Cold War,”33 in which architecture, cinema, and the arts played a major role in shaping, promoting, and propagating a socialist (p- 299) internationalism. In other words, defa-futurum offers us a glimpse at a network of practices that emerged from a composite of cinema, cybernetics, logics, philosophy, desires, and the East German version of Soviet-aligned Marxism-Leninism. It only can be analyzed on grounds of such a macro-micro entanglement that weaves its visual culture together with the desire for political emancipation, technological advancement, and social struggles. By exploring futu-rum's political cine-futurism from the GDR today—in a moment of global right-wing ascendency that goes hand in hand with the “rise of cryptofascist tendencies within the tech industry” 34—its visual culture invites us to speculate differently about defa-futurum as a techno-political project, considering its communist dimensions.
In 1968—then under the name of the DEFA group Profil—Hellwig and Ritter produced the international collaboration Narrations from the New World, which can be read as a cine-commemoration of Karl Marx's 150th birthday. It is a striking film project. After a five-minute prologue with archival material narrating the formation of the proletariat as a class gaining power, the six-episode, feature-length film portrays the situation of workers in Chile, Ghana, Vietnam, Italy, the GDR, and the Soviet Union, while celebrating proletarian internationalism.35 Hellwig and director of cinematography Wolfgang Randel travelled to Ghana in 1964. The official travel request suggests that the filmmakers asked to travel to Ghana between February 25 and June 15, 1964.36 In Ghana, they were to produce the episode of the film that would “design and depict the GDR's relationship to young nation-states and how the heritage of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels has been realized on the African continent during the second half of the 20th century. In particular, the film shall report on the port of Tema, the Volta project and the two female District Commissioners in Kumasi.”37 The diplomatic bond between the GDR and Ghana was geopolitically and ideologically of great relevance for both countries. While the bond helped Ghana consolidate its independence from British colonial rule under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People's Party, it also helped the GDR demonstrate its own sovereignty in performing socialist internationalism independently from Moscow. Hence, Narrations can be considered here as a political document demonstrating the GDR's geopolitical position by the means of cinema.
Furthermore, the link between Narrations and defa-futurum's commitment to the future by means of cinema specifically takes place in the Soviet episode. Here, the narrator's voice-over mentions the filmmakers themselves waiting for their return flight at the airport of Novosibirsk after filming in Akademgorodok. The episode portrays a boy arriving from the past, a place coded in Orientalist terminology in the dissertation document,38 in the “the city of science in Siberia” to study physics. The film commentary speculates whether the boy “could be one of the nuclear physicists who deciphers the secret of solar energy for humankind's usage in the year 2000?” It seems here, though, that the socialist future film repeats a dominant trope of imperialism to promote the old against the new, tradition against modernity, or “sultans and caliphates” against state socialism. Also in the dissertation, Hellwig and Ritter recall their future-oriented experimentation for the first time in connection with the Soviet episode for Narrations: “Sons of Prometheus or e = m x c2”—the episode's working title—is a project where, as (p- 300) they describe it,
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“we tried consciously in a short film (because the final episode is conceptualized as such inside of the entire film), for the first time, to process a future problem.”39 Narrations, which was co-produced with a crew that included Massimo Mida and Richard Cohn Vossen,40 is notable not only for being Hellwig and Ritter's first attempt to discuss the politics of a socialist future by the means of cinema. It is also, importantly, an experimental project in dialogue with the documentary practice of Dziga Vertov and Esfir Shub's innovative conceptualization of the nonfiction film.41 Hellwig and Ritter frame their experiment as a “mass-medial film [that] contributes effectively and artistically to building socialism in the GDR and educating the citizens.”42 Thus, futurum explicitly allies itself with Soviet revolutionary cinema. It does not know about, and does not particularly aim to reference, its own contemporaries, for example, Chris Marker's Letter from Siberia (Lettre de Sibérie, 1957).43 It also distances itself from the cinema of Nahfantastik, or “fantastic fiction of the nearest frontier,” that occurred during the Stalinist Soviet Cinema period of the late 1940s, when only the verified truth of science could be used in fiction.44
In other words, futurum's deployment of documentary practice is conceptualized by approaching the “socialist future film,” on one side, through “the necessity of the documentary to unlock new regions of reality,” and on the other side, through “seeking for the best communication of our artistic intentions” by cinema.45 While educational film projects like Vertov's The Sixth Part of the World (1926) document the variety of cultures in the vast land of the USSR, Hellwig and Ritter shift the precariousness of facts from the past to the future by proposing a visual culture by way of a documentary practice that speculates about a science of humans for tomorrow. Their proposal claims an emancipated position in the science-fiction genre, as well as the tradition of revolutionary film, by situating futurum in a prewar Soviet film documentary tradition. Neither documenting the past nor projecting a utopian future, they engage in the “year 2002” or in the “3rd millennium” by debating the politics of reality, which is a reality of the workers' class. To make their alignment with Soviet revolutionary cinema clear, they reference Esfir Shub, who famously stated that “not the fact itself, but our relation to facts, our class-specific recognition of reality, our class-specific reflection of facts—that seems to me the most important.”46 While analyzing the political alignment of film with the task of constructing a socialist society, Hellwig and Ritter argue:
The insight that past, present, and future are dialectically interrelated leads us to focus our aims in nonfiction future films on stimulating responsibility for the future in the moviegoer. We have framed this specific aspect of our film projects in the maxim: consciousness of the present is the basis of responsibility for the future; consciousness of the future is the basis of responsibility for the present. With this maxim, the film we are striving to make is neither “utopian” nor “fantastic” nor “popular science” nor “documentary,” although it may incorporate these and other genres. It is, to our minds, a “film of the contemporary world” above all, a socialist contemporary film [ ... ] In this sense, we regard our future films as “political” films, if that attribute remains in play in the discussion of filmmaking in the GDR.47
(p. 301) While aligning itself with the “scientific socialism” that had also been foundational for Marxism-Leninism in the GDR, futurum detested the genre of “science fiction” as portrayed in Perry Rhodan's novels, which depict a dystopian future of war and greed and the battle for domination.48 Instead, futurum's socialist future film aimed for a contemporaneity of science, society, and knowledge as it already takes place in Narrations through the montage of images and voice-over, closer to a travel diary or “an essay documented by film.”49 The working group explicitly attached itself to the importance of realism over utopia, while updating Shub and Vertov's mode of the documentary film by integrating aesthetic elements from animation, short films, music films, and feature films. Hellwig and Ritter explain: “The experiences we were able to gather in non-fiction filmmaking mostly arose from the documentary approach this genre requires. It was partially enhanced by new methods and modes of representation we developed under the title ‘intergenre film.'”50 This new format was necessary in order to claim the singularity of the East German socialist future film taking responsibility for questions relevant to viewers' own present. Historically speaking, the invention of the “inter-genre film” stands out as defa-futurum’s achievement.
To implement this vision, Hellwig and Ritter discuss the production format of a workshop in their dissertation and explicitly in Workshop Future I and Workshop Future II. Borrowing working methods from scientific research, futurum conceptualized a workshop principle without hierarchy, that is, without one person owning knowledge and advising others to execute it, but by a truly transversal interaction that demands dialogue to connect the different forms of knowledge. They write:
Scientific representations of the future, i.e., prognoses, are the work of sometimes hundreds of people who rely on the work of hundreds more; they employ the most modern means, scientific methodologies and technologies. The creator of artistic portrayals, by contrast, works in isolation in the process of artistic creation. Must that remain that way? Are today's social conditions, which manifest themselves in manifold ways in the union of the processes of life and creation, adequate to the composition of a future? If an artist chooses to grapple with this subject, the future, does it even make sense for him to work in isolation, or which new forms will need to be found? Are consultations sufficient, or should we seek to devise new methods? How can collective creative thinking be adopted as a workshop principle in literary creation?51
Aspiring to create “socialist future film as a specific form of a film of the present,”52 futurum produced several short films, a few feature films, and a cinetract-like short, primarily intended for television broadcast. From 1975 onward, defa-futurum also produced so-called disco films to be projected in discotheques, including Kosmos 73 Film-Beat-Treff vor Mitternacht shown on Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin.
The disco films were music clips that often mixed documentary with amazingly animated drawings,53 even before MTV aired its first music video in 1981. A few of the disco films were produced by futurum (with Hellwig as dramaturge) with the purpose to entertain as
well as educate young people by reaching out to them in cultural and (p- 302) social spaces. “Disco” had already become an important symbolic space in Love in the Year 2002, a site for investigating how young people imagine love in the future, socially and technologically speaking. Love in the Year 2002 is an odd and ambitious film—an excellent example of futurum's inter-genre film, bringing together documentary practice with fiction, animation, jazz, modern dance, and computation. Staged in the form of an entertainment show with dance scenes choreographed by the famous Polish dancer Conrad Drzewiecki and music by Polish jazz musician and composer Jerzy Milian, the twenty-minute short also includes documentary scenes from the Berlin-Schonefeld airport and a discotheque ablaze with glittery light, where the GDR-famous Chris Wallasch (moderator of Schlagerstudio, the first East German hit parade on television) interviews passersby or young couples about their imagination of the future. Back in the studio of the entertainment show, we follow a science-fiction scenario staging the engineering of human reproduction, now orchestrated by a match-making computer machine which would allow the features of a future child to be calculated a priori to the act of insemination, albeit with a woman's body bearing the pregnancy.
The film contemplates several elements significant to the group's mission, especially futurum's commitment to investigating the potential of cybernetics in fostering a socialist society, which will be addressed later at length. For the moment, Love in the Year 2002 is especially compelling for its attempts to define an East German socialist cine-futurism as a kind of socialist pop(ulism) by way of documentary practices. Futurum's experimentation with popular formats of mass media, which could be (mis-)understood as light entertainment, marks a significant difference regarding their outspoken commitment to the intellectualism of Soviet revolutionary cinema. Mixing documentary practice with a sort of quiz show, as well as the contemporary song and dance routine of light entertainment, suggests a unique selling point for a cinematic practice from the GDR, or politically speaking, claims the right for self-determination by the means of film. In particular, the latter becomes pertinent in Hellwig's attempts to introduce, or rather to smuggle, a copy of Love in the Year 2002 into the program of the 19th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (Filmtage in Oberhausen) in April of 1973: “Hellwig caused conspicuous attention during the Filmtage in Oberhausen of Spring 1973,” one can read in the Stasi report from October 31, 1973, authored by one lieutenant Kol/Ko of the central department XX/7, responsible for the control of culture and mass media. It continues that Hellwig “exported illegally a copy of Love in the Year 2002 from the GDR to Oberhausen, where he tried—without consultation with the direction of the East German delegation—to present [the short film] in the ‘information program.' ”54
A delegation traveling from the GDR to Oberhausen had already been tasked with representing the country at one of the oldest West German film festivals. Without the knowledge of the GDR delegation's leader, Hellwig traveled separately to the festival with a copy of Love in the Year 2002. This breach of trust demonstrates Hellwig's disobedience toward the party delegation system. Following the reports, Hellwig stubbornly insisted on presenting futurum's short film during a gathering to promote an image of an East German future imaginary regarding its Marxist orientation. He writes in his report to his su
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perior on April 24, 1973: “the Maoists could use the film against us by (p- 303) asserting that it is petit-bourgeois socialism without the call for class struggle.”55 In his report, which reads more like a justification letter, Hellwig demonstrates his desire for visual self-determination of East German cinema that should be protected from local and foreign manipulation. The event is reported by other informants and specifically reoccurs in another report from October 1973 that tries to discredit Hellwig's solo run, which he himself justifies as “political agitation for the GDR.”56 The reports relating to the events surrounding Love in the Year 2002 at the Oberhausen festival demonstrate the struggle and stress that Hellwig had to endure in order to garner international attention for futurum's vision. One may assume, of course, that Hellwig would have very much liked futurum's film—partially his film—to be included in the festival.57 It is difficult to separate the filmmaker's individual ambitions to promote his film from his political ambitions to use the film as a means to declare artistic and cultural independence. This is precisely an instance of the macro-micro entanglements elaborated earlier in this essay that make the articulation of new vocabularies necessary.
“Life is more complicated than those of us who study it,” Avery Gordon reminds us in the first chapter of Ghostly Matters. It is a sentence to be shared, still, with many of my friends, colleagues, and comrades from “West-of-the-Rhine” while talking about the GDR. In many conversations with them, I feel ashamed of the perceived GDR “petit-bourgeois socialism” that cannot claim to be as exceptional as the Yugoslav socialism under Josip Broz Tito or the Nkrumaism in Ghana. How is it possible to argue plausibly that life in the GDR was not binary but rather tertiary coded? Such a tertiary-coded position, or a social figure dealing with macro-political protocols and micro-social creativity, could be, for example, a member of the party under observation by the Stasi, like Joachim Hellwig himself. He could be a self-employed man who would refuse to be a member of the party while accepting commissions from the state, like my father who worked as an independent photographer in the GDR. Or he could be an unruly worker, a dissident songwriter, and a diligent informal collaborator (Informeller Mitarbeiter) for the Stasi (IM) like Gerhard Gundermann.58 Or she would have written the novella What Remains? (Was Bleibt? 1979) about the psychological terror from being observed by the Stasi day and night, while she had submitted reports under IM “Magarete,” just like Christa Wolf did.
The Stasi report files about Hellwig (as well as travel reports by Hellwig himself) contain more than one hundred and eighty pages spanning over more than thirty years.59 In the reports, Hellwig is characterized as a person of “ignorance and political misbehavior.”60 He was called regularly to meetings. But he was also granted travel visas to Ghana, Yugoslavia, Italy, England, France, Poland, and West Berlin to make his films. (p- 304) It seems that Hellwig was part of a Reisekader (travel squad), a hypothesis, which would be at odds with his rather bad reputation with the Stasi. Usually only hard-liners or public intellectuals would be granted permission to travel. Are the Stasi files the remnants of a social-political record of a society and a psychopathological timeline of state power? Do
Page 11 of 29 the Stasi files narrate a GDR history that is written by its people, but to denounce its people? Are the Stasi files not only binary, but rather tertiary coded by the victim, the perpetrator, and the social figure of the haunted, spinning a web of relations involving unease, confusion, anger, trauma, and delay? Does the Stasi Records Agency provide a rare but monstrous institutional infrastructure in contemporary Germany, securing public access for researching the complexity of life in the GDR—a forty-year history of the cultural, social, and political life of a vanished state? Do the records enforce a split, another binary imperative, which claims to separate a complex life into before and after? Is it possible for a tertiary-coded temporality to emerge that would unsettle the chrono-normativity administering before and after, in which the time lag as discursive temporality can finally unfold?
Bhabha's concept of “discoursive temporality, or time-lag,”61 proposed in 1994, disturbs the principle of disciplined time as chrono-normativity, which operates in alignment with linear imperatives of historical narrations. The time lag folds various temporalities emerging from political, social, and cultural processes into time as a condition for discursivity. Bhabha situates the time lag within societies with postcolonial experiences, which are forced to process profound systemic ruptures regarding dominant orders, politics, and social microstructures for a political cause; it provides a methodology for situating the analysis of the visual cultures of defa-futurum in a postcolonial environment. It may be more appropriate to speak of a decolonial approach.62 The debate has been ongoing as to whether the “post- in postcolonial [is] the post- in post-soviet.”63 The debate indicates an ideological battle over Francis Fukuyama's famously declared (and debated) “end of history” as an end of empire inaugurating a “post-” of imperial colonialism. However, the problem of the “post” in relation to “decoloniality” is not about the danger of misunderstanding a space-time complex as life after colonialism.64 Instead, speaking of decolonial is about resisting the danger of reestablishing new relations of narrative dominance or binary constellations of colonial versus postcolonial. Scholars in Slavic studies have highlighted for us the pitfalls of postcolonial studies in the early 1990s regarding their conceptual cooptation of former socialist (“Eastern”) regions into the Eurocentric models of Western modernity, including the construction of the East.65 Part of decolonial analysis must guarantee the possibility for knowledge that is neither archived nor easily accessible because it has been disqualified by oppressive orders or dominant voices.66 In the case of the GDR, the oppression found its expression in a monomaniacal narrative of a Soviet socialism as model for the fraternal imperative of East German state socialism after 1945; in operations of the GDR's secret service of which its records report about the violent mechanics of disqualification; and in the erasure of publically owned institutions, social property, and public narratives from the GDR by the legal way of the German Reunification Treaty. The condition (p- 305) for “decoloniality” must therefore be understood as an ongoing process beyond a disciplinary field: it takes place, mutates, and changes across sets of self-knowledge, legal contexts, traumas, communities, and solidarities. Therefore, distinguishing between “post-” and “de-” indicates a positioning rather than academic disciplining.
In this context, it is telling that the first time that defa-futurum caught my attention was through Joachim Hellwig's The Black Star (1965). The thirty-six-minute documentary, shot in independent Ghana in Spring 1964 under Kwame Nkrumah's Convention People's Party (CPP), provides a rare visual document of socialist friendship between the GDR and Ghana before the coup d'état of February 1966, which forced Nkrumah into exile.67 The Black Star was screened during the Summer Film Institute Cold War, Hot Media: DEFA and the Third World in 2011.68 It was a summer of heat waves. For one week, an international group of scholars, filmmakers, and curators gladly sat inside of an air-conditioned cinema while watching documentaries, shorts, and features by East German filmmakers with a specific focus on internationalist cinema from the GDR. At that time, I was working on my doctoral thesis.69 With friends and colleagues, I was also digitizing the archive of my father who worked as an independent Bildreporter, or image reporter, in the GDR for the International Trade Fair in Leipzig.70 I was born in the GDR, enjoyed my early childhood education in a kindergarten and primary school of the one-party state, while my secondary and higher education took place in institutions in Germany and the United Kingdom modeled (differently) after liberal democratic principles. Those born in the GDR between the mid-1970s and early 1980s are defined in social studies as the Dritte Generation Ost (Third Generation East),71 and the Malian cultural theorist Manthia Diawara observes in such educational trajectories a proximity between scholars from the Continent growing up under colonial rule, experiencing a revolutionary rupture and studying in another political system, often abroad.72 In other words, why did I have to travel to the United States to learn about films that carried voices, spirits, and narrations of a socialist internationalism from the GDR? Why had I never heard of Joachim Hellwig or Iris Gusner before? What kind of conditions existed in the Germany of 2011, washed over by the sea of ostalgia, that stereotyped the political complex of East German culture from a Western perspective? Why could exhibition projects, publications, and conferences in Germany itself often only differentiate between the “state artist” and the “underground artist”? Why would a conversation with non-East German friends only have room for discussions of conformism or dissent? Why so many conversations revolving around a fixation on propaganda or prison? Why were contemporary art institutions in post-1989 Germany seemingly more interested in socialist internationalism from Ghana, Egypt, or India but not from the GDR? What went wrong in Germany after 1990? And why did I continuously feel like a diasporic subject when talking to West German colleagues working in the field of contemporary art? After trying to research—unsuccessfully—the conditions of making The Black Star, I phoned Joachim Hellwig in his home in northern Berlin. He talked and talked, not about The Black Star, but about defa-futurum with impressively fresh enthusiasm.73
Engaging with the unknown artistic working group, specifically via Hellwig and Ritter's dissertation, introduces us to a range of unknown theorists, philosophers, and futurolo-gists.74 Some of the Polish, Russian, or East German authors mentioned in the disserta-
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tion are hardly traceable online. One of them is the German-Jewish immigrant, activist, communist, philosopher and professor Franz Loeser (1924-1990).75 Loeser's philosophical writings on logics are critically important for futurum's development of an approach to cybernetics from a Marxist angle. He philosophically and mathematically analyzed the prognostic advantages of cybernetics on the human forms of cognition, morals, communication, and labor for enhancing the capacity of the socialist human. In 1968, he published the scientific treatise Interrogativlogik starting with the fundamental question “Can machines simulate the human capacity for intellectual work?”76 Loeser unpacks the question by using philosophical reason, Marxist norms, and deontic logic. Carefully avoiding the framing of cyber-technologies as a battlefield of the Cold War, Loeser's meticulous elaboration of the function of the “Frage-Antwort-Prozess” (question-answer-process or FAP),77 as a method for stating a problem, specifying the conditions of a problem, and reaching a cognitive validation of reasoning to solve a problem. For Hellwig and Ritter, such a problem-oriented approach must have been exactly what they had been looking for in order to develop the socialist future film, when they state in the last chapter of their dissertation:
The process of artistic creation may be regarded as a problem-solving process.
The task is to employ appropriate methods based on scientific insight to develop a description of a problem that is suitable to art and the chosen genre as part of the process of artistic creation.78
Loeser proposes a new field of logic with Marxist content: the logics of interrogation,79 by developing a philosophical-mathematical understanding of the question and answer as thought-forms “that are subject to laws of logical relations.”80 The FAP, in other words, is a methodological device—or an “appropriate [method] based on scientific insights”—to detect a problem and to prove its rational reasoning in the relations between ethics, morals, and obligation.81 Many of futurum's films deal with the enhancement of the socialist human as a collective force to fight for a better world by cybernetic-political means. Needless to say, such a commitment to algorithms puts us in the middle of a tightrope walk from today's political and ethical perspective. Loeser's treatise directly informs futurum's ambitions to create a general principle to produce the socialist future film. For example, in Workshop Future I, a group of three citizens who have been “captives” in the present travel in a time machine to a discussion meeting at “future workshop,” which looks like a laboratory with many monitors, consoles, and a robotic (p- 307) voice speaking as an invisible moderator. The voice announces: “By a new method of 'thought-image-transformation,' we are able to convert your thoughts and wishes into images. We are interested in learning about your idea of the future, and considering with you how this future shall look.” All five persons are seated on comfortable chairs facing monitors, as if they were sitting in a multiscreen cinema or in a TV studio, to watch their own imagined/projected image and to think about the automation of labor, domestic work, food supplies, child care, social relations, and love. Workshop Future I uses the format of a group discussion—a reoccurring format in several futurum films—to detect, debate, and process social problems. Love in the Year 2002 uses the interview-question as a critical method to collect answers about the future in the format of an entertainment show. In Workshop Future II, the interview-question also serves as the main method: four re
Page 14 of 29 searchers decide to study different contexts—playground, artist's studio, photographer's studio, construction site—to collect various answers. The research method focuses on collecting examples, first, to specify the “premise of the problem” by an applied scientific socialism, and second, to involve the people's reflection, because, the future “emerges from our wishes and dreams, also my own!” as stated by one of the women participating in an experiment of “Gedankenbildumwandlung” (transformation of thought-image), that uses a computational technique with the ability to detect thoughts and convert them into images.
From today's perspective, after the “datalogical turn” that has been changing the foundations of social forms and epistemological recourse,82 futurum's celebration of algorithmic models to enhance the human appears like a naïve fetishism of empirical facts. Loeser's proposal for a “science [ ... ] and laws of the logical relation between question and answer” would be discussed today as a cybernetic nightmare of centralized governance to control, plan, and manage thought.83 However, for Hellwig and Ritter—following Loeser— the machine helps recalibrate the political mission when the human is manipulated, blinded, or brainwashed. In Kolditz's famous In the Dust of the Stars, the character Suko from the socialist planet Cyrno returns with a memory block from the headquarters of TEM 4, where he has been tortured by a misogynist elite group of men, who are also responsible for the systemic oppression of the indigenous Turi-people on planet TEM. The Turi people are expropriated of their indigenous rights and forced to labor in a subterranean mining complex. The mission from Cyrno led by Akala, the female captain of the crew of five, is to help the Turi people liberate themselves from colonial rule of TEM 4. “Light years ago,” in the film, radio-phonic sensors on planet Cyrno received SOS frequencies from TEM. Suko appears to be in a terrible state. He can neither remember nor speak. Akala decides to project Suko's previously taken images of planet TEM on a screen for him to watch, which finally pushes him into a state of delirium. He excitedly yells “Turi, the Turi! It's their planet!” It is impossible, though, to process any further thought or observation. Akala speculates what if “not only Suko but all of us have been mentally blocked?”
This is the question method, as proposed by Loeser, used to detect a problem. Miu, Akala's female tech expert on the mission, knows that the computer is able to detect human-memory blackouts when “there is something we cannot think or say. Something
(p. 308) we haven't spoken of since we have been blocked. Our computer should be able to compare our speech.” This is the analysis of the conditions of the problem or the “premise of the problem” according to Loeser's logics of interrogation. The computer filters the speeches of all crewmembers during the time of their mission. Very quickly, it calculates the susceptibility of human memory: the blinking result on the screen is the sin-gled-out word “HILFE” (help) and “HILFRERUF” (call for help). Reading these words triggers Akala's memory to remember, making her immediately suffer from a severe headache, as if her brain were controlled by external forces that want to prevent her thinking. This sequence demonstrates in such a palpable way the correlation between futurum's cinematic practice and Loeser's philosophy of logic. The film enacts Loeser's proposal for cybernetics as a research method that helps the (socialist) human to fight colonialism in the name of an extraterrestrial socialist internationalism from planet Cyrno, or, the GDR.
The following quote by Hellwig and Ritter summarizes their political aspirations for cyber-technologies with the capacity to enhance human life in a socialist/communist society, while it leads to a certain awareness of the dangers of socialism with a trans-human face:
But the purpose of automation remains to set man free from heavy labor, monotonous labor, and simple intellectual processes, and it would seem to be entirely possible that automation in socialism/communism will also be capable of setting man “free from menial forms of creative thinking” and empowering him to focus on higher forms of creative thinking. Automated creativity will not perform the same work that man does in the same manner; it will be “a tool that will surpass him” (F[ranz] Loeser, D[ieter] Schulze, Erkenntnistheoretische Fragen einer Kreativitatslogik, manuscript, p. 52). Its purpose is to multiply human faculties in the interest of humans without being able to surpass man. It remains to be seen whether this is an automated “creativity” in the conventional sense or whether our ideas about creativity will have undergone transformation.84
In other words, a Marxist politics of cybernetics—as proposed by Loeser and applied by futurum—cannot be detached from moral principles, obligations, and the quality of thought. Rather than a “communicative capitalism” as suggested by the political theorist Jodi Dean to denounce the algorithmic transformation of knowledge from quality (message) into quantity (data),85 I suggest that Loeser's approach justifies speaking of a communicative communism. Because communism has flaws and pitfalls under socialist conditions, however, the computer will not replace the human but make space and time for the worker's capacity to think creatively by collectivizing debates, automating labor, and centralizing the food supply. The machine balances her human limits in solidarity with her political mission on earth to fight colonialism, oppression, and domination. Of course, this conclusion occludes all horrific problems that the dictatorial regime of a one-party state like the GDR generated; it does not consider the devastating efforts of the GDR's surveillance state in observing, controlling, interrogating, and imprisoning its own people in the name of socialism following the principle of only one possible (p- 309) socialism. defa-futurum, however, can be understood as an experiment of a socialist cine-futurism that sought to interconnect cinema with science, cybernetics, and socialism in the service of “building up a classless communist society as a future of all humankind through overcoming class relations on an international scale.”86
This is a good moment to point to futurum's remarkable cybernetic chart (see Figure 12.1) suggesting a multistage systemic scheme for creating the socialist future film
(p. 310) by an artistic process with defined principles. The chart comes from the appendix of Hellwig and Ritter's doctoral dissertation, which alone impresses by its profoundly practice-based reasoning while situating futurum's practice in a political ontology of cinema as we have seen earlier. In other words, futurum's practice itself defined the principles that were analyzed and situated with writings from political theory, philosophy, logic, and film history. At the same time, it can be argued that futurum's readings of Franz Loeser, in reverse, informed futurum's methods for researching new vocabularies to imagine the future as a political project. The chart provides a precise scheme for operating a collective effort that goes through a creative production process for solving a problem emerging from material existence by the means of film. Specifically, Franz Loeser's vocabulary for his deontic logic as a complex process of questioning (interrogating) reappears in the chart with regard to the problem as an active agent in various stages (the chart indicates process, condition/premise, defining, solution in two phases). Above all stands Marx's main theorem of the dialectics between Sein (existence) and Bewusstsein (consciousness): “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”87
Published in Erkenntnisse und Probleme, Methoden und Ergebnisse bei der künstlerischen Gestaltung sozialistischer Zukunftsvorstellungen im Film unter der besonderen Berücksichtigung der Erfahrungen der AG defa-futurumfrom, PhD dissertation (Appendix), Department of Cultural History and German Studies, Karl-Marx University Leipzig, April 1975.
In the Dust of the Stars, we follow an experienced techno-politics as the computer's calculation of the crew's speech generated during the anti-imperialist mission on planet TEM unlocks human (Suko's) memory. The sequence showcases the Marxist determination of social existence that seems obscured by the human's sensitivity for ideology but operates better through a computationally run collective process in order to detect materially existing evidence of oppression, extraction, and colonization, which in turn defines the urgency to liberate the Turi people from colonial rule as defined in the problem. It is not “the consciousness of man” following the imperatives of capitalist modernity by seek-
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ing superiority in terms of economic growth, individual progress, labor division, and primitive accumulation, but social existence that is the declared point of departure for engaging with cyber-technologies to enhance collective efforts. There are four main creative/ political figures composing the collective-creative work securing such a commitment: the Kulturpolitiker (cultural politician), the Dramaturg (dramaturge or dramatic advisor), the Schriftsteller (scriptwriter or author), and the Regisseur (director).88 One of the central hubs of the chart is the schöpferischer Dialog [creative dialogue] about and across the many fields of expertise (ideology, individual existence, cultural stands, etc.). Of course, from today's perspective, the figure of the “cultural politician” is alarming. In a one-partystate, she or he represents the state's macro-political protocol. Perhaps the role filled by the party-functionary of DEFA. Regardless, in futurum's terms, the political figure guarantees that film remains “the most important of all arts” in the ideological working of state socialism.89
The “postcolonial time lag” resides exactly in the struggle to position a project like defa-futurum in the present. Where is it located in a world that seems urgently in need of
(p. 3ii) an alternative to global capitalism? Where is it located in the face of today's algorithms that kill people, manipulate presidential elections, and reproduce racial capital-ism?90 Proposed by Homi Bhabha in a moment of a new world order,91 the theory of “postcolonial time lag” as a discursive temporality has been adopted here for the post-1989 condition of a vanished East German socialism. It allows for an intellectual and social call for help to decolonize socialism from the “monomaniacal [Soviet] manner to the superpower quest for world domination,”92 to decolonize socialism from its state-protocols, its naïve promise to result in communism, its male gazes and patriarchal imperatives, its blindness to see techno-fascism.
Returning to the contemporary moment of political impotence in effectively countering the rise of neofascist propositions not only in Germany but also elsewhere in the world, let me end with a striking Stasi report about a meeting between Joachim Hellwig and Thomas Harlan in a bar in Warsaw on November 4, 1960, years before defa-futurum began to exist.93 At the time, Hellwig had just finished two films, The Heusinger Case (Der Fall Heusinger, 1959), documenting the continued presence of Nazi generals in the West German Bundeswehr after the war, and The Diary of Anne Frank (Ein Tagebuch für Anne Frank, 1959), which collected evidence that high Nazi officials (e.g., Hans Globke) continued to work unscathed and unpunished in West Germany. In Warsaw, Hellwig and Harlan talked about the sensitive information regarding the “preparations for an Auschwitz trial” in Frankfurt/Main that would prosecute Robert Baer, an SS commander from Auschwitz who lived as a businessman in Lusatia after 1945. It would take three more years before the first Auschwitz trials took place in Frankfurt. It was a critical period because the GDR government staged a show trial against Hans Globke to showcasein the accused's absence—the continuity of fascist thought in West Germany after 1945 and to demonstrate the potency of the GDR's jurisdiction. The show trial, of course, had
Page 18 of 29 the purpose of propagating the GDR's antifascist motivation in order to draw attention to West Germany's refascistization, while the GDR itself was struggling at the time to be recognized internationally as a sovereign state. Signed by Lieutenant Reinhardt, the report mentions two former high-ranking Nazis hiding away in the GDR at that time and concludes with the bizarre speculation that West Germany is working on “the disclosure of Nazis living in the GDR with the objective of distracting from the show trial against Globke.”94 Reading the report's narrative, one may conclude that the GDR government was not interested at that time in analyzing its people's entanglement—territorially, mentally, and culturally—with the Nazi era. The report complicates the socialist state's efforts in substantiating, showcasing, and proving West Germany's impotence to grapple with its own past, by disclosing its disregard for its own proximity with fascist structures. The Cold War was not only about competing in technological and economic terms, it was—as we can observe here—also about competing to de-Nazify governmental structures and mental states. Defa-futurum always operated with state support. It was never as independent from DEFA as, for example, the Heynowski & Scheumann Studio (Studio H&S), which was founded around the same time with special permission to participate in international film festivals. Following Hellwig's ambitious cinematic projects of the late 1950s in support of the GDR's strategy to disclose the continued Nazi influence in West Germany, he experimented with new formats in order to construct a (p- 312) cine-futurism in the GDR. However, it seems to me that his ambition for a socialist pop(ulism) did not help futurum to imagine a future that could be larger than the “petit-bourgeois socialism” of the GDR, which Hellwig so much detested. If defa-futurum was initiated to prognosticate a socialist future by reflecting on the present, then this reflection created a condition from which a present mutated into a never-fulfilled future that never shed light on the system's blind spots. By engaging with studies of visual culture, it is therefore possible to conceptualize an East German socialism less as a “satellite” socialism and more as a social form, a media infrastructure, and an unfulfilled future of a specific “disjunctive space of modernity”95 that locates futurum in the Cold War's German-German issue as a symptom of the new world order after 1945. Committing to Bhabha's logic of the time lag inevitably means unblocking binary extremes of creativity by listening to “shared but denied histories between the West and non-West that silently ruffle the surfaces of our daily lives” as Irit Rogoff describes the visual studies' “vision of critique.”96 From today's perspective, futurum invites us to repoliticize this regime of images beyond a representational capacity into the imageless (Abbildlose).97 The future will not be televised, but narrated —for example—through a compilation of different film genres, the “inter-genre film” via a collective “workshop principle.” Thus, in order to release and disarm unease about futu-rum's allegiance to vocabularies of GDR macro-politics while striving for a self-determined position through cinema and cybernetics, it is necessary to animate studies of futurum by a “creative heterogeneity,”98 which offers the possibility to create an “emancipatory ‘present' liberating the discourse of emancipation from binary closures.”99 That is where a discursive temporality may unfold and the work of decolonizing socialism for voicing a complexity of the post-1989 condition may begin.100
Arndt-Briggs, Skyler, and Victoria Rizo Lenshyn. DEFA International: GDR Film and the Global Cold War. Film and the Global Cold War Series. DEFA Film Library. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming 2020.
Augustine, Dolores L. Red Prometheus Engineering and Dictatorship in East Germany, 1945-1990. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
Azoulay, Ariella. Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography. London: Verso, 2012.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Dahlke, Günther, and Lilli Kaufmann. Lenin über den Film ... wichtigste aller Künste. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1970.
Dean, Jodie. “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics.” Cultural Politics (2005) 1, no, 1: 51-74.
(p. 319) Fritzsche, Sonja. “East Germany's ‘Werkstatt Zukunft': Futurology and the Science Fiction Films of ‘defa-futurum'.” German Studies Review 29, no. 2 (May 2006): 367-386.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters—Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Hanakova, Petra. “First Contact or Primal Scene: Communism Meets Real Socialism Meets Capitalism in Early Chechoslovak Science Fiction Cinema.” In Red Alert. Marxist Approach to Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Ewa Mazierska and Alfredo Suppia, 2547. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016.
Hecht, Gabrielle. Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.
Hellwig, Joachim, and Claus Ritter. Erkenntnisse und Probleme, Methoden und Ergebnisse bei der künstlerischen Gestaltung sozialistischer Zukunftsvorstellungen im Film unter der besonderen Berücksichtigung der Erfahrungen der AG defa-futurum. PhD dissertation, Karl-Marx-University, Leipzig, 1975.
Jameson, Fredric. The Ancients and the Postmoderns. London: Verso, 2015.
Klaus, Georg. Wörterbuch der Kybernetik. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1968.
Kolodziejczyk, Dorota, and Christina §andru. Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe. London: Routledge, 2013.
Kovacevic, Natasa. Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe's Borderline Civilization. London: Routledge, 2008.
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Loeser, Franz. Deontik. Planung und Leitung der moralischen Entwicklung. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1966.
Loeser, Franz. Die Abenteuer eines Emigranten. Berlin: Neues Leben, 1980.
Loeser, Franz. Interrogativlogik. Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1968.
Rogoff, Irit. “Studying Visual Culture.” In The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 24-36. London: Routledge, 1998.
Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
(1.) Anna Seghers, Sonderbare Begegnungen (Berlin and Weimer: Aufbau-Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, 1973, 2008), 147.
(2.) Joachim Hellwig and Klaus Ritter, Erkenntnisse und Probleme, Methoden und Ergebnisse bei der künstlerischen Gestaltung sozialistischer Zukunftsvorstellungen im Film unter der besonderen Berücksichtigung der Erfahrungen der AG defa-futurum, PhD dissertation, Karl-Marx-University, Leipzig, 1975. The unpublished dissertation was defended at Sektion Kulturwissenschaft and Germanistik, Karl-Marx-Universität Leipzig, on April 25, 1975. All translations from the dissertation are by the author, if not indicated otherwise.
(3.) Fredric Jameson, The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms (London: Verso, 2015), 255.
(4.) Hellwig and Ritter call defa-futurum a Künstlerische Arbeitsgruppe (KAG), in English “artistic working group.” See Hellwig and Ritter, Erkenntnisse und Probleme, 272.
(5.) Collected in 2018, it might be possible that further files will continue to be found or reconstructed in the future.
(6.) To name but a few, the work of Bauhaus-trained architect Konrad Püschel who developed and realized a Masterplan for the city of Hamhung in North Korea in 1955 after the Korean War; the GDR-architectural projects in Ghana of the 1960s; the films by Iris Gus-ner and other East Germans who studied film directing at the internationalist VGIK in Moscow during the 1960s; the amazing graphic design of AKA ELECTRIC Warenzeichenverband der DDR; the cover design of Lothar Reher for the Spektrum book series publishing international literature; and the Paul-Robeson-Committee of the DDR.
(7.) The historian Sonja Fritzsche indicates defa-futurum's active years as 1971-1980, in Sonja Fritzsche “East Germany's ‘Werkstatt Zukunft': Futurology and the Science Fiction Films of ‘defa-futurum',” German Studies Review 29, no. 2 (May 2006): 367-386. The Wikipedia entry on defa-futurum defines the years as 1971-1991. I propose a period of 1968-1979, bookended by two film projects from the group: Narrations from the New
World (1968) and Das Ding im Schloss (Dir. Gottfried Kolditz, 1979), the latter being the last large-scale DEFA project.
(8.) Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters—Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 7.
(9.) Approximately 170 pages, spanning from 1951 to 1988, could be found in the Stasi Records Agency under the name Joachim Hellwig. It is likely that other files have been destroyed by Stasi employees, specifically after November 1989. At the time, civil rights activists occupied Stasi headquarters to prevent the destruction of surveillance documents. The first such occupations took place in Erfurt and Leipzig on December 4, 1989.
(10.) Gordon, Ghostly Matters, xvi.
(11.) Hellwig and Ritter, Erkenntnisse und Probleme, 272.
(12.) Futurum was preceded by the artistic working group “Profil,” with which Hellwig wrote the script for Journey to the 3rd Millennium (Reise ins 3. Jahrtausend, 1969), a film that remains unmade.
(13.) Hellwig and Ritter, Erkenntnisse und Probleme, 272.
(14.) Simon Spiegel, “Defa-futurum. Der Versuch, die Utopie zu dokumentieren,” Wirklichkeiten und Weltenbauen: Realities and World Building, University of Vienna, September 20-23, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkxG7LTOvXM. Simon Spiegel, “Realsozialistisches Intermezzo: Die Zukunftsfilme der defa-futurum,” in Bilder einer besseren Welt: Die Utopie im nichtfiktionalen Film (Marburg: Schüren Verlag, 2019).
(15.) Jameson, The Ancients and the Postmoderns, 255.
(16.) Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 1.
(17.) See Dolores L. Augustine, Red Prometheus Engineering and Dictatorship in East Germany, 1945-1990 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) and Gabrielle Hecht, Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
(18.) While writing this essay, on August 26, 2018, the rallies of a right-wing mob led to violent conflicts with migrants on Brückenstrasse in Chemnitz, and ultimately to the death of the Cuban-German Daniel Hillig by a Syrian and Iraqi seeking asylum in Germany. The then-President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution doubts the authenticity of the video evidence of the right-wing nationalist antimigrant hunt after Hillig's death, which activated a public debate about right-wing ideologies among German politicians in power.
(19.) Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident, as well as right-wing political parties with seats in governments and splinter groups elsewhere, provide forums to agitate for a nationalistic supremacy based on race, tradition, and religion.
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(20.) Wolf Biermann, “Ihr seid Feiglinge,” Der Spiegel 55 (2017), online version, http:// www.spiegel.de/plus/wolf-biermann-ueber-hass-und-wut-in-ostdeutschland-a-ac767c6a-0c73-4847-b7de-0794c120712e.
(21.) Ibid.
(22.) Jameson, The Ancients and the Postmoderns, 255. (Italics added.)
(23.) Fritzsche, “East Germany's ‘Werkstatt Zukunft,'” 367-386. Also in Sonja Fritzsche, “The East German Disco Film: From Solidarity Short to Music Video,” in DEFA International: GDR Film and the Global Cold War, edited by Skyler Arndt-Briggs and Victoria Rizo Lenshyn. Film and the Global Cold War Series. DEFA Film Library. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming 2020.
(24.) The Hauptabteilung XX (main division), or HA XX of the Ministry for State Security— Stasi (MfS), was commissioned to secure the state apparatus, the church, and the field of culture including the so-called underground. It was an organ of defense. XX/7 was the unit overseeing culture and thus also in charge to observe Hellwig's activities.
(25.) Hellwig and Ritter, Erkenntnisse und Probleme, 205-206.
(26.) The gulf between aspiration and reality regarding gender equality in the GDR has been researched comprehensively in the last years. For examples of this scholarship, see Katja M. Guenther, Making Their Place Feminism after Socialism in Eastern Germany (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Kyle Frackman and Faye Stewart, Gender and Sexuality in East German Film: Intimacy and Alienation (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018); and Anna Kaminsky, Frauen in der DDR (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2017).
(27.) The subject of eroticism, sexuality, femininity, and gender inequality in futurum's productions would demand a further essay. Regarding the self-image of women in the context really existing socialism, see Kristen R. Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (New York: Nation Books, 2018).
(28.) Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (London: Verso, 2012); Meg MacLagan and Yates McKee, Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism (New York: Zone Books, 2012).
(29.) “How is historical agency enacted in the slenderness of narrative? How do we his-toricize the event of the dehistoricized? If, as they say, the past is a foreign country, then what does it mean to encounter a past that is your own country reterritorialized, even terrorized by another?” In Bhabha, The Location, 198.
(30.) The political slogan “Wir sind das Volk” (“We Are the People”) was chanted at the beginning of the demonstrations in Leipzig and elsewhere in 1989/1990, which soon was replaced by “Wir sind ein Volk” (“We Are One People”).
(31.) Matthias Judt, DDR-Geschichte in Dokumenten Beschlüsse, Berichte, interne Mateialien und Alltagszeugnisse (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 1997), 493.
(32.) During the first conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in September 1961, Jawaharlal Nehru as the Prime Minister of India called the German-German division an “international frontier.” See John F. Kennedy Library, Washington, folder JFKPOF-104-004, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-104-004.aspx.
(33.) Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
(34.) Ana Teixeira Pinto, “Capitalism with a Transhuman Face,” in CCC Public Thought, Public Seminar on December 4, 2018, CCC Research-based Master, HEAD Genève, Switzerland.
(35.) The Italian episode “Wohin soll ich gehen?” is directed by documentary filmmaker, scriptwriter, and director Massimo Mida, who worked with Roberto Rossellini in the 1940s, within the tradition of Italian neorealist cinema.
(36.) Document of the folder MfS HA XX AP 13960 92A, dated January 1, 1964, B000071, BStU, Stasi Records Agency, Berlin. Although another document suggests different dates: the Stasi-file MfS HA XX AP 13960 92A reports about travel dates to Ghana from end of 1964 to early 1965, BStU 000072, Stasi Records Agency, Berlin.
(37.) In Ghanaian city of Tema, the Leipzig-based VEB Zentrales Projektierungsbüro “Polygraph” supervised the construction of the governmental printing house from 1962 to 1964 (inauguration on September 21). Bruno Flierl, “Bauten der DDR im Ausland,” in Deutsche Baukunst (Berlin: Deutsche Bauakademie, 1964), 540-543.
(38.) Described in the dissertation as “middle Asia, Khiva and Buchara with eternal gems of Islamic architecture; but also with houses made from adobe, which was governed by ‘insha-allah' and sultans and califates.” In Hellwig and Ritter, Erkenntnisse und Probleme, 140.
(39.) Ibid., 139.
(40.) The Italian crew seems to be comprehensively involved, with Bruno Baratti as coscriptwriter next to futurum's Joachim Hellwig and Hans Oley, with Giuseppe Pinori as director of photography, next to futurum's Wolfgang Randel, as well as with Massimo Mida next to Richard Cohn-Vossen as directors. Joachim Hellwig appears as an artistic director of the whole project.
(41.) Simon Spiegel, Bilder einer besseren Welt: Die Utopie im nichtfiktionalen Film (Marburg: Schüren Verlag, 2019).
(42.) Hellwig and Ritter, Erkenntnisse und Probleme, 142.
(43.) Chris Marker participated in the Internationale Leipziger Dokumentar- und Kurzfilmwoche für Kino und Fernsehen, or DOK Leipzig, with Le Joli Mai (1963), which was awarded the Golden Dove Award. Thus, East German filmmakers had a chance to learn about Marker's work.
(44.) Hellwig and Ritter, Erkenntnisse und Probleme, 89. See also Petra Hanâkovâ, “First Contact or Primal Scene,” in Ewa Mazierska, Red Alert. Marxist Approach to Science Fiction Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016).
(45.) Hellwig and Ritter, Erkenntnisse und Probleme, 141.
(46.) Ibid., 146.
(47.) Ibid., 155-156. Translated by Gerrit Jackson.
(48.) Hellwig and Ritter, Die Welt der Gespenster, 1972.
(49.) André Bazin quoted in Nora M. Alter, The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 127.
(50.) Hellwig and Ritter, Erkenntnisse und Probleme, 205-206.
(51.) Ibid., 69. Translated by Gerrit Jackson.
(52.) Ibid., 93.
(53.) Disco-Film 28: City, Träume, directed by Jürgen Steinheisser, dramaturgy by Joachim Hellwig, 1979, GDR, 6.08 min., is an outstanding example of documentary footage with psychedelic animation of cityscapes.
(54.) Signed by Lieutenant Kolbe, Hauptabteilung XX/7, October 31, 1973, MfS HA XX AP 13960 92A, BStU 000108.
(55.) Four-page report by Hellwig, a kind of justifying letter to Wolfgang Kernicke, then director of the DEFA Studio for Short Film, on April 24, 1973. MfS HA XX AP 13960 92A, BStU 000101.
(56.) Four-page report by Hellwig, BStU 000109.
(57.) Most likely, films from the GDR were generally not allowed to be screened in Oberhausen, similar to the situation for Prix FUTURA 73 in West Berlin from March 28 to April 6, 1973, when Hellwig and Ritter visited. In his report (addressee not clear from the document), Hellwig remarks: “Nevertheless, one cannot help but think that also the GDR could participate in international events of this kind, for which we have to be prepared.” File: MfS AP 13.960/92./BStU 000096-98.
(58.) Andreas Dresen, Gundermann (2018), 127 min.
(59.) Most likely, there were more reports written about Hellwig, but much had been destroyed in Autumn 1989 by the Stasi itself.
(60.) File: MfS AP 13.960/92. BStU 000105-000107.
(61.) Bhabha, The Location, 184.
(62.) See Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Walter Mignolo and Wanda Nanibush, “Thinking and Engaging with the Decolonial," Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 45 (2016): 24-29; W Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
(63.) For examples, see David Chioni-Moore, “Is the Post- in Post-Colonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique," PMLA 116:1 (Special Issue: Globalizing Literary Studies): 111-128; Boris Buden, “Ce este postcolonial in postcomunism?" Su-plimentul de cultura 144 (2017): 8-14; Dorota Kolodziejczyk and Cristina §andru, Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 2013).
(64.) Derek Gregory, Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004). Amie Siegel, DDR/DDR, film, 2008, HD, 135 min., color/sound.
(65.) Natasa Kovacevic, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe's Borderline Civilization (London: Routledge, 2008). Vedrana Velickovic, “Belated Alliances? Tracing the Intersections between Postcolonialism and Postcommunism," Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48, no. 2 (2012): 164-175, doi:10.1080/17449855.2012.658247.
(66.) Building on resources of postcolonial studies and maintaining a cautious skepticism, a decolonial analysis seeks avoiding the imposition of one (postcolonial) theory about a region, for example, the GDR territory, by committing to (a) the historical dimension and (b) the contemporary problems of case studies.
(67.) Only the GDR could have been a political diplomatic partner for Ghana at that time —and vice versa—considering both Ghana's commitment to state socialism after independence from British colonialism and the GDR's commitment to socialist internationalism, particularly after the Afrika-Jahr in 1960 in the name of seeking international recognition.
(68.) Organized by Barton Byg, Skyler Arndt-Briggs, and Evan Torner for the DEFA Film Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst, held at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
(69.) Doreen Mende, The Itinerant: On the Delayed Arrival of Images from International Solidarity with Palestine That Resonate Towards a Geopolitical Exigency in Exhibiting Processes under Globalising Conditions, PhD dissertation, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2015.
(70.) Estelle Blascke, Armin Linke, and Doreen Mende, Double Bound Economies: Reading a Photographic Archive from the GDR (1967-1990) (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2013).
(71.) See Adriana Lettrari, Christian Nestler, and Nadja Troi-Boeck, Die Generation der Wendekinder: Elaboration eines Forschungsfeldes (Heidelberg: Springer, 2016). Wolfgang Engler and Jana Hensel, Wer wir sind: Die Erfahrung, ostdeutsch zu sein (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2018).
(72.) During a Q&A session after Diawara's talk “Photography and Fashion in Mali, “Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo, October 25, 2013.
(73.) The phone conversation with Hellwig took place in December 2013. Due to his wife's weak health at that time, we agreed to meet at his house near Berlin only during the summer of 2014. When I called him during the second week of August to arrange a meeting, his wife reported Joachim Hellwig's death, just a month prior.
(74.) Beside Stanislaw Lem, the Strugatzky Brothers and Alberto Cavalcanti served as important references in cinema, as well as Maxim Gorki, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx, of course. We also learn about Kobo Ade, Jewgeni Brandis, Vera Graaf, M. G. Jarosewskij, Georg Klaus, Aron E. Kobrinski, Franz Loeser, Gitta Nickel, German Nedoschiwin, Boris Polewoi, and Claus Träger.
(75.) Franz Loeser (1924-1990), son of a Jewish-German family, left Germany for England as a child after his father was killed on the street during “Reichskristallnacht." After serving the British Army, he studied Political Theory at University of Minnesota, where he became an activist in the communist student movement during the McCarthy era, supporting the African American professor Forrest Oran Wiggins and the African American singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson. On account of his political activities, Loeser had to leave the United States and resettled again in England, where he became the president of the National Paul Robeson Committee. Thanks to his firm commitment to communism, he relocated to the GDR in the late 1950s. However, in 1982, he defected in New York during a lecture tour, citing GDR's militarized ideology of a one-party state socialism. See Franz Loeser, Die Abenteuer eines Emigranten (Berlin: Neues Leben, 1980). Franz Loeser, Die unglaubwürdige Gesellschaft, Quo vadis DDR? (Cologne: Bund Verlag, 1984).
(76.) Franz Loeser, Interrogativlogik (Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1968), 11. All quotes translated by the author, if not indicated otherwise.
(77.) Ibid., 17.
(78.) Ibid., 292. Translated by Gerrit Jackson.
(79.) Ibid. The “logics of interrogation" can be understood as a method to calculate, plan, and develop the moral development of the human under conditions of algorithmic communism. Franz Loeser's ideological commitment to communism comes from antifascist aspirations: his parents were victims of the Holocaust. More than once in his life he was exiled to another country.
(80.) Ibid., 21.
(81.) See also Franz Loeser, Deontik. Planung und Leitung der moralischen Entwicklung (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1966). In this book, Loeser develops his approach to deontic logics, specifically in the context of Marxist reasoning, to rationalize the work on morality by considering the principle of class struggle. This work led to the invention of a “logics of interrogation.”
(82.) Patricia Ticineto Clough, Karen Gregory, Benjamin Haber, and R. Joshua Scannell, “The Datalogical Turn,” in Non-Representational Methodologies Re Envisioning Research, edited by Phillip Vannini (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 146-164.
(83.) Loeser, Interrogativlogik, 21.
(84.) Hellwig and Ritter, Erkenntnisse und Probleme, 81.
(85.) Jodie Dean, “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics,” Cultural Politics 1, no. 1 (2005): 51-74.
(86.) Hellwig and Ritter, Erkenntnisse und Probleme, 81.
(87.) Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, translated by S. W Ryazanskaya (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977).
(88.) Hellwig and Ritter significantly chose the term “dramaturg,” which translates in English as “dramatic adviser,” and is closer to the language of theater, but would be insufficiently translated as the word “scriptwriter.” The figure of the “dramaturg” here is closer to the author of the script who also provides the ultimate instructions to produce the film.
(89.) See Günther Dahlke and Lilli Kaufmann, Lenin über den Film ... wichtigste aller Künste (Henschelverlag: Berlin, 1970).
(90.) The research on data, manipulation, and politics has increased enormously in the last few years. For examples, see Susan Schuppli, “Deadly Algorithms: Can Legal Codes Hold Software Accountable for Code That Kills?” Radical Philosophy 187 (2014): 2-8; Hannes Grassegger und Mikael Krogerus, “The Data That Turned the World Upside Down,” Motherboard (January 28, 2017), https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win; Andrew Smith, “Franken-Algorithms: The Deadly Consequences of Unpredictable Code,” The Guardian (August 30, 2018), https:// www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/29/coding-algorithms-frankenalgos-program-danger.
(91.) Published in 1994, The Location of Culture was written while witnessing the aftermath of the breakdown of Soviet-style state socialism, with its attendant consequences for socialist societies in the tricontinental world of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
(92.) Young-Sun Hong, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2.
(93.) File: MfS AP 13.960/92. BStU 000036.
(94.) See Kurt-Jung Alsen, Die Bilder des Zeugen Schattmann (The Pictures of Witness Schattmann), 329 min., four TV episodes, 1972.
(95.) Bhabha, The Location, 342.
(96.) Irit Rogoff, “Studying Visual Culture,” in The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 1998), 24-36.
(97.) Ibid., 145.
(98.) Ibid.
(99.) Bhabha, The Location, 266.
(100.) The author would like to thank Barton Byg for inviting her to participate in the Summer Film Institute 2011, without which she would not have become familiar with the work of defa-futurum. Furthermore, she thanks Kodwo Eshun, Sven Lütticken, and Marina Vishmidt for valuable comments on earlier versions of the text; Aga Skrodzka for her editorial focus as well as Ted Fendt and Evan Torner for language editing; Alima de Graaf for researching documents in the Bundesarchiv Berlin and Film University Konrad Wolf Babelsberg; Stephan Bachtejeff-Mentzel of the Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitdienstes der ehemaligen DDR for meticulous tracing of files; and the students and colleagues at the CCC Research Master of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD Genève.
Doreen Mende
Doreen Mende, Associate Professor in Visual Arts, HEAD Geneva University of Art and Design
The Visitation of the Idea: Badiou on Film and Communism a
Rohan Kalyan
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Oct 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.36
This article discusses the life and work of the French philosopher Alain Badiou in the context of a broader meditation on the relationship between film, philosophy, and communism. It draws in large part from the author's own experiences codirecting and coproducing a feature-length documentary film about this octogenarian communist philosopher. It further juxtaposes this film with several other films on communism, as well as their analyses by Badiou himself and other leftist critics. Ultimately, by foregrounding the historical intersection between film, communism, and critical thought, the article argues that in the process of making the documentary Badiou, the author became an ambivalent participant in the production of late-communist visual culture.
Keywords: film, documentary, philosophy, Alain Badiou, communism, late communism, lateral montage
A truth cannot be a German truth. A truth cannot be a French truth. A truth cannot be a white truth, or a black truth. A truth is something which transits from a world to another world. And there is a fundamental relationship between the Idea of communism and the Idea of truth. Because if you cannot have any truth, there is no hope to unify, really, all humanity under the same Idea. There is no possibility to be uniquely under the law of Being. Always you return to differences of existence. And it is why a truth is universal.
This is the point, the radical point. The very maxim of communism is not, first, no private property and so on. All that is a consequence in some sense. Possible consequence, material consequence. The point is the recognition of humanity as such. That is, radical equality.
—From Badiou (2018)1
This text comes to us in the form of a lecture in the final act of our film Badiou (2018). The film examines the life and philosophy of the communist philosopher Alain Badiou. By this point in the film the viewer has already gone through Badiou's major life events—his birth in Morocco in 1937, coming of age in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, his participation in the student-worker uprisings of May 1968, and finally, his twilight years as a nomadic public intellectual, traveling the world and giving lectures on his philosophy and views on politics, art, love, and mathematics.
Badiou narrates this passage just after a scene in which he shows us a photograph depicting his political work with undocumented migrant workers (sans papier) in France. This “militant photo,” as he calls it, depicts Badiou with his partner Judith Balso (two white bodies) sitting at a table with six black African workers in a house. Speaking over (p- 321) the photograph, he explains the solidarity that he, an intellectual, feels with them, uneducated workers coming from Mali and Cameroon. Badiou describes the moment as “something glorious. It is something exceptional, something remarkable.” As we are about to find out, he associates this experience of solidarity and comradeship with the Idea of communism, its universal and radical truth. This was something he first felt in May 1968. For Badiou, his “philosophy is completely a result of this experience.”
Then we come to the scene in question: “A truth cannot be a German truth. A truth cannot be a French truth. A truth cannot be a white truth, or a black truth ... ” Accompanying these words are a set of images that explore the multiplicity of the picture that Ba-diou placed in front of the camera previously. The montage functions “laterally,” cutting across different regions of the picture in close detail, emphasizing the contrasting pigments of the people in the photo, their different bodily comportments and expressions. Toward the end of this montage sequence we begin to hear the distant rumblings of a large orchestra. It is playing the closing lines of Richard Wagner's Faust Overture (1855). The music pulls the montage away (once again, laterally) from the picture of Badiou and the workers and pushes it in a different cinematic direction. "The truth is something which transits from a world to another world.”
Now we are positioned inside a metro train car in contemporary Paris. We are looking out the rear window, perceiving an underground station with two smooth lines of tracks gliding underneath. Soon we are enveloped in the darkness of a subway tunnel, only to emerge above ground, now looking out the side window at the passing cityscape. As the music builds, we cross the Seine, then pass over a busy road and a large, oddly shaped office building. "And there is a fundamental relationship between the Idea of communism and the Idea of truth.” Slowly we begin to descend underneath the city once again. The train car allows us to perceive the transition from above ground to below ground, the threshold between lightness and darkness, outside and inside. Now we are back in the tunnel. It looks like a darkened cave (this is significant, as we will see). The perspective changes from the train's exterior to its interior. “And it is why a truth is universal ... ” We see the inside of an empty train car, then a multitude of anonymous riders getting on and off, jostling for space, coexisting among, if not with, their fellow travelers. “The point is the recognition of humanity as such. That is, radical equality."
We are visiting with the Idea, the Idea of communism as politics of radical equality. This makes our film Badiouian not merely in content but in form. For the concept of visitation is central to the poetics of film in Badiou. As he writes:
The entire effect of this poetics is to allow the Idea to visit the sensible. I insist on the fact that the Idea is not incarnated in the sensible. Cinema belies the classical thesis according to which art is the sensible form of the Idea. The visitation of the sensible by the Idea does not endow the latter with a body. The Idea is not separa-ble—it exists only for cinema in its passage. The Idea is itself visitation.2
Truth in cinema is the visitation of the Idea. It cannot be objectified or totally captured in any particular image we see or sound we hear, isolated from the movement through
(p. 322) which the Idea presents itself. The movement itself becomes the medium of the Idea's expression. Badiou insists that this is how the cinema thinks, making it unique as a form of art: “it is not what is said in the film, it's not how the plot is organized that counts; it's the very movement that transmits the film's thought.”3 In our film the Idea of communism is embodied both in Badiou's philosophy (through what he calls a “truth procedure”) and in his biography (as a “body-in-truth”). Both are movements in their own right. But in the scene described earlier the representation works more indirectly. The scene is one of many instances in the film where the Idea of communism pays us a visit. Here, it is moving along with the train, transiting among the passengers, across virtual (cinematic) and actual (urban) space, passing in and through the words Badiou says and the notes of Wagner's musical score. But this truth is not objectified in any one of the specific words, images, or sounds in this scene. The words were originally recorded in an entirely different context, that of a series of academic lectures for a public audience. And the images of Paris are just historical inscriptions, particular to their time and place. Finally, truth is not in the music we hear; we cut off the last 240 seconds of the Wagner piece and added it to our digital montage. Instead, the universal is more fleeting and mobile and for all that more potent and radical in cinema. It is not imposed from above (as in transcendental truth), but rather emerges immanently from the cinematic image itself, allowing thought to emerge and difference/ change/ transformation to become imaginable, and thus, possible. Truth in cinema, as Badiou writes, is about the visitation of the Idea. And in this particular scene it is about the contingent combination—the music, the words, the images, the movement—how these elements come together, how each raises the power of the other individual moving parts, while also amplifying that of the whole. The visitation becomes an invitation to think.
At least, this was our hope and intention as filmmakers. And it is why we put this sequence all the way at the end, to give the viewer something to go home and keep thinking with.
This essay serves as an addendum of sorts to our film Badiou, which was codirected and coproduced by Gorav Kalyan and myself from 2014 to 2018 (see Figure 13.1). But this essay also continues to keep thinking with the film. I look back on the filmmaking experience, offering a few juxtapositions with various films and philosophers that in part influenced our approach to making Badiou. Ultimately I argue that in the process of making this particular film about this particular subject, we were ambivalent participants in the production of late-communist visual culture: a communist film made in the long aftermath of the fall of communism.
Film capture © Gorav Kalyan and Rohan Kalyan
For someone like Badiou, the last two centuries have produced only one political Idea, that is, an Idea worthy of unconditional fidelity to its universal truth. Badiou's Idea of communism is both simple and complex. It is about radical human equality and (p- 323) collective emancipation through politics (that is, through ideological and mass struggle). In this sense, it is a hypothesis that can never really be proven false once and for all, even if it is tested over and over again in the political field. For here even “failed tests,” like that of Stalin's Russia or Mao's China (to take the most famous—or infamous—examples), are not final indictments of the Idea itself. Rather, “failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis, provided that the hypothesis is not abandoned.”4 In this sense, even historical failures of communism provide lessons for future struggles.
Badiou continues by complicating the picture somewhat, adding three mutually interwoven, yet analytically distinct, elements. All three “are needed for the operation of the Idea of communism.”5 An interesting thought exercise might be to identify these three elements in our film. Following are some rudimentary definitions:
1. Politics: that communism is a political idea should hardly be surprising to anyone. But for Badiou it is the political Idea. Radical equality and universal human emancipation are the only true universals worth striving for in politics. For its committed militants the political Idea of communism serves as a kind of regulative ideal through
Page 4 of 18 which present-day injustices can be perceived and used as rallying calls for the pursuit of progressive change. To put this in Lacanian terms (and Badiou insists on the relevance of psychoanalysis for understanding capitalist ideology and resistance to it), the universal truth of the political Idea is approximate to the order of “the real,” which in Lacan, is tantamount to saying “the impossible.”6 But the Idea's traumatic impossibility in the political scene is precisely what necessitates that it be continually pursued by ideologically and organizationally committed militants of its truth. When it comes to truth, (p- 324) impossibility is not the same thing as futility. Politics is the mediation of the (im)possible.
2. History: But for Badiou the historical context in which the political Idea operates matters deeply. Here, history is about the local situatedness that a truth encounters, translates, and transforms into its own becoming universal logic. For we cannot hope to institute communism's radical thesis, of unconditional human equality, without an understanding of concrete differences that shape the texture and dynamics of equality claims. In Lacanian terms, this constitutes the symbolic order through which any political subjects pursuing equality and emancipation signify their claims and engage in concrete, local struggles. But these claims, if they are to be truly progressive ones, must always travel in the same direction, from the particular to the universal. Such an emergent, militant universalism is not imposed from above but emerges through concrete struggles, including negotiations and discussions (i.e., movement politics) among historically situated collectives and organizations. Thus, the movement of the political Idea comes into fruition in the movement of the collective subject of historical struggle.
3. Subjectivity: this brings us to the last of the three elements that Badiou binds to the Idea of communism, that of subjectivity. The subjective decision and the desire to pursue the radical consequences of the political Idea of communism, to intervene in a given local symbolic order in the name of the impossible real, and to remain in fidelity to the impossible (because unimaginable) truth that the real represents, all this requires the mediation of a militant or ideologically committed subject. And in Lacanian terms this is where the imaginary order comes in. It is always located in-between the (impossible/virtual) real and the (possible/actual) symbolic orders. Subjectivity for Badiou is the decision to remain in fidelity to the Idea and requires a certain amount of courage (and even defensiveness) to ward off the anxiety of living in capital's vacuous, precarious, and destructive symbolic orders.
Politics, history, and subjectivity work interdependently as an operation that is continually in process. This is what makes the Idea of communism not merely a truth but what Badiou calls a “truth procedure,” a process of transformation and realization that changes the very conditions from which it emerges.7 This process is political (oriented toward a universal truth), historical (particularized to local coordinates, material realities), and subjective (engaged in transforming concrete individuals into subjects through the mediation of revolutionary events).
In Badiou's philosophical system, politics forms but one of four “conditions” of philosophy. It is philosophy's unique task to analyze and evaluate the truths that these four procedures continually advance, to apply their universal relevance to the various worlds that subjects inhabit. The four conditions are the truth procedures of politics, love, mathematics, and art. All four begin with events that are unpredictable and unexpected: a revolt, an interpersonal encounter, a scientific discovery, an aesthetic creation. (p- 325) We deal with each of these truth procedures and the events that inaugurate them in our film. But since ours is a cinematic treatment, it is the artistic truth procedure that attains prominence in Badiou. Within the space of art, truths are singular and immanent to particular works and media.8 But for Badiou, cinema holds a special significance as a generator of singular, immanent truths. The shorthand for this complex process is “the visitation of the Idea.”
Cinema as an art form holds a special place, according to Badiou, for several reasons. First, cinema is by necessity an art of the contemporary, whatever time period we are talking about. Cinema not only comments (consciously and unconsciously) on contemporary situations coeval with its long twentieth-century development, but it also has the ability to conjure past situations, as well as distant situations, into the “here” and “now” of the audience. As Badiou comments,
cinema is a profound art form—hybrid but profound nonetheless—we learn quickly and in depth that we're contemporaries of Kazakhstanis or Bangladeshis. This doesn't have anything to do with documentary footage; on the contrary, it's usually fictional films, which are quite complex and remote from us by definition, that are the ones we learn the most from.9
Yet, if cinema is a hybrid art form, it is also for that reason more “impure” than the other arts. For Badiou, however, this impurity is more a strength than a weakness, for it frees the cinema to borrow freely and unabashedly from the other arts—theater, music, literature, dance, painting, sculpture, other films and audiovisual media—and to fold their heterogeneous elements into its own creative praxis. Badiou's formulation of this thought is evocative:
It is effectively impossible to think cinema outside of something like a general space in which we could grasp its connection to the other arts. Cinema is the seventh art in a very particular sense. It does not add itself to the other six, while remaining on the same level as them. Rather, it implies them—cinema is the “plus-one” of the arts. It operates on the other arts, using them as its starting point, in a movement that subtracts them from themselves.10
In Badiou, this is what we were trying to accomplish by inserting Wagner's music into the scene about the Idea of communism. For even if we just used a small fragment of the original piece, its effect nevertheless was to amplify the images and words it accompanied in a uniquely cinematic way. “All the arts flow through cinema,” Badiou writes, and in the case of music, cinema raises this art form “to a simultaneously impure and heightened formal power that affords it a new timelessness.”11 In Badiou, Richard Wagner, long asso
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ciated with German fascism, is “impurely” subtracted from that context and added into a radically different one: his sweeping musical score moves dramatically with the Idea of communism and amplifies its affective capacity.
(p. 326) In addition to its contemporariness and impurity, cinema as an art form stands out from the others because of the intensity with which it conjures truth through its audiovisual movements. Of all the arts, Badiou writes, cinema
thinks all by itself and produces truth. A film is a proposition in thought, a movement of thought, a thought connected, so to speak, to its artistic disposition. How does this thought exist and get transmitted? It is transmitted through the experience of viewing the film, through its movement. It's not what's said in the film, it's not how the plot is organized that counts; it's the very movement that transmits the film's thought ... .Of all the arts, this is certainly the one that has the ability to think, to produce the most absolutely undeniable truth.12
This undeniable truth is the visitation of the Idea. It is not the subjective representation or objective embodiment of the Idea but its movement through the film, its passage from frame to frame, cut to cut, between audio and visual materials, actual and virtual spaces, between light and shadow, interior and exterior, that intersubjective space between screen and audience.
We get a good sense of the power of such visitations in a film that Badiou particularly likes, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's 1972 film All's Well (Tout va bien). This film takes place in the post-May 1968 years in France, or what Badiou calls in our film “the red years” (see Figure 13.2). It is a film that has close resonance with Badiou's own life story and philosophical experience. Here I present parts of Badiou's analysis of this film in order to suggest an aesthetic and political influence on our own cinematic thinking in Badiou.
Film capture © Gorav Kalyan and Rohan Kalyan
(p. 327) All's Well contains the three main ingredients for political cinema, according to Badiou. First, it is contemporary with its own times, covering the themes of working-class politics, the role of intellectuals in revolutionary struggle, and the beginning of the end of the revolutionary fervor in France that began with May 1968 but was beginning to show signs of waning four years later. More specifically, the film focuses on a wildcat strike at a food-processing factory. The event is witnessed first-hand by an American reporter and her French husband, a commercial filmmaker. The strike is led by a group of radical workers who disobey directives from their union leaders and take over the factory, holding the manager against his will. Thus, the film is contemporary with the situation on the left in post-1968 France, with apparent divisions among workers, workers' organizations, and radicals regarding the best means to organize collective action and progressive change.
Second, the film is notable for how it employs the “plus-one” formula that Badiou specifically identifies with cinema. Here the additional art form that the film borrows from and incorporates into its own thinking is that of the theater. Indeed, All's Well stands out in Godard's larger corpus of work for its innovative use of theatrical sets and explicit stage design to show a visually striking cutout view of the factory under siege by the striking workers. The view diagrammatically shows the different rooms and spaces in which the main action in the first half of the film unfolds. More pertinently, the view allows Godard and Gorin to show the workers as one mass that are nevertheless partitioned into different camps, showing us both the alienation of work space and the fragmented left, on the one hand, but also the potential for unification, on the other. The plus-one addition of theater into All's Well's aesthetic structure also allows for a Brechtian-style of intervention that features scenes in which characters address the camera directly, delivering long didactic monologues and ironical commentaries on the situations and events unfolding in the film.
All's Well is a film with only secondary concern for presenting the main narrative in clear and concise terms. For as is typical in Godard and Gorin's films (both in collaborations and separate projects), the narrative and character development are often muted, creating uniquely cinematic spaces for nonchronological mediations. While the film is notable for employing two well-known movie stars, the American actor Jane Fonda and the French actor Yves Montand, and the story between these two “protagonists” drives what is supposed to be the main narrative of the film, these plot points and characters become gradually subordinated to the nonsynchronous wildcat actions of the striking workers. The latter ultimately emerge as the real protagonists of the film. This becoming-collective subject, through its impossible and untimely movements, constitutes the visitation of the Idea of communism in this film.
Looking at the film from Badiou's perspective, one might note that this visitation is most striking in the penultimate scene. There is a long lateral tracking shot inside a modern supermarket. The single take unfolds over the course of several minutes. There is no voice-over narrative, nor any direct dialogue between specific actors. Instead, we only hear the cacophony of the supermarket space, as the camera, positioned behind the
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cashiers, moves smoothly and deliberately from left to right, crossing over several isles
(p. 328) and sections of the store before coming back. It repeats this back-and-forth movement several times. All the while we see and hear the action that unfolds at some remove on the other side of the cash registers. A group of young radical activists come running into the supermarket to “liberate” the consumer products, pushing the customers to exit the store without paying. Before long they (and some of the customers) get into confrontations with the police and cause a riot in the previously orderly commercial retail space. The movements and distances tracked by the mobile camera within the space of the supermarket, the depth of field between the action in the store and the camera at some remove, between the relative tranquility that preceded the riot and the chaos that ensued, all these participate in clearing out a cinematic space for the Idea of communism to pay a visit. It is not so much about the specificity of the actions undertaken here (whether we agree or not with the young radicals), as it is about the emancipatory potential of the action itself, its ability to change things in the name of a collective becoming. The mobile camera, the movement of the radicals, the confrontation with the police, all these present us with a visitation that forces us to think about something that was unimaginable before.
Badiou tends to privilege such didactic operations in art. This is perhaps why he is so taken with All's Well, which does little to hide or make subtle its political intentions. Yet in some ways this didactic approach seems to belie the radical implications of the concept of visitation that Badiou ascribes to truth in cinema. The purpose of the didactic operation in art is to instill in the audience a lesson that is unambiguous and clear. It is also one that lasts. Yet this “lasting” is dependent on a certain immutability in the lesson. The concept of visitation, on the other hand, seems to privilege a process of movement and change, of perpetual transformation. Far from “lasting” over a given duration of time, visitation changes the experience of time itself, rendering time otherwise. For truth as visitation is contingent on at least two things: a limited duration (an encounter) and a place amenable to the visit. In other words, a visit is precisely what is impermanent and constantly inviting change. As filmmakers, we were continually negotiating between two positions: Badiou's didactic take on art and our own instincts which ran counter to such didacticism. In wrestling with these concerns, we were also making a contribution to late-communist visual culture.
Growing up in the United States during the Reagan years and their aftermath, we were bombarded with anti-communist visual culture at all times and from all directions. A formative memory I have regarding the visitation of the Idea of communism in popular visual culture was when I was a teenager and watched an episode of the 1990s American sitcom Seinfeld. In an episode called “The Race” (originally aired December 15, 1994), the character named Kramer, known for his unpredictable behavior and “alternative” lifestyle choices, suddenly takes to communism after meeting a labor organizer named (p- 329) Ned Isakoff.13 Kramer is temporarily employed as a shopping mall “Santa Claus” during
Page 9 of 18 the holiday season, and he soon attempts to radicalize his coworkers, convincing his friend Mickey, who is playing Santa's “Elf,” to demand better working conditions from the mall. But, quite hilariously, Kramer also attempts to indoctrinate the children visiting Santa to ask for toys.
KID: I want a racing car set.
KRAMER: Don't you see, kid? You're being bamboozled. These capitalist fat cats are inflating the profit margin and reducing your total number of toys.
The child, rather than innocently heeding the words of this ostensibly wise, old man, instead reports him to the authorities, having been already indoctrinated by the anti-communist ideology of the United States:
KID: Hey, this guy's a COMMIE!
MICKEY: Hey, kid, quiet. Where did a nice little boy like you learn such a bad word like that? Huh?
Growing up in the ideological center of the capitalist world meant growing up in a place where the hauntology of communism was strangely ubiquitous.14 That is, only in a country as ideologically committed to capitalism as America would the specters of communism need to be so routinely conjured away and exorcised, especially in popular visual culture. My brother and I, eager viewers of Seinfeld in the 1990s, inherited the show's intellectual ambivalence toward the Idea of communism. To take communism seriously, you had to be someone like Kramer, zany and odd and different from everybody else. This, of course, is in direct contrast with Badiou's argument that the Idea of communism is not only universally rational but universally relevant. The Idea transits from one world to another, and across all possible and impossible worlds. For Badiou, it is the universal political Idea, the only one that really matters.
“America is a monster!” Badiou exclaims in one scene that we unfortunately had to cut from the final version of Badiou. It is a shame in some ways because the scene is a humorous one. We put together a montage of Badiou visiting “typical” American locations, including a Walmart megastore just outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Badiou walks through various isles of the big-box store (which looks a lot like the supermarket in All's Well), observing the rows of products with slightly restrained and bemused disgust. He gazes blankly at a television screen showing a continuously running advertisement for Walmart. Then the camera pans to a wider shot that shows Badiou standing in front of a wall of digital TVs all showing the exact same thing. In the center of global capitalism, America and Walmart are places with no Idea of being, of existence-as-such, except existence through the mediation of money and commodities. “And the world knows perfectly the value of money. But, for us, it's the value of the human being which is the question, not the value of money.” This is how Badiou puts it in another scene, one we actually decided to keep in the final cut and which appears near the very end of the film.15
(p. 330) At our most insecure moments (and filmmaking is full of them), we felt sure that Badiou saw us—two Indian American filmmaking brothers—as “little monsters,” always chasing him around with cameras and microphones and pestering him for more interviews. Who were we, two brown, bearded guys that never really took communism seriously as a political ideology, to make a film about perhaps the world's most famous and influential communist philosopher working today? A certain amount of ambivalence and doubt was built into our project from the outset.
We were originally invited by our friend Jaden Adams (who is co-producer of the film) to shoot a week-long lecture series titled “Badiou on Badiou” in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 2014. The lecture series featured Badiou speaking on his life and philosophy, and the relationship between the two. As we planned to shoot the lecture series, my brother Gorav and I decided to read up on Badiou, about whom we both knew very little. As we got immersed in the material, we became increasingly drawn both to his ideas as well as his larger persona. This attraction was only enhanced through our direct encounters with him in Grand Rapids (where we shot the lectures as well as many hours of sit-down interviews and b-roll footage), and later in Paris (where we did more of the same, albeit in his home city). Although a certain estrangement persisted between us, “little filmmaking monsters,” and our biographical/ philosophical/ cinematic subject, this space of estrangement became a productive site of ambivalence that informed many of our creative decisions when it came to thinking about our larger film.
Didacticism was not going to be the answer. Instead, we turned to an approach that reflected our own sense of openness to the encounter, uncertainty, and ambiguity, to coexist and move with the visitation of the Idea without closing it up in a timeless lesson. We wanted to turn the Idea of visitation less into a lesson to last for eternity and more into an invitation to think some more, to think differently than before. To think in a different time.
In closing this essay, I turn to another inspiration for Badiou, the documentary film The Last Bolshevik (1992), directed by Godard and Gorin's fellow French New Wave filmmaker Chris Marker. The film is beautifully analyzed by Badiou's contemporary Jacques Ranciere.16 Both Marker's paradoxical visitation with the Idea of communism in this film, as well as Ranciere's analysis of this ambivalent cinematic treatment, informed how we went about making Badiou.
In his book Film Fables, Ranciere uses Marker's film on the communist filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin (a communist as out of place in Stalin's Russia as Badiou is in contemporary neoliberal France) to ask two questions of high relevance to our film: what is documentary as a genre of fiction? And what is the relationship between film (as a key aspect of visual culture) and communism?
Ranciere thinks about these questions through the paradoxical memorialization of Medvedkin that The Last Bolshevik enacts.17 Medvedkin was a little-known Soviet filmmaker who was a contemporary of Vertov and Eisenstein and who passed away during the Perestroika. He was largely unknown outside of the USSR. Inside it, his films were mostly banned by the Soviet censors and thus largely unseen by the public. As Ranciere argues,
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however, the point of Marker's film is not “to preserve Medvedkin's (p- 331) memory, but to create it.”18 This is but a more rarified expression of what all documentary film theoretically does: not the preservation of actual memories but the creation of virtual ones. For Ranciere, memory is not the subjective storehouse of individual recollections. Otherwise there would be no such thing as collective or institutional memory. Rather, memory is socially constructed as “an orderly collection, a certain arrangement of signs, traces, and monuments.”19 Memory is an archive of documents, both real and imagined, discursive and material. But these documents do not speak for themselves. They must be made to tell a story, and thus to create a “fictional” account of the past. This is where Ranciere gets his concept of “documentary fiction,” which he argues Chris Marker uses to great effect in his film on Medvedkin. Here, “fiction means using the means of art to construct a ‘system' of represented actions, assembled forms, and internally coherent signs.”20 Both documentary and narrative films partake in the construction of fictions that look more or less coherent and feel more or less “real.” Yet documentary and narrative films differ in how they treat the real. As Ranciere points out, the “difference between [the two genres] isn't that the documentary sides with the real against the inventions of fiction, it's just that the documentary instead of treating the real as an effect to be produced, treats it as a fact to be understood.” This gives documentary a certain artistic leniency that fictional narratives do not usually enjoy, constrained as the latter are by the “real of fiction that ensures the mirror recognition between the audience in the theaters and the figures on the screen, and between the figures on the screen and those of the social imaginary.”21 Fictional narrative films often must turn to easy stereotypes, recognizable figurations, or simplistic representations of places and times in order to establish the broadly intelligible “reality” across which the “fiction” takes place. Documentary does not have to spend time establishing this fabricated reality, but can instead creatively play with the intelligibility of the real in ways that it took narrative films many decades to do. That is, documentary films have long deployed heterogeneous images (extracted from different archives, epochs, technological media, and durations) and stitched them together in montage form, as “a way of cutting a story into sequences, of assembling shots into a story, of joining and disjoining voices and bodies, sounds and images, of lengthening and tightening time.”22 Ranciere finds in Chris Marker's The Last Bolshevik an exemplary demonstration of the power of documentary fictions to do something very specifically cinematic, that is, produce virtual images in montage:
Marker composes The Last Bolshevik with scenes filmed in Russia today, the accounts offered by the people he interviews, yesterday's news items, and with film clips from different time periods and by directors with varying agendas, ranging from Battleship Potemkin all the way to Stalinist propaganda films. With incursions, of course, into the films of Alexander Medvekin [sic] himself, all of which Marker reinserts into a different plot and binds together with virtual images.23
What does Ranciere mean by “virtual images” here? I take this concept to resonate closely with Gilles Deleuze's work on cinema, which itself is explicitly beholden to (p- 332) Henri Bergson's philosophy of time and the virtual.24 For Deleuze, cinema—especially modern, postwar cinema—generates a direct image of time through its nonchronological, or
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virtual, movements: cuts, edits, and depths of field that put different senses of time into juxtaposition and conflict.25 Rather than time merely serving as a homogeneous, empty backdrop across which narrative movement and realistic action take place (this was emblematic of prewar, or classical cinema), the new cinema discovered novel ways to make time heterogeneous with itself, exploring nonchronological trajectories and relations, tapping into the virtuality of memory and decentered perception through technical creativity.26 French New Wave artists like Marker, Godard, and Gorin (among others) used this virtual heterogeneity in time to push cinema in radical new directions, including within the genre of documentary film. But it was not the didactic operations of these films —valued by Badiou—that constituted the virtual and gave it an affective charge. Rather, a more ambivalent operation, one employing what I call (following the film critic André Bazin) “lateral montage,” departs from and challenges linear expectations and strictly pedagogical narratives, confronting these with something radically different.
Reviewing Marker's 1957 film Letters to Siberia, Bazin locates the concept of lateral montage in the way Marker creates a space of poetic ambivalence between audio and visual elements, that is, between the narrative voice and the images used as illustration.27 In this film about life and travel (visitation) in the far eastern reaches of the Soviet Empire, this ambivalence and creativity emerges between the unseen narrator whose words seem to impose a certain order over the images and the mute power of these images to signify otherwise. Ultimately, this opens up a nonchronological space for critical thought and reflection. Bazin nicely distills this innovative filmmaking technique: “it might be said that the basic element is the beauty of what is said and heard, that intelligence flows from the audio element to the visual. The montage has been forged from ear to eye.”28 Overturning, however improbably, the ocular-centrism of the cinema, Bazin notes how Marker's film gives power and virtual presence to the nonvisible elements of the cinema's visual cultural production: the gap between audible sounds and visible images opens up a space for multiple, contested meanings. Here the artistic work delivers not a didactic lesson but an invitation for thinking otherwise about the distribution of the visible.
The cinematic technique of lateral montage is one that I find compatible with Badiou's notion of visitation of Ideas and truths in cinema. In the sequence about the universal truth of communism with which I began this essay, where the visitation of the Idea is actualized through a variety of assembled movements (the view from the mobile train car, the actions of the passengers riding the train, the words of Badiou, the music of Wagner), lateral montage allows Badiou's words to hover virtually over the images and sounds and shape them without completely determining them. More generally, we used lateral montage to create conceptual spaces to allow the philosophical content to crystallize outside of the dominant temporality of Badiou's biography. The latter organizes the chronological meta-structure of our film. But there are various moments throughout where this biographical story is interrupted or traversed by dense conceptual and (p- 333) theoretical terrain. These conceptual spaces are lateral in the sense that they create an open (virtual) space for the viewer to reflect on philosophical matters in (another) time with the film.
In one such conceptual space, Badiou discusses his concept of ontological multiplicity, and we use various photographs already featured in the film up to that point (pictures of his mother and father, himself as a young man, as an infant) and explore the multiplicity within each of these images, locating subtle patterns and small details that escape our immediate attention (see Figure 13.3). The voice-over from Badiou is spoken in French:
The experience of the world is a constant experience of multiplicity. For, and this is my philosophical thesis, Being is multiple. If you find yourself reading a book, you're dealing with multiplicity. If the book bores you, you'll notice that you still have 123 pages to read. That is an experience of multiplicity. If you want to go to somewhere in Paris, you cross many unknown streets, and there you are in multiplicity. And if I look even closer I see that each of these things is itself a multiplicity. So we are dealing with multiplicities of multiplicities of multiplicities. At every moment the world is multiplying itself on different scales of our observation. I would even say that it is the first thing a baby discovers when he's born. He cries because he discovers the multiple. He understands that he and his mother are not the same thing. And after that it never stops. It never stops.
Badiou's thesis of multiplicity articulated here may seem to contradict his Idea of communism, as the latter has historically been defined by forms of collectivism, mass organization of space and time, group thought, and totalitarian states. Yet, for Badiou, the Idea of communism is less about the instantiation of particular political and institutional forms and more about the Idea that another world is possible, a world beyond the one that dominant ideologies of capital construct as natural, inevitable, and immutable. That is, the Idea of communism is about the multiplicity and alterity (p- 334) inherent in different worlds, for the Idea is precisely what traverses these different worlds and brings these worlds together through the universality of its truth.
Film capture © Gorav Kalyan and Rohan Kalyan
Another example of a conceptual space assembled through a montage of virtual and actual images is when we get Badiou's interpretation of Plato's cave allegory. We illustrate this passage indirectly with shots of Paris seen from a boat gliding up and down the Seine. The cavernous river walls, built of stone and holding the city's buildings back at some remove, become the cave walls of Plato's famous allegory. The boat passes under
Page 14 of 18 old stone bridges, from light to dark and back again, like shadows flickering across the walls. It is a dark, rainy day. Badiou describes the world inside the cave, filled with “oppression, division, rich and poor, and so on.” The cave is “the world as it is,” Badiou tells us. But “you can find an exit,” and after this event, “Plato describes magnificently, you see the trees, you see the sky, and finally you see the sun. And the sun is the metaphor of the Idea.” At this moment the boat emerges from underneath another bridge, and the Eiffel Tower suddenly comes into view. Now we exit the cave and the perspective jumps from the boat to an elevator inside the tower itself. As we ascend, we see Paris through the tower's intricately patterned metal beams. From the top we get a series of panoramic views looking back down at the river and the sprawling urban space of Paris. Once we exit the cave, we are able to ascertain “the true nature of the cave ... the true nature of the world.” But then we must return to the cave, Badiou tells us. After finding the truth of the sun, it is one's duty to go back down and “to organize the exit of all the people of the cave.” We descend back down to the ground floor in the elevator, back into the cave to teach and organize those still enveloped in the darkness. “And this movement is politics.”
This sequence is a combination of didactic and lateral operations in film. For, on the one hand, we are teaching a lesson on Plato's cave allegory quite directly but are doing so through Badiou's words and actions, illustrated with our B-roll shots in Paris—from the river (the cave) to the top of the Eiffel Tower (the Sun) and back down again. But at the same time, this is a story in miniature that detours laterally from the main vertical trajectory of the film: Badiou's biography told (more or less) chronologically from beginning to end. The lateral movements inject a certain difference and potentiality (a potential for unexpected change) into the film's narrative. Ranciere's argument is that documentary films can more readily conjure such lateral movements and bring their virtual powers to bear in cinema. Combining this claim with Badiou's insight on the relationship between film and truth, as the visitation of the Idea, we might say that lateral movements create conceptual spaces (between audio and visual contents, spatial and temporal coordinates) that allow for a thinking with the film, and not merely about it. This is a more ambivalent operation, one that comports with our own uncertain position as filmmakers in a fundamentally estranged relationship with our cinematic subject. But rather than seeking to hide this foundational ambivalence through clever editing and narrative strategies, we wanted to emphasize this gap between our world and that of Badiou's, the tension it produced. We wanted to preserve some of the strangeness of our encounter with the octogenarian philosopher so that it might transform into something different when diverse audiences encountered him through our images.
(p. 335) What would Badiou think about Badiou? This is, of course, an entirely different question from what the general audience might think. I would like to believe that he would affirm our overall approach, which attempts to balance the didactic operations he favors (evidenced in Godard and Gorin's All's Well) with more ambivalent techniques advanced in the films of documentarians like Chris Marker. Our film is both an homage to Badiou's way of thinking about film and philosophy but also a subtle challenge and immanent critique of the same.
More generally, I think that Badiou would appreciate the relationship between biography and philosophy that the film explores structurally. Any philosophy, Nietzsche once wrote (and Badiou likes to retell), is a biography of the philosopher. Badiou inverts the terms: “the biography of the philosopher, told by the philosopher himself, is a piece of philosophy.”29 I continue with words taken from our film's official website:
From his birth in Morocco, to the events of May 1968 in Paris, to his twilight years as a nomadic public intellectual, Badiou's own biography is perhaps his most complex and thought-provoking work ... .By addressing the inherent contradictions in Badiou's life and work through cinematic means, the filmmakers are confronted by the inherent contradictions of cinema itself: thought vs action, interiority vs exteriority, presence vs absence ... . They must ask a question as old as the medium: can cinema think?30
Badiou would be more or less in agreement with all of this. Our film tells the life story of the philosopher and shows how Badiou's biography shaped his philosophy and vice versa. But it also attempts to go beyond this didactic lesson and pursue visitations with the universal truths and concepts of philosophy itself. These visitations invite the viewer to do two things: (1) think about the philosophical lesson contained in Badiou's biographical story, and (2) introspect on the impact philosophy and philosophical thinking has had on their own lives and biographies, potentially changing the way they think about the latter. Perhaps the most important conceptual space we create emerges toward the very end of the film, in the final act. I began this essay by describing the scene that deals with the Idea of communism as a sort of culmination of Badiou's various life events. Here the two trajectories of our film, the biographical and the philosophical, merge together in the visitation of the Idea of communism. We must leave it to the viewer to be affected (or not) by these cinematic movements, to turn the visitation into an invitation for further thought and action.
Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2005.
Badiou, Alain. Cinema. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.
Badiou, Alain. The Communist Hypothesis. New York: Verso Press, 2010.
Badiou, Alain. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Bazin, André, 1958. Review of Chris Marker's film Letters from Siberia (1957). https:// chrismarker.org/andre-bazin-on-chris-marker-1958/
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books, 1990.
(p. 337) Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. London: Routledge Press, 1994.
Kalyan, Rohan. “Ghostly Images, Phantom Discourses, and the Virtuality of the Global.” Globalizations 7, no. 4 (2010): 545-561.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press, 1977.
Ranciere, Jacques. Film Fables. Oxford: Berg, 2006.
(1.) This text is from our film Badiou (codirected by Gorav Kalyan and Rohan Kalyan), which we began work on in July 2014 and premiered at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in October 2018. Visit http://www.badioufilm.net for more about the film.
(2.) Alain Badiou, Cinema (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 90.
(3.) Ibid., 18.
(4.) Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London: Verso), 7.
(5.) Ibid., 230.
(6.) Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 167.
(7.) Alain Badiou, Being and Event (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 345-358.
(8.) Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).
(9.) Badiou, Cinema, 2.
(10.) Ibid., 89.
(11.) Ibid., 7.
(12.) Ibid., 18.
(13.) I write about both Seinfeld and Badiou's philosophy in a forthcoming essay with the journal TV and New Media.
(14.) Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (London: Routledge Press, 1994).
(15.) In fact, this line comes just after the speech about the Idea of communism that I referenced at the beginning of this essay.
(16.) Jacques Rancière, Film Fables (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 157.
(17.) This sense of memorialization is more explicit in the film's French title, Le Tombeau d' Alexandre (Alexander's Tomb). The title The Last Bolshevik was used for the film's US release.
(18.) Rancière, Film Fables, 157.
(19.) Ibid.
(20.) Ibid., 158.
(21.) Ibid., 159.
(22.) Ibid., 158.
(23.) Ibid., 159.
(24.) Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1990).
(25.) Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
(26.) Rohan Kalyan, “Ghostly Images, Phantom Discourses, and the Virtuality of the Global,” Globalizations 7, no. 4 (2010): 545-561.
(27.) André Bazin's review of Chris Marker's film Letters from Siberia (1957) is accessible online at https://chrismarker.org/andre-bazin-on-chris-marker-1958ZM
(28.) Ibid.
(29.) Badiou, Cinema, 110. Here he references the quote, but in our interviews for the film (in French) he expands on this relationship between biography and philosophy (in light of Nietzsche's original quote) at length. This specific segment of the French interview did not make it into the film.
(30.) Badiou official website, http://www.badioufilm.net/badiou/.
Rohan Kalyan
Rohan Kalyan, Assistant Professor of International Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University
In the Name of Internationalism: The Cinematic Memorialization of Norman Bethune in Socialist China a
Xiaoning Lu
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Oct 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.13
The red martyr holds a special place in the collective memory of communist nations. In the Chinese pantheon of red martyrs, Norman Bethune, a renowned Canadian doctor who died during his selfless support of China's anti-imperialist war against Japan, occupies a unique place. Bethune was sacralized as the ultimate symbol of internationalism by Mao Zedong in his essay “In Memory of Norman Bethune.” Much of the commemorative art about Bethune inevitably entails performing exegetic exercises of the Mao text. Using the 1962 compilation documentary In Memory of Norman Bethune and the 1964 biopic Doctor Bethune as examples, this article examines specific narrative strategies utilized in the cinematic memorialization of Bethune. It argues that despite their diverging styles and innovative engagements with the Mao text, both films perpetuate the political reification of the spirit of Bethune as proletarian internationalism incompatible with humanitarianism, while consolidating the political power of central authorities.
Keywords: Norman Bethune, red martyr, internationalism, proletarian internationalism, humanism, cinematic memorialization, Chinese socialist cinema, Zhang Junxiang
Comrade Norman Bethune, a member of the Communist Party of Canada, was around fifty when he was sent by the Communist Parties of Canada and the United States to China; he made light of travelling thousands of miles to help us in our War of Resistance Against Japan. He arrived in Yenan in the spring of last year, went to work in the Wutai Mountains, and to our great sorrow died a martyr at his post. What kind of spirit is this that makes a foreigner selflessly adopt the cause of the Chinese people's liberation as his own? It is the spirit of internationalism, the spirit of communism, from which every Chinese Communist must learn.
—Mao Zedong1
Heroes and heroic deaths hold a special place in the collective memory of communist nations. This is particularly true in the early years of the People's Republic of China (PRC) when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) embarked on a systemic project of nation building. Although suffering, death, and grief were still fresh, the brutality of war and the massive loss of human life in the decades preceding the founding of the PRC in 1949 had to be renarrated and remembered with a collective optimism in order to create a sense of historical continuity and to enhance a forward-looking revolutionary vision for the newly built political community. There emerged in this process a new culture of commemoration —substituting the traditional culture of ancestor worship with the public honoring of China's “heroic daughters and sons” (yingxiong ernu). Throughout the 1950s, a large number of military cemeteries, memorial halls, and monuments were built; state funerals of Chinese communist leaders and reburials of Chinese revolutionary pioneers were staged as public spectacle;2 and print media and cinema (p- 342) were utilized to tell the stories of the “people's heroes” and to manufacture memorable revolutionary icons. All these are constitutive of what Chang-tai Hung has aptly termed as “the cult of the red martyr”—state-instituted commemorative practices with the aim of extolling “war's glory and warrior's sacrifice to the lofty political goal of socialism.”3
Due to its heavy reliance on visual means, the cult of the red martyr became an important part of visual culture in socialist China, leaving material traces in everyday spaces and etching distinctive icons on people's minds. Being integral to the CCP's political culture, it also played a significant role in cultivating civic responsibility, forging national cohesion, and legitimizing the Chinese path to communism. However, political vision encoded in the cult of the red martyr is by no means constrained by national boundaries or restricted by parochial nationalism. Outward orientation, political imaginaries of internationalism, and even technologies of the self are also stimulated by this cult, particularly, by foreign martyrs who died for “the Chinese revolutionary cause.” The cult of Norman Bethune in socialist China is an intriguing case in point.
Born in Gravenhurst, Ontario, Norman Bethune was a Canadian doctor who gained great distinction as a chest surgeon and pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis in Montreal in the late 1920s. In 1936, when the Spanish Civil War erupted, he travelled to Spain as a volunteer with the Canadian Red Cross where he conceived and provided mobile blood transfusion service for front-line treatment and became committed to communism. Soon after, in 1938 he answered a call by the American and Canadian League for Peace and Democracy to travel to China. Amid the Second Sino-Japanese War, Bethune worked as a medical consultant in the Jin-Cha-Ji (Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei) border region in the Chinese communist base area, training Chinese medical personnel and providing medical treatment to the sick and the wounded. Unfortunately, he contracted septicemia while operating on wounded soldiers and died at his post in 1939.4
In the Chinese pantheon of red martyrs, Dr. Bethune occupies a unique position. Immediately after his death, Mao Zedong wrote “In Memory of Norman Bethune,” extoling the virtues of this “foreign martyr” and holding him up as an exemplar of “the internationalist fighter.”5 On the fifth anniversary of Bethune's death in 1944, Chinese writer Zhou Erfu
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published a literary reportage “A Few Fragments from Norman Bethune's Life” in Liberation Daily (Jiefang ribao), which was to exert great influence on the ensuing creation of novels and screenplays on Bethune.6 Public commemoration of this Canadian doctor persisted throughout China's era of high socialism, including the turbulent ten years of the Cultural Revolution despite an ever-shifting political climate. In 1953, Dr. Bethune's remains were reinterred in the Cemetery of Martyrs, a military cemetery in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province.7 In 1967, the Bethune Museum was built on the site of a former wartime medical center in Shanxi province and in 1974 Bethune Memorial Hall was set inside the Bethune International Peace Hospital in Shijiazhuang.8 On every anniversary of Bethune's death from 1949 to 1979 commemorative essays were published in People's Daily, the official newspaper of the CCP. In addition, visual representations of Bethune proliferated, encompassing a wide range of visual genres and media such as sculpture (see Figure 14.1), poster, postage stamp, painting, |(p- 343) (p. 344) embroidered picture, woodcut, and film.9 All these helped cement Norman Bethune's status as the ultimate icon of internationalism in socialist China.
Photograph © Wu Xiaoqing, 2016
Compared to the iconographies of Chinese revolutionary martyrs, including Zhao Yiman, Liu Hulan, and Dong Cunrui, which center on the defining moments of the revolutionaries' heroic acts and are saturated with the artistic style of socialist realism, the iconography of Bethune is marked by an eclectic formal expression and thematic focus, thus displaying a kind of imaginary indeterminacy. Among Bethune posters which were circulated in the 1970s, some are painted in watercolor with broad strokes; others are rendered in condensed composition with bright color in accordance with the Chinese folk-art convention; still others use the gongbi style, meticulously contouring the main characters. These
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posters not only highlight Bethune's professional identity (an experienced surgeon performing an operation in a makeshift hospital; a conscientious army doctor in a daring dash on horseback to rescue the injured) but also present this Canadian doctor's connection with the Chinese people—Bethune meets and chats with Chairman Mao; Bethune conducts a physical check-up on a sturdy peasant boy in a boisterous village; Bethune even appears as a mental image conjured up by a hard-working young Chinese woman who aims to emulate his dedicated spirit and to advance her technical skills and knowledge for the revolution.10 Rather than indicating the boundless possibilities of representing an international friend or attesting to the difficulty of crystalizing Bethune's spiritual legacy, this imaginary indeterminacy manifests artists' active responses to the ideological interpellation, or more precisely, of their engagement with the urtext of Bethune—Mao's essay “In Memory of Norman Bethune.” Ironically, due to their textual proximity to the authoritative Mao canon, visual representations of Bethune accommodate different artistic styles and stimulate variant political imaginations of internationalism while perpetuating Mao's verdict on the foreign martyr. Such visual practices are a manifestation of ex-egetical governmentality,11 a mechanism of power that relies on political exegesis of revolutionary canons to reinforce the power of political leaders and to constitute the socialist subject by involving individuals in this exegetical process.
This chapter takes two commemorative films—the documentary In Memory of Norman Bethune (Jinian Baiqiuen, dirs. Jiang Yunchuan and Duan Hong, 1962) and the biopic Doctor Bethune (Baiqiuen daifu, dir. Zhang Junxiang, 1964)—as samples among a diversity of visual representations of Bethune to examine the specific mechanism of cinematic exegesis of Mao's canonical essay on Bethune and to investigate how these practices, by transforming Bethune from a historical figure into a political signifier, probe the ideological boundaries of “internationalism” as well as the limits of the artists' creative freedom. Given the importance of Mao's obituary for Bethune, I will first explain why this particular foreign figure held specific significance for Mao and then conduct a historically informed textual analysis to investigate how Mao's text is quoted, evoked, reframed, and appropriated in the aforementioned films and how other cinematic strategies are utilized to create this foreign martyr. Through these case studies, I hope not only to challenge the conventional understanding of communist propaganda as a transparent mouthpiece but (p- 345) also to call attention to aesthetic imaginaries inspired by the imbrication of the national and the international in Chinese revolutionary politics.
In general, commemorative texts, whether verbal, written, or visual, are all products of memory work. The urtext of Bethune, Mao's “In Memory of Norman Bethune,” despite its foundational status in the making of Bethune's martyrdom, is based on Mao's rather elusive memory of this Canadian doctor. Mao confesses in the essay that he only met Dr.
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Bethune once and wrote to him once only in response to the doctor's many letters.12 Although being hardly acquainted with Bethune, Mao wrote in a decisive tone praising the doctor profusely and calling all Chinese communists to emulate this great martyr. He emphasized that Bethune had travelled from afar to support China's War of Resistance against Japan, exalted his hard work, selflessness, and his great warm-heartedness toward all comrades, and held him up as the embodiment of “the spirit of internationalism and the spirit of communism.”13
Why was Norman Bethune of particular interest to Mao? He was by no means the only foreigner who had travelled from afar and offered dedicated services to the Chinese people during the second Sino-Japanese War. Among the famous “international friends,” a designation conferred by the CCP to foreigners who have made considerable contribution to the Chinese revolutionary cause,14 there were the Lebanese-American Shafick George Hatem, who joined the CCP in 1937 and served as a long-term health advisor to the Party; the skilled Korean physician Dr. Bang Wooyong, who offered six-year medical services in Yan'an and whose kindness and patience won him the nickname of “mama doctor” among patients and nurses; and Indian doctor Dwarkanath S. Kotnis, who treated the wounded soldiers at battlefronts, delivered medical lectures to students, and died at his post in 1942.15 There were also unsung heroes, including Jean Ewen, Dr. Bethune's interpreter and nurse, who trekked across war-torn China and braved air raids to save injured Chinese and to collect much-needed medical supplies on her way to Yan'an.16
Indeed, international support for China during the 1930s and 1940s was provided by people of different political persuasions but mainly existed in the form of humanitarian assistance. For instance, as Stephan Craft's historical study reveals, thousands of American missionaries were heroic peacemakers during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War. Risking their own lives, these missionaries spared no effort to provide educational, medical, and spiritual relief and established refugee camps and war relief programs for widows, orphans, and the Chinese population at large. They also waged (p- 346) peace movements in both China and the United States to stop the Sino-Japanese War “in the interest of saving Chinese lives, expanding the Christian enterprise in China and preventing a greater conflagration.”17 There were also numerous nonreligious aid workers from all parts of the world who strove to provide effective and swift humanitarian assistance to Chinese people who were suffering from the atrocities committed by Japanese troops. For instance, the Canadian-American Medical Aid Team, which consisted of Norman Bethune, Jean Ewen, and the American doctor Charles Parsons, was initially formed in response to an appeal by the American journalist Agnes Smedley for doctors and nurses to assist the Chinese people. All three members were received by representatives from the Chinese central government, and soon Ewen and Bethune were sent off to work for a Red Cross unit attached to the Eighth Route Army in the communist region in observation of the United Front agreement.18
Among all those aid workers, Norman Bethune stood out as a great humanitarian and a committed communist. In fact, he was one of very few people who had set their feet on two battlefronts of the worldwide anti-fascist war. The doctor's hot temper, irascible per
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sonality, and arrogance, coupled with excellent surgical technique and devotion to work, made him a very controversial figure during his lifetime.19 But he never failed to impress people as a dedicated humanitarian. In her memoir, Jean Ewen relates many incidents of Dr. Bethune providing care for the sick, the wounded, and the poor at the risk of his own safety on their trek to Yan'an, the capital of the communist base area. The doctor bound the wounds of all who came to him, disregarding the imminent air bombings. He fed abandoned hungry children himself and went to the quartermaster to secure trousers and jackets for them.20 To Ewen, Dr. Bethune “was a gifted physician with a manner that gives patients confidence. At heart he was a missionary.”21 Bethune's remarkable humanitarian compassion also seeps into his own writing. A passage from his essay “Wounds” reads:
Any more? Four Japanese prisoners. Bring them in. In this community of pain, there are no enemies. Cut away that blood-stained uniform. Stop that haemorrhage. Lay them beside the others. Why? They're alike as brothers! Are these soldiers professional mankillers? No, these are amateurs-in-arms. Workman's hands. These are workers-in-uniform.22
What is revealed here is a great love of humanity that knows no national boundaries and transcends differences in gender and political creed. However, this essential aspect of Bethune's internationalist spirit was obscured by Mao's focus on valorizing the doctor's communist spirit, and with the popularization of Mao's text, it has become forgotten.
Peter Slater once suggested the reason why Dr. Bethune held enormous significance to the Chinese communists is that he was the right man at the right time in the right place: the doctor's occupational prestige in the Western world made him a vital sign of international recognition and tangible support to the CCP at a time when the Chinese communists had been betrayed by the Russian communists and had little current (p- 347) contact with the United States and Europe; and Mao appreciated Bethune's rare combination of idealistic dedication and technical excellence.23 What should not be neglected is a genuine spirit of comradeship between Bethune and Mao, two staunch communists. As Ewen recalls, at Bethune's first meeting with Mao, the doctor formally presented his credentials from the Communist Party of Canada. “His card was printed on a square of white silk, signed by Mr. Tim Buck, secretary of the party, and adorned by the party seal. Chairman Mao took the credentials with great ceremony, bordering on reverence, and said, ‘We shall transfer you to the Communist Party of China so that you will be an inalienable part of this country now.'”24 This account offers us a glimpse into the organizational practice of the Communist International (Comintern), which was committed to anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, and self-determination of nations. It also turns our attention to the emergence of a new type of internationalism within the realm of international politics, an internationalism—anti-imperialism on the global scale—that is aligned with national interests.25
To a large extent, Mao's interpretation of Bethune's extraordinariness is heavily influenced by his political vision of the path of the Chinese revolution. In the same year when Dr. Bethune arrived in China, Mao delivered speeches and reports advocating a long-term national united front against Japan in order to fight a protracted war and proclaiming that the Chinese communist must be “an internationalist, at the same time a patriot.”26 With an understanding of China's War of Resistance against Japan as at once a national war for independence and part of a worldwide proletarian revolution, Mao injected much-needed optimism into the beleaguered Chinese communist force and pointed out the wider significance of the Chinese war effort. As he claimed, “only by achieving [our] national liberation will it be possible for the proletariat and other working people to achieve their own emancipation. The victory of China and the defeat of the invading imperialists will help the people of other countries.”27 Because of Bethune's political credential and unique experience in the anti-fascist war in Spain, his arrival in the Chinese communist revolutionary base areas not only attested to the possibilities of establishing the widest united front but also made him the perfect poster child of communist internationalism, which, in practice, requires the proletariat of the capitalist countries to support the struggle for liberation of the colonial and semicolonial peoples and the proletariat of the colonies and semicolonies to support that of the proletariat of the capitalist countries.
Mao's political conviction also led him to offer a reductive causal explanation of Dr. Bethune's deeds, emotions, and thoughts. In his funeral oration, Mao conveniently interpreted the doctor's remarkable moral qualities, including self-dedication, incessant pursuit of technical excellence, and warm-heartedness to comrades and ordinary people, as external manifestations of his lofty political commitments, thereby asserting the communist ideology's transformative power in shaping good socialists. This is the start of the political reification of the spirit of Bethune, which disregards the complexity of human nature and writes off Bethune's humanitarianism for the sake of promoting “proletarian internationalism,” an international spirit that is based on proletarian solidarity, rather than the universal idea of humanity, and that has a specific aim of (p- 348) advancing a worldwide communist revolution. Such a reification, in fact, betrays Mao's understanding of humanism informed by classical Marxism. In Communist Manifesto and Anti-Dühring, Marx and Engels repudiate the view that holds freedom, equality, and justice as eternal truths and instead treat them as historical products.28 Similarly, humanism needs to be understood as a socio-historically conditioned idea. Since alienation not only defines labor activity but also characterizes social relations in a class society, particularly, capitalist society, humans cannot achieve true self-realization and emancipation. Thus, fully developed humanism is only possible with the realization of communism.29 From this Marxist perspective, the views that embrace an abstract notion of human nature and champion universal love for human beings can only be labelled as bourgeois humanitarianism, which is naïve and hypocritical. Mao made a similar point by advocating class-bound emotion in his famous Yan'an Talks in 1942. He states, “There will be genuine love of humanity—after classes are eliminated all over the world [ ... ] but not now. We cannot love enemies, we cannot love social evils, our aim is to destroy them.”30 Throughout the early years of the PRC, humanitarianism and communism were still regarded as incompatible, if not mutually exclusive. The modifier “socialist” or “proletarian” regularly preceded the term “humanitarianism” to indicate that humanitarian love in a transitional historical stage to communism could only be extended to the proletariat and their allies.
Suffice it to say, Bethune became a vehicle for Mao to develop his political thought. Mao's commendation of the doctor not only set the tone for ensuing public discourse and cultural memorialization of Bethune but also created conditions under which political exegesis of Mao's foundational text on Bethune could be pursued.
Among visual representations of Bethune, the black-and-white documentary In Memory of Norman Bethune best illustrates the intertwinement between performing political exegesis of the Mao text and preserving the visual memory of Bethune. Produced by the Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio (CNDS) in 1962, the film bears the imprint of the ongoing nationwide campaign of “Learning Chairman Mao's Works,” which was first initiated by Lin Biao, the minister of defense, in the military in 1959. With the increasing deterioration of the Sino-Soviet relationship at the turn of the 1960s, Lin opposed bookish worshiping of Marxist classics and slavish following of the Soviet model. Instead, he promoted Mao's writings as a shortcut to Marxism-Leninism as they united MarxismLeninism with the Chinese revolutionary experience and so, he argued, were most relevant to the Chinese.31 In particular, he called on People's Liberation Army soldiers to “lively study and apply the Mao Zedong thought” (huoxue huoyong), encouraging them to memorize short passages relating to (p- 349) Mao's political concepts. “In Memory of Norman Bethune,” “Serve the People,” “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire,” and other pieces written by Mao during the most difficult years of the Chinese communist revolution became what was considered the optimal study materials as they had recently been collected into the newly canonized first four volumes of Selected Works of Mao Zedong.32 Taking account of this historical context and the fact that the documentary bears the exact same title as Mao's canonical essay on Bethune, this cinematic memorialization of the Canadian doctor could well be regarded as another “recitation” of the Mao text, an example of the flexible use of Mao's works, and an active engagement with and popularization of Mao's political concepts.
Two filmmakers, Jiang Yunchuan and Duan Hong, shouldered the task of communicating and portraying “the spirit of Bethune” for their documentary project. By ingeniously weaving archival photographs and film footage into the narrative framework of the Mao text and by using political commentary to inject new meanings into source images, they fulfilled the dual task central to the memorialization of Bethune—recovering authentic traces of Bethune as a historical figure and consolidating the ideological hegemony of proletarian internationalism.33
The documentary opens with a close-up of the cover of the second volume of Selected Works of Mao Zedong, which gradually zooms in and then cuts into another close-up of the text of “In Memory of Norman Bethune” once the volume is opened. These shots are complemented by an emphatic male voice-over narration: “Among Chairman Mao's writings, there is a memorial to Bethune.” When the lighting focus is cast on the essay title,
Page 8 of 24 the well-known beginning of the text is read out, “Comrade Bethune, a member of the Labor-Progressive Party in Canada,34 was sent by the Labor-Progressive Party in Canada and the Communist Party of the United States; he made light of travelling thousands of miles to China to help us in our War of Resistance Against Japan.” As Mao's writing is presented as an integral part of the voice-over narration, a full-body statue of Bethune fades in. It is first superimposed onto Mao's essay in the volume and then zooms out to replace the text as the sole focus of the frame. This sequence is echoed in the ending of the documentary. After presenting footage of Bethune's simple funeral and news reports on the immediate reactions to Bethune's death, the film returns to the opened volume of Mao's works and quotes the most important passage from Mao's eulogy as the ultimate and most authoritative comment on this remarkable doctor: “What kind of spirit is this that makes a foreigner selflessly adopt the cause of the Chinese people's liberation as his own? It is the spirit of internationalism, the spirit of communism, from which every Chinese Communist must learn.” As the running intertitle which is superimposed onto the opened book rolls out, a shot of the standing statue of Bethune fades in until it occupies once more the center of the frame and commands the sole attention of the audience.
Referencing Mao's essay offers an expedient framing device which enables the filmmakers to construct a coherent narrative of Norman Bethune out of an assemblage of randomly taken photographs and often fragmented historical footage. Sandwiched between Mao's quotations are, among others, a rare photograph of Bethune meeting Chinese general Nie Rongzhen shot by famed photographer Sha Fei (see Figure 14.2) (p- 350) and an iconic footage of Bethune performing a medical operation under the eaves of a small temple filmed by Wu Yinxian, a prominent cinematographer and one of the founding members of the Yan'an Film Group in the late 1930s.35 These images by themselves are a vital attraction as they offer a rare glimpse into the Chinese communist community in its germinal stage and present valuable visual records of Norman Bethune's medical work in the rugged Jin-Cha-Ji military district. Aside from their historical value, they are material testimony to the international solidarity among communist filmmakers—film footage was shot with a 16mm movie camera and the precious film stock donated by the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens to the Yan'an Film Group in 1937.36
Frame capture
Those original photographic images had not been produced for specific documentary projects, as Wu Yinxian once said that he used his photos only to record life and to capture the unique spirit permeating the young Chinese communist community.37 But they were carefully selected and skillfully edited in such a way that they not only present a chronological narrative of Bethune's life in the CCP-controlled areas but also resonate and constitute the political exegesis of the Mao text in the military medical circle since the founding of the PRC. For instance, after the CCP decided to send the Chinese People's Volunteer Force to the Korean War in 1950, Bethune's spirit of internationalism was invoked in the mobilization drive to encourage Chinese doctors and nurses to take “the cause of the Korean people's liberation” as their own and to support “the great war to resist America and aid Korea.”38 During peacetime, Bethune was mainly held up as an
(p. 351) inspirational figure to encourage medical workers to improve their work attitude toward patients, to enhance their professional skills, and to combine technical excellence and political responsibility in order to facilitate the professionalization and formalization of military hospitals.39 As the documentary places much emphasis on Bethune's great contribution to China's military-medical services, the spirit of self-reliance, revolutionary optimism, and wholehearted dedication to the Chinese revolutionary cause—part of the Chinese communist army's revolutionary legacy—were held as the essential constitutive elements of the spirit of Bethune.
Through their creative editing of sound and image, the filmmakers transform the raw archival footage of a historical past into visual evidence for a political argument, which either augments or alters the original signification of the source materials. For instance, footage of the architectural layout of the Songyankou Model Hospital and the daily activities of hospital staff are spliced together with footage of Bethune demonstrating surgical techniques and doing administrative work, thus fleshing out the narrative of his contribution to health infrastructure development in the Chinese communist base area. The voiceover narration added to this group of disparate shots further hammers home this message: “Thanks to Comrade Bethune's initiation and leadership, a model hospital was es-
Page 10 of 24 tablished with the aim of improving medical services in the border region and cultivating military-medical cadres.”
In addition to providing basic historical information, the episode on the Model Hospital delivers a clear political message, as evidenced by this visual unit that consists of several shots focusing on various kinds of manual labor: medical staff setting up a large steamer in the kitchen, hospital workers shaking sieves and cutting medicinal crops, a patient paired with a health worker doing leg-pushing exercises. The complementary voice-over narration comments, “When there is great shortage of essential material during the wartime, we must be self-reliant. Everything depends on our hands.” This interior scene quickly cuts to an outdoor scene where Dr. Bethune and Chinese medical staff clad in military uniform busy themselves with carpentry work, and then to a wooden traction device attached to a patient's broken leg inside a hospital ward, with a commentary running on the soundtrack: “Comrade Bethune has said that a battlefield surgeon has to be a carpenter, a tailor, a blacksmith, and a barber at the same time. Only by mastering the other four skills can he be an excellent battlefield surgeon.” Undoubtedly, this segment augments the original meaning of the historical footage as it aligns Bethune's expertise and professionalism with self-sufficiency and self-reliance, the key qualities of the Yan'an spirit which lies at the heart of the Chinese communism.
In other instances, voice-over commentary with the support of carefully selected music significantly alters the neutrality encoded in the original documentary footage. Take, for instance, the footage of Dr. Bethune bandaging the wounds of an injured solider in the open air. Sandwiched between shots of Bethune receiving an enthusiastic welcome from the Eighth Route Army and another set of shots showing the marching communist soldiers and supplemented by the upbeat drumming and lively tune of The Song of Guerrillas as the background music, this ordinary scene of medical service is now imbued with revolutionary optimism. The overlapping (p- 352) voice-over narration in fact obliterates humanitarianism and celebrates the fighting spirit of proletarian internationalism:
[Comrade Bethune] said, “Right now I am at the heart of the center of the [Sino-Japanese] war. Now I can truly understand the magnificent and sublime spirit of this earth-shaking revolution.” Many soldiers who have recovered after receiving Comrade Bethune's treatment can now return to the frontline to make their contribution to the Chinese nation's liberation cause once again.
These words clearly stress the mutually beneficial relationship between Bethune and the Chinese soldiers as both intellectually and physically regenerative. The inseparability between Bethune and the Chinese revolutionary cause is finally monumentalized in Bethune's death. Toward the end of the documentary, the filmmakers invoke many sorrowful moments. Newspaper obituaries and funeral footage are followed by repeated close-up shots of the big brownish marks on Bethune's forearm, a result of the doctor's excessive blood donation to Chinese patients and the ultimate symbol of his selflessness. Mao's eulogy on the soundtrack once again invites sensorial immersion and incites mourning while affirming the greatness of Bethune's spirit of communist internationalism.
Whereas the documentary In Memory of Norman Bethune is a cogent cinematic treatise on the spirit of Bethune, the 1964 biopic Doctor Bethune is a dramatized portrayal of Bethune's life in the Jin-Cha-Ji border region until his death. The latter film demonstrates the conscious effort of the director Zhang Junxiang to humanize the deified martyr via a creative engagement with the Mao text. Among Chinese filmmakers who were active in the 1950s and 1960s, Zhang is quite an exceptional figure. He graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at China's prestigious Tsinghua University in 1931 and then studied dramaturgy at Yale University in the United States in the late 1930s. After returning to China, Zhang first established himself in China's drama circle and then turned to more lucrative filmmaking in response to financial pressures during China's civil war (194 5-1949).40 Soon after the establishment of the PRC, Zhang, a member of the Chinese Communist Party, was appointed to important leadership positions, including deputy head of Shanghai Film Studio, head of Shanghai Film Bureau, and later deputy head of the Film Bureau under the Ministry of Culture. This rare combination of English proficiency, artistic acumen, and political commitment not only made Zhang Junxiang particularly receptive to Joris Ivens's suggestion that Chinese film workers should make a biopic (p- 353) about Bethune when the latter visited China in 1958,41 but also made him the most qualified Chinese filmmaker to embark on this project.
The fact that Bethune had received Mao's endorsement soon proved to be a double-edged sword for the aspiring director. On the one hand, such an endorsement ensured that the subject matter of this film project was considered appropriate. In 1963, the screenplay Doctor Bethune,42 which had been cowritten by Zhang Junxiang and Zhao Tuo, was shortlisted by the Film Bureau as one of ten excellent screenplays, which held the promise of yielding high-quality films suitable to be screened during the 15th National Day Celebration in the following year.43 On the other hand, Mao's essay posed considerable constraints on the filmmaker's artistic creativity. At the inception of his film project, Zhang was fully aware that “the main task of a biopic of Bethune is, of course, to eulogize what Chairman Mao has pinpointed in his memorial to Bethune: this great internationalist fighter's selfless spirit, his exceptional dedication to work and his extreme enthusiasm towards comrades and towards the people.”44
As a well-trained dramatist, Zhang also understood that a fleshed-out character was the soul of any biopic and that the spirit of Bethune had to be manifested in the concrete life details, including Bethune's personality, words, and deeds.45 Eager to disclose the inner logic of Bethune's selfless dedication to the Chinese revolutionary cause, Zhang and his coauthor dedicated the first third of their screenplay Doctor Bethune to depicting Bethune's advocation of a social medical system in Montreal and his medical services during the Spanish civil war. “I'm afraid that without this prologue,” Zhang wrote in his rec-
Page 12 of 24 ollection of the production of film, “audiences wouldn't understand that it is the immense hatred towards the fascists that prompted him [Bethune] to come to China and to the battlefront in the Jin-Cha-Ji region ... and that the rest of the screenplay in fact narrates how Bethune perfects himself as a communist.”46 Unfortunately, due to financial constraints, these foreign scenes were not materialized. In the finalized version of the film, the prologue is a prominent quotation of the best-known passage from Mao's essay on Bethune, which appears as white intertitles printed on a crimson background and is reinforced by a male voice-over recitation.
Nevertheless, Zhang found other ways to flesh out the main character. In order to create a sense of authenticity, the film cast Gerald Tannebaum, an American who resided in the PRC at the time, as the protagonist. It uses bilingual dialogues for a substantial part of the film and embeds Bethune within a network of characters, including the doctor's entourage, villagers, Chinese army doctors, and Chinese communist leaders, thus providing multiple perspectives on the protagonist. A more important cinematic strategy is the employment of dramatization, especially dramatic conflicts between Dr. Bethune and the Chinese people in the revolutionary base area, in depicting Bethune as a great internationalist hero in the making. This is the director's ingenious solution to the seemingly insurmountable difficulty in narrating the story of Bethune, which he had identified at the outset of this film project: given the fact that Bethune, who wielded a scalpel instead of a weapon, had no direct confrontation with Japanese invaders, there seemed to be a lack of conflict that could sustain narrative drive.47 By introducing narrative conflicts among “the people of our own rank,” Zhang fulfilled the generic (p- 354) expectations of Chinese biopics on revolutionary martyrs, namely, disclosing social causes that engender heroes.48 Moreover, his conscientious conception of a dynamic and mutually benefitting relationship between Bethune and the Chinese people not only helped him tactfully avoid the politically undesirable portrayal of the Chinese as passive beneficiary of communist internationalism but also domesticated Bethune as one of our heroes.
Treading a fine line between political appropriateness and artistic effectiveness, Zhang employs various kinds of dramatization and narrative conflict to present both the ordinariness and extraordinariness of Bethune. Some are politically innocuous quotidian confrontations revolving around Bethune's foreignness. These conflicts not only introduce ordinary aspects of Bethune's life but also inject light humor into this otherwise serious cinematic memorialization project. For instance, upon entering a village on the Loess Plateau with his medical team, Bethune aroused much suspicion and was stopped in the middle of the road by a vigilant peasant boy scout holding a red-tasseled spear. His appearance also presents a spectacle of strangeness to curious Chinese villagers. An elderly woman says with a puzzled expression, “He looks so strange: a full-head of gray hair and a carrot-colored complexion.” She goes on wondering why this foreigner has come to her mountain village. In another scene, Bethune, who has little knowledge of the Chinese language, relies on gesticulation and guesswork to communicate with a young soldier who serves him a chicken dish for dinner. After a little argument, Bethune decides to eat this special dinner but admonishes the soldier not to treat him differently from the Chinese soldiers in the future.
Other dramatic conflicts are designed specifically to foreground the development of the character and to illustrate the spirit of Bethune. For example, a conflict between technical excellence and political “redness” undergirds a subplot revolving on Bethune and a self-taught Chinese army doctor named Fang Zhaoyuan. Bethune first meets Fang on one of his medical inspection tours. When checking a patient's suppurating leg, Bethune is shocked to find out that sorghum stalks instead of splints have been used to immobilize the patient's leg. Infuriated, Bethune confronts Fang, who performed the operation, and bluntly criticizes his extremely poor surgical technique. Deeply concerned with the shortage of medical equipment and supplies and appalled by local doctors' inadequate medical techniques, Bethune proposes that the Chinese commander should set up a model hospital and have the best doctors from each subdistrict sent there for professional training. Unsurprisingly, when Fang comes to enroll in the training program at the Model Hospital, Bethune sternly rejects this “quack doctor” in order to safeguard the dignity of his profession. It isn't until Health Commissioner Yu makes a special case for Fang that the Canadian doctor decides to offer Fang an opportunity out of his respect for the Party's recommendation. Before long, Bethune is impressed by Fang's great diligence. In his answer to Bethune's question why such a hard-working doctor has such poor medical technique, the Health Commissioner explains that Fang, who was born into a poor family, joined the Chinese communist army at a young age and had no chance to receive formal medical training. However, he trained himself to be a surgeon over an eight-year period of self-study. These revelations draw Bethune into deep thought.
(p. 355) These dramatic conflicts endow Zhang's exegesis of the Mao text with a dialectical flavor—the spirit of Bethune is understood not as a moral quality intrinsic to the doctor, but a noble nature fostered and tempered by Bethune's encounter with the great Chinese revolutionary war. Hence, the director arranges the blood transfusion scene, an iconic moment of internationalism to succeed the aforementioned episode between Bethune and Fang. In order to rescue the life a Chinese war hero who has suffered several gunshot wounds to the abdomen, Bethune insists on the nurse drawing his type O blood to prepare for an emergency blood transfusion. With music swelling in the background, the camera zooms in and out from a syringe piercing through the blood vessel in Bethune's forearm. It then shifts back and forth several times from Bethune to the wounded solider into whose arm the doctor's blood is being injected (see Figure 14.3). Interspersed are occasional reaction shots of the anxious Chinese medical workers. The scene ends with the solider regaining his consciousness. In this deeply moving scene, Bethune is metaphorically welded into the collective Chinese national body as his blood slowly flows into the Chinese soldier's body. The fact that this scene is bookended by a military combat sequence and a shot of a jubilant crowd of Chinese soldiers cheering thunderously for their hard-won victory further cues the audience to politicize the doctor's humanitarian act as a great contribution to the Chinese war effort: the transfused blood not only helps to extend the life of a Chinese war hero but also replenishes the vitality of the Chinese revolutionary force.
Frame capture
Since not a single conflict among “the people of our own rank” is able to sustain the narrative or drive the plot forward, Zhang resorted to an episodic structure to emphasize Bethune's accumulated experiences gained from encountering the Chinese people. The director foregrounds a symbiotic relationship between the self and the Other as the foundation of Bethune's spirit of internationalism. Another important episode which illustrates how the foreign doctor is bound still closer to the Chinese people is set in a makeshift clinic housed in a peasant's home at the center of a battle zone. Disguised as an old Chinese peasant and braving enemy's gunfire, Bethune arrives at this clinic. To his great surprise, his recuperating patients have received excellent care from local villagers and a plain-clothed female army doctor named Feng. He marvels at the ordinary people's wisdom as he is guided through a well-disguised entrance to a hidden pharmacy underneath the floorboards; he becomes ever more overwhelmed to find out that despite the harsh and dangerous situation, Doctor Feng has taught herself the current battlefield medical techniques by learning from the textbooks that he had written for the Chinese communist army doctors. The emotional impact of this visit on the doctor is manifested in the next scene, which shows Bethune writing his diary under the feeble light of a kerosene lamp, deep into the night. Seemingly addressing his interpreter Tong, who is drifting to light sleep, Bethune's words reveal his inner thoughts and excitement:
You know, Tong. When I decided to come to China, Dick O'Brien, one of my colleagues, thought I was crazy. He said that the Japanese were equipped with the most modern arms, but the Eighth Route Army was nothing but a bunch of peasants with spears. I told him that I'm going to China just to find out how this army he called peasants can stop the rampant fascists. I think I've found the answer now.
(p. 356) (p. 357) The scene culminates in a highly emotional moment full of internationalist connotations. As the melody of the “Internationale” surges onward, the camera zooms in on Bethune, who utters with a deep emotion, “This is my country; this is my people!” This close-up shot which shows Bethune's bright eyes looking off-screen is an excellent example of Zhang's skillful negotiation of political demand and individual artistic aspiration (see Figure 14.4). It can be read at once as a very intense personal moment of this specific character and an anti-individual socialist-realist gaze. The socialist-realist gaze, which Stephanie Donald identifies as “a fixed stare out to a horizon, beyond the diegetic world, and apparently also beyond the world of the audience,”49 is a distinct stylistic feature of Chinese revolutionary films and a quintessential romanticized expression of socialist realism. Bethune's gaze, understood in the narrative context, is a gaze not meant to be returned but to be shared with the audience, fellow compatriots of the Chinese nation. Hence, it projects proletarian internationalism as a common desire.
Frame capture
Upon its completion in 1965, the biopic Doctor Bethune was immediately banned from public release because of Jiang Qing (aka Madame Mao)'s final verdict: "This subject matter should not even be touched upon. Mao has already written the article [about Bethune]. What else do you want to do [with the subject]?”50 While implicitly acknowledging all narrative productions of Bethune as exegeses of the Mao text, Jiang Qing's (p- 358) decision was informed by the rapid political radicalization which soon led to the eruption of the Cultural Revolution. Humanism, which is central to both Bethune's spirit of inter
Page 16 of 24
nationalism and the biopic's narrative strategy, was simply deemed as out of step with a new age of revolutionary fanaticism and proletarian violence. It was not until Jiang Qing and her political clique lost power after the Cultural Revolution that the film Doctor Bethune greeted the Chinese audience on National Day in 1977 and received critical acclaim.51
Intersecting visual culture and political culture in socialist China, public commemoration of the red martyr not only inspired the people to emulate those extraordinary revolutionaries through creating memorable iconographies and honoring the red martyr's moral values, it also played an instrumental role in promoting the legitimacy of the Chinese communist revolution and consolidating the political power of central authorities. Norman Bethune, a renowned Canadian doctor who died during his selfless support of China's anti-imperialist war against Japan, is a unique red martyr as his martyrdom was sacralized by Mao as the ultimate symbol of internationalism. The canonization of Mao's funeral oration of Bethune, on the one hand, reduced and reified the remarkable spirit of Bethune, which comprises his profound love for humanity and his resolute faith in communism, into militant proletarian internationalism, a spirit deemed desirable for the specific phase of the Chinese communist revolution. On the other hand, it demanded the visual production of Bethune to be an exegetical practice of the Mao text, thus ironically accommodating diverse artistic styles. The compilation documentary In Memory of Norman Bethune and the biopic Doctor Bethune—two examples of the cinematic memorialization of Bethune—evoke, quote, and appropriate Mao's text on Bethune in their distinct ways. Whether propagating Bethune's internationalism as an unequivocal political idea or humanizing Bethune as an internationalist in the making, both films domesticate this great internationalist by emphasizing the reciprocal relationship between Bethune and the Chinese communist revolution. In so doing, they perpetuate the reification of the spirit of Bethune as ideologically oriented proletarian internationalism incompatible with universal humanitarian love. It was not until 1979 that People's Publishing House published a beautifully designed memorial volume on Bethune containing the doctor's correspondence and literary works, including the aforementioned essay “Wounds.” For Chinese readers who finally had an opportunity to learn about Bethune's thoughts from his own writing, their discovery of humanitarianism as an integral ingredient of the spirit of Bethune proved to be enlightening, if not shocking.52
Allan, Ted, and Sydney Gordon. The Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Doctor Norman Bethune. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1981.
Allan, Ted, and Sydney Gordon. The Story of Doctor Bethune (Baiquen daifu de gushi). Translated by Wu Ningkun, Shanghai: Pingming chubanshe, 1954.
Anderson, Perry. “Internationalism: A Breviary.” New Left Review 14 (2002): 5-25.
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Apter, David E., and Tony Saich. Revolutionary Discourse in Mao's Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Craft, Stephen G. “Peacemakers in China: American Missionaries and the Sino-Japanese
War, 1937-1941.” Journal of Church and State 41, no. 3 (1999): 575-591.
(p. 363) Donald, Stephanie Hemelryk. Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
Ewen, Jean. China Nurse 1932-1939. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1981.
Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect, edited by Graham Burchell et al., 87-104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Hung, Chang-tai. “The Cult of the Red Martyr: Politics of Commemoration in China.” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 2 (2008): 279-304.
Lerner, Loren. “The Unmasking of Dr. Norman Bethune.” Journal of Canadian Art History 31, no. 1 (2010): 100-119.
Leese, Daniel. Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Leyda, Jay. Films Beget Films. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964.
Mao Zedong. “In Memory of Norman Bethune.” December 21, 1939. https:// www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_25.htm
Mao Zedong. “On Protracted War.” May 1938. https://www.marxists.org/reference/ archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_09.htm)
Mao Zedong. “The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War.” October
1938. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/ mswv2_10.htm
Mao Zedong. “Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art.” May 1942. https:// www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_08.htm
Martin, Helmut. Cult and Canon: The Origins and Development of State Maoism. London: M.E. Sharpe, 1982.
Qi, Li. “From Political Propaganda to Academic Study: Seventy Years of Research on Bethune” (Cong zhengzhi xuanchuan dao xueshu yanjiu: woguo Baiqiuen yanjiu qishi nian gaikuang). Journal of Shangrao Normal University 30, no. 4 (2010): 29-34.
Shen, Jiawei. Painting History: China's Revolution in a Global Context. Edited by Mabel Lee. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2018.
Stewart, Roderick, and Sharon Stewart. Phoenix: The Life of Norman Bethune. Montreal McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011.
Zhang, Junxiang. “Doctor Bethune: A Screenplay” (Baiqiuen daifu: dianying wenxue juben). Renmin wenxue 1 (1963): 52-80.
Zhang, Junxiang, and Zhao Tuo. Screenplay: Doctor Bethune (Dianying wenxue juben: Baiqiuen daifu). Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1978.
Zhang, Junxiang et al. “Film Symposium on Doctor Bethune” (Zhuotan yingpian Baiqiuen), Renmin dianying 11 (1977): 2-10.
Zhang, Wenlin. International Friends and the Red China (Guoji youren yu hongse zhong-guo). Lanzhou: Gansu Renmin chubanshe, 2000.
(1.) Mao Zedong, “In Memory of Norman Bethune,” December 21, 1939. https:// www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_25.htm.
(2.) Chang-tai Hung provides a detailed account of such commemorative practices in his article “The Cult of the Red Martyr: Politics of Commemoration in China,” Journal of Contemporary History, 43, no. 2 (2008): 279-304.
(3.) Ibid., 302.
(4.) Loren Lerner, “The Unmasking of Dr. Norman Bethune,” Journal of Canadian Art History 31, no. 1 (2010): 101.
(5.) Mao Zedong, “In Memory of Norman Bethune,” December 21, 1939. https:// www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_25.htm. The text was to become a part of “Three Constantly Read Essays” (lao san pian) and was recited by millions of Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution.
(6.) This reportage serves as the basis of Zhou Erfu's novel Dr. Bethune, which was serialized in Fiction Monthly in Hong Kong in 1946. The novel became an important reference source for Bethune's biographers and play writers. For detailed publication information, see Qi Li, “From Political Propaganda to Academic Study: Seventy Years of Research on Bethune in China” (Cong zhengzhi xuanchuan dao xueshu yanjiu: woguo Baiqiuen yanjiu qishi nian gaikuang), Journal of Shangrao Normal University 30, no. 4 (2010): 29-34.
(7.) Roderick Stewart and Sharon Stewart, Phoenix: The Life of Norman Bethune (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011), 334.
(8.) See Zhonggong dangshi yanjiu shi keyan guanlibu, Overview of Important Revolutionary Sites in China (Quanguo zhongyao geming yizhi tonglan), vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 2013), 167; Zhang Guangyu and Han Hongquan, Cultural Heritage of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun junshi wenhua yichan) (Shanghai: Shanghai daxue chubanshe, 2007), 163.
(9.) Many Chinese artefacts and artworks related to Bethune, including ceramic figures and woodcuts, also found their way to the Bethune Memorial House in Canada. See Loren Lerner, “The Unmasking of Dr. Norman Bethune,” 100-121.
(10.) These examples are taken from the Gallery of Chinese Propaganda Posters, available on https://chineseposters.net/themes/bethune.php.
(11.) For detailed introduction of the concept of “governmentality,” see Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Graham Burchell et al. (eds.), The Foucault Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87-104. David E. Apter and Tony Saich's work on revolutionary discourse in Mao's republic already touches upon exegetical governmentality. According to their observation, Mao was the master storyteller who created new narratives of Chinese history. His words were turned into sacred texts that would be ritually reiterated. This process not only inculcated political ideas but also created the “exegetical bonding,” which was instrumental in making a revolutionary community. See David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao's Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
(12.) Mao, “In Memory of Norman Bethune.” Mao's memory may not be reliable. According to Jean Ewen's memoir, Mao received Bethune twice in Yan'an. See Jean Ewen, China Nurse 1932-1939 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981).
(13.) Newly uncovered materials in a recent biography of Bethune by the Stewards suggest that what motivated Bethune to work in China was rather complicated. In addition to his commitment to communism, his irascible personality, restless energy, psychological breakdown, and expulsion from Spain could all be contributing factors to his decision to lead a wanderer's life. Roderick Stewart and Sharon Stewart, Phoenix: The Life of Norman Bethune (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011).
(14.) Zhang Wenlin compiles life stories of more than forty “international friends” in professions such as journalism, medicine, and law from countries including Austria, Germany, Japan, and the United States. See Zhang Wenlin, International Friends and the Red China (Guoji youren yu hongse zhongguo) (Lanzhou: Gansu Renmin chubanshe, 2000).
(15.) Ibid., 474-480, 497-500. Bang Wooyong is known by his Chinese name Fang Yuyong, and Dwarkanath S. Kotnis is known as Ke Dihua in China.
(16.) Ruth Wright Millar, Saskatchewa Heroes and Rogues (Regina: Coteau Books, 2004), iii, 95-96.
(17.) Stephen G. Craft, “Peacemakers in China: American Missionaries and the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1941,” Journal of Church and State 41, no. 3 (1999): 575-591.
(18.) To resist the Japanese invasion the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party and Communist Party of China formed a united front during 1937-1941. According to Ewen, after arriving in Hankou, Dr. Parsons decided to go back home rather than trek to northern China. Jean Ewen, China Nurse 1932-1939 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1981), 50.
(19.) Both Jean Ewen's memoir and a recent biography of Bethune by Stewarts point out the doctor's complex personality traits. See Roderick Stewart and Sharon Stewart, Phoenix: The Life of Norman Bethune (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011).
(20.) Ewen, China Nurse 1932-1939, 66, 74.
(21.) Ibid., 74.
(22.) Quoted in Shen Jiawei, “Wounds,” in Painting History: China's Revolution in a Global Context, ed. Mabel Lee (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2018), 57.
(23.) Peter Slater, Religion and Culture in Canada (Toronto: Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion, 1977), 301.
(24.) Jean Ewen, China Nurse 1932-1939, 88.
(25.) This form of internationalism is different from what precedes it, a type of internationalism exemplified by the Second International. As the double connexion—capital/the national, labor/the international—characterized the economic-political alliances in the nineteenth century, the Second International took upon itself to oppose nationalism for the interests of the proletariat worldwide. For a brief introduction to the political development of internationalism, see Perry Anderson, “Internationalism: A Breviary,” New Left Review 14 (2002): 5-25.
(26.) The most important two speeches are “On Protracted War” made in May 1938 (available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/ mswv2_09.htm) and “The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War” delivered in October 1938 (available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/se-lected-works/volume-2/mswv2_10.htm).
(27.) Mao Zedong, “The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War,” October 1938 (available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/ volume-2/mswv2_10.htm).
(28.) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Bantam Books, 1992); Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1877 available at https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/
(29.) Kar Marx claims that “This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man.” See Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” available at https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
(30.) Mao Zedong, “Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art,” May 1942, available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/ mswv3_08.htm
(31.) Daniel Leese, Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 100; Huang Yao, “Why Did Lin Biao Promote Leaning Mao's Works?”(Lin Biao tichang xuexi Mao Zedong zhuzuo suowei he shi), Dangshi bolan, 12 (2009): 42-47. Lin played an important role in canonizing Mao's works and building up the personality cult of Mao. The intimate relationship between canon and cult cumulated in the so-called little red book, Quotations from Chairman Mao, which was widely disseminated, recited, and quoted during the Cultural Revolution.
(32.) The first three volumes of Selected Works of Mao, which cover the history of the Chinese communist movement up to the end of the war against Japan, came out in quick succession between 1951 and 1953, and the fourth volume was published in 1960. See Helmut Martin, Cult and Canon: The Origins and Development of State Maoism (London: M.E. Sharpe, 1982), 16.
(33.) Apparently, the two filmmakers chose the most appropriate film form for their project. As Jay Leyda suggests, the film form of compilation is an ideal vehicle for a cinema of ideas. Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964).
(34.) The text in this version is slightly different from Mao's 1939 essay, which specifies that Bethune is a member of the Communist Party of Canada. The Communist Party was banned in 1940 in Canada and it refounded itself as the Labor-Progressive Party in 1943.
(35.) Trained at the Shanghai Art Academy, Wu Yinxian established himself as a professional photographer in the 1930s. He also worked as cinematographer for such well-known Chinese films as Sons and Daughters of the Storm (1935) and Street Angel (1937). In 1937 he travelled to the Chinese communist revolutionary base area in Yan'an, where he helped found the Yan'an Film Group.
(36.) Joris Ivens made his documentary The 400 Millions in Yan'an in 1937. After completing this project, he presented his movie camera and unused film stock as presents to the beleaguered Yan'an Film Group. See Ian Aitken, ed., Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film (London: Routledge, 2006), 400.
(37.) Zhong Dafeng, Reflections on Images and Ideas: Collection of Zhong Dafeng's Essays on Film History (Huoxue siying lu: Zhong Dafeng dianying shilun ji) (Beijing: Dongfang chuban she, 2015), 349.
(38.) Ye Qingshan, “Work Hard for the Health of Our People and the People's Army: Commemorating the Twelfth Anniversary of Dr Bethune's Death” (Wei renmin jiankang, wei renmin jundui de jiankang er nuli gongzuo: jinian Baiqiuen daifu shishi shier zhounian), Renmin ribao, November 12, 1951.
(39.) Mei Ling, “Learn from Bethune's Great Hardworking Spirit, Build Formalized People's Army Hospitals” (Xuexi Baiqiuen weida gongzuo jingshen, jianshe remin jundui zhenggui hua yiyuan), Renmin ribao, October 29, 1949.
(40.) Rao Shuguang, “Zhang Junxiang's Biography and Filmography” (Zhang Junxiang shengping yu chuangzuo nianbiao), Dangdai dianying 7 (2005): 31. Diary on Returning Home (Huanxiang riji, 1946) and The Lucky Son-in-Law (Chenglong kuaixu, 1947), the two light comedies that Zhang made in the late 1940s both contain stylistic norms common in the classical Hollywood cinema.
(41.) Zhang Junxiang, “About the film Doctor Bethune” (Guanyu yingpian Baiqiuen), in Zhang Junxiang and Zhao Tuo, Screenplay: Doctor Bethune (Dianying wenxue juben: Baiqiuen daifu) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1978), 2.
(42.) The film script was conceived as an adaptation of the popular biography of Bethune, The Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Doctor Norman Bethune, written by Ted Allan and Sydney Gordon. The book was translated into Chinese under the title The Story of Doctor Bethune in 1954. According to the original plan, Allan and Gordon would draft the script and Zhang would complete the screenplay. However, Allan only offered some suggestions and Gordon wrote a preliminary draft. The screenplay was completed by Zhang Junxiang and Zhao Tuo. See Zhang Junxiang, “Baiqiuen daifu: dianying wenxue juben,” Renmin wenxue 1 (1963): 52.
(43.) Chinese Film Association, “The Current Situation of Film Production (Excerpts)” (Dangqian dianying chuangzuo de qingkuang), December 1963, in Wu Di, ed., Chinese Cinema Research Materials (1949-1979) (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2006), volume 2, 415-418.
(44.) Zhang Junxiang, “About the Film Doctor Bethune,” 2.
(45.) Ibid.
(46.) Ibid., 5.
(47.) Ibid.
(48.) Other examples include Dong Cunrui (dir. Guo Wei, 1955) and Lei Feng (dir. Dong Zhaoqi, 1964).
(49.) Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 62.
(50.) Zhang Junxiang, “About the Film Doctor Bethune,” 1.
(51.) Ibid. See also Zhang Junxiang et al., “Film Symposium on Doctor Bethune” (Zhuotan yingpian Baiqiuen daifu), Renmin dianying 11 (1977): 2-10.
(52.) Young painter Shen Jiawei was one such reader. As Shen recalls, his encounter with this 3,000-word essay “was the unforgettable basic training in internationalism for me.” See Painting History: China's Revolution in a Global Context, 56-57. I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to Mr. Shen Jiawei who generously shared his experiences in Mao's China with me through email correspondence. His 1984 oil painting Wounds: The Story of Dr. Norman Bethune, a powerful statement on Norman Bethune and humanism, provides inspiration for this project.
Xiaoning Lu
Xiaoning Lu, Lecturer in East Asian Languages & Cultures, SOAS, University of London
Listening between the Images: African Filmmakers' Take onthe Soviet Union, Soviet Filmmakers' Take on Africa
Lindiwe Dovey
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Film
Online Publication Date: Jul 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.15
This article explores the relationships between African filmmakers and communism during the Cold War period, with a particular focus on those African filmmakers who were trained in the Soviet Union, such as Sarah Maldoror, Ousmane Sembene, and Abderrah-mane Sissako. The essay argues that, while affinities can be found between the work of African and Soviet filmmakers, these relationships were often compromised by utopian assumptions of “brotherhood” or racism—an issue frequently critiqued by African filmmakers in their films through creating tension between images and soundtrack. The analysis thus foregrounds the aural language of film, the sonic contexts in which films are made and viewed, and the language(s) in which research is conducted, to emphasize how the aural is an important aspect of the visual even in its absence, and to sound a note of caution against overly celebratory accounts of transnational film relationships.
Keywords: Soviet-Africa relations, Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, VGIK, African filmmaking, Soviet filmmaking, film sound, film festivals, Sarah Maldoror, Ousmane Sembene, Abderrahmane Sissako
The utopian message at the beginning of Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov's film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is well known, but it is vital to recall it here in relation to the focus of this chapter:
Without the help of intertitles ... This experimental work aims at creating a truly international language of cinema based on its absolute separation from the language of theatre and literature. (my emphasis)
At that historic moment for cinema, just after film sound had been invented in 1927, we paradoxically have a triumphant proclamation of the universality of film as a visual language, accessible to people around the world. It is also well known that Lenin valued cinema as the most important of all the arts due to its visual language,1 particularly in a context (the Soviet Union) in which the majority of the population could not read.2 The
Soviet filmmakers of the early twentieth century—such as Vertov, Eisenstein, and Kuleshov—are seen as pioneers of film's visual language, particularly insofar as this language is seen to be constituted through montage or editing. However, as the burgeoning scholarship on film sound emphasizes,3 since the invention of film sound (and perhaps even during the silent film period), film has always been both a visual and aural language, a medium that combines both images and sound. And yet scholars and filmmakers frequently emphasize the visual aspects of film over the aural aspects, thus losing a significant, and sometimes unsettling, angle of analysis. In this chapter—one of the first to explore the relationships between African filmmakers and communism during the Cold War period (with a particular focus on those African filmmakers who were trained in the Soviet Union), I foreground the aural language of (p- 365) film, the sonic contexts in which films are made and viewed, and the language(s) in which research is conducted, so as to sound a note of caution against overly celebratory accounts of transnational film relation-ships—whether framed through communist or neoliberal capitalist allegiances. My focus on the aural may appear paradoxical in a volume concerned with visual culture; I hope to show, however, that it is impossible to divorce the visual from the aural, since even in silence, the visual still references the aural precisely through its absence.4
My interest in sound's relationship to the visual has both an aesthetic and political value. As will become apparent through my analysis, while strong communist connections between African filmmakers and filmmakers from elsewhere around the world did indeed form during the Cold War period, these connections were often compromised either by utopian assumptions of eternal “brotherhood” or by racism toward Africans—an issue frequently critiqued explicitly or implicitly in films by Africans, and often through creating tension between images and soundtrack. Given racism's visual basis and bias, it makes sense that these filmmakers would draw on the aural as a means of defense against it. As Yevgeniy Fiks notes of the Wayland Rudd Archive, which contains more than two hundred Soviet-made images from the 1920s to the 1980s, mostly of Africans and African Americans:
The images in the archive present a very complex and often contradictory mapping of the intersection of race and communism in the Soviet context. They present this issue as unresolved, revealing the Soviet legacy on race as a mixed bag of internationalism, solidarity, humanism, communist ideals as well as exotici-sation, otherness, stereotyping and hypocrisy.5
Many of the contributors to the recent collection Red Africa: Affective Communities and the Cold War (2016) discuss the racism that dark-skinned peoples (not only Africans) experienced during their time as guests and beneficiaries of the Soviet Union. Sri Lankan student Saroj Pathirana describes how foreign students were frequently beaten and even killed.6 Polly Savage thus argues for an approach of “reading between the lines” of any utopian account of the “friendship” the Soviet Union extended to colonized peoples, as radical and transformative as this policy may have been. This approach necessarily requires “close reading,” she says, to reveal the “fissures ... where the visions of donor and recipient failed to align.”7 I have been inspired by Savage's approach and wish to adapt it
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so as to listen between the images, as it were, to try to conjure some of the more difficult elements of Soviet-African (cinematic) relationships, particularly as they related to issues of spoken language, dialogue, voice-over, silence, music, and (mis)translation.
The broader inspiration to engage with this topic developed out of the fact that there has been an almost complete lack of research, until recently, in both African and Soviet/Russ-ian scholarship about the fact that several of the most internationally lauded African filmmakers, across three generations—Ousmane Sembene, Sarah Maldoror, Souleymane Cisse, and Abderrahmane Sissako—were given bursaries to study at a (p- 366) specific film school in the Soviet Union: the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow. This is a fact often mentioned in African screen media scholarship but not elaborated on in any way, besides in the groundbreaking chapter by Josephine Woll, “The Russian Connection: Soviet Cinema and the Cinema of Francophone Africa” (2004).8 As curators Rasha Salti and Koyo Kouoh's recent exhibition Saving Bruce Lee: African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy (A Prologue) (The Garage, Moscow, June 12— August 23, 2015), and ongoing research, is revealing, there are also dozens of other, lesser known African and Arab filmmakers who were trained at the VGIK from the 1960s to the 1980s.9 A research project called “The African-Asian Cinema Connection,” which Kate Taylor-Jones and I have recently initiated, is also bringing to light the fascinating relationships that African filmmakers have had with other communist countries beyond the Soviet Union—such as Japan and China.10 However, for the purposes of scope, the focus here will be on Soviet-African cinematic connections.
While research on Soviet-African cinematic relationships has recently been gaining momentum within Russian and Slavic studies,11 particularly via the use of film festivals as a heuristic device (as I explore later in this article), there remains a complete lack of attention to this history within African screen media studies. I thus come to this research as an Africanist, with a particular investment in trying to find out how Africans themselves may have perceived and been affected by these relationships. I have been especially interested in the experiences of Sarah Maldoror, considered by some to be the “Mother of African Cinema” for being the first woman to make a feature film in Africa (Sambizanga, 1972), and whose voice has often been silenced in favor of listening to the experiences of pioneering male African filmmakers.12 While my methodology has mostly involved trying to listen between the images in my analysis of certain films made by Sembene, Maldoror, and Sissako—as well as a Soviet film made about Africa titled African Rhythms (1966)—I also draw on an original interview I conducted with Maldoror about her time studying at the VGIK in the Soviet Union—to my knowledge, the only interview conducted with her on this topic. It should be said, however, that conducting this interview itself presented multiple issues in translation: since Maldoror was seventy-nine years old at the time and struggled to remember her time in the Soviet Union, the interview had to be conducted via her daughter, Annouchka de Andrade, and for ease of communication, we conducted it over email, in French. Clearly such oral history projects should have taken place earlier, when the filmmakers were still alive or younger, and would have allowed scholars to understand better the details of the training offered at the VGIK and the clearly quite special relationships that developed between the Soviet teacher/filmmakers and the African student/filmmakers.
Josephine Woll points out in her essay that “inquiry into the actual significance of [Soviet] training [of African filmmakers] as well as into the admittedly vexed question of influence” has been overlooked in the past due to the bias in African screen media scholarship toward studying “France's pragmatic and cultural hegemony” over African filmmaking.13 It has perhaps also been ignored due to African filmmakers' own expressed anxiety of having influences ascribed to their work by others: when African film critic (p- 367) Françoise Pfaff pointed out certain similarities between Sembene's and Hitchcock's films, Sembene retorted: “It is not Hitchcock's way; it is Sembene's way”14; in my interview with her, Maldoror said that while at the VGIK she primarily learned not to slavishly copy other filmmakers; and Abderrahmane Sissako has expressed attachment to specific films rather than filmmakers (although he does name Andrei Tarkovsky as an influence).15 However, these filmmakers are at the same time quick to point out what they see as their influences—Sembene, Maldoror, and Cissé all cite Sergei Eisenstein as an influence, for example.16
This particular anxiety of influence undoubtedly needs to be politically situated, too, as a response to paternalistic and patronizing accounts of African political and artistic prowess as always having already been inspired by some non-African source; as the PanAfrican theorist George Padmore cogently argued in his 1956 book Pan-Africanism or Communism?:
For if there is one thing which events in Africa, no less than in Asia, have demonstrated in the post-war years, it is that colonial peoples are resentful of the attitude of Europeans, of both Communist and anti-Communist persuasion, that they alone possess the knowledge and experience necessary to guide the advancement of dependent peoples. Africans feel that they are quite capable of leading themselves, and of developing a philosophy and ideology suited to their own special circumstances and needs, and have come to regard the arrogance of white “loftiness” in this respect as unwarranted interference and unpardonable assumption of superiority. Africans are quite willing to accept advice and support which is offered in a spirit of true equality ... 17 (my emphasis)
To avoid assumptions of influence only in the direction of Soviet filmmakers on African filmmakers, I will explore some of the work of African filmmakers who were trained in the Soviet Union through David Trotter's concept of “significant affinities.”18 This concept, I hope, will allow me to open productive conversations between African and Soviet films and filmmakers while not presuming that similarities were necessarily a result of influence per se. Woll also ultimately rejects the concept of influence and settles instead for the more open idea of dialogue: “What emerges with absolute clarity,” she argues, “is the ongoing, endless and endlessly rewarding dialogue engaged in by artists of every country and culture.”19 This stance is more generative and generous in building a critical transnational cinema studies since it allows for the idea that influence moves in both directions.20
While dwelling on questions of influence and affinity, I must also emphasize the expressive freedom that African filmmakers enjoyed relative to their counterparts in the Soviet Union, who had to navigate state-enforced socialist realism, imposed from 1932 to 1988. Indeed, in my interview with her, Maldoror emphasized that what was most difficult about her experience in the Soviet Union was “the lack of freedom of expression. We had to pretend that everything was perfect in the Soviet Union.”21 This perhaps relates to the fact that while many African countries were socialist-leaning during this period, very few adopted the Soviet or Chinese communist model wholesale. (p- 368) John Hazard points out, for example, that Modibo Keita (from Mali) was the only African president who, during the 1960s, tried “to introduce orthodox Marxism-Leninism” into his society.22 For their part, Ethiopian filmmakers have said that even though they were bombarded with Soviet propaganda on television during the communist Derg regime in Ethiopia from 1974 to 1987, they continued to have access to American films through the cinemas.23 Another reason that African filmmakers perhaps had more freedom to pursue their own points of view is that there were very few African filmmakers during this period, due to the costs of film training and of film production; there certainly were not enough filmmakers in respective African countries to be able to create durable socialist or communist film collectives. Largely having to operate as individuals, African filmmakers of the Cold War era often challenged conventional wisdom and refused to toe the party line in their respective contexts.
While communist film collectives did not develop in Africa, two of the first anticolonial films to be made in the continent were made through collaboration between non-African communists and locals: Come Back, Africa (1959), generally acknowledged as the first antiapartheid film, was made clandestinely in South Africa by American communist Lionel Rogosin and members of the Sophiatown literary set such as Lionel Ngakane, Bloke Mod-isane, and Can Themba; and The Battle of Algiers (1966) was made as a collaboration between Italian communist Gillo Pontecorvo and members of the victorious FLN (National Liberation Front) in Algeria. There were also some attempts to build film cultures in certain socialist-leaning countries. For example, an attempt was made in Guinea Bissau, where Amilcar Cabral had enjoyed support from Cuba in his liberation struggle against Portugal24 and had been inspired by the Cuban film institute ICAIC, to create a socialist-oriented Institute of Cinema in the 1970s, after independence; sadly, it was not able to withstand political and historical ravages.25 The young Marxist leader of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987, Thomas Sankara, gave more support to fostering a film culture in his country than any other African leader, and he actively sought to create connections with communist countries such as Cuba; these connections tended to be ideological rather than practical, however, with the financing of a film festival such as FESPACO still coming largely from Europe.26
In order to set the Cold War scene and to try to summon the ideological and affective relationships that were encouraged between ordinary Soviets and Africans during this period, it helps to turn to a film rather than to conventional academic analysis. African Rhythms (1966) was one of the many films made about Africa by Soviet filmmakers in
(p. 369) the wake of African independence and through which the Soviet Union attempted to involve Africa and Africans in their utopian vision of a communist world. Attention to the sound in this film, however, reveals where the fissures lay in the Soviet-African relationship, and it is thus a useful background against which to view and analyze films by African directors who studied filmmaking in the Soviet Union.
The story of how I first encountered African Rhythms implicates me, too, in narratives and issues of contact zones, curatorial practices, and (mis)translation. I was introduced to the Russian filmmaker Alexander Markov who, for the past decade, has been working on a major project called Our Africa, in which he has been given unprecedented access to thousands of kilometers of Soviet archival footage of Africa dating back to the 1960s. As Markov has said, in the immediate postindependence period in Africa, Soviet filmmakers “rushed to Africa, making films whose titles speak to the emotion with which they were imbued: Hello, Africa!, We Are with You, Africa!, Good Luck to You, Africa!”27 In my capacity at the time as the codirector and curator of Film Africa, a London-based African film festival, I invited Markov to our 2012 edition to present excerpts from his work. It was an exhilarating yet difficult event given various language barriers and the lack of adequate translation, which forced us to try to meet one another through the images themselves. It was at this event that Markov introduced us to a fascinating documentary, African Rhythms (1966), made by the Second Creative Union of Moscow, and directed by I. Ven-zher and L. Mahnach, about the first major arts festival in postindependence Africa—the 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. When analyzed alongside the other documentary made about this festival—The First Festival of Negro Arts (dir. William Greaves, 1966)—African Rhythms allows an ideal opportunity to listen between the images of Soviet filmmakers' take on Africa and Africans at the time. To complement my close reading of this film, I have drawn on an interview I conducted with Markov and on viewing Markov's new, forty-five-minute version of Our Africa (2018).
The First World Festival of Negro Arts, held April 4-24, 1966 in Dakar in Senegal, was an event of “Olympian proportions” and is said to have had “the greatest impact of any single cultural event in Senegal” to this day.28 There were 25,000 participants and 2,500 performing artists from forty-five countries and four continents, and “You needed a hundred seventy hours just to see the competitive program of the festival” (African Rhythms). There were art exhibitions; music, theatre, and dance performances; film screenings; col-loquia; and cocktail parties. Fortunately for scholars, a great deal of excellent research has recently been published about the Festival.29 However, perhaps the most evocative documents we have are two films, one by African American filmmaker William Greaves and one by Soviet filmmakers I. Venzher and L. Mahnach.
While there is not space here to engage in a full comparative analysis of the two films, it is important to note certain key similarities and differences, given that these films were meant to officially represent the respective positions of the United States and the Soviet Union at the Festival-positions that were, in many ways, diametrically opposed, as David Murphy points out:
(p. 370)
The festival, somewhat inevitably, also found itself bound up in the complex political wrangling of the Cold War, as both the USA and the Soviet Union sought potential allies among the newly independent African nations ... .In particular, the participation of Duke Ellington's orchestra had been facilitated by funding from the US State Department which had, by the mid-1960s, been deploying its Jazz Ambassadors programme for a decade as part of its Cold War diplomacy, sending black artists around the world to represent the USA while, back home, they did not enjoy even the most basic civil rights ... For its part, the Soviet Union, which consistently underlined US racism in its pitch to newly independent black countries, was keen to use the festival to increase its influence in Africa.30
Lacking resources, the Soviet Union attempted to attack the United States largely on moral grounds: “While the Soviets could not compete with America's contribution of black art and performance, they did serve vodka, and they mounted an exhibit highlighting the fact that (as the New York Times reported) ‘the Russians never engaged in the slave trade, while guess-who did.'”31 What is evident in the Soviet enthusiasm for the festival, however, is an ignorance of the ways in which the black artists themselves defined the event, and a will to appropriate the festival into a triumphant communist narrative, just as the North Americans displayed a will to appropriate the festival into a glorious narrative of American liberalism.
Both documentaries largely work in the mode of revalorization and celebration, recognizing the need-after hundreds of years of denigration and oppression through slavery and colonialism-to revive and celebrate black cultural heritage. The excitement of the filmmakers is palpable in the textures of the films themselves, which are mimetic rather than simply descriptive of the festival. In both films, the camera seems to participate in the festival rather than adopt the position of a bystander. Most significantly, however, these films do what many historical accounts of the festival cannot: they bring it “alive” again in material, haptic form by allowing us to see the facial and bodily expressions of the participants. Murphy compares the Soviet film favorably with the American film because it “was shot in color and it captures more of the spontaneity and excitement of the performances” as well as “street scenes that are largely absent from the Greaves film ... ”32 Murphy has nothing critical to say about African Rhythms and reminds us “to be wary of excessively ideological readings of complex personal encounters.”33 While this is an important point, a close listening to (and not simply a close viewing of) the film reveals cer
Page 7 of 23 tain fault lines that are crucial to acknowledge, and which show the hypocrisy of the Soviet Union critiquing the United States for its racism.
Narrated in Russian, the film was clearly aimed at a Soviet rather than global audience. As with Greaves's film, its tone is triumphantly fraternal; however, rather than uniting on the basis of race, here the makers clearly see the independence of African countries as related to the march of communism and their version of internationalism. Interestingly, the word “Négritude” is not used in the film despite this being a key organizing concept for the festival;34 rather, the festival is renamed “the first International (p- 371) festival of the African art.” When Senghor is quoted, there is no mention of race but rather of world peace and “international civilization.” The message of the film, as the voice-over tells us, is that “the people of different nations, different races, can live in one united and friendly human family.”35
In positive terms, the film anoints Dakar as the epitome of a bright, modern, self-sufficient city. Indeed, the film opens with panning shots of the Dakar beach, high shots looking down on the modern city center, and then more shots of the coastline and of the rich magenta shock of bougainvillea, all set to the rousing voice of Mighty Terror (the stage name of Fitzgerald Henry, 1921-2007), a Trinidadian calypso singer who attended the festival, singing the song “Dakar, I Do Love Dakar.” Into the optimistic strains of similarity between the Soviet states and the reunited African nations “that were torn from each other” (as the voice-over tells us) slip notes of exoticization, however, that set Africa apart from the Soviet Union. The Russian voice-over refers to “the musical rhythm” that courses through Africans' blood, and this quickly turns into racist narratives of human development (“And, suddenly,” the Russian voice-over says, “somewhere in the dance patterns, in its spontaneity, you recognize the hot childhood of humanity”). This racist pinning of Africa to a primitive identity is contradicted by the images of an Africa as modern sublime in the rest of the film—a paisley suitcase, a woman in a boubou strumming a guitar.
The film also veers in strange ways between problematically speaking for Africa (as in, “We and the drum are one”) and speaking about Africa to Soviet audiences in an ethnographic tone (as in, “In the Jeve language, Togo means ‘behind the sea'”). All of these aural examples from the film remind us, like the contributions to the book Red Africa (2016), that racism infected Soviet-African relationships during the Cold War and undermines any retrospective scholarly attempt to find utopian “brotherhood” here. It is extremely significant, in this respect, that Alexander Markov has explicitly chosen not to revoice old films such as African Rhythms in his film Our Africa (2018). He says he does not want to “rehabilitate the Soviet point of view on the African continent” but rather to critique it.36 In the section that follows, I will listen between the images of certain films made by African filmmakers who trained at the VGIK in Moscow, to analyze their critiques of racism, their exploration of cross-cultural (mis)understandings, and some of the visual and sonic affinities their work shares with that of Soviet filmmakers.
As noted earlier, the research of curators Rasha Salti and Koyo Kouoh is helping to uncover the profound extent and nature of the relationships between the VGIK in (p- 372) Moscow and African filmmakers. Because this research is still emerging, however, I want to focus here specifically on the work of several of the most internationally well-known African filmmakers who studied at the VGIK. Woll (2004) has already offered an illuminating close reading of films by three of these filmmakers, each from a different generation —Ousmane Sembene (Senegal), Souleymane Cisse (Mali), and Abderrahmane Sissako (Mali/Mauritania)—searching for similarities between their work and that of their Soviet/ Russian teachers and filmmaking contemporaries. Sembene (1923-2007) went to study at the VGIK for one year, in 1961, when he was already a well-known novelist;37 Cisse (1940-) spent eight years studying film at the VGIK in the 1960s when he was in his twenties;38 and Sissako (1961-), who spent parts of his youth in Mali and Mauritania, respectively, went to the Soviet Union when he was nineteen, initially to study Russian, before moving from Rostov to Moscow to study at the VGIK from 1983 to 1991.39
What is particularly striking, however, is that Woll makes no mention of Sarah Maldoror, who trained at the VGIK at the same time as Sembene,40 leading to a lifelong friendship.
Although the first woman to direct a feature film in Africa—Sambizanga (1972)— Maldoror's status as an African filmmaker has sometimes been challenged because she is of the diaspora.41 However, as someone who traveled and worked extensively across the African continent, and who participated in the liberation war in Angola (she was also married to the Angolan anticolonial resistance fighter Mario Pinto de Andrade), Maldoror is perhaps the example par excellence of the radical filmmaker concerned with bringing about social justice and international solidarity and, in my view, fully deserves her place within the history of African filmmaking. Her film Sambizanga and the films that she helped to make—Battle of Algiers (1966) and The Pan-African Festival of Algiers (1969)— express the pain and excitement of the times surrounding and during the African liberation wars, and Sambizanga is particularly poignant for focusing on one woman's experiences during this era.
Besides leaving Maldoror out of her study, another significant oversight in Woll's otherwise groundbreaking essay is that she focuses on film as primarily a visual rather than audiovisual language. Woll positions herself as someone with “eyes educated in Soviet cinema”42 and notes that “The early Soviet directors left their mark on the African directors' manipulation of cinema's basic aesthetic components—camera placement, mise-en-scene, shot duration, pacing,”43 thereby focusing on the visual, rather than aural, components of filmmaking. This is not to say that Woll is incorrect in emphasizing that the Soviet filmmakers' visual style—and especially Eisenstein's montage strategies—had a significant impact on African filmmakers trained at the VGIK. As David Trotter explains in a recent article following renewed contemporary interest in the work of Sergei Eisenstein during the centenary, in 2017, of the October uprising brought to life in Battleship Potemkin (1925):
Montage involves the editing of individual shots into a sequence of some kind.
Most directors of the [1920s] aimed to link one shot to the next in such a way as to generate a coherent, psychologically-motivated narrative ... . Eisenstein preferred collisions (p- 373) to linkage. In his view, it was the violence with which one image met another that provoked in the viewer an otherwise inconceivable new thought or feeling.44
Eisenstein called this form of montage dialectical because of the way it generated meanings and affect through juxtaposition. As noted before, Sembene, Maldoror, and Cisse have each acknowledged the influence of Eisenstein's filmmaking on their work. Sembene expert Samba Gadjigo shared with me that Sembene spoke about the influence Battleship Potemkin had on his editing process,45 and in our interview Maldoror also singled out this film as the most influential she saw while in the Soviet Union, saying that it made her realize it was not sufficient for a filmmaker to have only the technical means to make a good film—that much more was required. But what I am interested in exploring here is how these African filmmakers also seemed to turn radical, dialectical montage into an aural principle in certain films.
Sembene, who joined the French Communist Party when he worked in Marseilles in the 1950s and proclaimed himself a Marxist to his “last breath,” vehemently drew on “his radical, Marxist views”46 to counter Senegalese President Leopold Sedar Senghor's notions of Negritude and “African Socialism,” which Sembene saw as exploiting an essen-tialist idea of indigeneity to mask the lack of “a deeply critical analysis” of neocolonial capitalism in postindependence Senegal.47 Indeed, both Borom Sarret (1963) and Xala (1974) are caustic, Marxist critiques of Senghor's failures to address economic exploitation of the poor and the corruption of the rich and powerful comprador class in Senegal. While Gadjigo highlights Camp de Thiaroye (1988) as Sembene's film that shows the most affinities to the work of Eisenstein, Borom Sarret and Xala also draw on dialectical montage to parody and critique the exploiters and to express empathy with the exploited, in a similar way to Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927). Sembene reveals his uneasiness with adopting any party line, however, through using the power of sound, something that was not available to Eisenstein during the silent cinema period. What is most striking about Sembene's first two films—Borom Sarret (1963) and Black Girl (1966)—is how they use voice-over to individualize and thus create audience empathy for their protagonists (an impoverished cart driver and a young woman who works as a domestic help for a white family, respectively). It is also through these characters' voice-overs that Sem-bene is able to act as ventriloquist, expressing his own critique of class, racial, and gender exploitation.
Samba Gadjigo and his coeditors of Ousmane Sembene: Dialogues with Critics and Writers (1993) clearly see Sembene's choice to study at the VGIK as somewhat unusual of
African filmmakers at that time, and they also imply that this training set Sembene off on a different path from that of his peers:
unlike his peers in francophone Africa, [Sembene] went not to France but to the Gorki Institute in Moscow for his technical training in filmmaking. Sembene's own experience may explain why his work does not conjure up the simplicity of the African village, but instead often focuses on industrial and urban settings, examining (p- 374) the characters and motives of those who seek to exploit the changed social conditions of the post-colonial economy and polity in modern West Africa.48
Like Sembene, Sarah Maldoror can be said to have blazed a trail entirely and uniquely her own. Born in 1938 in Gers, France to Guadeloupian parents, Maldoror first attended theater school in Paris. Like Sembene, she was offered a scholarship to study filmmaking at the VGIK in 1961, and then returned for an additional year in 1963. Maldoror made her first short film Monangambé in Algeria, in 1968, and it was selected for Directors Fortnight at Cannes in 1971. Maldoror's first feature film, Sambizanga, adapts a story by Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira about the anticolonial war in Angola of 1961-1974, and won the Tanit d'Or at the 1972 Carthage Film Festival. Maldoror had to make the film in the Democratic Republic of Congo due to the fighting in Angola; she made it when only in her early thirties, and without being able to speak Portuguese.49
Also like Sembene, Maldoror has professed her admiration for Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1917) and her films, like those of Eisenstein and Sembene, show her clear, Marxist investment in highlighting an opposition between the exploiters and the exploited. Where Sembene pays attention to white racial exploitation of black people in Black Girl and Camp de Thiaroye, however, Maldoror is careful to show in Sambizanga that white people can be both oppressors and oppressed; in the film, the Angolan construction worker, Domingos Xavier, is eventually killed because he refuses to name his white comrade who is fighting alongside him in the anticolonial war. As Maldoror has said: “the color of a person's skin is of no interest to me. What is important is what the person is doing ... . For me there are only the exploiters and the exploited, that's all.”50 Sambizanga is an unusual anticolonial film for another reason, however; its protagonist is not Domingos, a man, but rather his wife Maria, and much of the film simply yet emotively shows Maria's walk from her village to the city to search for Domingos after his arrest. “What I wanted to show in Sambizanga," Maldoror says, “is the aloneness of a woman and the time it takes to march."51
An emphasis on what is shown in Sambizanga, however, can elide the power of the film's soundtrack, which seems to me to be inspired by Eisenstein's conception of dialectical montage, transposed from image to sound. Where the images in Sambizanga are, for the most part, gentle in their lingering long takes or affectionate in their close-ups on people's faces, the sounds in the film crash against one another just as we see and hear the waves crashing against the Angolan shoreline in the opening shot of the film. While there is obvious violence in the scene in which the colonial police torture Domingos, a deeper sense of violence is embedded in the film through the way that Maldoror shifts between the plaintive musical refrain that accompanies Maria on her journey to find her husband and the harsh sounds of police activity (shouting, banging doors, bullying, hitting). If one deeply listens to the film rather than simply viewing it, the sonic montage is painfully evident—we hear the sounds of new life (Maria and Domingos's baby crying), of grief (Maria's wailing when she learns of Domingos's death), and of joy and resilience (the upbeat music at the party at the end of the film, at which Domingos's comrades vow to fight on), all crashing against one another to create a cacophony of life.
(p. 375) It is well known that the Soviet Union offered very generous bursaries to Africans wishing to train in filmmaking, but when I asked Maldoror in our interview why she had chosen to study at the VGIK, she simply said: “Who did not dream of studying at this school?” It was thus the reputation of the VGIK that drew these African filmmakers there, as well as the desire to sidestep the pull of Europe that many other African filmmakers had experienced, with all that it entailed. Far from studying in Moscow being only a pleasurable experience, Annouchka de Andrade pointed out to me that her mother frequently told her, as she grew up, about the racism that she had experienced in the Soviet Union during her film training there. At the same time, in my interview with her, Maldoror spoke of her teacher, Mark Donskoi (Eisenstein's assistant), with great admiration, saying that she learned from him, in particular, how to respect actors because “it is the actors who make the film.” She says that her two years (1961, 1963) at the VGIK were “fundamental” to her development as a filmmaker and that it was here that she learned “what cinema is.” Other lessons that she attributed to Donskoi's teaching included “curiosity and the importance of going to visit churches and museums. Donskoi told us to study the composition of each work—the total view but also the details ... to learn to find the particularity of each one and to capture it.” What is especially striking about Maldoror's responses to my questions is the human rather than ideological connection that Maldoror felt with Don-skoi, which aligns with the close relationship Woll describes between Sembene and Don-skoi.52 This is an important reminder that, in our analysis of cross-cultural relationships in the communist world (or in any context), we have to search beneath formal policies and official ideologies to uncover the chemistry between individuals, which often exceeds or transgresses the party line.53
In his films, the Malian-Mauritanian filmmaker, Abderrahmane Sissako, the youngest of the African filmmakers under study here, certainly prioritizes the chemistry between individuals, and there is also often a palpable, poetic chemistry between himself as filmmaker and his characters, whether he is making fiction or documentary films. His characters seem to glow, brought alive on screen by Sissako's attentive, patient eye and ear. Sissako studied under the filmmaker Marlen Khutsiev at the VGIK from 1983 to 1991, during the final phase of the Cold War, and he made one of his first short films, Octobre (1993), in Russia. As Sissako himself has said, this film is “about a mixed-race couple in Russia—a society which, without necessarily being racist, does not easily accept the Other.”54 The couple is Irina, a white Russian woman, and Idriss, a black African man (we never hear which country he is from), and early on in the film we learn that Irina is pregnant but has not told Idriss because she is unsure whether or not she wants to keep the baby.
In a wonderful essay comparing Sissako's Octobre to Khutsiev's films, Prachi Mokashi-Punekar argues that “Sissako, quite like Khutsiev, creates a dissonance between the visual and the aural.”55 She notes that “Octobre is a film that uses dialogue sparingly and as the film progresses it gradually dwindles into silence. Instead of dialogue, Sissako chooses to explore Irina's psyche through internal monologues and Idriss' state of mind through music.”56 Beyond this, we could argue that it is only through sound that Idriss
(p. 376) is able to stage any kind of resistance to the unspoken visual prejudice that envelops him in Russia; when Idriss visits Irina at her apartment, her neighbors complain to the police that “someone” has been making a noise on the landing, even though Idriss has not made a sound. It is paradoxical, of course, that the neighbors complain about the sounds of someone when we know their prejudice is visual—about skin color. In protest, when Idriss leaves Irina's apartment, he stops on the landing, stamps his feet, and claps his hands. Thereafter we are treated to an electrifying scene in which Idriss, in the Moscow Metro, is approached by a black African woman who begins to dance with him without saying a word, before she runs off to get her train; African music provides the beat for their moves. The scene—which has significant affinities with an early scene in Khutsiev's I Am Twenty (1965), in which a woman approaches and dances with the protagonist Sergei before running off to her boyfriend—is full of the sense of warmth and home and connection which Idriss clearly lacks in his life in Russia and in his relationship with Irina.
Octobre seems to suggest that images deceive where words, sounds, and music can provide clarity, resistance, or connection. Toward the end of the film, a dark-skinned child brings Idriss his hat; he asks where she is from, but before she can answer, an older, paleskinned woman calls her by a Russian name and she runs off. In the scene in which Idriss remembers the moment he met Irina on a train, the camera suggests that there was a strong visual attraction between them—the camera moves from Idriss's point of view to Irina's handbag dropping to the floor to a long shot of them standing beside one another, shyly smiling, being rocked by the moving train. But while we, the viewers of the film, have access to Irina's thoughts and feelings through her voice-over, she does not pay Idriss the same compliment and refuses to talk to him when he comes to visit her at her apartment. Like her neighbors' unspoken prejudice, Irina refuses to talk about what is clearly bothering her—that if she has the baby it will be mixed race and suffer from racism.
The film aptly ends with the following sequence of shots: Irina staring forlornly at a television screen on which we see the famous Georgian dancer Vahtang Tchaboukiani in his role as Othello in the filmed ballet Maure de Venise (1958); a shot of Irina's point of view, showing the frame of the television; and finally, a shot in which we are taken inside the television to a close-up of Tchaboukiani's face, full of grief and powerlessness at having lost Desdemona and at being trapped in a society that traps him within his own skin. Images deceive, we are reminded, just as in the opening sequence of the film we see a random body lying in the middle of the street removed by a police van as though it were a trompe l'oeil. Without the power of the aural, Sissako seems to suggest, we would have no way of escaping the suffocation of the visual. But the film, which clearly references
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Eisenstein's October in its title, also appears to be a critique of the kind of utopian triumphalism evident in the latter film; rather than the dramatic violence of revolution, here we have only the violence of a quick color shot in an otherwise black-and-white film, showing the crimson blood on Irina's finger as a thorn from the roses Idriss gives her pierces her skin (see Figure 15.1). | (p- 377)
Notably, the study of communist film festivals has developed into one of the most productive subfields for understanding the relationship between the Soviet Union and African filmmakers in the Cold War era, as well as cultural diplomacy in the communist world of the Cold War era more generally. This research is currently being pioneered by, among others, Russian scholars such as Rossen Djagalov, Masha Salazkina, and Elena Razlogova. Djagalov and Salazkina have been undertaking groundbreaking research on the Tashkent Festival of African and Asian Cinema, which was, they convincingly argue, the “most visible link in the Third-World filmmakers' and Soviet cultural bureaucracies' ambitious but now-forgotten effort to construct, with Soviet help, a Third-World cinematic field that could compete against Hollywood or west European cinema's global domination in the realm of both aesthetics and distribution.”57 Notably, this attention to (p- 378) welcoming sub-Saharan African filmmakers was not a feature of the Film Weeks that were organized in the People's Republic of China from 1949 to 1966, although there was a focus on Egyptian cinema in 1957.58 While one could argue that this might have been due to the fact that sub-Saharan Africans only began to make their own films in the early 1960s, it seems the Soviet Union incorporated sub-Saharan Africa into its vision to a greater extent than China.
Just as Ran Ma reveals fascinating nuances of how the PRC interacted with other nations through film,59 Djagalov and Salazkina use the Tashkent Festival as an opportunity to emphasize “the polyvalence of Soviet interactions with the non-Soviet world, thereby offering a counterpoint to the work of such prominent scholars as Evgeny Dobrenko, who have stressed the top-down nature of Soviet interactions with foreign cultures.”60 They read the Tashkent Festival as a contact zone but one that “cannot be reduced to the ‘colonizer-colonized,' ‘center-periphery,' or any singular hegemonic model (including the Cold War binary).”61 Indeed, the possibility of escaping from the suffocating, oppressive hierarchies of French control over African filmmaking was also one of my motivations for studying what I assumed might be a more equal transnational cinematic partnership between the Soviet Union and Africa. While the evidence suggests that this cinematic relationship certainly was more balanced than the cinematic relationship between France and Africa, it is still important to acknowledge the problems.
A recent article that reveals both the significant affinities and the difficulties in Soviet-African cinematic relationships through focusing on the importance of sound and language is Elena Razlogova's “The Politics of Translation at Soviet Film Festivals during the Cold War” (2015). Razlogova is not only a scholar but also comes from an illustrious family of film translators; her father, Kirill Razlogov, was one of the film translators for African filmmakers at film festivals in the Soviet Union. This article is thus imbued with a charismatic, insider's perspective of what actually took place at these film festivals. As Razlogova tells us, “International festivals became enmeshed in the politics of translation from their inception”62 and “Nations thus fought the Cold War both on vocal and visual film tracks.”63 She makes a vital distinction between film festivals held in the socialist and capitalist world in this respect:
On paper, most festivals have required or preferred subtitled films since the early 1950s ... . Soviet festivals—the Moscow International Film Festival, launched in 1959, and the Tashkent International Festival of African and Asian Cinema, inaugurated in 1968 (it had included Latin American cinema since 1974)—chose simultaneous film translation as the standard.64
This choice was partly practical (it was far less costly to rely on live, simultaneous commentary than on dubbing or subtitling) and partly political (the socialist festivals “needed multilingual translation all the more because they courted filmmakers and critics from Asia, Africa, and Latin America,”65 unlike the major West European festivals, which celebrated films from these countries but were not interested in “cultivating Third World filmmakers as a group”66). While the demands of offering simultaneous (p- 379) translation of films aloud and via earphones, sometimes in as many as five different languages, led to frequent criticisms of these festivals by visitors, usually along technical lines,67 Razlogova emphasizes instead the unexpected benefits of such cacophony at festivals—the politicized spontaneity, the sense of empowerment and community created among audiences, and the cross-cultural humility fostered. American fear at how the ideological perspectives in their films might be changed via this process led to Variety trade magazine warning American companies “to always subtitle pictures sent to the Moscow festival.”68 And
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yet they might not have feared, since “Local spectators' judgments often contradicted the Soviet political party line” and they would stamp their feet and shout if they did not desire the translator's intervention.69 Far from ignoring cultural differences, these sonic encounters reminded participants of them, encouraging “a sense of “humility,” making the encounter with foreign, especially non-Western, films, both more pleasurable and less certain.”70
As Salazkina and Djagalov point out, “The Soviet archives offer unusually rich and almost unexplored perspectives on African and Asian culture.”71 And, as Alexander Markov noted in his interview with me, although the Soviet-African connection is not well known in contemporary Russia, young Russian people in particular are “very curious about this part of the Soviet history.”72 However, as I have emphasized earlier, if we are to engage in a truly critical transnational film studies, then we require perspectives from both sides. More research is needed from African perspectives on these relationships.73
Viewed in the most positive light, Soviet-African cinematic relationships were (framed as) an attempt to contribute to global decolonization, sovereignty for the oppressed, and cross-cultural partnerships on an equal footing. In reality, as I have shown, such utopian aims did not succeed and the fissures and fault lines emerge as soon as one begins, in particular, to listen between the images. African students' experiences of racism in the Soviet Union paint a far grimmer picture and such painful experiences, somewhat paradoxically, are often to be sensed more through the aural than the visual language of film. It is only when we start to listen to the voice-over in African Rhythms, for example, that we are repulsed by the patronizing and infantilizing views of Africans expressed therein.
At the same time—and precisely because it forces us to focus on our lack of understanding, and on the need for humility in the face of the Other—sound can have revolutionary qualities. Socialist film festivals were progressive in emphasizing linguistic differences through simultaneous translation, rather than smoothing out these differences through emphasizing film as a universally accessible visual language. Doing the research for this chapter has been an equally cacophonous and humbling experience (p- 380) through which I have found myself longing for greater competency in French and for even a basic knowledge of Russian. This was a reminder that, within the growing field of transnational cinema studies, we need to engage in collaboration and not overestimate our own, individual ability to interpret texts and experiences from widely divergent cultural backgrounds.
Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
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Altman, Rick. Sound Theory Sound Practice. London: Routledge, 1992.
Bolgar Smith, Kate. Soundtracks of the City: Listening to the Film Music of the Black Diaspora in London and Paris. PhD dissertation, SOAS University of London, 2016.
Carter, Jill. “Towards Locating the Alchemy of Convergence in the Native Theatre Classroom.” Canadian Theatre Review 149 (Winter 2012): 82-84.
Cesar, Filipa. “Black Students in Red Russia.” In Red Africa: Affective Communities and the Cold War, edited by Mark Nash, 27-33. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2016.
Chomentowski, Gabrielle. “LExpérience Soviétique des Cinémas Africains au Lendemain des Indépendances.” Le Temps des medias 26 (Spring 2016): 111-125.
Djagalov, Rossen, and Masha Salazkina. “Tashkent '68: A Cinematic Contact Zone.” Slavic Review 75, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 27-98.
Dovey, Lindiwe. “Interview with Rasselas Lakew.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 25, no. 1 (2013): 107-113.
Dovey, Lindiwe. Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Dovey, Lindiwe, and Angela Impey. “African Jim: Sound, Politics, and Pleasure in Early ‘Black' South African Cinema.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 22, no. 1 (2010): 57-73.
Ellerson, Betti. Sisters of the Screen. New York: Women Make Movies, 2002.
el-Tahri, Jihan. Cuba: An African Odyssey. Paris: Arte, 2007.
(p. 384) Gadjigo, Samba et al. “Introduction.” In Ousmane Sembene: Dialogues with Critics and Writers, edited by Samba Gadjigo et al., 1-3. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.
Hanson, Helen. Hollywood Soundscapes: Film Sound Style, Craft and Production in the Classical Era. London: British Film Institute, 2017.
Hazard, John. “Marxian Socialism in Africa: The Case of Mali.” Comparative Politics 2, no. 1 (October 1969): 1-15.
Higbee, Will, and Song Hwee Lim. “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies.” Transnational Cinemas 1, no. 1 (2010): 7-21.
Ma, Ran. “A Genealogy of Film Festivals in the People's Republic of China: ‘Film Weeks' during the ‘Seventeen Years' (1949-1966).” New Review of Film and Television Studies 14, no. 1 (2016): 40-58.
Maldoror, Sarah. “To Make a Film Means to Take a Position.” In African Experiences of Cinema, edited by Imruh Bakari and Mbye Cham, 45-47. London: BFI, 1996.
Mokashi-Punekar, Prachi. “From Moscow to Mauritania: Bridging Second and Third Cinema in Abderrahmane Sissako's Octobre.” Unpublished master's essay for module “Cinema, Nation, and the Transcultural,” SOAS University of London.
Murphy, David. Sembene: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction. Oxford: James Cur-rey, 2000.
Murphy, David, ed. The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar, 1966. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2016.
Murphy, David. “Introduction.” In The First World Festival of Negro Arts, edited by David Murphy, 1-44. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2016.
Onwudiwe, Ebere, and Minabere Ibelema, eds. Afro-Optimism: Perspectives on Africa's Advances. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
Pfaff, Françoise. “The Uniqueness of Ousmane Sembene's Cinema.” In Ousmane Sembene: Dialogues with Critics and Writers, edited by Samba Gadjigo et al., 14-21. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91 (1991): 33-40.
Razlogova, Elena. “The Politics of Translation at Soviet Film Festivals during the Cold War.” SubStance 44, no. 2 (2015): 66-87.
Saul, John. The Next Liberation Struggle: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy in Southern Africa. Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005.
Savage, Polly. “Reading between the Lines: African Students in the USSR.” In Red Africa: Affective Communities and the Cold War, edited by Mark Nash, 35-43. London: Black Dog, 2016.
Trotter, David. “A Cine-Fist to the Solar Plexus,” London Review of Books 40, no. 15 (2018): 33-35.
Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou. Le cinéma et l'Afrique. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1969.
Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou. Le cinéma au Sénégal. Brussels: OCIC and Paris: L'Harmattan, 1983.
Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou. Ousmane Sembène, cinéaste: première période, 1962-1971. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1972.
Von Eschen, and Penny Marie. Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Woll, Josephine. “The Russian Connection: Soviet Cinema and the Cinema of Francophone Africa.” In Focus on African Films, edited by Françoise Pfaff, 223-240. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004.
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(1.) Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Le cinéma et l'Afrique (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1969), 74.
(2.) Josephine Woll, “The Russian Connection: Soviet Cinema and the Cinema of Francophone Africa,” in Focus on African Films, ed. Françoise Pfaff (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 225.
(3.) See, for example: Rick Altman, Sound Theory Sound Practice (London: Routledge, 1992); Lindiwe Dovey and Angela Impey, “African Jim: Sound, Politics, and Pleasure in Early ‘Black' South African Cinema,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 22, no. 1 (2010): 57-73; Kate Bolgar Smith, Soundtracks of the City: Listening to the Film Music of the Black Diaspora in London and Paris (PhD diss., SOAS University of London, 2016); Helen Hanson, Hollywood Soundscapes: Film Sound Style, Craft and Production in the Classical Era (London: British Film Institute, 2017).
(4.) My title is a direct reference to, and adaptation of, the title of Polly Savage's chapter “Reading between the Lines: African Students in the USSR,” in Red Africa: Affective Communities and the Cold War, ed. Mark Nash (London: Black Dog, 2016), 35-43. This chapter is dedicated to Sarah Maldoror, for her beautiful films and for her generosity. My sincerest thanks to the filmmakers who so generously shared their experiences with me through interviews—Sarah Maldoror and Alexander Markov. I am also indebted to An-nouchka de Andrade, Alain Sembene, Samba Gadjigo, and Rasha Salti for their wonderful help. Masha Salazkina, Rossen Djagalov, and Elena Razlogova have been an inspiration, and I want to thank them for their openness and for sharing their work. Thank you also to Prachi Mokashi-Punekar for allowing me to cite from her brilliant essay comparing Sis-sako and Khutsiev's films.
(5.) Yevgeniy Fiks, “Untitled,” in Red Africa: Affective Communities and the Cold War, ed. Mark Nash (London: Black Dog, 2016), 22.
(6.) Cited in Filipa Cesar, “Black Students in Red Russia,” in Red Africa: Affective Communities and the Cold War, ed. Mark Nash (London: Black Dog, 2016), 32.
(7.) Savage, “Reading between the Lines,” 35. We also perhaps need to consider these experiences of racism as one of the reasons why these relationships with the Soviet Union have not been discussed more by African filmmakers and scholars; in this sense, the silence itself might be the most powerful statement. As Ayi Kwei Armah says: “If I see things unseen by those who have eyes, why should my wisest speech not be silence?” (used as an epigraph in Namibian filmmaker Perivi Katjavivi's film The Unseen [2016]).
(8.) See, for example, the lack of any reference to this in Frank Ukadike's interview with Souleymane Cissé in Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 19-28.
(9.) The brochure for the exhibition Saving Bruce Lee (2015) is an invaluable resource in terms of providing biographies of many of these filmmakers, including, for example, Moroccan filmmaker Mohammed Abouelouakar and Algerian filmmaker Rabah Bouberras. It also provides information on these African and Arab filmmakers' Soviet mentors, including not only the most well-known (Mark Donskoy and Marlen Khutsiev) but also less well-known teachers such as Roman Karmen and Alexander Stolper.
(10.) An edited volume is forthcoming on this topic.
(11.) See, for example: Woll, “The Russian Connection”; Elena Razlogova, “The Politics of Translation at Soviet Film Festivals during the Cold War,” SubStance 44, no. 2 (2015): 6687; Rossen Djagalov and Masha Salazkina, “Tashkent '68: A Cinematic Contact Zone,” Slavic Review 75, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 279-298; Gabrielle Chomentowski, “L'Expérience Soviétique des Cinémas Africains au Lendemain des Indépendances,” Le Temps des medias 26 (Spring 2016): 111-125.
(12.) For example, she is not included in David Murphy and Patrick Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007) or in Ukadike, Questioning African Cinema. This is possibly because she was not born and raised on the African continent, revealing a certain bias against filmmakers of the African diaspora who have, nevertheless, been actively engaged in filmmaking on the continent.
(13.) Woll, “The Russian Connection,” 223.
(14.) Françoise Pfaff, “The Uniqueness of Ousmane Sembene's Cinema,” in Ousmane Sembene: Dialogues with Critics and Writers, eds. Samba Gadjigo et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press), 19.
(15.) Rachel Gabara, “On the Politics of African Auteurs,” in The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 44.
(16.) Email correspondence with Samba Gadjigo, August 10, 2017; personal interview with Sarah Maldoror, July 17, 2017; Woll, “The Russian Connection,” 233.
(17.) George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa (London: Dennis Dobson, 1956), 17-18.
(18.) David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 1.
(19.) Woll, “The Russian Connection,” 237.
(20.) Further research is needed, for example, on the influence the African filmmakers had on Soviet filmmakers during this period.
(21.) Personal interview, email, July 17, 2017.
(22.) John Hazard, “Marxian Socialism in Africa: The Case of Mali,” Comparative Politics 2, no. 1 (October 1969): 1.
(23.) Lindiwe Dovey, “Interview with Rasselas Lakew,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 25, no. 1 (2013): 108.
(24.) Jihan el-Tahri, Cuba: An African Odyssey (Paris: Arte, 2007).
(25.) Cesar, “Black Students,” 92.
(26.) Lindiwe Dovey, Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 102.
(27.) Comments made at Film Africa 2012 film festival in London.
(28.) Ebere Onwudiwe and Minabere Ibelema, Afro-Optimism: Perspectives on Africa's Advances (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 55.
(29.) David Murphy ed., The First World Festival of Negro Arts (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2016).
(30.) David Murphy, “Introduction,” in The First World Festival of Negro Arts, ed. David Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 31.
(31.) Penny Marie Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 160.
(32.) Murphy, “Introduction,” 32.
(33.) Ibid., 33.
(34.) See, for example: Murphy ed., The First World Festival of Negro Arts (2016); Andrew Apter, “Beyond Négritude: Black Cultural Citizenship and the Arab Question in FES-TAC 77,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2016): 313-326.
(35.) I had to rely on the English subtitles for the Russian voice-over, which might have obscured certain nuances.
(36.) Personal interview, email, September 18, 2017.
(37.) Woll, “The Russian Connection,” 225.
(38.) Ibid., 228.
(39.) Ibid., 225.
(40.) As Annouchka de Andrade, Sarah Maldoror's daughter, told me, there is some confusion about whether Maldoror and Sembene met while in Moscow or had already met one another in Africa before that.
(41.) Betti Ellerson, Sisters of the Screen (New York: Women Make Movies), 2002.
(42.) Woll, “The Russian Connection,” 232.
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(43.) Woll, “The Russian Connection,” 233.
(44.) David Trotter, “A Cine-Fist to the Solar Plexus,” London Review of Books 40, no. 15 (2018), 33.
(45.) Email correspondence, August 10, 2017.
(46.) David Murphy, Sembene: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), 1.
(47.) John Saul, The Next Liberation Struggle: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy in Southern Africa (Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005), 33.
(48.) Samba Gadjigo et al., “Introduction,” in Ousmane Sembene: Dialogues with Critics and Writers, eds. Samba Gadjigo et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 1. It should be noted that the same focus can be found in Souleymane Cisse's early films such as Baara (1978) and Finye (1982), but I do not have the space here to analyze these films; some analysis of these films can be found in Woll, “The Russian Connection.”
(49.) The first time that I met Maldoror in person was when I invited her to present Sam-bizanga (1972) at the 2003 Cambridge African Film Festival. Assuming from Sambizanga (which is in Portuguese) that Maldoror speaks Portuguese, I arranged for a Portuguesespeaking friend to meet her at the train station to welcome her. But she speaks only French (and used interpreters on her film set), and my friend found himself in a cab with her unable to communicate. This reveals the assumptions we are capable of making about each other's language affiliations and how deeply this affects the research process and relationships, too.
(50.) Sarah Maldoror, “To Make a Film Means to Take a Position,” in African Experiences of Cinema, eds. Imruh Bakari and Mbye Cham (London: BFI, 1996), 46.
(51.) Ibid., 47.
(52.) Woll, “The Russian Connection,” 225-228.
(53.) David Murphy makes a similar argument in his introduction to The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar, 1966, ed. David Murphy (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2016).
(54.) Olivier Barlet cited in Woll, “The Russian Connection,” 231.
(55.) Prachi Mokashi-Punekar, “From Moscow to Mauritania: Bridging Second and Third Cinema in Abderrahmane Sissako's Octobre,” unpublished master's essay for module “Cinema, Nation, and the Transcultural” (SOAS University of London), 6.
(56.) Ibid., 5.
(57.) Djagalov and Salazkina, “Tashkent '68,” 280. Forty-nine African and Asian countries were represented at the first festival in 1968, and there were more than two hundred film industry and government personnel involved (Djagalov and Salazkina, 279).
(58.) Ran Ma, “A Genealogy of Film Festivals in the People's Republic of China: ‘Film Weeks' during the ‘Seventeen Years' (1949-1966),” New Review of Film and Television Studies 14, no. 1 (2016): 40-58.
(59.) Ibid., 47.
(60.) Djagalov and Salazkina, “Tashkent '68,” 281.
(61.) Ibid., 280.
(62.) Razlogova, “The Politics of Translation,” 67.
(63.) Ibid., 68.
(64.) Ibid., 67.
(65.) Ibid., 71.
(66.) Ibid.
(67.) Ibid., 73 and 77.
(68.) Ibid., 68.
(69.) Ibid., 73.
(70.) Ibid., 77.
(71.) Djagalov and Salazkina, “Tashkent '68,” 282.
(72.) Personal interview, email, September 18, 2017.
(73.) I have written about Paulin Soumanou Vieyra's experiences of the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students (held in Moscow in 1957), in Lindiwe Dovey, “Towards Alternative Histories and Herstories of African Filmmaking: From Bricolage to the ‘Curatorial Turn' in African Film Scholarship,” A Companion to African Cinema, ed. Carmela Garritano and Kenneth Harrow (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019).
Lindiwe Dovey
Lindiwe Dovey, Professor of Film and Screen Studies, SOAS University of London
Brothers at War: The Images of Prison S-21 (Tuol Sleng) in the Framework of Intracommunist Conflicts a
Vicente Sanchez-Biosca
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Jan 2020 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.17
In January 1979, Vietnamese troops triumphantly entered Phnom Penh, the capital of Democratic Kampuchea ruled by the Khmer Rouge. The images they produced to justify their military offensive dwelled on the horror of the atrocities committed by the overthrown Pol Pot regime in the former torture center code-named S-21. In the framework of a split within the communist Bloc between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, this article discusses three strategies put forward by the Vietnamese propaganda machinery in which the visual imagery of the former prison played a crucial role: an intense documentary production, the atrocity-themed museum constructed on the site of S-21, and the trial for genocide held in absentia against Pol Pot and leng Sary. These visual strategies aimed to deprive the Khmer Rouge of their communist status by associating them with Nazis and their crimes.
Keywords: Khmer Rouge, Cambodian genocide, S-21, Tuol Sleng, film and genocide, visual propaganda, Southeast Asia
On January 7, 1979, Vietnamese troops triumphantly entered the ghost city of Phnom Penh, the capital of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), which had been under the rule of the Khmer Rouge (KR) since April 17, 1975.1 What had started out as suspicions and resentment, combined with nationalist and racial issues dating back centuries, later intensified by decolonization and the creation of the Indochinese Communist Party, then escalated into an international conflict as the Khmer Rouge regime felt increasingly threatened and isolated. “Brother Number One” Pol Pot (alias of Saloth Sar, 1925-1998, general secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea) deployed a reckless propaganda campaign that showed he had lost touch with reality, engaging in what Stephen Morris—in allusion to Max Weber—called “emotional actions.” These emotionally motivated political programs often take a chiliastic or apocalyptic form, present in social and political millenari-an movements, whose objectives are boundless and different in kind from other struggles
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known in history; in other words, Pol Pot's campaign can be considered as a millenarian cataclysm from which the Cambodian world would emerge, according to the KR ideologues, totally transformed and redeemed.2 In Pol Pot's regime this manifested itself in hasty violent incursions into Vietnamese territory while at the same time carrying out general purges within his own ranks.3 By mid-1978, the People's Republic of Vietnam decided to launch a full-scale attack; unleashed on Christmas Day in 1978, it ended in less than two weeks with the taking of Phnom Penh.4
This battle was a seismograph of the geopolitical balances and crises in the region, extremely complex both from within as well as outside the socialist camp. Primarily, Cambodia and Vietnam were the stage of “the climax of the Sino-Vietnamese split.”5 But this was the outcome of movement at a much higher level between the two communist goliaths: the USSR, whose rapprochement with Vietnam was aimed at furthering their (p- 386) hitherto too scarce presence in Southeast Asia; and the People's Republic of China (PRC) that exclusively sustained DK, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm and internal differences. However, the “pawn” states enjoyed certain autonomy: DK, for example, took the proposals of the Chinese revolution a step further, while Vietnam was late in notifying the USSR of its decision to invade Cambodia. Nevertheless, the consequences of the clash revealed geopolitical paradoxes of the so-called second Cold War, such as the Sino-Ameri-can tactical rapprochement beginning in 1972 (the Shanghai communiqué), but intensified in the following years. Revealingly, the time when China-Vietnam political relations were at their worst “coincided with the progress in Sino-American normalization.”6 So much so that on December 15, 1978, ten days before the offensive, China and the United States announced they had re-established diplomatic relations. It should be further borne in mind that when the KR took power in 1975, leftists were ascendant in China and moderates like Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping were on the defensive; whereas when Vietnam invaded Cambodia, Deng and a coalition of reformers had moved China toward a less radical posture.7 All these events had knock-on effects, one of which was the UN General Assembly recognizing the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia in September 1979, and another, the invasion of Vietnam by China in February 1979, although this war had limited consequences.8 In short, the so-called Third Indochina War constituted the breaking point of the precarious balance among the major world powers: the United Nations, the United States, the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the USSR, and the PRC.9
The Vietnamese victory, instead of easing the pressure, made it worse. International backlash was so intense that as soon as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam achieved victory, they found themselves obliged to launch an intense propaganda campaign to legitimize their occupation. To achieve this, an effective rhetoric aimed at the international community had to exploit anti-American pacifism resulting from the Vietnam War by stressing the KR's crimes. In such a thorny operation, the combined skills of the Vietnamese, Soviet, Cuban, and East German propaganda machines were decisive. In other words, the communist visual machinery manifested itself in an apparently minor event, namely the Kampuchea conflict, which then became the high focal point of global propaganda at that time.
If we move to the key points of this campaign in self-legitimation, we can see that the most visible one is criminalization by association. Two 1979 publications edited in English in Moscow and in Hanoi, respectively, clearly reveal the Soviet-Vietnamese implications in denouncing the Chinese enemy concealed behind DK's atrocities. Edited by E. V. Kobelev and designed by V. V. Eremin, Kampuchea: From Tragedy to Rebirth expresses in its own title the sequence guiding from the “reactionary pro-Peking Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime” to the Vietnamese liberation.10 The narrative is as follows: in 1970, the people of Kampuchea rose up in arms against the puppet government of General Lon Nol and gained victory on April 17, 1975. Nonetheless, the power was then “usurped by the reactionary Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique, supported by Peking, which betrayed the revolutionary cause.”11 The barbaric and medieval methods used by the KR showed that “the Kampuchean version of the ‘cultural revolution' surpassed all known (p- 387) patterns of evil,” and this entailed “an anti-Vietnamese hysteria.”12 All the text included in the volume insists on the Maoist responsibility: “Peking regards Kampuchea as a testing ground for its political and military concept and plans.”13 Not surprisingly, the 1979 Vietnamese victory is represented as a popular Cambodian anti-Maoist uprising, minimizing the role played by Vietnam in the military action. In this context, the discovery of the detention and torture center code-named S-21 (Tuol Sleng) embodies the horror, as given in A. Levin's account when he found instruments of torture such as crowbars, manacles, chains, tongs and fetters, and “bloody shovels that nobody had bothered to wash” abandoned in the compound.14
Published in Hanoi, Kampuchea. Dossier III: The Dark Years reproduces identical rhetoric condemning a regime considered “undoubtedly the most bloody [sic] in human history.”15 Most telling is the timely opportunity afforded this publication: the opening of the People's Revolutionary Tribunal to judge in absentia Pol Pot and leng Sary for the crime of genocide, which was held in Phnom Penh in August 1979. In this sense, the book represents a supplementary effort to persuade the international community of the exactitude of what was at stake in the hearings, namely, that “Maoism found zealous disciples in the neo-fascist clique of Pol Pot, leng Sary and Son Sen.”16 The publication's particular strength lies in reproducing the statements of two prominent American jurists: the defense laywer Hope R. Stevens and the judge John Quigley, to which we shall return later on.
In sum, these two books released in the heat of the 1979 campaign to achieve international recognition by the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) shape the basic rhetoric with which Vietnam presented the new Republic in diplomatic circles over the years to come. In spite of the efforts, one month later, the United Nations General Assembly, on September 21, 1979, voted in favor of recognizing the KR as the legitimate government of Cambodia condemning the Vietnamese invasion.
All through the 1979, the KR's genocidal cruelty was compared in PRK's official discourse to the crimes of the Nazis in Germany (which arguably the KR would even outperform).
This was to prove a productive choice for various reasons. First, because it took advantage of a rhetoric of condemnation that had already been wielded against the United States for its violation of human rights during the Vietnam War, that encompassed the effects of the My Lai massacre in 1968 and the Vietnam-Cambodia border massive bombings by the Nixon-Kissinger administration chasing Vietcongs. It was, however, in East German circles that the Nazi lexicon was more efficiently implemented to name the KR atrocities: Vernichtungskrieg (war of annihilation), which initially branded American intervention as “ruthless genocide.”17 Secondly, it applied this manufactured terminology to a new enemy within the ranks of communists, which illustrates just how bitter this infighting had become. In this tangle of runaway propaganda and counterpropaganda, the main arguments were crystallized in images that were more eloquent, direct, and imbued with greater emotional power than the means of other discourses. These accordingly fulfilled a triple task: legitimizing the invasion based on its objectives, proving the criminal nature of the recently toppled regime, and denying the socialist nature of the People's Republic of China. So, what were these images?
One clue that aids in understanding this propagandistic impulse can be found in what I shall call the visual paradox of victory. Considering the propaganda training the Vietnamese received when covering their own long civil war, one might have expected the photographs and footage depicting the seizure of Phnom Penh to convey a heroic sense of victory expressed in euphoric terms. Surprisingly enough, though, the images disseminated over the following weeks and months were dismaying. The Vietnamese, alongside the former KR who had fled from DK and formed the Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation (KUFNS), dwelled on the horrors of the Pol Pot regime by unveiling the gruesome details of a center for repression that they had discovered and which illustrated the horror of the overthrown regime: the aforementioned S-21. This prison's documentation was almost intact and provided irrefutable proof of the crimes committed by the “Pol Potleng Sary clique.” When looking at the images generated by the Vietnamese invaders, the following questions arise: What was the contribution made by these images? How were they used as evidence by the new government? Through what direct and indirect channels were they displayed before the international community in order to reap political interest? The answers to these key questions will help us assess how effective the Vietnamese master narrative was and how it was established in the form of what Michael Vickery, in 1984, critically called the Standard Total View (STV), namely, a view of Pol Pot's dictatorship as a catalogue of atrocities.18
I would argue that the visual materials related to S-21 and the investment in shock and awe by the Vietnamese propaganda campaign played a crucial role in the Vietnamese strategy of casting themselves as liberators, as appears in the “emotional actions” mentioned at the beginning of this text. Analysis of this micro-episode can shed new light on some aspects of the intracommunist struggle in terms of visual propaganda, rhetoric, and strategies of conceptual montage, utilized in a campaign designed by one of the parties
Page 4 of 23 involved. In order to evaluate the conflict in full, a parallel study would be necessary from the Chinese perspective, but unfortunately there is no mention of this micro-episode in the official coverage; the KR leaders, such as leng Thirith, simply denied the existence of S-21 as a Vietnamese fabrication.
The images in question show the vestiges of KR violence captured by Vietnamese cameramen who accompanied the armed forces as they forced their way into the capital.19 It was this filming that set the tone and the visual style with which the Vietnamese, and their allies, would organize their propaganda machinery over the following decades (see Figure 16.1). The cornerstone came in the form of some enigmatic footage filmed by cameraman Ho Van Thay, consonant with a series of photographs taken simultaneously by Ding Fong, both working for the Vietnamese army. This footage condenses the visual, emotional, and narrative patterns of the propaganda project that united Vietnam, the USSR, and the German Democratic Republic employed in their fight against the still threatening KR, who at that time were entrenched in the jungle. | (p- 389)
Frame capture.
This initial action of documenting the discovery and entrance into S-21 paved the way for three outcomes, illustrating the propaganda agents' comprehensive planning. The first outcome was the ensuing abundant filming (in addition to stills), which bore a striking similarity to the parameters of the original footage, in the hands of filmmakers and politically committed reporters, who consciously or unconsciously emulated the appeal strategies that Ho Van Thay's film established. The second outcome materialized in converting S-21 into a museum, preserving not only the basic structure of the main buildings,20 but also choreographing the disturbing visual elements (photographs, torture instruments, human remains), along the lines of staging a site for what came to be called “dark tourism.”21 The third outcome was the preparations—allowing for the limited resources at
Page 5 of 23 the disposal of a devastated country—to prosecute the two KR leaders, Pol Pot and leng Sary, for genocide in a trial, which would be held in absentia in August 1979, amid considerable efforts by the new government to attract foreign lawyers and representatives as well as to deploy all the available media resources in order to disseminate the trial reports among the international community.
These dynamics should not be seen as separate actions but rather the expression of a three-fold plan. While the idea of a trial had already been in the making, at least since September 1978, what allowed it to be put into action, with the other two strategies, is what we could metaphorically refer to as the objet trouvé S-21, because its revelations generated a particularly intense power of shock. As soon as Phnom Penh was liberated, the Vietnamese colonel Mai Lam, a specialist in the study of combat zone bodies, who had conceived the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of American War Crimes right after the end of the Vietnam War (1975), was brought to Phnom Penh to (p- 390) gather evidence on the Pol Pot regime crimes.22 What was analyzed in S-21 most likely exceeded all his expectations.
Looking back, this triple strategy appears to anticipate the modern viewing culture with regard to its articulation of atrocities. In the arena of justice, the trial against Pol Pot and leng Sary was to be the first in history for the crime of genocide,23 albeit that a number of objections have been raised as to the procedures followed and its apparent foregone conclusion of guilt. As regards the museum's curatorial strategy, Mai Lam decided to exploit the visual shock effect and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum became one of the most visited destinations in the world for experiencing atrocities. The climax of the museum's exhibition was a map of Cambodia made with the skulls of victims, with the rivers drawn with blood-red lines.24 Finally, the visitors drawn to Phnom Penh would in turn generate further iconography as they took photographs on the spot becoming then a soundboard of the Vietnamese design. In each of the three visual spheres, the image of Tuol Sleng was to play the starring role.
In December 2008, the head of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam) received a copy of film footage from the Vietnamese authorities, which had been shot in January 1979 by cameramen accompanying the troops who discovered S-21. The silent footage, some twelve minutes long, was submitted by DC-Cam, together with two rolls of film containing seventy photographs, to the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) to be admitted as evidence in Case 001 against Kaing Guev Eav (alias "Duch"), who was the prison warden between 1976 and January 7, 1979. Spencer Cryder, DC-Cam Legal Associate, describes it in the following terms:
The grainy black and white video portrays the Khmer Rouge detention centre, codenamed "S-21" (Security 21), just days after the Khmer Rouge abandoned the site where approximately 14,000 Cambodians were tortured and killed. The "S-21 video" portrays the front and rear gates, the fence of corrugated sheet iron topped
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with rows of barbed wire, a wooden shack that is no longer there, and Buildings A, B, and C overlooking freshly plowed dirt where coconut trees, graves, and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum ticket booth now sit. (...) the S-21 video taken by Ho Van Thay, the Vietnamese cameraman, also depicts graphic scenes of decomposing corpses left shackled to metal bed frames, as well as Vietnamese soldiers with two babies and two young children found at S-21.25
The impact of this apparent discovery in 2008 had not been undermined by the fact that many fragments of the footage in question had been in prior circulation for decades. Just to give an example, the documentary filmmaker James Gerrand had included a long fragment in his Cambodia Kampuchea (1987), in which it is embellished (p- 391) with a firstperson plural voice-over in English with a Cambodian accent speaking about the impressions of the liberators:
Visit to a secondary school. Over the past three years, this school was turned into a jail for political prisoners. Let us visit a cell block. This is a special block. We say special because in each former classroom only one prisoner was kept. His hands and feet were chained to an iron bed.
When we came to this prison on the 14th of January 1979, there were eleven dead bodies in the eleven former classrooms and one body lying in the yard. In this compound, we found a large number of prisoners' files and photographs. After killing a prisoner, the torturers would cut his throat and rip up his belly; then put a number on his body and once again take a photograph of him dead. What did they do it for?26
In fact, the Vietnamese footage was taken by many as an exact, and not only faithful, representation of the prison. This “reality effect,” deprived of added sound, reinforces the impression of unfiltered material. Leaving aside the exception of Duch's Cambodian defense attorney, Kar Savuth, who challenged the film as being “politically motivated,” nobody appeared to dwell on its propagandistic details. If the court rejected it, it was because it was presented late and they had no wish to further delay a trial, which by its very nature was already highly complex.27 The footage had been probably brought to Ho Chi Minh City in early 1979 with thousands of meters of KR propaganda films, photographs, and other documents retrieved by the occupants with the aim of using them as first-hand material for staging newsreels and documentaries.
Closer examination, however, of the footage as delivered by the Vietnamese authorities in 2008 reveals that the material had already undergone editing, so even if the reality it depicts is not questioned, the fact remains that it has been carefully submitted to assemblage so as to have a convincing film form. Several features confirm this thesis. To begin with, the excerpt commences with a tracking shot passing through two gates and leaving them behind as it guides the viewer into the interior of the yard. This effect of accompanying the reporter suggests he is unaware of what awaits him inside. Eight minutes later, the camera reverses the previous tracking movement in leaving the prison camp, as if closing the circle, carefully echoing the previous camera track. This enunciation strategy
Page 7 of 23 implying the guiding of the would-be spectator in the process of discovery is confirmed by a series of tracking shots entering different cells to focus on decomposing corpses lying and chained to iron beds. In all these, the camera leads the spectator's gaze emphasizing the gruesome details as a pars pro toto of the violence perpetrated (shackles, blood, hair, skulls, and instruments of torture). In so doing, the editing acts as a magnifying glass focused on the macabre details, constraining the spectator to adopt the same physical, narrative, and cognitive stance as the cameraman, while he captures the scenes without pausing to dwell on them. Avoiding montage effects thus seems to be the outcome of a calculated strategy to present the footage as not only faithful to the facts, but also unmediated.
(p. 392) It is impossible to draw definitive conclusions without access to the outtakes and missing footage, but I would argue that the film attempted to respond in advance to foreseeable accusations of being staged. Shots from this film can be found in news reports produced by the propaganda services of the new government since 1979. Very often they are rounded off with more recent film reports of the detention center as it was turned into a museum. As a matter of fact, Tuol Sleng became an inevitable juncture during diplomatic visits and meetings with representatives from ally countries or humanitarian organizations, the first of which probably was held as early as on January 25, 1979, with representatives of the international press.28 During such visits the ever-attentive cameras registered the looks of horror on the visitors' faces who reacted with dismay to what they saw and, with it, they added the weight of human empathy to the museum's shocking display of the crimes committed by the Pol Pot regime.29
While the Vietnamese were propping up their denouncement by presenting their film as transparent images, they were also aware of the fact that this material would be challenged by their various enemies (United States, United Nations, and China) as having been fabricated and would end up being viewed with suspicion in international circles. To counter this, they employed a two-fold strategy. On the one hand, they constructed a documentary discourse endowed with interviews, archival material, and staging devices. On the other hand, they facilitated access to the site of the prison, turning visitors into “secondary witnesses” to the KR crimes. As regards the former, the German Democratic Republic documentary filmmakers Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann (H&S Studio) played a decisive role; they were audacious and innovative during the 1970s and early 1980s in matters of political agitation and propaganda, benefiting from their status of independence from DEFA, the state-owned East German film studio. Their strategies combined staging and “direct cinema” techniques (i.e., handheld camera, sync sound, hidden camera), and these were used to emphasize that the genocide committed by the KR was inseparable from the influence of Maoist China. When these filmmakers, who had been very active during the Vietnam War, made a triptych about Cambodia,30 its first two parts laid out the general lines of the propaganda campaign, and in both, S-21 was the cornerstone: Kampuchea: Sterben und Auferstehen (Kampuchea, Death and Resurrection, 1980) and Die Angkar (The Organization, 1981).31
These two films are crucial documents to grasp the Vietnamese discourse, even though they were not released in 1979. The first was released in Phnom Penh in September 1980 in the presence of numerous East German, Vietnamese, and Cambodian dignitaries and was also released in the GDR and even aired on (p- 393) television.32 In September 1982, the PRK President Heng Samrin was offered copies of the second film along with a personal note by Erich Honecker. It was later, during 1982, that a diplomatic change in the United States and the GDR to make a rapprochement toward China made the critical invective against Maoism, contained in H&S's documentaries, suddenly seem inappropriate. This resulted in the dissolution of the Studio and its integration into the DEFA. The thesis sustained by the first two films is best described in the words of the new Minister for Information and Propaganda, Keo Chanda, who argued for the historical fraternity between Vietnamese and Cambodian communism and who condemned the criminal policies of Pol Pot and leng Sary instigated by China.33 The vision of a communist accord between Vietnam and Cambodia is embodied in the signing of the agreement between representatives of both countries, while the embrace between the leaders, which seals it, is used by the filmmakers as the opening and closing shots of their film, thus refuting the idea of a military occupation.
Following a dialectic principle, much of the material is shown in the form of a montage: the statements by Ieng Thirith, Ieng Sary's wife, and the DK's Minister for Social Affairs, are refuted by juxtaposing them with the voices of survivors, shots of mass graves, and images of atrocities. In addition, both Kampuchea and Die Angkar verbally and visually associate the KR crimes with those perpetrated by the Nazi regime. This strategy was directed toward the Western audience, at the time highly sensitized on human rights issues. The alignment with the politics of the Nazi Germany echoed the line of argumentation exploited by the DEFA against the German Federal Republic (GFR), which they viewed as a cover-up for Nazis. Expressions that are used in the film narratives, like Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil), applied to Pol Pot's nationalism, are reminiscent of the Nazi ideology in the same way that Appelplatz refers to the concentration camps and the Ausrottung (extermination) of the Untermenschen (subhumans) recalls the killing of the Jews. The attempt to compromise the Maoist support for KR is made explicit in Die Angkar by including references to a Chinese film which shows radiantly happy Cambodian peasants, and which the narrator couples with the filmed farce staged in the Nazi concentration camp of Theresienstadt that attempted to persuade the international community about the happiness of its inmates: Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Führer Gives the Jews a City, 1944).
But it is S-21 that confers a visual tone to the film: photographs or stills from Auschwitz are shown side by side with the shots and photographs of S-21. The labels printed on each of these photographs clarify any doubts: Hitler-KZ and Angkar-KZ (see Figure 16.2).34 The order in which details appear in the film that the East German filmmakers shot upon their arrival in Phnom Penh in the early months of 1979 persistently follows the
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same strategies as those used by Ho Van Thay: featuring tufts of hair, pools of blood, and torture instruments in identical cells. In addition, Die Angkar dedicates a key sequence to S-21. It starts off with a close-up of the barbed wire fencing, followed by the camera sliding along a track through a corridor, from which it peers at the brick cells of building C. The viewer is then subjected to an enlarged view of victims as they were photographed by their captors upon detention. (p- 394) This presentation to the camera implies that a period of preparation, cataloguing and developing the negatives, had elapsed between the finding and the filming. Finally, the sequence ends with a commemorative photograph and a shot, in which seven survivors of the prison pose two years after they were liberated, that is, January 1981. The camera closes in on their faces, returns to the series of photographs, and zooms in to focus on one of these photographs, which represents Ung Pech, who subsequently gives evidence of his experience.
Frame capture
Choosing Ung Pech is by no means accidental, for, as we shall see, he is one of the linchpins of the accusing machinery. As both the former inmate of S-21 and the first director of the museum, he was to play a very important role in testifying and reporting on the prison at the August 1979 trial. Due to his position, Pech was constantly chosen for interviews. This is followed by a scene that features the survivors of S-21, who appear before the camera and recount aspects of their experiences at the scene of the crime: the painter Vann Nath and the sculptor Bou Meng, to name but two. At the time of filming, Nath had already put to canvas some of the atrocities committed within the walls of S-21, since he had been contracted by the museum's management in November 1979 to contribute to the iconographic aspect of memory. The movie camera records some of the paintings.
Although at first those who visited Tuol Sleng were sympathizers with the new government, news reporters played a decisive role. An internal order sent to the museum officials from 1980 by the Ministry of Culture, Information, and Propaganda stresses “the need for bright lights in the rooms so that the foreigners can take pictures easily.”35 Not surprisingly the number of news reports and documentaries had skyrocketed in mid-1979, particularly those by foreign visitors, as tensions in the region multiplied: the Chinese attack on Vietnam in February 1979, the KR's threats from their strongholds in the jungle, and the precarious situation of supply shortages to refugee camps on the border with Thailand (medical and food provisions levels were approaching a state of extreme emergency) in parallel with multilateral negotiations within the United Nations. In this framework, French television set aside air time for frequent news coverage and debates on the subject, while their reporters circulated throughout this former French colony.36 British reporters were no less active. Among the first documentaries, two serve as illustrative examples: Cambodge: Année néant (Jérôme Kanapa, Jean-Marie Cavada, and Michel Toulouze, 1979) and Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (John Pilger and David Munro, 1979). Both were filmed at the same time, although they were the product of two quite different reporting patterns and approaches.
In July, August, and early September of 1979, the Australian reporter John Pilger made what he proudly but inappropriately presented as the first documentary filmed by Westerners in Cambodia after the defeat of the KR (see Figure 16.3). Familiar with life in
(p. 396) Phnom Penh in the 1960s, Pilger travelled from Vietnam accompanied by the photographer Eric Piper, film director David Munro, cameraman Gerry Pinches, and sound recordist Steve Phillips of Associated Television (ATV). The documentary was shown on British television on November 1, 1979.37 Around the same time, another film crew from France headed by Jérôme Kanapa made the documentary Cambodge: Année néant, which was broadcast by France 3 on October 3, 1979.
Frame capture
Pilger and Kanapa, whatever their differences, both chose the genre of an urgent news reportage to appeal to Western audiences for international aid to help alleviate the humanitarian crisis in which the country was immersed. The two documentary titles bear similarities, and likewise echo to some extent the Angkar slogans (such as rebuilding a society from the ashes) that François Ponchaud referenced in his book about the KR genocide.38 How do the two documentaries cover the story, especially in comparison with the Vietnamese discourse on the KR genocide? How do they report on the hotspot Tuol Sleng?
Pilger's voice-over in his documentary introduces the Tuol Sleng episode as follows:
And this is where some of them die. A high school, which became an Asian Auschwitz. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge photographed their victims when they were brought to the camp and as they were hanged, drowned, disemboweled, tortured, electrocuted. In this camp alone, 12,000 people died like that. [my italics]39
The rhetorical devices associating Nazism and the KR regime symptomatically echo the Vietnamese official terminology, as analyzed earlier. Yet Pilger goes even further: he brings his cameraman to the facilities in order to see for himself, filming in color. He makes forays into the Tuol Sleng compound, choosing track camera shots to give the impression of a “subjective exploration” by the filmmaker as he makes his way into the individual brick cells of building C. The camera does not fail to zoom in on close-ups of photographs of victims, using camera angles for emphasis and editing to enhance the terror associated with the instruments of torture. By now the reader can begin to detect similarities with some of the means used by Heynowski & Sheumann, although Pilger could not have been familiar with them at this time because their work did not come to light until much later. But despite this chronology, the itinerary followed by Pilger was already
Page 12 of 23 carved out when Pilger filmed it and, given that this path has been designed by the museum narrative layout, we might conclude that Pilger is, consciously or unconsciously, following the steps and adopting an already solid narrative. Furthermore, to underscore the sensationalist approach, the film editor embedded dissonant sound effects in these shots that bring sinister connotations to the exploration of the site.
After filming an interview once again with Ung Pech, which symptomatically focused on the details of the kind of torture he underwent, Pilger's cameraman delves into the cells of the upper floors of building A, simulating a first-person gaze, and providing the following commentary:
People were mutilated in iron beds and there are blood and tufts of hairs still on the floor. Former civil servants, soldiers, teachers, students, actors, technicians. This (p- 397) was a victim photographed as he was found when the Vietnamese discovered the camp. A Gestapo called S-21 tortured and killed all those designated as sub-people. Virtually anybody who lived in a town, who had modern skills, who knew foreigners. For example, only one lawyer has been found alive. [my italics]40
By resorting to associations with Nazism (“Gestapo”), and endorsing the use of the term “subpeople” (an allusion to the Nazi use of the word “subhumans”), this language shows how Pilger found himself influenced by the already widely disseminated Vietnamese discourse. When Pilger filmed these spaces seven months after the former prison was discovered, the state of the cells was still surprisingly abrasive: tufts of hair, blood stains, and pieces of paper with the remains of confessions were all preserved to look like an uncontaminated crime scene. One wonders to what degree the very state in which the place was preserved invited visitors to take photographs and film there. Was the uncontaminated state, which must have required investing time and effort, the result of the wishes of those who were overseeing the facilities?
Against the same backdrop of barbed wire fencing filmed in Die Angkar, Ung Pech refers to tortures he suffered, crimes against women and children, stressing the most physical aspects of it under Pilger's questions. Pech had worked hand in hand with Mai Lam (and also East German specialists) in analyzing the evidence for the trial to come against Pol Pot and leng Sary. It is no mere coincidence that the same person who was a direct link between the trial and the museum project appeared to be available to speak to Pilger at such a key moment. Whether Pilger had mimetically adopted the Vietnamese discourse or acted out of his own ideological convictions is hard to determine, but this mimetism is symptomatically absent from Kanapa's documentary.
In Kanapa's journalistic quest to deliver coverage of the KR crimes to the French audiences, Tuol Sleng is also featured as one of the climatic moments in the documentary, although he shows himself to be more cautious about mimicking the Vietnamese jargon. The camera eye gives great importance to the KR's meticulous records, listing those who were executed and filming the mug shots of the victims, sliding between these small-size pictures and the enlarging prints of the panels exhibited at the museum rooms. Then, quite suddenly, the camera jerks away from these images to focus on piles of clothes and
Page 13 of 23 material remains. Much like in the films discussed earlier, there is the inevitable token visit to the cells with the fetishized details of bars, blood, and tufts of hair. Kanapa's team must have been filming almost at the same time as Pilger's, although Kanapa avoids incursions into the (almost gothic) atrocity rendering performed by Pilger and does not use tracking shots along corridors accompanied by macabre sound effects.
There is something else which is surprising about Kanapa's view. The camera fixes on one of the iron beds, in front of which there is a table. On the bed, there is a sheet, and underneath, a huge pool of dried blood. This scene, regardless of how it reminds us of the “original” filmed by Ho Van Thay in early January 1979, has already incorporated the staging characteristics of a museum; it attempts to reconstruct (or perhaps only evoke) a collage-scene of the interrogations and their effects. All of a sudden, a swish pan turns our attention to a photograph hanging on one of the nearby walls, namely, a snapshot
(p. 398) from January 1979 taken by photographer Ding Fong. The camera movement is particularly noteworthy, because it reveals how the camera replicates the resolve of the museum organizers to record a “first sight” of these spaces, simultaneously highlighting the awareness of the temporal gap separating this camera from Ho Van Thay's, the one considered as the “primal filming.” Kanapa's cameraman invokes the original scene and, at the same time, leaves a mark of the current view that confirms that it is belated and mediated.
Arguably, when Kanapa and Pilger's cameras film the compound, Mai Lam's strategy has already taken effect by having arranged the objects and prompted a narrative journey through the different buildings that is subsequently adopted by the reporters as an invisible and likely unconscious script, to or from which they can either get closer or slightly move away. In other words, the filmmakers work within a specific framework and, even though they have some leeway in style and resources at their disposal, they are in some way overdetermined by the Vietnamese design.
The North American judge John Quigley, on his arrival in Phnom Penh in 1979 to assess the hearing by the authorities of the new Cambodian-Vietnamese government from a legal perspective, stated:
At the time of the trial, Phnom Penh was a ghost town (...). Attractive urban villas still stood empty, many with rusting Renaults parked in the driveways where their owners had abandoned them during the 1975 evacuation. There was no industry in the city, and shops were closed. My initial reaction on arriving in Phnom Penh was to wonder why anyone was bothering to hold a criminal trial, when so much needed to be done to restore normal life.41
It is not difficult to find an answer to his reflections: the trial was one of the threepronged propaganda campaigns launched by the new government to legitimize invading Cambodia and accusing China. Some speculate that Hun Sen's mentor, the Soviet diplo
Page 14 of 23
mat Igor Rogachev, proposed the trial.42 Others note that the Soviet Supreme Court judge Valentin Shubin participated in it, but, as Gutman concludes, little evidence has come to light of Soviet involvement in its planning. Be that as it may, the announcement that Vietnam would provide “an Executive Team” headed by Tran Huu Due “for a Cambodian court in order to help Cambodia convene a trial to sentence the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique”43 was only after a meeting between PRK leaders and members of the Central Committee of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Whatever the case, the Pol Pot and leng Sary trial for the crime of genocide generated a very intense campaign. Its participants included twenty-two foreign observers, twenty-nine foreign journalists, (p- 399) and lawyers from Algeria, Cuba, India, Japan, Laos, Syria, the USSR, the United States, and Vietnam. In addition, some international organizations attended, although Amnesty International was not on the guest list. The trial took place in barely five days (August 15-19) in the Chaktomuk Theater, which seated five hundred. The proceedings were broadcast through Voice of Kampuchea Radio, the press published transcripts and photographs, and filmed coverage was also provided.
As was to be expected, the hearing was criticized as a “show trial” in the West, but that did not stop Vietnam from presenting their findings on September 17, 1979, to the Secretary General of the United Nations. Furthermore, the Russian Judge Valentin Shubin made public his report of the trial. These documents are now available thanks to the meticulous work by Quigley and Helen Jarvis.44 Numerous government news bulletins included moments of the trial, as does the film by Kanapa, although not Pilger's. In a number of the shots of the trial footage, the central importance of Ung Pech is clearly seen, but it is also noticeable that some of the perpetrators interviewed by Pilger and Heynows-ki & Scheumann appear in selected fragments filmed during the trial as well. This seems to confirm the close link between the strategies designed by Keo Chenda, minister for information and propaganda, who was also the presiding judge.
The narrative presented at the trial echoes the logics expressed at the Nuremberg trials, combined with the later Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). Accordingly, its conclusion adapts the new concept of genocide, as Quigley states “that genocide has indeed been committed here.”45 Nevertheless, the language used by the Defense Council Hope R. Stevens in his “Closing Argument” reveals to what extent, and beyond the juridical aspect, the official discourse had permeated the language of the hearings:
It is clear to all that Pol Pot and leng Sary were criminally insane monsters carrying out a program the script of which was written elsewhere for them. So that if it were left to me and the other lawyers of the world who are present here, you would not have only Pol Pot and Ieng Sary and their agents and willing vassals standing judgment here; in fairness to them we would have beside them as fellowaccused the manipulators of world imperialism, the profiteers of neo-colonialism, the fascist philosophers, the hegemonists, who are supporting Zionism, racism, apartheid and the reactionary regimes of the world, all these would be standing here with the false socialist leaders of fascist China awaiting the verdict and sharing the sentence of your decision.46
Following this jargon, “Stevens' rhetorical excesses link him so close to the government narrative that he is effectively undermining his role as international lawyer, reducing himself to a handy symbol of the humanist/universalist grand narrative while keeping the dialectic relentlessly on the anti-Maoist track.”47 Symptomatically, the official language resonates also in witnesses' and victims' statements, who do not fail to express their gratitude to the liberators. This is very surprising, since, as Gray points out,48 not many people describe the death of their loved ones by punctuating their testimonies with ideological slogans. This made Quigley think that the slogans were added mechanically (p- 400) by the typists; nevertheless, this does not invalidate their veracity.49 Whatever the correspondence between the language of victims and the state language might have been, John Quigley's position is clear in sustaining the accusation of genocide against the KR leaders.
The Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia reinforced the strategic position of the USSR in Asia. For its own part, Vietnam managed to achieve hegemony in the region to the detriment of China. China itself, after its unsuccessful military incursion into Vietnam in February 1979, opted for a more pragmatic approach over military methods. Vietnam, always viewed with mistrust by Thailand and Laos, was severely debilitated by the occupation of Cambodia until its forces withdrew in September 1989, when perestroika, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Soviet collapse changed the face of the communist Bloc. But this is another chapter of history. One could say that the Vietnamese propaganda victory in Cambodia in the aftermath of defeating one of the most criminal states of the twentieth century was paradoxical as well as very complex. On one hand, their initiative involved the entire communist Bloc and formed a critical juncture in the fundamental schism between the USSR and the People's Republic of China. Moreover, in spite of being a small country, Cambodia became one of the strategic pieces in the second Cold War. Among the communist battles that called upon the priority of ideology, this was perhaps the last.
If the still existing identikit portrait of the KR is heavily infused with what Michael Vickery called the “Standard Total View,” it is not only by the abhorrent nature of the KR atrocities, but also because the Vietnamese propaganda strategy bore fruit despite the fallout from the international arena. The narrativization of S-21 (Tuol Sleng) constituted a pars pro toto case, which shaped an intracommunist war, in part openly waged, in part reduced to a minor skirmish, and for the main part deferred—but no less bloody for it.
In his book Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia, Stephen Morris refers to emotions as a neglected component in political and military history because it does not align well with the criteria of reason and vested interests. The DK's “suicide” by openly attacking Vietnam in 1978, while its hyper-Maoism was viewed coldly even in China, constitutes the most visible vestige of this arduous issue.50 Hatred, resentment, inferiority complex, frustration, Page 16 of 23 and the escalation of nationalism led the country to lose its touch with reality. In the annals of the history of communism, the experience of these three years, eight months, and twenty days of communist Kampuchea is remembered as a period that ended in a cardinal criminal act, in which at least 25 percent of the population succumbed to the hands of their own rulers.51 It was another communist force, the Vietnamese-Soviet alliance, which wrested the country from the genocide. It is crucial to remember that the image of a genocide performed in the name of communism, constructed and circulated by a communist propaganda machine played a key role in the (p- 401) intracommunist war, which reshaped the world. Seen from today's perspective, the image of one of the most often cited and photographed traumascapes, the tracks left by the first criminal trial for genocide, and the construction of one of the most privileged sites in the world of “dark tourism,” all constitute a complex set of reasons for why the Cambodian scenario, through its strategic use of international image propaganda, should be studied within the framework of the visual culture of communism.
AAVV. Kampuchea. Dossier III: The Dark Years. Hanoi: Vietnam Courier, 1979.
AAVV. Kampuchea: From Tragedy to Rebirth. Moscow: Progress, 1979.
Benzaquen, Stéphanie, Anne-Laure Porée, and Vicente Sânchez-Biosca. Cambodge: Tuol Sleng ou l'histoire du génocide en chantier. Mémoires en jeu 6 (2017): 44-109.
Benzaquen-Gautier, Stéphanie. Images of Khmer Rouge Atrocities 1975-2015. Amsterdam: Imaginary Museum Projects, 2016.
Böttcher, Claudia, Judith Kretzschmar, and Corinna Schier. Walter Heynowski und Gerhard Scheumann -Dokumentarfilmer in Klassenkampf. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2002.
Brown, Caitlin, and Chris Millington. “The Memory of the Cambodian Genocide: the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.” History Compass 13, no. 2 (2015): 31-39.
Chandler, David. Voices of S-21. Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Cryder, Spencer. “Investigative Inertia during the ECCC Trial Phase. The 1979 ‘S-21 Video' & Child Survivor Norg Chanphal.” https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Investigative_Inertia_During_the_ECCC_Trial_Phase_Spencer_Cryder_DC_Cam.pdf
De Nike, Howard J., John Quigly, Kenneth J. Robinson eds. Genocide in Cambodia: Documents from the Trial of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
ECCC (Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia). “Decision on the Vietnamese film footage filed by the Co-Prosecutors.” July 28, 2009. https://www.eccc.gov.kh/en/ar-ticles/admission-vietnamese-film-footage-evidence-rejected
ECCC. “Motion of Co-Prosecutors to Submit New Evidence.” January 28, 2009. Document E5/10.
Elliott, David W P. ed. The Third Indochina Conflict. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981.
Evans, Grant, and Kelvin Rowley. Red Brotherhood at War. Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos Since 1975. Revised first edition London: Verso, 1990.
Gray, Tallyn. Justice and Transition in Cambodia 1979-2014: Process, Meaning and Narrative. PhD thesis, University of Westminster, 2014.
Gutman, Tara. “Cambodia, 1979. Trying Khmer Rouge Leaders for Genocide.” In Trials for International Crimes in Asia, edited by Kirsten Sellars, 167-190. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
(p. 405) Horten, Gerd. “Sailing in the Shadow of the Vietnam War: The GDR Government and the ‘Vietnam Bonus' of the Early 1970s.” German Studies Review 36, no. 3 (2013): 557-78.
Jarvis, Helen. Getting Away with Genocide?: Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. London: Pluto Press, 2004.
Kiernan, Ben. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
Ledgerwood, Judy. “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative.” Museum Anthropology 21, no. 1 (1997): 82-98.
Lennon, John, and Malcolm Foley. Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster. London: Thomson, 2000.
Maguire, Peter. Facing Death in Cambodia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Mertha, Andrew. Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014.
Mezl, Jamie Frederic. Western Responses to Human Rights Abuses in Cambodia, 19751980. London: MacMilland & St. Martin's Press, 1996.
Morris, Stephen. Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and the Causes of War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Pao-Min, Chang. Kampuchea between China and Vietnam. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1985.
Pilger, John. Heroes. London: Jonathan Cape, 1986.
Ponchaud, François. Cambodia Year Zero. New York: Reinhardt, and Winston, 1978 [French original from 1977].
Port, Andrew I. “Courting China, Condemning China: East and West German Cold War Diplomacy in the Shadow of the Cambodian Genocide.” German History 33. no. 4 (December 2015): 588-608.
Pribbenow, Merle L. “A Tale of Five Generals: Vietnam's Invasion of Cambodia.” The Journal of Military History 70, no. 2 (2006): 459-486.
Rivero, Miguel. Infierno y amanecer en Kampuchea. Havana: Ciencias Sociales, 1979.
Sánchez-Biosca, Vicente. “Non-Author Footage, Fertile Re-Appropriations. On Atrocity Images from Cambodia's Genocide.” In A History of Cinema without Names, edited by Diego Cavallotti, Federico Giordano, and Leonardo Quaresima, 137-145. Udine: Mimesis, 2015.
Sánchez-Biosca, Vicente. Miradas criminals, ojos de víctima. Imágenes de la aflicción en Camboya. Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2017.
Sion, Brigitte. “Conflicting Sites of Memory in Post-Genocide Cambodia.” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 2, no. 1 (2011): 1-21.
Sutter, Robert S. “China's Strategy Toward Vietnam and Its Implications for the United States.” In The Third Indochina Conflict, edited by David W Elliott, 163-192. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981.
Vickery, Michael. Cambodia 1975-1982. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1984.
Williams, Paul. Memorial Museums. The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities. Oxford: Berg, 2007.
(1.) This text has been conceived in the framework of the research project “Contemporary Representations of Mass Violence Perpetrators: Concepts, Narratives, and
Images” (HAR2017-83519-P). I acknowledge Rithy Panh, Chhay Visoth, Youk Chhang, and Helen Jarvis for helping me at different stages of my research.
(2.) Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) quoted in Stephen Morris Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and the Causes of War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 10.
(3.) DK produced a “Black Paper” in September 1978 depicting the conflict with Vietnam as the culmination of five centuries of Khmer struggles against expansion by the Vietnamese (Grant Evans and Kelvin Rowley, Red Brotherhood at War. Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos Since 1975, revised edition [London: Verso, 1990], 32).
(4.) Merle L. Pribbenow, “A Tale of Five Generals: Vietnam's Invasion of Cambodia,” The Journal of Military History 70, no. 2 (April 2006): 459-486.
(5.) Chang Pao-Min, Kampuchea between China and Vietnam (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1985), xi.
(6.) Robert S. Sutter, “China's Strategy Toward Vietnam and Its Implications for the United States,” in The Third Indochina Conflict, edited by David W. Elliott (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981), 186.
(7.) Andrew Mertha, Brothers in Arms. Chinese Aid to Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 16.
(8.) This attack occurred as the Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong was in Phnom Penh to sign a Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with the PRK.
(9.) An assemblage of fear within ASEAN (most particularly, Thailand toward the threatening expansion of Vietnam), secret negotiations between China and Thailand as early as January 1979, a UN Security Council meeting on January 1979, and calculations for the future, like Deng Xiaoping's visit to United States at the end of January, confirmed the sensitivity of the Cambodian issue during the first months of 1979. See Jamie Frederic Mezl, Western Responses to Human Rights Abuses in Cambodia, 1975-1980 (London: MacMilland & St. Martin's Press, 1996).
(10.) Ibid., 5. Miguel Rivero, correspondent from Cuba, entitled his April 1979 book following the same pattern: Infierno y amanecer en Kampuchea [Hell and sunrise in Kampuchea] (Havana: Ciencias Sociales, 1979). Rivero visited the former prison, which he erroneously names as “Tuns Len.”
(11.) Ibid., 6-8.
(12.) Ibid., 8.
(13.) Ustanov and Schmelyov, “The Kampuchean Tragedy,” originally published in New Times 37 (1978), 19.
(14.) A. Levin, “According to an Old Gestapo Recipe,” originally published in Pravda, February 2, 1979, 26-27.
(15.) Kampuchea. Dossier III: The Dark Years (Hanoi: Vietnam Courier, 1979), 7.
(16.) Ibid., 73.
(17.) Gerd Horten, “Sailing in the Shadow of the Vietnam War: The GDR Government and the ‘Vietnam Bonus' of the Early 1970s” (German Studies Review 36, no. 3, October 2013, 557-578). In fact, the Vietnam War was what East Germany had been dreaming about—a
Page 20 of 23 scenario for their anticapitalist propaganda, Jean-Paul Sartre himself had employed in an article for New Left Review the term genocide in 1968 in reference to US foreign involvement.
(18.) Michael Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1984).
(19.) In his prominent book on S-21, David Chandler evokes the discovery of the prison by two photographers, but he does not mention either of their names or the film footage (Voices of S-21. Terror and History in Pol Pot's Screet Prison [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999], 2-3).
(20.) The original S-21 prison compound included a considerable number of buildings in addition to those (four plus the office central building) that form the current museum.
(21.) John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Thomson, 2000).
(22.) Mai Lam was already collecting data in February 1979, according to Min Khin (cited in Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide?: Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal [London: Pluto Press, 2004], 41). Peter Maguire, in his interview with Mai Lam, points out that in view of the trial and future museum, the Vietnamese colonel was working in Cambodia since February or March 1979. See also Peter Maguire, Facing Death in Cambodia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 89.
(23.) John Quigley, “Introduction,” in Genocide in Cambodia: Documents from the Trial of Pol Pot and leng Sary, edited by Howard J. De Nike, John Quigly, Kenneth J. Robinson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 17.
(24.) Later on, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum became an inevitable reference. See, for instance, Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (Oxford: York, Berg, 2007), 32; Brigitte Sion, “Conflicting Sites of Memory in Post-Genocide Cambodia,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 2, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 1-21; Caitlin Brown and Chris Millington, “The Memory of the Cambodian Genocide: The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum,” History Compass 13, no. 2 (2015): 31-39, among many others. For a contribution to the history of the museum, see Stéphanie Benzaquen, Anne-Laure Porée, and V. Sânchez-Biosca, Cambodge: Tuol Sleng ou l'histoire du génocide en chantier, Mémoires en jeu 6 (May 2017): 44-109.
(25.) In his report, “Investigative Inertia during the ECCC Trial Phase: The 1979 ‘S-21 Video' & Child Survivor Norg Chanphal,” https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Investigative_Inertia_During_the_ECCC_Trial_Phase_Spencer_Cryder_DC_Cam.pdf
(26.) Voice-over narration from the film Cambodia, Kampuchea (James Gerrand, 1987).
(27.) ECCC, “Motion of Co-Prosecutors to Submit New Evidence,” January 28, 2009 (Document E5/10). Regarding the last decision, “Decision on the Vietnamese film footage filed by the Co-Prosecutors,” July 28, 2009. https://www.eccc.gov.kh/en/articles/admission-vietnamese-film-footage-evidence-rejected. One of the sources of this complexity resides in the hybrid nature of the tribunal, made up of national and international actors.
(28.) Isao Takano, “A Report by Special Correspondent of the Newspaper Akahata,” Akahata January 27, 1979, in Kampuchea: From Tragedy to Rebirth (Moscow, Progress, 1979), 101-103.
(29.) A good deal of material of this genre has been consulted in Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in Phnom Penh. http://bophana.org.
(30.) After Exercises (1981), Dschungelskrieg (1984) was to be the fourth, but it was never released due to the strategic changes we mention later.
(31.) The lineup of the cameramen and other technicians, translators, and so on who worked on these two films shows the bold efforts by the East German company. See Claudia Böttcher, Judith Kretzschmar, and Corinna Schier, Walter Heynowski und Gerhard Scheumann -Dokumentarfilmer in Klassenkampf (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2002), 94-95.
(32.) Andrew I. Port, “Courting China, Condemning China: East and West German Cold War Diplomacy in the Shadow of the Cambodian Genocide,” German History 33, no. 4: 602.
(33.) The omission of Nuon Chea comes from the Vietnamese hope of a split within the KR and the old belief that he was more favorable to solidarity with Hanoi, which was shown to be false. In fact, the decisive broadcast by Hanoi Radio VNA on June 20, 1978, which first mentioned the “clique,” left out the name of “Brother Number Two” (Morris, Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia, 105).
(34.) KZ (Konzentrationslager, concentration camp).
(35.) Judy Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative,” Museum Anthropology 21, no. 1 (1997): 89. Ministry of Culture, Information, and Propaganda, The People's Republic of Kampuchea 1980 Report: Angkor Conservatory—Museums: National Museum, Former Royal Palace and Tuol Sleng. Phnom Penh.
(36.) The French television (TF1) aired as early as April 1979 the film Cambodge, un pays à refaire [Cambodia, a country to be remade], by journalist Roger Pic and directed by Jacky Kargayen.
(37.) See the details of his visit and filming, according to the journalist, in John Pilger, Heroes (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986), 375-403.
(38.) François Ponchaud, Cambodia Year Zero (New York: Reinhardt, and Winston, 1978 [French original from 1977], ix, was one of the pioneer voices in denouncing the Kmer Rouge genocide.
(39.) His articles in the Daily Mirror on September 12 and 13 with the pictures by Eric Piper followed the same pattern.
(40.) John Pilger's voice-over narration from Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (David Munro, 1979).
(41.) John Quigley, “Introduction,” Genocide in Cambodia, 1.
(42.) Interview with Elizabeth Becker by Tara Gutman, “Cambodia, 1979: Trying Khmer Rouge Leaders for Genocide,” in Trials for International Crimes in Asia, edited by Kirsten Sellars (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016), 170.
(43.) Gutman, “Cambodia, 1979,” 170.
(44.) Fawthrop and Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide?
(45.) “Statement of John Quigley (Professor of Law, Ohio State University, USA),” in K. Robinson, J. Quigley, and H. Nike, eds., Genocide in Cambodia, 518.
(46.) “Closing Argument of Hope R. Stevens, Defense Counsel (Attorney and Counsellor at Law, Member of the Bar of the United States Supreme Court, Co-Chairperson of the National Conference of Black Lawyers of the United States and Canada),” in K. Robinson, J. Quigley, and H. Nike, eds., Genocide in Cambodia, 507.
(47.) Tallyn Gray, Justice and Transition in Cambodia 1979-2014: Process, Meaning and Narrative, PhD thesis (University of Westminster, May 2014), 104.
(48.) Ibid., 105.
(49.) Quigley, “Introduction,” Genocide in Cambodia, 15.
(50.) Morris, Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia, 17.
(51.) Stephen Heder explained in a lucid essay that Vietnamese socialism, forged in internationalism during the 1930s, was based on the idea of community; conversely, Cambodian communism emerged in the 1960s in a totally different context, that is, confronting Prince Sihanouk's regime which had resorted to an anticolonialist rhetoric and achieved a degree of social development. As a consequence, the nationalism and radical class struggle were inherent in Cambodian communism. See Stephen P. Heder, “The Kampuchea-Vietnamese Conflict,” in Elliott, The Third Indochina Conflict, 36 and ff.
Vicente Sanchez-Biosca
Vicente Sanchez-Biosca, Professor in Film Studies and Visual Culture, University of Valencia
The Constructivist Sartorial Utopia and Its Revolutionary Potential: Then and Now
Djurdja Bartlett
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Aug 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.18
In the early 1920s, the new geometrical lines of the constructivist-proposed dress and textile designs were a sartorial expression of the sweeping Bolshevik political program and its rejection of the past following the 1917 October Revolution. The essay explores the trajectory of the constructivist revolutionary ideas, and their various sartorial expressions, in both political and commercial variants. Its political versions appeared within the movement known as International Modernism in the late 1920s, from Bauhaus to the Czech functionalist modernism, but are also present in work of some contemporary fashion designers who draw on the original constructivist ideals. On the one hand, fashion could only denigrate the noble utopian ideals. On the other hand, the constructivist-inspired collections by the leading Western fashion designers have time and again showed that the aspiration to utopia nonetheless survives.
Keywords: constructivism, fashion, geometry, international modernism, surplus value, use value, utopia
In the early 1920s, a group of artists known as the constructivists were determined to clothe the New Man and New Woman in simple and functional clothes of geometrical lines, fitting the political and ideological program of the new Bolshevik socialist state. This chapter explores the trajectory of the constructivist revolutionary ideas, and their various sartorial expressions, in both utopian and commercial variants, in the Soviet Union, postsocialist Russia, and in the West.
The constructivists could not accomplish their uncompromising utopian goal, as the Russian economy was in total disarray in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The consecutive rise of Stalinism from the late 1920s onward, accompanied by a new model of the planned economy, additionally crushed the constructivists' utopian project both politically and organizationally. However, similar utopian visions appeared within the movement known as International Modernism in the late 1920s, from Bauhaus to the Czech functionalist modernism, and are also present in the work of some contemporary artists, dress and fashion designers who draw on the original constructivist notions.
The chapter explores the interactions between the three intersecting revolutions—the political, the artistic, and the fashion related—from the beginning of the twentieth century up to today. These revolutions have been variably informed by the different conceptual frameworks, but their interweaving histories, resulting in their corresponding aesthetics, show that they nevertheless have been influenced by each other. While initially fiercely promoted by the Russian constructivists in the early 1920s, geometry was fully embraced by Western fashion already at the end of that decade. (p- 407) Sharing with the avantgarde arts and politics the urgent need for change, to be manifested in radically new forms of life and dress, fashion favored the same techniques, such as deconstructing and reconstructing. Due to this conceptual proximity to the contemporary arts, fashion also materialized as one of the most prominent expressions of modernity. On the other hand, precisely because of its commercial nature, fashion was able to envisage new dresses in geometrical shapes, efficiently produce them, and successfully sell them. In this sense, the communist visual culture, as imagined by the constructivists, had been introduced in the field of fashion soon after they launched their radical dress-related proposals.
Yet, informed by their respective relationships toward the concept of utopia, there was the ontological difference between constructivism and fashion from the very beginning. Embedded in the messy everyday, fashion is an antiutopian practice, equally guided by the commercial interests of the capitalist system, and individual tastes and pleasures of its consumers, while the Soviet constructivist dress was a highly ideological construct, driven by the noble utopian ideals, without taking into consideration individual drives and desires of its potential users in the early postrevolutionary Russia. In fashion, this irrevocable difference has been manifested as the dominance of monetary surplus value over use value. In contrast, the constructivist pure revolutionary message was not tainted by any commercial interest. In their ideologically informed world, the dominance of utopian surplus could have been enacted only as use value when, and if, implemented.
However, this chapter addresses the continuing cultural currency of the constructivist aesthetic in the field of Western fashion, specifically highlighted in the periods of crises, and their accompanying social and cultural searches for a better world, such as the 1960s, the late 1980s, or the beginning of the 2000s. On such occasions, the constructivist project has certainly been depoliticized of its original, highly utopian ideals. On the other hand, if we are to escape the interpretations that exclusively embed fashion in the framework of the commodification culture, such as Marx's strictly economic analysis of the commodity, as well as those considerations which dismiss fashion as an ephemeral phenomenon, we could trace the noble ideals in the constructivist-inspired collections by the leading Western fashion designers, which have time and again shown that the aspiration toward utopia nonetheless survives. The constructivists, those pre-eminent bearers of the genuine communist visual culture, have played the most important role in transmitting its relevance, and its beauty, to the previous generations, as well as to this one and those that will follow.
In the early 1920s, in a new Bolshevik Russia, a group of artists known as the constructivists proposed a new shape of dress within their utopian program aimed at the total change of the country, its culture, and its citizens' opinions and looks, and expected that it would become the new socialist clothing. The new geometrical lines of their proposed
(p. 408) dress were a sartorial expression of the sweeping Bolshevik political program and its rejection of the past following the 1917 October Revolution.1 For those constructivists who engaged in dress and textile design, such as Aleksander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Liubov Popova, fashion was tainted by its connections to commerce and to inappropriate desires and pleasures.2 It belonged to the past, and not to the new, rationalized, and ordered world they were attempting to build. Embracing geometric abstraction as their exclusive visual language, the constructivists fiercely rejected any form of decoration.
The rejection of the phenomenon of fashion and its decorativeness was part of a bigger picture: the constructivist programmatic rejection of the fine arts and applied arts. Stepanova had announced a rupture between artistic culture and constructivism in her INKhUK lecture in 1921: “Constructivism is not an attempt to rework aesthetic taste into industrial taste. It is a movement against aesthetics as manifested in the various fields of human activity.”3 In the next couple of years, the constructivists were supported by the powerful Commissar of the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, which not only provided them with a significant political power but also made them believe that they would be able to turn their utopia into practice. A new dress was so important for them precisely because it was firmly embedded in the everyday existence (byt), moreover in the old prerevolutionary byt, which they dreamed of changing with the new Soviet byt.
Nevertheless, Stepanova and Popova's first engagement with dress design happened in Vsevolod Meyerhold's theater productions. His new system of actor training—biomechan-ics—perfectly fitted constructivist cry for a total change.4 Led by the constructivist functionalist aesthetics, Popova did not design decorative theater costumes but work uniforms for Meyerhold-directed play The Magnanimous Cuckold in 1922. She called her geometrically cut costumes prozodezhda5 and intended them not only to allow total freedom of movement at the scene but also to be worn by actors during rehearsals and in their everyday life.6 In 1922, Varvara Stepanova also designed the constructivist costumes for the play The Death of Tarelkin. She used simple cuts and only two colors in geometric juxtapositions to achieve dynamic effects.7
As Popova and Stepanova were well versed in cubist artistic practices, they relied on genuinely cubist devices—geometry and flatness—in developing their costume designs.8 Equally, both Meyerhold's method of biomechanics, and the artists' costumes and scenog-Page 3 of 27
raphy for his theater productions, pointed to the Bolsheviks' fascination with American technology, specifically with its new model of time- and labor-expedient industrialization. Feeding on the concept of the American Taylorist streamlined mass efficiency, the Bolsheviks envisioned the application of this doctrine in both the arts and industry.9
Staying true to the constructivist ideals, Stepanova decided to take her uniformed clothes out from the theater experiment into everyday life experience in her programmatic article “The Clothing of Today: Prozodezhda,” published in the constructivist journal Lef in 1923 (see Figure 17.1).
Courtesy of Alexander Lavrentiev
(p. 409) (p. 410) Here, she challenged both the traditional Russian and contemporary Western dress codes, insisting that the previous field of fashion—regarding production, retail, and dress practices—should be abolished altogether. Instead, Stepanova insisted on simplicity and functionality of the newly envisaged prozodezhda. She stressed that new clothing “is tested only through the process of working in it” and that “the clothing of today must be seen in action,” further emphasizing that “clothing must cease to be craft-produced in favour of mass industrial production.”10 Apart from prozodezhda as work clothing, distinguished by profession and type of industry, Stepanova acknowledged its two other versions in her Lef article: spetzodezhda, special protective uniform, needed in certain jobs, and sportodezhda, sports clothing. In this programmatic article, Stepanova did not specify the shape of her production clothes nor divided them according to gender. They were never mass produced, but four drawings of sports clothing that accompanied her article demonstrated consistency with her radical theory in their geometric treatment of both the body and the dress.11
At the same time, the artist Gustav Klutsis also searched for a new socialist dress. For him, like for his fellow constructivists, dress had to be resurrected from the old world and redesigned for the new one.12 Klutsis's two 1922 dress drawings were embedded in the vigorous constructivist utopianism. Prominent pockets stored tools in his overalls, which were envisaged for a highly qualified engineer, but those sophisticated instruments seemed to merge with the body underneath to, eventually, reveal the engineer's body parts, such as his heart and his lungs. Similarly to El Lissitzky, Klutsis contributed to the utopian vision of a new efficient man bordering on a machine. His other constructivist sartorial drawing showed an equally boundless belief in the socialist future, as his new athletic worker leaped toward it with the springs attached to his footwear. Moreover, by manipulating the strings that connected his feet to his hands, Klutsis's worker controlled his actions, and his destiny.13
The constructivist utopian ideal was to bridge the gap between art and industry, and between the artists and the masses. They considered that the masses could easily relate to their aesthetic expressions, but, equally important, they assumed that constructivist industrial products would directly affect the everyday lives of the people. The constructivist Osip Brik acknowledged this goal in his article “Into production!”: “There is a consumer who does not need pictures and ornaments, and who is not afraid of iron and steel. This consumer is the proletariat. With the victory of the proletariat will come the victory of constructivism.”14
Thus, Stepanova and Popova's engagement as textile designers in the First State Textile Print Factory in Moscow in 1923 was supported by their constructivist colleagues. Brik strongly advocated this move “from painting to the textile print,” claiming that the applied arts survived only because of the fatal rupture between the artist and industry. In such a situation, the traditional artist “did not understand the necessities of economic directives, and so involuntarily slipped into aesthetic templates.”15 Instead, by attempting to become directly involved in the technology of fabric production, Stepanova and Popova hoped to realize the constructivist concept of the artist-engineer. They planned to:
(p. 411)
participate in the work of production organs ... to participate in the chemistry laboratory as observers of the coloration process ... to establish contacts with the sewing workshops, fashion ateliers and journals ... to undertake agitational work for the factory through the press and magazine advertisements.16
Simultaneously, Stepanova and Popova tried to abolish traditional flower motifs that the factory was still producing, and instead proposed novel geometrical patterns. The purge of decorative flowers in favor of minimalist triangles, circles, and rectangles, composed with a compass and ruler, announced an abrupt constructivist break with tradition in the textile design. Although some of their fabric designs were actually produced and did arrive in the shops, the designers did not interact significantly with their ideal consumer— the masses. Moreover, the management asked them to make their avant-garde designs more acceptable for the traditionally oriented mass consumers.17
Similarly to the geometric style of Stepanova's prozodezhda and Klutsis's futuristic overalls, constructivist textile patterns did not refer to any previous or contemporary domestic sartorial practice. Due to the high concentration of utopian surplus value, they could only exist inside the constructivist self-encompassing cosmos.18 In her book Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths, art historian Rosalind Krauss interrogates the aesthetics of the grid, a new abstract, geometric form in the history of modernist art from cubism of the 1910s onward. She claims that the power of geometry lay in its total novelty: “In that great chain of reactions by which modernism was born out of the efforts of the nineteenth century, one final shift resulted in breaking the chain.”19 But, as Krauss further argues, there was more to it than inventing an autonomous art style, which was antinatural, antimimetic, and antireal. The fact that the grid does not imitate the existing world and that it is instead the outcome of an aesthetic decree allows for its messianic role in the arts and society. For its practitioners, “the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete,”20 stated Krauss. By loyally embracing the Bolshevik political call for a total change of the society, the constructivists were on such a messianic mission, and their radically new dress and textile designs visualized the radical nature of the Bolshevik project.
In this sense, bourgeois modes of production, however technologically advanced and therefore irresistibly seductive for the constructivists, were ideologically unacceptable and had to be overtaken by the revolutionary and socially progressive technologies. Everyday objects and people were “dynamized” in the frenetic rhythm of Boris Arvatov's utopian dream which took place in an industrial city: “Collapsible furniture, moving sidewalks, revolving doors, escalators, automat restaurants, reversible outfits, and so on constituted a new stage in the evolution of material culture. The thing became something functional and active, connected like a co-worker with human practice.”21 For Arvatov, the task of the proletariat was to transform the bourgeois “deeply individualistic, and therefore anarchic dynamism” into “a systematically regulated dynamism of things.”22 Equally, the mass production that Stepanova advocated was even more revolutionary than the geometric style of her dress proposals, as the constructivist concept of productivist merger of art and industry tied up technological development with social (p- 412) progress. For Stepanova, the new industrial production would bring transparency in the relationship between new socialist men and new socialist objects, and thus reveal all the secrets behind a dress: “The stitching of a garment, its buttoning ... needs to be exposed ... the stitching of a sewing machine industrializes the production of a dress and deprives it of its secrets.”23
The earlier Russian socialist utopia was almost as influential in the constructivist narrative as the latest American news on the advancing machine age. In his 1908 Marxist science fiction novel Red Star, Alexander Bogdanov advocated that the concepts of simplicity and gender neutrality could perfectly correspond to an industrially highly developed society. A trained scientist, economist, philosopher, and close collaborator of Lenin in the
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early years, Bogdanov imagined a Marxian society on Mars that was about three hundred years in advance of Earth in technology, ideology, and human behavior, with its citizens wearing androgynous, loose clothes, produced in the technologically most innovative ways. Martians were exclusively using synthetic spider-web-like fabrics which “streamed out in broad unbroken ribbons to the cutting shop, where they were seized by other machines that piled them in many layers and cut out individual pieces of clothing according to thousands of different predetermined patterns.”24 The sewing section was equally advanced, and the pieces of fabric were chemically fused together, “producing ready-to-wear suit pieces in several thousand models of different forms and sizes.”25 Neither was the color of the clothes a problem as “most Martians are satisfied with the usual dark, soft shades of the fabric itself.”26 The progressive Martians were manufacturing and wearing a unisex uniform.
But from the mid-1920s, it was obvious that the constructivist utopian ideals of the total redesign of dress had not materialized. The industrially backward country could not support the constructivist utopian dreams of a total merger between arts and industry, in order to mass-produce a functional, uniform, and hygienic new dress. Their productivist dreams were shattered by out-of-date machinery, shortages of raw materials, and lack of dyes.27 Equally, the new economic and political circumstances brought by the New Economic Policy (NEP) had a huge impact on the position and influence of the constructivists.28 After being in charge of important cultural and artistic institutions, and protected by state funding, however modest, they found themselves in a commercialized environment, in which the laws of the market and competition were operating again. In this sense, Stepanova's fierce 1923 attack on fashion could be perceived within the context of the new NEP culture in which fashion had started to flourish once again.29
While Rodchenko and Stepanova strictly adhered to geometrical cuts in their dress designs throughout the 1920s, their proposals softened. A woman's prozodezhda in Stepanova's 1924 drawing was monochrome, yet gender-specific, and polished in its clever use of visible vertical and horizontal lines which accentuated its large pockets, waistline, and seams. Her drawings of three black day dresses from the same year proposed complex geometric cuts and were discreetly adorned with geometric details in three colors: red, white, and green.30 Rodchenko designed similar, geometrically cut costumes for the play Inga in 1929.31 Its heroine Inga was the director of a sewing factory, thus symbolically pointing toward the fields of dress and textile design, in which the
(p. 413) constructivists especially attempted the merger between art and production. But by that time Rodchenko had understood that Inga's geometrically cut suits would not automatically transport her into a constructivist ideal future. Writing in the brochure that accompanied the play, Rodchenko admits that the costumes:
are made with the intention of emphasizing Inga's inherent aestheticism in a search for an as yet unfound rationalization of the female suit. In the costumes demonstrated on the mannequins the question of rationalization is raised, but only theoretically, because of course its solution is an extremely difficult assignment.
This question needs work and more work, connecting the artist's search with everyday conditions.32
In their struggle with NEP, and its embrace of ornate fashion, Lunacharsky and the Bolsheviks needed more pragmatic sartorial solutions than those proposed by the constructivists. By bringing her creative and technical expertise to search for the new socialist dress, the respected prerevolutionary fashion designer Nadezhda Lamanova was central in those efforts. After Lunacharsky trusted her with that task in 1919, she was able to de-velop—and execute-simple and functional prototypes in her Workshop of Contemporary Dress.33 Moreover, Lamanova was first to conceptualize dress design within the fields of industry and art in her discussion at the First All-Russian Conference on Art and Production in August 1919. Here, she claimed that dress was one of the most suitable mediums for the dissemination of art into all manifestations of the everyday, and called upon artists to design beautiful dresses using plain fabrics, corresponding to the new mode of working life.34
Like the constructivists, Lamanova wrote about the need to construct modern clothes:
Thus, before being sewn, a dress must be constructed. In order to construct a dress well, a figure should be mentally divided into geometric shapes so as to invoke a clearer image of its proper shape. In projecting the figure onto the plane and drawing it, we should regard it as a series of planes. If, due to the defects of the figure, these planes are disproportionate, by dividing these planes by other planes of different shapes (for example, by intersecting them with triangles or rectangles), we can achieve a more harmonious correlation of parts, and thus a more constructed silhouette.35
Lamanova's modernist discourse about planes, triangles, and rectangles was not overtly ideological, for, as a practitioner, she wanted to use construction to perfect both the dress and the look of its wearer. Lamanova, understandably, abandoned the fashionable dress of the bourgeois past yet still defended the beautiful outfit by, for example, promoting dynamism and contrast in the Ukrainian skirt.36
In the years to follow, Lamanova perfected her approach to the new dress by reducing the shape to a simple rectangle and insisting on the appropriate relationship between the modest fabric and the cut of the dress. The 1925 booklet Art in Everyday Life (Iskusstvo v bytu), published as a supplement in the journal Red Field (Krasnaia niva), with the full support of its coeditor Lunacharsky, successfully integrated all these goals. In their dress (p. 414) proposals, the booklet's authors, Lamanova and the artist Vera Mukhina, addressed the women workers, offering them the simplest solutions to make their own, men's, and children's clothes from fabrics, which were supposed to be available: embroidered towels, patterned shawls, uniform fabric, and unbleached linen. Mukhina's drawings were accompanied with paper patterns and precise instructions, thus competing with the NEP fashion journals and their regular paper patterns with the latest Western fashions. In their geometric cut and modernist interpretation of traditional ethnic motifs, Lamanova's dresses from the mid-1920s were attempting to adjust the constructivist aes-
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Moreover, in the still pluralistic 1920s, the constructivist utopian aims of refashioning the whole world of everyday material goods, and especially their attempts in inventing a new everyday dress, had been considered too fierce in a wider artistic community. In his 1923 article on “Dress and Revolution,” published in the journal Atelier (Atel'e), Vladimir von Mekk understood prozodezhda as an adventurous theoretical proposal, which could not possibly be relevant for the everyday life dress practices. The real revolution in dress, observed von Mekk, had happened when the new urban proletariat left their traditional peasant dress and started to follow Western fashion trends already in the pre-revolutionary period.37 The artist Aleksandra Ekster published her ideas on functional work clothing meant for mass production in the same issue of Atelier. She acknowledged that “pro-zodezhda or a mass-produced dress should be based on complementary colors and simple geometrical shapes,” but emphasized that “a style of dress grows out from conditions of life: work and leisure.”38 A series of Ekster's drawings published in the journal Red Field in the same year showed that her ideas on rational mass clothing did not exclude diversity and elements of ornamentation. Her concept of functionality presupposed that the same outfit could be used as a day dress, eveningwear, and work clothes, simply by adding or taking off different layers.39
In his review of the First All-Russian Exhibition of the Art in Industry, which was organized in Moscow in 1923, the prominent art critic Iakov Tugendkhol'd emphasized that the proletariat deserved beautiful and functional clothes, and questioned the constructivist's identification of the proletariat's aesthetic needs with the aestheticization of the machine, a position that had been promoted in Lef.40 Furthermore, observing the insistence on geometric style both in the Soviet Union and the West, Tugendkhol'd doubted the identification between constructivism and a proletarian country while reviewing the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts that took place in Paris in 1925:
The Paris Exposition has revealed that constructivism is identifiable equally with bourgeois countries too, where “leftist” bourgeois bedrooms ... and leftist ladies' manteaux of ermine and sable are being made ... . Does this mean that the revolutionary ideology is conquering the bourgeois consciousness, that it is entering the bourgeois world or, on the contrary, that these principles are really not so revolutionary? The latter, I would think.41
(p. 415) Eventually, Rodchenko was the only constructivist who wore prozodezhda in everyday life. Designed by himself, and sewn by Stepanova from woolen cloth in 1922, it was a proper workers' overall with big pockets to store tools, leather details, exposed stitching, and fastening done with metal buckles. He looked like an artist engineer, the role that the constructivists imagined for themselves.42 However, the rise of Stalinism from the late 1920s tamed the avant-garde utopianism into a homogenized industrial routine, by embedding the design, production, and distribution of dress into its bureaucracy-driven Five-Year Plans, which also marked the end of the NEP.43 In 1931, according to the critic Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov: “Prozodezhda will unquestionably develop hand-in-hand with collectivization, with the elimination of individualism in everyday life and individual forms of labour.”44 In sharp contrast to Rodchenko's smart, hand-produced version, prozodezhda did become a mass-produced, ordinary clothing item. Yet, accompanying Stalinist hurried industrialization of the country, it turned into a bare necessity, executed poorly in the fabrics of the lowest quality.
The constructivist utopia did not materialize in the new socialist country, but the members of a wider movement, known as International Modernism, continued to share and support the constructivist aesthetic and drive for a new and better world throughout the 1920s. Integrating a novel geometric style with socially progressive politics, its various participants imagined an excessively rational universe, in which only an equally rational, mechanically produced dress could fit in. The project Civilized Woman was initiated by the Bauhaus-educated Zdenek Rossmann and realized in 1929 as an exhibition and its accompanying publication, in the Czech city of Brno, one of the strongholds of interwar International Modernism. Rossmann and his collaborators, from product designer Jan Vanek to fashion designer Bozena Hornekova and journalist Milena Jesenska, shared the constructivists' radical politics, as well as their anxieties concerning fashion as a carrier of status and gender differences. In order to become modern, a woman was supposed to dress like a man, as this rationalized dress style let her move freely and enabled her to become civilized. Hornekova designed a visionary collection based on women wearing trousers and overalls. But instead of offering a fashion collection, she envisaged a modern woman going about her everyday life, depicting her during her morning routine, working in the office, traveling, and visiting the theater.45 As perceptively observed by Helena Jarosova, Hornekova primarily engaged with a new, totally radical concept of clothing, so her “drawings were instructive and descriptive without greater artistic ambitions done in school on a given theme than ... fashion drawings.”46
However, while Civilized Woman was an all-encompassing modernist project, it was conceived in a city, which was industrially developed and rich between the two world (p- 416) wars. The Czech disciples of International Modernism could not resist cozy comforts and rituals of bourgeois materiality. Thus, Civilized Woman's take on clean, modernist design, regardless of its progressive aesthetics and social agenda, did not only envision a new modern woman in new androgynous clothes but embedded her in a sophisticated lifestyle narrative. In the photographs accompanying the catalogue, this modernist woman wore leather overalls while piloting an airplane, but domestic help supported her refined lifestyle, with even her maid sporting modernist overalls. Consequently, Hornekova's outfits executed for the exhibition Civilized Woman showed androgynous and functionalist, yet highly polished, clothes.47
In 1928, Lis Beyer-Volger designed and executed one of the few outfits that were created under the direct influence of the Bauhaus School of Design. This geometrically cut dress
Page 10 of 27 was made in the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where Beyer-Volger worked on the production of sample fabrics. Blending cotton and raw silk, she also designed fabric for her dress, which, due to the intentionally coarse texture, shimmered in various shades of blue. Beyer-Volger's dress could not be simpler, but, at the same time, it was a very smart dress, fitting the concept of modernist elegance practiced by the Bauhaus artistic community. Indeed, either Lis Beyer-Volger herself or Walter Gropius's wife, Ise, was depicted in that dress in Erich Consemueller's photograph sitting on the B3 Marcel Breuer's chair, with the face covered with Oskar Schlemmer's mask. Everything in that image pointed to the victory of abstraction: the geometric plainness of the dress, a chair held together by the grid of tubes, the abstraction of the body itself hiding behind a mask.
However, this highly urbanized, complex type of abstraction contradicted both the aesthetic simplicity and utopian ambitions of the constructivist project. The powerlessness of the Soviet textile industry had a strangely liberating effect on the constructivists' visions. Their utopian dreams grew boundless, as they were not forced to negotiate their ideas within the capitalist mode of production and the market demand. Equally, in their utopian world, they were not constrained by the technological level of the industry, nor had they compromised their imagination in private commissions. The constructivists were the only modernists who could afford to reject ornament completely, because they rejected history in the first place. The Bauhaus designers could not give up ornament, as they needed its evocativeness in order to make their work appealing to their classy customers. Just as Lis Beyer-Vogel did in designing the fabric for her dress, the Bauhaus designers tried to justify ornament by the discreet use of precious materials and contrasting textures.
The constructivists' fierce proletarian social standing led them to reject objects whose production perpetuated social inequality and exclusivity. Due to this clash between the modernist style that they embraced and its capitalist modes of production that they despised, the constructivists simultaneously felt at home and alienated in the West. Aleksander Rodchenko's visit to Paris in 1925 as one of the designers of the Soviet Pavilion at the World Exposition is well documented in a series of letters he sent home to his wife, Varvara Stepanova.48 Seductive capitalist objects not only lacked the (p- 417) transparency that the constructivists advocated but also kept their dark secrets hidden. For Rodchenko, Western commodities were “decorated on the outside, and they coldly decorated Paris, but on the inside, like black slaves, they concealed catastrophe.”49 Similarly to Ar-vatov, Rodchenko wanted to establish a radically new relationship between the socialist subject and the world of objects, in which an object would never again be a commodity, a result of an alienated and exploitative labor, but “a friend” and “a comrade.” He dreamed of a new interactive relationship in which “man and object would talk to each other.”50
Only in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a group of the socially engaged Italian architects, Archizoom Associati theoretically addressed the initial constructivist concerns on the role of design in society. As observed by the art critic Germano Celant, like the Soviet avant-garde, Archizoom focused not on erecting buildings and designing new objects but on conceptualizing existence of design and architecture:
Shifting the focus of attention from the building or object to be completed implies an effort to escape from the alienating effect of production and commercialization of one's ideas, in order to attain an ideological absolute, pertaining alike to philosophy and attitude. Refusing to let oneself become prey to the commercialization of production could also entail a radical change in the activity of architecture and design: a silence in performance, a nonrealization of one's own ideas and projects.51
Precisely as the early Bolsheviks, Archizoom wanted to make a clean sweep of the existing practices and “function through ideological behavior and actions disruptive of past architecture and design.”52 Equally, addressing the crisis of design in everyday life, they also engaged with various mediums, from photography to writing, film, exhibitions, and dress design. Yet Archizoom ideologically challenged the world of objects within the very different political, economic, and social circumstances. While Boris Arvatov attacked the chaotic and alienated exchanges of goods at the earlier capitalist market, Archizoom contested a reformed and efficient capitalist system and, specifically, its project of the welfare state. The development of the latter united the right-wing and left-wing political parties in the 1960s Italy. Instead, Archizoom claimed that the welfare state did not free the working class but only further enslaved them. Archizoom's hard left ideological position was influenced by the theories of Operaismo, a radical Marxist group of communist militants, who linked the advent of the welfare state to the phenomenon of mass con-sumerism.53
Feeding on such ideas, Archizoom proposed a model for a city without architecture in their No-stop City project, characterized by “the three fundamental spatial archetypes of the industrial city—the factory, the parking lot and the supermarket,” thus expanding “the logic of the factory to the entire urban condition.”54 In No-stop City, the residential buildings of the middle-class city disappeared, as well as the middle-class rituals taking place there. As Archizoom stated, the working class never owned this bourgeois city and only unsuccessfully copied its rituals, being deprived of developing (p- 418) its own culture.55 For Archizoom, the large, and prevalently empty indoor spaces of their No-stop City were “a completely accessible enclosure within which to exercise one's regained freedom of action and judgment.”56
Similarly, Archizoom's 1974 sartorial project “Vestirsi e facile/Dressing Is Easy” advocated an equally basic do-it-yourself method of producing everyday clothes.57 In their attempt to demystify the phenomenon of fashion, Archizoom did not propose a new line of dress to be industrially produced but investigated a different way of using clothing. As emphasized by one of Archizoom's founders, Andrea Branzi, “the goal ... was a product that would stimulate but not exhaust the creativity of its user,” and which, moreover, could re-establish “a symbolic attachment between man and his household articles.”58 Indeed, in contrast to the already well-advanced contemporary Italian fashion industry, “Dressing Is Easy” promoted self-creation, based on the use of simple techniques of assembly, stitching, and cutting. The system renounced the traditional methods of tailoring, and the waste of fabric that accompany it, in favor of a continuous strip of the rectangular-shaped fabric which could be converted into various outfits, such as working jackets, skirts, trousers, overalls, and long dresses. In the journal Casabella, the drawings of these simple, geometric-style clothes were accompanied with a photograph of the box of tools containing colorful threads and buttons, scissors and needle, suggesting both a potential pleasure and creative input in making one's own clothes.59
Nanni Strada was the Archizoom's contemporary and colleague. However, she was a professional fashion designer, who functioned at the edge of the Italian fashion industry and attempted to engage it with her avant-garde dress proposals. In her interest in the latest technological development she differed from Archizoom's DYI system, but she shared their insistence on geometric cuts. In her 1971 Ethnological Collection, Strada was inspired by the ethnographic research that Max Tilke conducted in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Tilke meticulously studied the richly embroidered and colorful embellishments in ethnic dress but focused on the inner construction of those outfits.60 Drawing on his purposeful geometry, Strada's Ethnological Collection was characterized by flat surfaces and “shapeless” cuts considering bodily lines and proportions, thus significantly differing from the contemporary fashionable interest in colorful and frilly “folk” dresses. In his presentation of the project in Domus, Tommaso Trini emphasized that “the structure of this fashion design was fundamentally technological” and closely “tied to production,” with the visual details simply evidencing “how the clothing was manufactured.”61
In 1973/1974, Nanni Strada presented her new dress proposal “The Cape and the Skin” with two different levels of clothing, outer and inner.62 As observed by Andrea Branzi:
The outer one was formed by a “cape” whose structure was determined by the mechanics of its single-piece construction, and the inner “skin” one, was made out of elastic knitted material, exploiting the technology of tubular knitwear to the maximum, so as to obtain the first complete one-piece-body-stocking produced in a single manufacturing operation.63
(p. 419) In this proposal, Strada attempted to engage even more closely with the industry, furthering the existing Pilot method, normally used in the manufacture of tights, so that it could accommodate the production of her Skin outfit. In her Casabella article dedicated to this dress project, Strada clarified that neither her Cape nor her Skin outfit depended on the human anatomy, so successfully avoiding the need for the intermediary dress sizes, and furthermore emphasized that her Cape “preserved its specific geometric shape whether worn or folded.”64
In her dress proposals, Nanni Strada attempted to neutralize the seasonal fashion circles, just as the constructivists and Lamanova did in the early and mid-1920s. In her resolute faith in technology, Strada's efforts resembled Stepanova's utopian vision. Eerily, just like for Stepanova, the decorative effects in Strada's Ethnological Collection arose out of the outfits' inner structure. Moreover, Strada invented her Skin dress proposal by furthering
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the already well-advanced technological development, thus fulfilling Bogdanov's utopian technological dream. All of this shows that in the 1960s and 1970s, the Italian avantgarde opposed the dominant world of fashion, relying on the same aesthetic devices and similar ideological arguments as those of their 1920s Soviet avant-garde predecessors. On the other hand, it's important to remember, that commercial fashion had started to use the same modernist aesthetic and the increasingly developing technological advances for its own market goals already in the 1920s.
From the 1920s, categories such as functionality, simplicity, and comfort increasingly migrated from the austere world of Russian and international constructivism into the field of international fashion. Ahead of the constructivists, the Italian futurist Thayaht (real name Ernesto Michahelles) proposed his all-purpose overalls—la Tuta—in an advertisement published in the respectful bourgeois newspaper La Nazione in Florence in June 1920. Thayaht designed his Tuta as a simple outfit, to be cut along straight lines, fashioned from modest fabrics such as khaki and linen, and easy to make by oneself. There was the same economy of fabric consumption, of effort, and of energy in Rodchenko and Thayaht's overalls, but Thayaht was commercially minded.65 However, Tuta did not become an everyday dress for all sections of society, as envisaged by its designer. Instead, endowed with a modernist credo due to its novel, geometric cut, Thayaht's Tuta, was swiftly acknowledged in the world of Parisian haute couture, which, at the time, was equally modernist and eager to experiment. From 1922, Thayaht practiced his new radical aesthetics at the Madeleine Vionnet fashion house in Paris, designing a series of Tuta-style dresses, and minimalist air travel ensembles, nevertheless executed in the most refined fabrics.
(p. 420) Adopting the modernist geometric visual language in her field of work, Vionnet herself relied on rectangles and circles when designing her high fashion dresses. In this, she shared modernity's interest in geometry as a progressive visual language with both the futurist Thayaht and the utopia-driven constructivists. However, the utopian dreams of deconstructing established dress codes and constructing a novel dress could materialize only in the field of fashion. As a modernist phenomenon itself, but unburdened by any messianic programs or manifestos, fashion both readjusted and transferred utopian ideas into the everyday. Its commercial nature enabled fashion and its practitioners not only to envisage new outfits in geometric shapes but also to efficiently produce them, and sell them, either as elitist clothes or smart sportswear.
In this sense, Coco Chanel's 1926 Little Black Dress and Stepanova's 1924 drawing of a woman's working suit belonged to the same age and shared the same aesthetic, characterized by flatness and overall economy of style. But the innovative Western fashion designers rebelled only aesthetically, while enjoying the advantages of technological advances to introduce novel ways of producing their designs. In one of his Paris letters to Stepanova, Rodchenko let her know that, in a fervent search for the new, geometric patterns were increasingly present in Paris in 1925, encouraging her to pass that informa-
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tion to the Board of the First State Textile Print Factory, where her abstract patterns were ever more rejected at that time.66 In one of her return letters, Stepanova longingly asked Rodchenko: “Did you finally meet any artists, have you been to theatres and the Rotonde? I'm interested to know what their artists seem like to you, are they working in production, or not?”67 Yet, as Rodchenko precisely observed, luxury, privilege, and commodity form were sewn in the seams of Parisian dresses, well hidden behind the superficial simplicity and functionality of their cuts and behind the “poverty” of their new fabrics such as jersey.
In the mid-1920s, the phenomenon of modernist Parisian fashion could accommodate the aesthetics of Sonia Delaunay's dresses and coats, decorated with colorful and strong geometric patterns, although they differed significantly from the smooth deluxe elegance of fur-trimmed gowns and long sumptuous evening dresses embellished with feathers by the leading Paris couturiers.68 Such differences only enriched the Paris fashion scene, offering the boldest but still acceptable modernist statement within the existing field of fashion. In 1928, Delaunay published an article on “Standardization of Clothes” in the Soviet fashion journal Art of Dressing (Iskusstvo odevat'sia). Here, she emphasized that two contradictory dress codes informed contemporary fashion: an everyday dress of functional cut made out of fabric suitable for everyday life and work, that is, prozodezhda, and an extremely imaginative evening dress, blooming with fantasy, decorativeness, and charm. She praised the standardized patterns of the Anglo-French fashion house Redfern, whose vividly colored patterned strips alternating with wide blank bands were an appropriate fabric for everyday dress, keeping it standardized yet beautiful.69 Popova had already envisioned such technological progress in 1924 in the ways in which she organized the relationship between the cuts and the rhythm of patterns in her drawings of “flapper” dresses, but the Soviet industry was not ready for such sophisticated techniques in dress and textile production.
(p. 421) The optimism that allowed for the artistic and sartorial experiments in the West in the 1920s was crushed by the economic crisis at the end of that decade, and furthermore defeated during World War II. However, the early 1960s brought a new enthusiastic approach to life, as overall prosperity emerged following the postwar deprivations. The so-called space age was marked by the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, Yuri Gagarin's first manned space flight in 1961, Valentina Tereshkova becoming the first woman piloting a space aircraft in 1963, and, finally, the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, with Neil Armstrong as the first man to walk on the moon. In the Soviet Union, the images showing Gagarin and Tereshkova in their futuristic, white cosmonaut suits in the stratosphere were the symbol of technological modernity, which also rekindled socialist utopian hopes and symbolically pointed toward the relaunch of socialism under Nikita Khrushchev.70 On the other hand, competing with the initial socialist victories in the space race, the United States attempted to invent not only technologically more advanced versions of the space suits for their cosmonauts but also to design visually more appealing outfits. The Americans initially experimented with the eye-catching silver-colored space suits, but eventually opted for the scientifically verified, and easier to produce white uniforms.71
Both NASA's technological innovations and the constructivist geometric aesthetic echoed André Courrèges and Pierre Cardin's space age collections of the 1960s, an era which still dared to dream of a utopian society of the future. Embracing technology and science, both designers relied on human-made fibers, including vinyl and plastic, or the highly advanced fabrics that were usually used for aviation and sport. Equally, both Cardin and Courrèges showed overalls within their sartorial explorations of new expressions of modernity, brought on by the space age. Cardin's 1970 men's futuristic overalls fitted in his continuing space-inspired narrative of geometrically cut clothes designed to free the body.72 In 1967, Courrèges launched his body stocking, a very tight, knitted all-in-one jumpsuit, celebrating a fit and athletic body.73 Furthermore, both Cardin and Courrèges designed unisex clothes; thus, the space trend embodied the earlier utopian ideas of simple, practical, and sexually neutral outfits for women. While fashionable, the space age-related overalls were geometric and minimalist, clearly referring to their utopian and avant-garde arts' roots.
From the 1970s throughout the 1990s, the American designer Geoffrey Beene became well-known for his refined versions of the overalls. Made in 1970 and sporting the button-on bib top, his first outfit of this kind reflected its source: workman's overalls, but, soon afterward, he was designing the evening wear overalls in expensive fabrics. Beene identified modernity “as a process of elimination: minimal seams, minimal weight, minimal care, minimal details ... the future-fuelled by a revolution of modern fabrics created in the chemist's tube.”74 In his resolute belief in future technologies endlessly inventing new materials, Beene was modern. Yet those luxurious versions could not be further away from the initial, basic, and gender-neutral intentions of overalls, as well as from Bogdanov's utopian concept of harnessing the latest technology into serving the Marxist society.
Mediated through a process of aestheticization that depoliticized its revolutionary message, the Soviet 1920s and its most prominent representatives, the constructivists,
(p. 422) have continued to inspire Western fashion designers. In his 1986 Autumn-Winter ready-to-wear collection, French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier drew on Popova's constructivist prozodezhda clothing designed for the play The Magnanimous Cuckold. Popova's functional numbering of each costume turned into a decorative element in Gaultier's collection, whose outfits were additionally emblazoned with his name in Cyrillic alphabet. Gaultier went even further by constructing his catwalk as a faithful reproduction of Popova's scaffolding stage set. Even John Galliano, who designed highly decorative outfits for the fashion house Christian Dior, succumbed to the constructivism's severe aesthetics with his 1999 Spring-Summer haute couture collection. In the spring of 2009, New York department store Saks Fifth Avenue designed its fashion advertising campaign inspired by the constructivist geometric style. Depicting models sporting a clenched fist, the slogans such as “Want It!” and “Arm Yourself with a Slouchy Bag” were printed in lettering and colors similar to Rodchenko's 1920s graphic designs for Moscow grocery company Mossel'prom.75
Rodchenko's image in his 1922 overalls has also recurrently served as an inspiration for contemporary fashion designers. Vika Gazinskaya, the Russian designer who presents her collections in Paris, showed at her 2016 Autumn-Winter catwalk overalls in a shimmering gray Lurex fabric, embellished only with a swirling pink stripe. The other one was executed in ribbed cotton jersey. Unlike Rodchenko's robust overalls, the latter was soft and seemed more appropriate for an afternoon nap than for a huge effort needed in building a new society. Gazinskaya hinted to its original roots by accessorizing her overalls with a typical Russian hat, a ushanka, yet making it in fake fur in an intense green color, with its ear flaps dancing around the model's face. A year later, Gazinskaya has returned to the same theme by presenting a minimalist, geometrically cut overalls in a soft faux leather. Due to her focus on essential construction, absence of any decoration, and a monochrome red color, with only some minimal details in gray, these overalls resembled Stepanova's early 1920s drawings. By keeping the modernist geometric shapes, but using new technologically advanced fabrics—Lurex, fake fur, and fake leather—Gazinskaya certainly made her overalls both modern and fashionable.
The recent endeavors by Beene, Gaultier, and Gazinskaya discussed earlier show the continuing cultural currency of the constructivist aesthetic. Moreover, as a result of the efforts of the contemporary Western fashion and graphic designers, the Russian constructivists have achieved the status of an iconic brand in the commercial world of Western fashion. In his book How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding, marketing expert Douglas B. Holt claims that “the crux of iconicity is the person or the thing widely regarded as the most compelling symbol of a set of ideas or values that a society deems important.”76 Furthermore, Holt states that “consumers flock to brands that embody the ideals they admire and to brands that help them express who (p- 423) they want to be.”77 Stripped of their original ideological message, could the values associated with the constructivists in the West be defined as romanticized notions of revolution and dreams of a better world?
On the one hand, fashion could only denigrate the noble utopian ideals. During the process of fashionalization, the constructivist, strictly functional clothing acquires the status of commodity in which surplus value significantly outstrips the use value. Developing their careers within the political economy of capitalism, professional fashion designers, whether they like it or not, cannot avoid this dominance of surplus value over exchange value or use value, even as their aesthetic draws on the socialist utopia of the 1920s constructivists. On the other hand, the constructivist-inspired collections by leading Western fashion designers have time and again shown that the aspiration toward utopia nonetheless survives.
However, existing at the edges, or indeed outside, of the otherwise highly commercialized world of fashion, some progressive designers interpret differently the constructivist aesthetic in ways that are more aligned with the original socialist project. In the early 1980s, the English designer Will Brown drew on the constructivist simplicity and functionality, which fitted his concept of well-constructed utilitarian clothes. Brown initially designed under his “Modern Classics” label, but he continued to design custom-made clothes for individual clients after closing his retail business. Around 1983, he made a “constructivist” dress for one of these customers (see Figure 17.2).
Courtesy of Will Brown
(p. 424) Displaying the strong constructivist-like graphics of wide red stripes and the red triangle with the logo of the London Underground, this simply cut cotton dress corresponded to Brown's notion of "considered design.” Around the same time, he also designed the overalls, which were carefully executed to the highest standards, yet retained the constructivist-like austerity. Later, Will Brown and his partner, Marie Willey, have opened a shop, Old Town in Holt, Norfolk, where they design and sell custom-made clothes inspired by early twentieth-century British workwear.
Comradettes (2011-2013) was a radical clothing project inspired by socialist work culture and ideology. Created by artist Eldina Begic, it aimed to shift the perception of manual workers and production in society. The project was shown as a series of installations and subsequently the clothes were made available on a made-to-order basis via the website. Comradettes encouraged people to take pride in utility clothing, questioning our aspirations and values. Drawing on constructivist ideas, the clothing was described as "produc-tivist worksuits.” Comradettes rejected the fashion industry's appropriation of workwear, such as denim jeans, as a form of luxury. Instead, workwear was presented as a means to
Page 18 of 27 ward a sense of solidarity and community, challenging the endless expression (p- 425) of individuality through one's clothes. Comradettes celebrated the attitude of the uniform and reprised the idea that clothing can reflect an ideology.
Similarly, working outside the fashion system, progressive artists Maura Brewer and Abigail Glaum-Lathbury, from the Chicago and Los Angeles-based The Rational Dress Society, have attempted to reposition overalls in an ecologically different social and sartorial environment. Understanding that a political potential of utopian dress is diluted or abandoned at the moment when fashion translates the categories of functionality, simplicity, and gender-neutrality into fast-produced fashionable items, these artists have tried to retrieve the original, genuine meanings of these notions in order to design and offer their overalls through a new, radical practice. They introduced their project, Jumpsuit, in 2016, and envisioned it as an “ungendered mono-garment to replace all clothes in perpetuity” (Figure 17.3).
Photo courtesy of Lara Kastner
For them, “it was important to design a garment that could be effectively worn by the largest number of people and would be appropriate for a wide variety of settings and ac-tivities.”78 Their jumpsuit only comes in two colors—black and white—and can be made in over two hundred sizes customized to a person's individual body type. Glaum-Lathbury developed a system with NASA body size data that is used to construct military-grade clothing for the US government in order to ensure the jumpsuit is individualized and it fits. The artists sell their overalls online and have additionally devised the paper patterns which could be downloaded from their website. This is a return to the beginning, which had started with the Russian science fiction writer Alexander Bogdanov's 1908 novel Red
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Star. Only now, due to the incredible technological advances in production, distribution, and communication, it is a potential reality, or at least one of its possibilities.79
Bartlett, Djurdja. FashionEast: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.
Kiaer, Christina. Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
(p. 431) Kraus, Rosalind. “Grids.” In Rosalind Krauss, Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths, 9-22. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986.
Lavrentiev, Alexander. Aleksandr Rodchenko. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2005.
Lavrentiev, Alexander. Varvara Stepanova: A Constructivist Life. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988.
Lodder, Christina. Russian Constructivism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983.
Sarabianov, Dmitri V., and Natalia L. Adaskina. Popova. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990.
Stites, R. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
(1.) The British historian E. H. Carr states that no other revolution rejected the heritage more strongly or was more determined to provoke an absolute break in continuity between the past and the present; quoted in E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country, 19241926 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1970), 13.
(2.) For an overview on the constructivist aesthetic in relation to dress, see Djurdja Bartlett, FashionEast: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 13-62; for an overview on constructivism, see Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983).
(3.) INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) was founded in Moscow in 1920. Its first president was Vasily Kandinsky, but Rodchenko took over as a president in 1921. The constructivist group was founded there in the same year. The INKhUK was dismantled in 1924. Stepanova's lecture was mentioned in the program of the activities of the INKhUK, as taking place on December 22, 1921 (“The Institute of the Artistic Culture,” in Russkoe Iskusstvo (Russian Art), no. 2-3 (1923): 85-88). Covering all the activities of the INKhUK, the article presented all the different approaches to the arts and applied arts in the peri
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od 1921-1923. The text of this Stepanova's lecture was reprinted in Alexander Lavrentiev, Varvara Stepanova: A Constructivist Life (London: Thames and Hudson 1988), 173-175; 173.
(4.) Meyerhold introduced the system of biomechanics in opposition to practices of bourgeois theater. While the latter is organized around the psychologization of characters, biomechanics was articulated as the scientific and technical system of actors' movements, which stressed the most economical mechanized gesture. For an overview, see Edward Braun, Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre (London: Methuen, 2006).
(5.) The word prozodezhda is an abbreviated combination of two words: proizvodstven-naya (production, industrial) and odezhda (dress). It is usually translated as “production clothing.”
(6.) Popova was the author of both set designs and costumes in the play, which premiered to enthusiastic critical and public acclaim in April 1922. Her handwritten costume manifesto has been preserved in the Manuscript department of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and quoted in Dmitri V. Sarabianov and Natalia L. Adaskina, Popova (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 379. See the same source for Popova's drawings of her prozodezhda costumes (1990: 246-247).
(7.) The play The Death of Tarelkin was directed by Meyerhold and his “laboratory assistant” Sergey Eisenstein. For an overview, see Lavrentiev, Varvara Stepanova, 68-72.
(8.) In Russia, cubism developed into different branches, such as cubo-futurism and suprematism, by different artists, including the constructivists Popova, Stepanova, and Aleksander Rodchenko as well as Kazimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, and Mikhail Larionov.
(9.) Founded in the United States and promoted through Frederick Taylor's 1911 ergonomic study Principles of Scientific Management; Taylor, Frederick Winslow, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York and London, UK: Harper & Brothers, 1911), his method was dully applied at the assembly line at Henry Ford's factory in Highland Park, Detroit, three years later. A machine-fascinated Bolshevik Alexei Gastev was one of the most prominent promotors of Soviet Taylorism.
(10.) Varvara Stepanova (Varst), “Kostium segodniashnego dnia—prozodezhda” (Today's clothing: Prozodezhda), Lef, no. 2 (1923): 65-68; 65.
(11.) Stepanova's sports prozodezhda was worn by her students in the performance accompanying the event An Evening of the Book in 1924. Stepanova's sports prozodezhda, modeled the same year by her artist friend Yevgenia Zhemchuzhnaya, is the only other photo-documented occasion, both photographed by Stepanova's husband, Alexander Rodchenko. The images are reproduced in Lavrentiev, Varvara Stepanova, 112 and 88, respectively.
(12.) Gustav Klutsis had moved from his home country of Latvia to Russia in the mid-1910s and actively participated in the 1917 October Revolution. After studying at the constructivist-run Higher State Workshops for Art and Technology (VKhUTEMAS), he eventually became one of the founders of the technique of photomontage. Klutsis was arrested and killed during the Stalinist purges in 1939. For an overview of Klutsis's various artistic practices and his personal life, see Larisa Oginskaia, Gustav Klutsis (Moscow: Sovetskiii khudozhnik, 1981); Margarita Tupitsyn, Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina (New York: International Center of Photography and Gottingen: Steidl, 2004).
(13.) Klutsis's dress drawings are reproduced in Oginskaia, Gustav Klutsis, 24-25. I am grateful to Iliana Veinberga, who let me know about this reference.
(14.) Osip Brik, “V proizvodstvo!” (Into Production!), Lef, no. 1 (1923): 105-108, 108.
(15.) Osip Brik, “Ot kartiny k sitsu” (From Painting to the Textile Print), Lef, no. 2 (1924): 27-34, 34.
(16.) Stepanova and Popova explained their ideas on the role of the artist in the textile industry in a memo sent to the management of the First State Textile Print Factory in 1923 or 1924 (quoted in Lavrentiev, Varvara Stepanova, 81). However, they did not realize any of their aims. In practice, they worked at home and delivered drawings of their textile patterns to the factory from there.
(17.) Two dozen of Stepanova's textile designs were put into production, while, according to Lavrentiev, Stepanova managed to design more than 150 different fabrics, while working for the factory (Lavrentiev, Varvara Stepanova, 81); see also Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions.
(18.) As argued by Hubertus Gassner, this utopian surplus value transformed every individual utilitarian object into a pars pro toto in the harmonically structured constructivist cosmos (Hubertus Gassner, “The Constructivists: Modernism on the Way to modernization,” in The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-garde, 1915-1932, edited by Thomas Krens (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1992), 298-319, 299.
(19.) Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” in Rosalind Krauss, Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 9-22, 10.
(20.) Ibid.
(21.) Boris Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing,” October 81 (Summer) (1997): 119-128, 126.
(22.) Ibid., 128.
(23.) Stepanova, “Kostium segodniashnego dnia—prozodezhda,” 65.
(24.) Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, edited by Graham L. Loren and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 97.
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(25.) Ibid.
(26.) Ibid., 99.
(27.) Following the Civil War, the Russian economy was in total disarray. Its key industries had been thrown back to their pre-1861 levels, and the production of cotton fabrics reverted to the level of 1857. For an overview of the social, economic, and political situation in the aftermath of the Civil War, see Moshe Lewin, Russia/USSR/Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate (New York: The New York Press, 1995); on the post-1917 textile industry, see Charlotte Douglas, “Russian Fabric Design, 1928-32,” in The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-garde, 1915-1932, edited by Thomas Krens (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1992), 634-647.
(28.) NEP was initiated in 1921 by Lenin in an attempt to improve the supply of basic goods following the Civil War, and it came to an end in 1928 with the start of Stalin's centralization of the economy and introduction of the First Five Year Plan. The NEP existed in the first place as an economic system that partially reintroduced private ownership and private retail practices, which proved to be much more efficient than the state-run businesses. For an overview of the political, economic, and social circumstances of the NEP, see Alan M. Ball, Russia's Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921-1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
(29.) While prerevolutionary fashion magazines were abolished after 1917, they reappeared during NEP and promoted the latest Western fashions on their pages. For an overview, see Bartlett, FashionEast.
(30.) For the images, see Lavrentiev, Varvara Stepanova, 102 and 99, respectively.
(31.) Rodchenko worked on both set decorations and costumes for this production, which was based on Anatolii Glebov's play Inga, and premiered in the Theatre of Revolution in 1929. An accompanying brochure addressed the problems of everyday life. Rodchenko signed his text as “worker-constructor” (A. Glebov, Inga [Moscow: Teakinopechat, 1929]).
(32.) Aleksander Rodchenko, “Diskussiia o novoi odezhde i mebeli—zadacha oformleniia” (Discussion about New Dress and Furniture—Design Task), in A. Glebov, Inga (Moscow: Teakinopechat, 1929), 12-14, 14.
(33.) Nadezhda Lamanova had founded her high fashion house in 1885 and lost it in the aftermath of the revolution, but she started to build a new career in dress design by marching through the newly established educational and artistic institutions. Her Workshop of Contemporary Dress (Masterskaia sovremenogo kostiuma) was embedded in the Subsection of Art and Production within the Fine Art Department (IZO) of the Ministry of Enlightenment.
(34.) Minutes of the First All-Russian Conference on Art and Production (Protokoly I Vserossiiskoi konferentsii po khudozhestvennoi promyshlennosti) (Moscow, 1920), 37-38. Among the one hundred delegates from both the industrial and artistic sectors that at-
Page 23 of 27 tended the conference, nine of them represented the textile industries (details in Iskusst-vo v proizvodstve [Art and Industry] [Moscow, 1921], 34-35).
(35.) Nadezhda Lamanova, “O sovremennom kostiume” (On Contemporary Dress), Red Field (Krasnaia niva), no. 27 (1924): 662-663.
(36.) Ibid.
(37.) Vladimir von Mekk, “Dress and Revolution,” Atelier (Atel'e), Moscow, no. 1 (1923): 31-32, 32. Von Mekk was a prerevolutionary patron of the applied arts.
(38.) Aleksandra Ekster, “V konstruktivnoi odezhde” (On the Construction of Clothes), Atelier, no. 1 (1923): 4-5, 5.
(39.) Aleksandra Ekster, “Prostota i praktichnost' v odezhde” (“Simplicity and Practicality of Dress), Red Field (Krasnaia Niva), no. 21 (1923): 31.
(40.) Iakov Tugendkhol'd, “Vystavka khudozhestvennoi promyshlennosti v Moskve” (The Exhibition of the Artistic Industry in Moscow), Russian Art (Russkoe Iskusstvo), nos. 2-3 (1923): 101-107, 105-106. Instead, he praised Lamanova and Mukhina's outfits, whose geometric shapes were embellished with purified ethnic motifs.
(41.) Iakov Tugendkhol'd, “Stil” 1925 goda. Mezhdunarodnaia vystavka v Parizhe (The 1925 Style: The Paris International Exhibition), Pechat' i revoliutsiia, no. 7 (1925): 29-66, 60. Tugendkhold probably referred to Sonia Delaunay's use of fur and her coats, as the photograph of her coats with abstract patterns which were presented at the Paris International exhibition, accompanied his earlier text “Paris” published in Krasnaia Niva in April 1925.
(42.) Photographs of Rodchenko in his prozodezhda, as well as his prozodezhda design, are reproduced in Alexander Rodchenko, 1891-1956, edited by David Elliott (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1979), 7 and 99, respectively.
(43.) For an overview on dress and fashion under Stalinism, see Bartlett, FashionEast, 63: 98.
(44.) Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov, Russkoe i sovetskoe iskusstvo (Russian and Soviet Art) (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975), 138.
(45.) Bozena Hornekova, Jan Vanek, and Zdenek Rossmann (eds.), Brno: Civilisovana ze-na/Zivilisierte Frau (Civilized Woman) (1929), 87-91.
(46.) Helena Jarosova, “The Beginnings of Fashion Design and Drawing,” in Czech Fashion, 1918-1939, edited by Eva Uchalova (Prague: Olympia, 1996) 26-35, 34.
(47.) The picture of the overalls-clad maid is on p. 74, while the documentary exhibition photographs showing Hornekova's executed clothes are on pp. 92-94. A photograph of a woman pilot in the leather overalls is significantly presented at the very beginning of the catalogue.
(48.) Rodchenko's letters from Paris, covering his three-month visit, were published in the constructivist journal Novyi Lef (New Left Front), 1927, no. 2, and republished in the book A. M. Rodchenko, Stat'i, vospominaniia, avtobiograficeshie zapisi, pis'ma (Articles, Memories, Autobiographical Notes, Letters) (Moscow: Sovetskii Khudozhnik, 1982). My quotes come from that book.
(49.) Rodchenko, Stat'i, vospominaniia, avtobiograficeshie zapisi, pis'ma (letter of May 4, 1925), 96.
(50.) Ibid., 95-96.
(51.) Germano Celant, “Radical Architecture,” in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape: Achievements and Problems of Italian Design, edited by Emilio Ambasz (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972): 380-387, 381-382. While they closely cooperated with other radical architecture group, Superstudio, I am addressing Archizoom in this essay, due to their prominent interest in dress design.
(52.) Celant, “Radical Architecture,” 382.
(53.) Led by Mario Tronti, this group of leftist militants was affiliated with the journal Quaderni Rossi and became known as “the Operaists.” For them, both production and mass consumption kept the reformed system functioning, only to bring ever more profit to the capitalist. For an overview, see Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Manfredo Tafuri, Archizoom, Superstudio, and the Critique of Architectural Ideology,” in Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, edited by Peggy Deamer (New York: Routledge, 2014): 132-147, 134-140.
(54.) Ibid., 143.
(55.) “Archizoom,” in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. Achievements and Problems of Italian Design, edited by Emilio Ambasz (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972), 232239, 236-238.
(56.) Ibid., 235.
(57.) Archizoom, “Vestirsi e facile/Dressing Is Easy,” in Casabella, no. 387 (March 1974): 43-48.
(58.) Andrea Branzi, The Hot House: Italian New Wave Design (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 86-95; 90 and 87, respectively.
(59.) The written advice, explanatory drawings, and a number of photographs in color presenting the executed outfits were published in Archizoom, Casabella, no. 387 (1974): 43-48. Branzi claimed that the system “Dressing Is Easy” could supply sixty different outfits (Branzi, The Hot House, 88).
(60.) Max Tilke was the German ethnographer, specializing in the study of ethnic dress. Starting in Europe and the Russian Empire in the 1910s, he eventually explored ethnic dress worldwide and extensively published on the topic. In 1926, he published The Costumes of Eastern Europe (London, Ernest Benn, 1926).
(61.) Tommaso Trini, “Abitare l'abito” (Inhabiting the Dress), in Domus, no. 510 (May 1972): 35-37, 37. The Ethnological Collection was produced under the MaxMara label, and it attracted some attention of the contemporary fashion media. On Strada's dress designs, see also Vittoria C. Caratozzolo, “Giu dal corpo: il dressing design degli anni Settanta e Nanni Strada,” in Fatto in Italia: la cultura del made in Italy (1960-2000), edited by Paola Colaiacomo (Rome: Meltemi editore, 2006): 65-96.
(62.) In 1973, Nanni Strada made a film with Clino Castelli called The Cape and the Skin (Il Manto e la pelle), followed by the article of the same title in the journal Casabella next year; Nanni Strada, “Il Manto e la pelle” (The Cape and the Skin), Casabella, no. 387 (March 1974): 38-42.
(63.) Branzi, The Hot House, 93.
(64.) Strada, “Il Manto e la pelle,” 39.
(65.) Thayaht invested a lot of effort into promoting his new outfit, and only a couple of weeks after its launch, one thousand tuta paper patterns had been already sold. For an overview on Thayaht, his invention of tuta, and his promotional efforts, see Mauro Prate-si, “1920. Thayaht inventa la Tuta e nasce il Made in Italy”; 2007: 12-23; Enrica Morini, “La Tuta: da antimoda a haute couture,” 2007: 24-33; both essays were published in Thayaht: Un artista alle origini del Made in Italy (Prato: Museo del Tessuto Edizioni, exhibition catalogue, 2007); see Morini also for Thayaht's collaboration with Madeleine Vion-net.
(66.) Rodchenko, Stat'i, vospominaniia, avtobiograficeshie zapisi, pis'ma, 93.
(67.) Quoted in Alexander Lavrentiev, Aleksandr Rodchenko (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2005), 170.
(68.) Born in Ukraine and raised in St Petersburg, Sonia Delaunay left the Tsarist Russia to study art in the West and, together with her husband, Robert Delaunay, became the prominent member of the Western avant-garde.
(69.) At that time, Delaunay was collaborating with Edmond Courtot from the fashion house Redfern and had published an article on the same topic in Femme de France on January 22, 1928.
(70.) See, for example, Soviet Space Culture: Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies, edited by Eva Maurer et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
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(71.) For an overview of the development of the space suit, and its technological, cultural, and social context, see Nicholas de Monchaux, Space Suit: Fashioning Apollo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
(72.) For Cardin's career path and his imagery, see Elisabeth Langle, Pierre Cardin: Fifty Years of Fashion and Design (New York: The Vendome Press, 2005).
(73.) For Courrèges, see Valérie Guillaume, Courrèges (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998).
(74.) Grace Mirabella, “Geoffrey Beene Interview,” in Geoffrey Beene Unbound, edited by Abbott J. Miller (New York: The Museum at the FIT, 1994): 2-8, 3.
(75.) The Saks campaign was designed by Shepard Fairey, designer of the Obama Hope poster. While he burdened the latter with a strong political message, Fairey insisted that the Saks constructivist-like campaign was only commerce, without “any political statement embedded in it” (quoted in Eric Wilson, “Consumers of the World Unite!”, The New York Times, January 7, 2009; https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/fashion/08ROW.html
(76.) Douglas B. Holt, How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004), 1.
(77.) Ibid., 3-4.
(78.) Zach Stafford, “Tired of the Tyranny of Fashion? Wear a Jumpsuit Every Day,” The Guardian, June 2, 2016; https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2016/jun/02/jumpsuit-ratio-nal-dress-society-fashion-clothing-vogue.
(79.) The research for this article was generously supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship Grant (2012-2014) and by The British Academy Small Research Grant (2009-2010). Additionally, I am grateful to Serguei A. Oushakine, who invited me to the conference “Illusions Killed by Life: Afterlives of (Soviet) Constructivism” at Princeton University in 2013, at which I presented an early version of this essay.
Djurdja Bartlett
Djurdja Bartlett, Reader in Histories and Cultures of Fashion, University of the Arts London
“Socialist Realist” Critiques of Neoliberal “Shock Therapy”: E^German Artists Respond to the 1973 Putsch in Chile
April A. Eisman
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Aug 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.19
This article focuses on the East German artistic response to the 1973 putsch in Chile, an event now recognized as foundational in the development of neoliberalism. Outraged and saddened, artists in East Germany responded to the putsch with thousands of works of art. These works disrupt Western expectations for East German art, which was far more modern and complex than the term “socialist realism” might suggest. They also offer insight into the horrors of the putsch and remind us that there have been—and can once again be—alternatives to neoliberal capitalism. In addition to creating prints, paintings, and sculptures, East German artists organized solidarity events to raise money for Chile and spearheaded a book project with artists from sixteen communist and capitalist countries to document the event and losses suffered. This article ultimately shows that communist visual culture can serve as a model for art as an activist practice.
Keywords: East German art, East German painting, socialist realism, art in socialism, socialist art, neoliberalism, Chile, modern art, contemporary art
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a powerful collective reckoning with the great crimes committed in the name of Communism ... . But what of the contemporary crusade to liberate world markets? The coups, wars and slaughters to install and maintain pro-corporate regimes have never been treated as capitalist crimes but have instead been written off as the excesses of overzeal-ous dictators ... [T]hat suppression is explained as part of the dirty fight against Communism or terrorism—almost never as the fight for the advancement of pure capitalism.
—Naomi Klein1
On Tuesday, September 11, 1973, the Chilean army general August Pinochet led a coup d'état against the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Since taking office three years earlier, Allende had been implementing the socialist program upon which he had been elected. This included nationalizing the educational and health care systems as well as large-scale industries such as banking and copper mining. The latter was an attempt to make Chile economically self-sufficient, but in the process, it struck against American financial interests. This fact, together with Allende's commitment to Marxism, led the United States under Nixon to actively undermine (p- 433) Allende through boycotts, negative propaganda, and, ultimately, by tacitly supporting Pinochet's putsch.2 Allende died on the first day of the coup, but his death did not end the violence. Tens of thousands of Chilean citizens were rounded up by Pinochet's troops, imprisoned, tortured, and many ultimately killed for their political commitment—or suspicions thereof—to Allende and his political party, the Unidad Popular.3
These events caused a public outcry around the world, in both capitalist and communist countries alike, but it elicited a particularly strong reaction in socialist East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR), recalling as it did the violence of the Nazi past less than thirty years earlier.4 In a call for signatures in support of a protest petition, the Academy of Arts of the GDR, for example, stated, “We call to you from Berlin, where Fascism burned books like in Santiago now, and where one later burned people.”5 For the East German government, the putsch served as a reminder of the need to stay vigilant against the spread of fascism. They used the events in Chile to emphasize the horrors of imperialism and the importance of the international communist movement for stopping it. In the process, they also raised their own political standing in the world by becoming one of the leading voices in the subsequent solidarity movement.6
East German artists responded to the coup by creating thousands of works, including prints, paintings, and drawings as well as a number of sculptures. As Marcus Kenzler has observed, “solidarity works relating to Chile became a defining feature of GDR-art in the 1970s.”7 Most were created in the immediate wake of September 11, 1973, although the theme continued to inspire works throughout the Cold War period, most notably for the fifth and tenth anniversaries of the putsch. While some of these later creations may have been inspired more by a desire to create works on a topic that had a higher chance of acceptance into juried exhibitions, the earlier ones—judging from their numbers and the speed with which they were created—indicate a deeply personal response and genuine investment in an act of international political intervention. According to Gabriele Muschter in an article published at the time in Bildende Kunst (Visual Arts), East Germany's most important art journal, “there has hardly ever been such a spontaneous reaction by artists of the GDR as to the horrific events in Chile.”8 Nor was the outrage limited to artists: the German historian Inga Emmerling has noted that there were protests and solidarity meetings in factories in which thousands of workers took part just a few hours after the putsch.9 There were also large protests in Dresden, Halle, Leipzig, Rostock, and Berlin within days.10 Indeed, conversations with former East Germans today indicate that their personal response to September 11, 1973, was not unlike that for September 11, 2001— many knew exactly where they were when they heard of the event, were outraged and
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horrified, and were glued to the news for weeks thereafter.11 Nor was the immediate artistic response limited to creating art: artists organized exhibitions and donated works to raise money for the Chilean people and later worked together with prominent writers to create a 288-page book that combined texts and images to document and respond to the putsch.
In this article, I focus on the East German artistic response to the putsch in Chile to challenge the common view in the West, held by scholars and nonscholars alike, that (p- 434) East German art was little more than kitsch or political propaganda. Such dismissals of East German art, often accompanied by the term “socialist realism,” serve to negate artwork critical of Western politics as well as artworks that do not fit comfortably within postwar Western aesthetic categories. Yet as I will show, East Germany had a vibrant and modern art scene, one that engaged with its own modernist past, and in particular expressionism, in the production of original works that defy Western understandings of socialist realism. These works stand in sharp contrast to many Westerners' expectations that artists in East Germany were beholden to Soviet aesthetics, to creating works that reflected optimism, heroicism, and illusionistic realism. As I have shown elsewhere, socialist realism in East Germany was not a style; it was a position or attitude, one that rejected art for art's sake in favor of societal engagement in terms of both subject matter and audience.12 The state's commitment to raising the general public's understanding of art—in art history classes in school, free art circles for adults, work trips to art exhibitions, and newspaper reviews—meant that by the 1970s, artists were able to create complex works that were nonetheless understood by the public.13 These efforts to educate the public about art also led to an increased interest in art among the East German populace. As Bernd Lindner has documented, East Germans attended art exhibitions in the 1970s and 1980s in significantly higher numbers than their Western counterparts.14 For many, art had become—like literature—an alternative public sphere in which issues of the day could be discussed.15
In this article, my interest is less in disrupting Western expectations for East German art, however, than on drawing attention to East German artists' reaction to the putsch in Chile, an event now recognized as foundational in the development of neoliberalism, a political system that has become so widespread in the intervening decades as to seem to have no alternatives.16 Yet in 1973, the alternative was not only real but threatening to the centers of neocolonial capitalist expansion. Quickly gaining momentum around the world, the socialist alternative not only promised egalitarian improvements but went about instituting them, piecemeal, in countries open to the Marxist experiment. The violence of the putsch was not just about changing who ran the government in Chile; it was a strategic act of aggression that sought to create a moment of collective trauma—a feeling of shock and paralysis among the Chilean people—that could be exploited by those wishing to promote neoliberal capitalism's core policies of privatization, government deregulation, and deep cuts to social spending at a time when socialism seemed to be gaining the upper hand.17 As David Harvey has pointed out, the putsch in Chile was not the first time that “a brutal experiment carried out in the periphery became a model for the formulation of policies in the center.”18 A study of East German artists' responses to
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the putsch thus offers insight into the horrors of that event, while also standing as a reminder that there have been—and can once again be—alternatives to neoliberal capitalism.19 Further, in looking at the art in question and how it sheds light on the pernicious motivations of early neoliberal expansion, one may evaluate communist visual culture as a model of collective art activism that may, and perhaps should, inspire our response to neoliberal violence today, in the realm of both international culture and politics.
The artistic response to the putsch in Chile reflected a long-term relationship between East Germany and Chile shaped in large part by the strained relationship between the two Germanys, one made worse by the Hallstein Doctrine. Implemented in 1950, just one year after the founding of both East and West Germany, the Hallstein Doctrine stated that, with the exception of the Soviet Union, West Germany would not maintain diplomatic relations with any country that had diplomatic relations with East Germany. The result was that most countries, wanting to maintain good relations with the United States, which supported West Germany, did not officially recognize the GDR in the early decades of the Cold War. Gaining recognition, and thus legitimation, became an important goal for the GDR, especially in the 1960s, and it was during this decade that the East German government courted a number of countries in the developing world and established a particularly strong relationship with the Communist Party in Chile. At the same time, Allende, who would become head of the Chilean Senate by the end of 1966, visited the GDR that year while touring a number of eastern countries and was both impressed with what he saw and hopeful that the GDR could provide scientific help to Chile in the future.
Five years later, in March 1971, the newly elected Allende—who had maintained his admiration of, and ties with, the GDR—established diplomatic relations with East Germany. His was the twenty-eighth country to do so since the GDR's founding more than twenty years earlier. Chile also actively intervened on the GDR's behalf with other countries in Latin America and rallied for its inclusion in the United Nations.20 The GDR was grateful for the recognition and did much to foster the relationship, both before and after recognition, including sending skilled workers and supplies to Chile to help support the new socialist government. This support became particularly valuable to Allende in the wake of the US-backed boycott of Chile on the international market in response to his attempts to nationalize Chilean industry.
With the election of Allende, Chile became a topic of much discussion in the East German media, where it was a source of positive propaganda for having democratically elected a Marxist leader. The general populace, which viewed Chile as an exotic and beautiful land that held the promise of a more democratic form of socialism, thus reacted strongly to the news of the putsch.21 The first headline in the Neues Deutschland (New Germany), the party's national newspaper, about the coup d'état appeared on September 12. The article emphasized the attack and the democratic nature of Allende and his government. Another article, also appearing on the front page, reflected upon the East German response to the
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recent events: “the workers of the GDR have learned with anger and disgust about the monstrous fact that a military putsch in Chile has taken place against the Unidad Popular and the elected president Salvador Allende.”22 It ended by pledging solidarity and, in particular, a commitment to supporting the Chilean fight for freedom, independence, and progress. By September 14, all of the articles on the (p- 436) front page were devoted to Chile, as were many of the articles within. They detailed the events of the putsch itself, the death of Allende, as well as the incarceration, torture, and death of numerous other Chileans, and called to those living in Berlin to join a mass protest that afternoon at the Humboldt University. Over the course of the next three months, Chile would be the focus of more than 280 articles in Neues Deutschland, more than seventy-five of which appeared on the front page.23
Coverage of the events in Chile was not limited to political outlets. Bildende Kunst, the GDR's main art journal, published several articles over the course of the subsequent year. Similarly, the Academy of Arts dedicated several pages of the November/December issue of its bimonthly newsletter Mitteilungen (Communications) to the putsch and its aftermath. The cover of this issue shows the word “Chile” going up in flames, while inside there are a number of texts about the loss of major cultural figures such as the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda, who had been both a vocal supporter of Allende and an honorary member of the Academy of Arts in East Germany.24
The November/December issue also included a call to artists around the world to sign a petition against the “fascist barbarism” that was taking place in Chile. Thousands responded, and some of their letters were published in subsequent issues of the journal. One of the most important to sign was the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, who stated in October that he was moved that Berlin, of all places, would take the cultural lead in opposing the events in Chile—Berlin, home of the infamous book burning in 1933, which was being relived in Chile under Pinochet, where Marxist books were going up in flames.25 Siqueiros declared his solidarity with East Germany and their call to oppose the events in Chile.
The desire for solidarity with the people of Chile can also be seen in the speed with which an art auction was organized for their benefit in Leipzig. Just over two weeks after the putsch, over seventy artists delivered paintings, prints, and drawings on the topic to the Galerie am Sachsenplatz.26 These works were then put on display for two days before being auctioned off on Saturday, September 29.27 The proceeds of more than 11,000 eastern marks went into a fund to be sent to help the people of Chile.28
The auction's black-and-white poster was designed by Bernhard Heisig (1925-2011), who would later become one of East Germany's best known and most influential artists. The lithograph depicts a woman dressed in black with a rifle in her hand and a determined look on her face. Armed comrades and dead bodies swirl around her in a simultaneous narrative composition—the doomed battle as a whole depicted in an expressionist man-Page 5 of 22 ner. It is an image taken from the final days of the Paris Commune in the late nineteenth century, when the socialist government set up by the people was brutally suppressed by the French military. This event was a frequent subject in Heisig's work since the mid-1950s, a symbol for the promise of socialism and the difficulties in (p- 437) actualizing a socialist state. In East Germany, the Paris Commune, despite its tragic end, was viewed as an important precursor to the GDR because it was the first socialist government on European soil. In the case of the putsch in Chile, the Paris Commune worked particularly well since both were socialist experiments that ended in tremendous bloodshed. The repeated references to the Paris Commune in Heisig's work also disclose a relationship to communism that challenges the Western tendency to see East German art as slavishly adherent to a solely Soviet paradigm.
Heisig made a number of artworks on the topic of Chile in the immediate wake of the putsch. Already on September 14, he published a drawing in the local party newspaper, the Leipziger Volkszeitung. It shows an army soldier holding a gun to the head of a civilian, who clasps his hands together and seems to be begging for mercy. Behind them the outline of an American dollar sign is clearly visible, suggesting the ultimate cause of the terror in Chile as Heisig and many others in East Germany saw it at the time. The text on the right reads (in German): “The army could no longer divest itself of responsibility ... those affiliated with the western embassies are well! Chile, 12. September 1973.” This was one of several similar drawings and prints Heisig made on the topic, each with a slightly different composition; in all three, the dollar sign is clearly visible.
Heisig also created two paintings with a similar composition, one of which was reproduced in the Leipziger Volkszeitung on September 25, Chile—12. September 1973 (see Figure 18.1). In this work, the army soldier wears a helmet and holds the civilian in a headlock. The latter, in a red shirt suggesting his communist sympathies, pulls at the arm around his throat, his head thrown back in a cry, presumably pleading for his life. The soldier, his lips pursed just above the gun he holds to the man's head, seems to be whispering into his ear, perhaps telling him there is no use in resisting. Behind them, and echoing the soldier's helmet in light-gray paint, is the top curve of a US dollar sign, which fuses compositionally with the figure, whose left arm becomes part of the sign's body, which ends in two light-gray lines in the bottom left corner of the painting. In comparison to the drawings, the reference to the dollar sign and the text about the Western embassies are less prominent. Instead, the interaction between the two figures is foregrounded, depicted with a loose brushwork that recalls works by the expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka.
© 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo: Deutsche Fotothek
That Heisig was deeply upset by the events in Chile is evidenced not only by the speed and number of works he created on the topic but also by the fact that he missed giving a speech for an exhibition of Leipzig painters held at the Kunsthalle in Rostock that fall.29 According to the East German art critic Rita Jorek, who took his place at the opening, Heisig could not attend because he was being treated by a doctor for exhaustion: “recently he has been working very hard, perhaps even more than what is bearable: he has created two paintings in protest against the despotic rule of the reactionary forces] in Chile and gave his all to the success of our solidarity art auction [for Chile] on the weekend.”30
Whereas Heisig focused on American imperialism in most of his works on the topic, other artists focused more generally on the nameless victims who had been rounded up and killed by Pinochet's troops. Indeed, the majority of works created in East Germany
(p. 438) at the time focused on the victims, be they the ones imprisoned, tortured, or killed, those in mourning, or the people more generally, as a result of the loss of important democratically instituted social programs. Hartwig Ebersbach (b. 1940), who had studied under Heisig at the Leipzig Academy several years earlier and worked in a similar expressionist style, created Widmung Chile (Dedication to Chile; see Figure 18.2). It consists of twelve panels—six large and six small—that lean against a wall, or each other, in two rows. Based on a late nineteenth-century photograph of corpses from the Paris Commune, each panel contains the bloodied body of a man or woman from Chile. It is as if we are looking at people lying in their coffins, which are then propped against the wall. The loose brushwork and plentiful use of red paint suggest the violent nature of their deaths. That there are twelve figures also suggests Christian iconography of the twelve disciples and thus recalls the martyrdom of Christ. Such references to Christianity were
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not uncommon in East German art in the 1970s and 1980s. The focus was less on making a religious statement, however, than on embedding the works into a longer art historical tradition. The Bible was, like mythological stories, a source for shared references and allegories for the present.
© 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Ludwig Forum fur Internationale Kunst Aachen, Schenkung Peter und Irene Ludwig
These works by Heisig and Ebersbach may surprise a Western audience expecting a simple realism based on nineteenth-century Soviet models. Not only modern in style, (p- 439) the subject matter of these paintings is pessimistic, focusing as it does on those killed—or in the process of being killed—in the Chilean putsch. Debates throughout the 1950s and 1960s in East Germany about what art should be—between politicians wanting Soviet-inspired, simple works and artists wanting an art that engaged with life in all its complexity —had resulted in a greater openness to modern art by the 1970s. By the time of the putsch in Chile, East Germany had entered a period when artists working in traditional media such as painting and sculpture were relatively free to pursue their own interests. This openness to artistic experimentation was cemented in 1971 when Erich Honecker came to power and stated that “when one starts from a committed Socialist position, there can be ... no taboos in art and literature, neither in content nor in style.”31 This change enabled artists to engage with modern artistic styles and pessimistic subject matter, and for some, most notably Leipzig School artists like Heisig, to represent East Germany in major art exhibitions in the West.
Just as Heisig and Ebersbach focused on unnamed victims in their work, so too did Werner Tubke (1929-2004), a colleague of Heisig's at the Leipzig Academy, in Chilenisches Requiem (Requiem for Chile, 1974). In his typical Renaissance-inspired style, Tubke depicted a corpse laid out on the ground, the Andes Mountains visible in the background. A Chilean flag appears at the bottom right-hand corner of the work. The overly muscled body of the male victim shows signs of rigor mortis and decay; it was based on sketches Tubke made at a local morgue. A woman dressed in black leans over the dead man, holding his left hand in her own and reaching for his face. The composition recalls the Christian pieta, with its figure of the sorrowful Virgin Mary posed over the body of Christ.32 In
Page 8 of 22 the background, just to the left of the tree, two birds circle, a symbol for death, while the purple tint of the mountains symbolizes sadness and (p- 440) mourning. A poem by Pablo Neruda appears on the trunk of the tree at the right. It states in German, “There is no forgetting, ladies and gentlemen, and through my wounded mouth those mouths will go on singing.” Tubke's use of Christian iconography, like so many other features of his art, defies the limiting scholarly appraisals of the East German art as ideologically in service to the Soviet regime and its well-publicized repression of religion.
Wolfgang Mattheuer (1927-2004), who, together with Heisig and Tubke, would later become one of East Germany's best-known painters, focused on the martyrdom of the Chilean folksinger Victor Jara in his painting, Requiem for Victor Jara (1973, see Figure 18.3). Deeply influenced by the folklore of Chile and other Latin American countries, Jara had combined these ideas with leftist ideology in his music. He was well-known internationally and a strong supporter of Allende and the Unidad Popular; he even gave free concerts in support of Allende's campaign. On September 12, 1973, Jara was picked up by Pinochet's soldiers along with thousands of others and taken to the (p- 441) Chile Stadium, where he was beaten, tortured, and finally killed. A popular story states that one of the soldiers, after breaking all of Jara's fingers, mockingly asked him to play guitar; Jara is said to have responded by singing a song in support of the Unidad Popular. In Mattheuer's surrealist painting, dominated by deep reds and yellows, the singer lies face down, presumably dead, with the sun setting behind him. His right arm is curled above his head; his left arm, extended out to one side, seemingly separated from his body. The arched fingers of his left hand appear as broken as the acoustic guitar, in flames, that lies next to him. The deep-red ground on which the dead singer lies prostrate reads as a desert in the background but transforms into the wrinkled edge of a blanket in the foreground, under which a small face peaks out just to the right of center, suggesting the many people who went into hiding after the widespread brutality of the first few days of the putsch.
© 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Lindenau-Museum, Altenburg. Photo: Bernd Sinterhauf
A reference to Jara can also be seen in Hans-Hendrik Grimmling's painting Junta Music (1973) through the inclusion of a broken guitar in the center of the composition. Clearly inspired by the early twentieth-century modern artist Max Beckmann, this work depicts Pinochet at the far left, with a conductor's baton in his hand, which he waves at the figures in the right half of the composition as if controlling their actions. A masked figure stabs the guitar, while another seated figure below him lights a match and holds it against the strings. The artist himself appears above these two figures and to the right of the guitar: he is the bearded man in the hat who is looking onto the scene helplessly from the shadows. Similarly, a rather threatening purple bird whose large eye and beak can be seen in the upper right-hand corner seems to be watching the scene and perhaps represents the harsh indifference of fate. Two soldiers in helmets and holding daggers appear in each of the bottom corners, recalling the role of the military in the putsch as well as in the torture and death of Victor Jara. The overall feeling of the painting is one of claustrophobia.
Grimmling was a student at the Leipzig Academy at this point in time, making him—at the age of twenty-six—one of the youngest artists to create a painting about the Chilean events. In his autobiography, he states that the putsch was a major source of inspiration for his work. Indeed, this painting was initially titled Mord an der Muse (Murder of the Muse), and it is one of several images—mostly prints and drawings—that he created on the topic. For him, it was an event similar to that of the violent suppression of the uprising in Prague in 1968. Unlike the other paintings discussed thus far, however, Grimmling did not exhibit this work in one of the regional art exhibitions but rather at the Leipzig Art Academy as part of his graduation work (Diplom).
Leipzig was not the only place where artists spontaneously created work in response to the putsch in Chile. Indeed, the catalogs for the regional art exhibitions that took place throughout East Germany in 1974 included a large number of prints and paintings on the topic. In Halle, Willi Sitte (1921-2013) showed a simultaneous narrative polyptych titled Jeder Mensch hat das Recht auf Leben und Freiheit (Every Person Has the Right to Life and Freedom; see Figure 18.4). This painting, like Heisig's work, focused on American imperialism, linking the events in Chile to the ongoing war in Vietnam as well as to the Nazi past. In the center panel, a blindfolded man leans forward, trying to (p- 442) escape from unseen captors who have his arms pinned behind him. In front of him, at a smaller scale, a parachutist kneels with arms crossed in front of his face as if to protect himself from the horrors before him. They are surrounded by images, at varying scale, of a downed American bomber jet and Asian faces exhibiting a variety of expressions, including confusion, concern, and anguish. The left panel shows Victor Jara's broken guitar and a nude figure—typical for Sitte's work and symbolic of humanity at large—confined in a box, a reference to one of the torture methods employed by Pinochet's troops. An image from the Nuremberg trials, with a blindfolded sculpture of justice above it, connects current events to the Nazi past and, perhaps also, to the idea of world justice. The right panel shows a Trojan horse, inspired by Picasso's Guernica, flipped upside down and in flames, above which an Asian woman struggles against an armed (p- 443) soldier. The predella panel, which for this painting is often exhibited at an angle jutting out from the wall, shows three dead soldiers against a backdrop of Nazi flags, again making the connection between American imperialism and the Third Reich.
© 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Albertinum | Galerie Neue Meister, Inv.-Nr. 78/02. © Photo: Albertinum | Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
In Dresden, Christoph Wetzel (b. 1947)—a recent graduate from the Dresden Academy-created Der tote Prasident—Dr. S. Allende (The Dead President-Dr. S. Allende), which depicted the body of Salvador Allende slumped lifelessly against the side of his chair. The bullet holes in the chair above his head and the shadow of a soldier at the left reflect the belief held at the time that Allende had been murdered by Pinochet's troops; it was later discovered that he took his own life before this could happen. In this painting, Allende's contorted body is wrapped in a Chilean flag.
In Berlin, Walter Womacka (1925-2010) created some of the most powerful images on the topic with a series of drawings titled In Chile herrscht Ruhe (In Chile, Quiet Prevails). In one, a determined-looking and bespectacled Allende appears next to a bullet-riddled chair, an outline of Chile showing through the right half of his face. In another, a young child holds out a milk container, recalling one of the many socialist programs Allende implemented when he came to power in 1970. The program referred to here is the one that ensured that all children under the age of fifteen received a certain amount of milk every day for free. The child depicted looks earnest, while the milk container is marked by two bullet holes. It, together with the mangled doll at his feet, reflects the loss of Allende and his socialist reforms. In the upper left-hand corner, two faces drink from cups—a reminder of what was—while just to the right of the child are the faint outlines of the faces of two crying children, reflecting the present reality of life under Pinochet's dictatorship.
The quiet loss suffered by those who remained was a topic taken up by a number of women in East Germany, including the Berlin artist Heidrun Hegewald (b. 1936). In Chile, 11. September 1973 (1973), she portrayed two women—a mother and child—centered against a dark backdrop. The mother sits stoically, her back straight, her eyes closed, her held tilted slightly backward to reveal tears streaming down her passive face. With her large right hand, she holds onto her daughter, who is drawn by something outside the right-hand side of the picture frame. It is a quiet image of loss that also captures the unique experience of women: in this case, the need for Chilean mothers to maintain enough composure to protect their children in the face of unimaginable loss. Similarly, Petra Flemming (1944-1988), from Leipzig, emphasized those left behind in Trauer im September (Sorrow in September, 1974). In this painting, two women lean over the shot-up corpse of a young man who lies with lifeless eyes open and blood streaming from his mouth. One woman has tears running down her face as she pulls up a blanket to cover him; the other woman's face is covered by her long hair. Between them, a grim male face stares into the distance, perhaps an image of the man as they remember him from life.
In addition to personal responses to the putsch, there were also nationally coordinated responses. The weekly newspaper the Wochenpost, with the support of the national artists' union, had a series, “Graphics for Chile's Freedom,” that ran every week for over six months, beginning in October 1973.33 Next to articles about the putsch, including firstperson accounts, were “prints on a variety of themes” by (mostly) (p- 444) East German artists; these ranged from images of defiance and hope to those of suffering and sorrow.34 In the margins, the names of the artists and the cost of the prints, ranging from 15 to 80 eastern marks, were listed so that readers could purchase them and thereby contribute to the cause; all of the proceeds went to a “solidarity with Chile” fund.35 Works could be bought directly through the newspaper by mail or at the district offices of the artists' union. For a while they were also available in the lobby of the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, where actors would meet with the public to sing “fight songs” before the performances.36 Already by early December—just two months into the series—they had raised 50,000 marks, of which 1,200 was contributed by the editorial staff of the newspaper; by mid-February, they had collected 80,000 marks.37 Altogether more than fifty artists donated work to the Wochenpost initiative to raise money for the victims of the putsch.
East German artists' official engagement with the putsch in Chile culminated in January 1975 with the publication of a 288-page hardcover book titled Chile: Gesang und Bericht (Chile: Song and Report), which reflected not only their commitment to solidarity with Chile but also their leading role in coordinating an international response. First announced at the Seventh Congress of the Association of Writers of East Germany in November 1973, this project brought together important East German writers like Anna Seghers and Volker Braun with important visual artists like Heisig, Tübke, and Sitte, who was president of the Union of Visual Artists at the time. Together they worked as editors of the large-format book with more than eighty illustrations of paintings, prints, photos, sculptures, and posters about Chile by artists from around the world. These included artists from eight communist countries (Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam) and eight capitalist ones (Belgium,
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Canada, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States).38 The majority of works, however, were from Germany, with 34 percent from East Germany and 23 percent from West Germany, followed by Cuba and Czechoslovakia at 5 percent each.39 A comparison of the works shows a shared condemnation of the events in Chile on both sides of the East/West divide. Similarly, the works are indistinguishable stylistically, reflecting a shared commitment to a modernist realist aesthetic on both sides of the Iron Curtain that disrupts the tendency to see Eastern art as realist but unmodern, and Western art as a modernist abstraction. The West German contributions were primarily prints, however, whereas the East German works were a mix of prints and paintings. Indeed, East Germany created the majority of paintings, which included Heisig's Chile, 12. September, Mattheuer's Requiem for Victor Jara, and Sitte's Everyone Has the Right to Life and Freedom, each of which was reproduced in color.
A perhaps surprising inclusion in the book is a work by the Dresden artist Hermann Glöckner (1889-1987) made in collaboration with the Leipzig printer Günter Jacobi (1935-2013). Best known in the West today for his constructivist works, Glöckner is often assumed to have experienced difficulty exhibiting work in East Germany because of his commitment to abstraction. Yet his inclusion in this book—and his many solo exhibitions and awards in East Germany in the 1970s and 1980s—shows that this (p- 445) assumption is misplaced. Chile combines an abstract composition of red and black scalene triangles by Glöckner with texts laid out by Jacobi. The first text (bolded black on red) is a quote from Pablo Neruda from 1973, translated into German: “We are being attacked by Fascists, Imperialists, and false Christians: The past is united in preserving the spider's webs.” The second, more difficult to read, is a thin white text on black, that reads, also in German, “One says that democracy must be bathed in blood every now and again so that it can remain a democracy. We want Marxism.” In this context, the abstract triangles read as violent slashes.
The prints and paintings accompany numerous texts—including poems, articles, and in-terviews—that suggest the international nature of the outrage over the putsch. Divided into five chapters, the book focuses on the background of capitalist exploitation in Chile, improvements made by Allende, the crimes of the Pinochet regime, and the greatness and subsequent tragic loss of Pablo Neruda. It ends with a poster by Nuria Quevedo and Rudolf Grüttner for an exhibition that took place in East Berlin in 1974 titled “The Visual Arts as a Sign of Socialist Internationalism and Anti-imperialist Solidarity.” The image, based on a woodblock print that was also used in the masthead of the Wochenpost series, shows two hands clasped together, their interlocking forms recalling the hunched-over shape of mourning parents created by the German socialist artist Käthe Kollwitz in the early twentieth century in response to the loss of her son in World War I. As such, the poster encompasses the sadness felt over the events, a critique of militarism, and hope for the future through international solidarity.
The putsch in Chile remained a topic for artists for many years to come. Anniversaries proved particularly conducive for such works. For the tenth anniversary of the event, for example, the Berlin artist Robert Rehfeldt (1931-1993)—best known as the father of mail
Page 14 of 22 art in East Germany—completed a painting titled Bild für einen lateinamerikanischen Sänger (Painting for a Latin American Singer). It depicts a solitary acoustic guitar leaning against a wall. It is covered—like the wall behind it—in blood-like smears of different colored paints, especially reds and blues. Above the guitar, hanging off kilter, is a framed image of a curled hand amid a bloodied background. The painting stands as a reminder of the loss of Victor Jara, and with him, of an entire generation of Chileans who supported Allende and the socialist cause.
The putsch in Chile brings to light an important moment in the history of East German art, one in which the political preferences from above and the feelings from below met on common ground. Artists from all parts of the cultural spectrum responded by creating works on the topic and taking part in solidarity auctions. These included so-called state artists, such as Bernhard Heisig, Wolfgang Mattheuer, and Werner Tübke, as well as members of the so-called counterculture (Gegenkultur) like Hans Hendrik Grimmling, Hermann Glöckner, Robert Rehfeldt, and Jürgen Schieferdecker.40 (p- 446) Schieferdecker, who created a mixed-media work titled Junta Einmaleins (Junta Multiplication Tables) in 1973, stated in 2006 that “[along] with Allende's administration, the USA-supported military putsch in Chile shattered a hope in the possibility of a democratic socialism that was also important for the oppositional GDR-citizen.”41 As such, a closer look at the breadth of works created disrupts current attempts to make clear distinctions between official and unofficial artists, and to distance so-called unofficial artists from socialist belief.42
The artworks created in response to the Chilean putsch also challenge the stereotype prevalent today, which frames official East German art as “an antimodern, uncritical and apologetic Socialist Realism” that “condemned classical modernism.”43 The works discussed in this chapter show that modernism, and especially expressionism, were part of the official art scene in East Germany. Indeed, Eberbach's Dedication to Chile not only evidences an expressionist style but pushes beyond a single panel to create an installation of twelve paintings. Works like this one—which was exhibited at the Regional Art Exhibition in Leipzig in 1974 and had a black-and-white illustration in the catalog—thus disrupt claims by prominent scholars who still define official art in East Germany as tendentious socialist realism committed to nineteenth-century realistic style and optimistic subject matter.44 While such a definition may be true for some art of the early 1950s, it ignores the complexity and development of East German art, which included experimentation with Picasso-inspired modernism in the mid-1950s, expressionism and pop art in the 1960s, and even performance and installation art by the late 1980s.45 This development, as well as the periods of cultural thaw that took place in official policy, are frequently elided by current scholarship in favor of an ahistorical dismissal of East German art.
The wholesale dismissal of East German art in the West is not just the result of ignorance. In a review of the Los Angeles County Museum's blockbuster exhibition Art of Two Ger-manys: Cold War Cultures (2009), the prominent Harvard art historian Benjamin Buchloh
Page 15 of 22 completely disregarded the quality of the artworks on display when he stated that East German artworks were “artistic abominations” made by “provincial party hacks” and “opportunists.”46 As he saw it, the exhibition, in an attempt “to give equal weight and presence to all types of articulations,” had demonstrated a “failure (or refusal) of aesthetic judgment.” Instead of exhibiting art, the exhibition was, according to Buchloh, a “didactic polarization of works of art as documents" (my emphasis) in which works of “merit” and “artistic relevance” were shown “against a massive backdrop of the vile banality of East German socialist-realist painting” and “an endless accumulation of gigantic second- and third-rate paintings” (which included work by West Germans).
Buchloh's criticisms of East German painting—as abominations, provincial, banal, and socialist realist—are not based in aesthetic judgments, as he maintains, but rather in an ideology that rejects the alternative, and fully justifiable, approach to art that these works embody. It also assumes that aesthetics are ahistorical and universal rather than culturally, historically, and politically situated. Whereas art in the West embraced art for art's sake in the wake of World War II, art in East Germany emphasized a dialogical (p- 447) relationship with its audience, one in which specialists and nonspecialists alike could engage. The result was a greater interest in art among the general populace in the East, whereas much painting in the West after 1945—what Julian Stallabrass has called “free enterprise painting”—has become increasingly just a rarefied object for corporations and the rich; indeed, in recent years, the price of contemporary art has become so high that even art museums are struggling to acquire new works.47
The framing of East German art as naive—most frequently within the category of socialist realism—reflects not only a continuing Western bias in art scholarship and art criticism today; it makes the content of these politically engaged works easier to ignore, whether the content is praise for the working class or criticism of capitalism and neocolonialism. Indeed, the term “socialist realism,” with its suggestion of poor aesthetic quality—often used together with the terms “banal” and “provincial”—refers to works by internationally recognized East German artists like Bernhard Heisig, clustering them together with works of questionable quality by unknown artists, dismissing all as unworthy of further consideration. As such, the term “socialist realism” can be seen as the art world's parallel to the term “populism,” which as Wolfgang Streeck pointed out, is frequently used today to conflate and dismiss all criticisms of neoliberal politics—left-wing and right-wing—as provincial and therefore not worth considering.48 The neoliberal project, which at its heart is about the restitution of wealth and the reversal of socialist gains, found its first major outlet in Chile, an event that is largely overlooked in the West, outside of academic circles.
East German artists' responses to the 1973 putsch make visible the violence and suffering caused by what Naomi Klein, quoted at greater length in the epigraph of this chapter, called “the fight for the advancement of pure capitalism.” Their artistic responses to the putsch in Chile also bring to light a moment when the GDR held a vocal place within an international community, one that included capitalist countries, and show why some artists chose to live in East Germany despite the limitations and difficulties of doing so:
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they found that East Germany offered hope for a better, more equal, and peaceful future that stood in sharp contrast to what they saw as Western imperialism.49 The putsch in Chile, like the Korean and Vietnam Wars, as well as coup d'états in Iran and elsewhere, served as a reminder for East Germans of the ideological divide between the East and the West. While the hope for a better world might be presented today as little more than a utopian dream, it was nonetheless one many believed in and were willing to sacrifice for: “our goal may be a utopia. But what would life be without utopias?”50
Portions of this chapter appeared in Spanish as “En shock y listos para actuar. Los artistas de la RDA y el golpe de Estado en Chile en 1973” in El arte de lat República Democrática Alemana, 1949-89, ed. Blanca Gutierrez Galindo (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2018), 185-204. My thanks to Grant Arndt, June Hwang, Ka-sia Marciniak, and Aga Skrodzka for their feedback on earlier versions of this chapter.
Aguilera, Pilar, and Ricardo Fredes, eds. Chile: The Other September 11. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2003.
Damus, Martin. Malerei der DDR. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, 1991.
Davis, Ben. 9.5 Theses about Art and Class. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013.
Dean, Jodi. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
Eckhardt, Frank, and Paul Kaiser, eds. Ohne uns! Kunst & alternative Kulture in Dresden vor und nach '89. Dresden, Germany: efau-Verlag, 2010.
Emmerling, Inga. Die DDR und Chile (1960-1989). Außenpolitik, Außenhandel und Solidarität. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2013.
Feist, Peter H. “Von Vietnam bis Chile. Zu Willi Sittes neuem Triptychon.” Bildende Kunst 12 (December 1974): 594-596.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009.
“Galerie am Sachsenplatz: Solidarität mit Chile.” Leipziger Volkszeitung, September 29, 1973.
Goeschen, Ulrike. Vom sozialistischen Realismus zur Kunst im Sozialismus. Berlin: Dunck-er & Humblot, 2001.
“Grafik für Chiles Freiheit.” Wochenpost, issues 1-18 (January-April 1974).
Horn, Ursula. “Solidarität mit Chile.” Bildende Kunst 6 (June 1974): 299-301.
Kaiser, Paul. “Bekenntniszwang und Melancholiegebot. Kunst in de DDR zwischen Historismus und Moderne.” In Abschied von Ikarus, edited by Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Wolfgang Holler, and Paul Kaiser, 61-73. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2012.
Kenzler, Marcus. Der Blick in die andere Welt: Einflüsse Lateinamerikas auf die Bildende Kunst der DDR. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012.
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador, 2007.
Kornbluh, Peter. The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. New York: The New Press, 2003.
Lang, Lothar. Malerei und Graphik in Ostdeutschland. Leipzig: Faber & Faber, 2002.
Muschter, Gabriele. “Grafik für Chiles Freiheit!” Bildende Kunst 1 (January 1974): 9-12.
Muschter, Gabriele. “Künstler helfen Chile.” Mitteilungen. Verband bildender Künstler der DDR (January 1974): 4-5.
Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert, Wolfgang Holler, and Paul Kaiser, eds. Abschied von Ikarus: Bildwelten in der DDR—neu gesehen. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2012.
Stallabrass, Julian. Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Streek, Wolfgang. “The Return of the Repressed.” New Left Review 104 (March/April 2017): 5-18.
“Wir rufen Euch, Kollegen in allen Länder,” Mitteilungen. Akademie der Künste der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (November/December 1973): 2.
(1.) Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (New York: Picador, 2008), 24.
(2.) According to a front-page article in the New York Times on the day after the coup, US investments had been reduced “from $750-million just before Dr. Allende came to power to under $70-million today.” David Binder, “Allende Out, Reported Suicide; Marxist Regime in Chile Falls in Armed Forces' Violent Coup,” New York Times, September 12, 1973, 1. Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: The New Press, 2003).
(3.) See Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation Report (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993). See also Klein, The Shock Doctrine, chap. 3.
(4.) Inga Emmerling, Die DDR und Chile (1960-1989). Außenpolitik, Außenhandel und Solidarität (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2013), 379. From September 29 to 30, 1973, an International Solidarity Conference for the Chilean People took place in Helsinki, Finland. It included more than 260 representatives from fifty-four countries, including the Soviet Union, France, Italy, and Sweden. Bericht über die Internationale Solidaritätskonferenz fuer das chilenische Volk am 29. und 30. September 1973 in Helsinki. Bundesarchiv-SAP-MO: DY 30 J IV 2/2J 4942.
(5.) “Wir rufen Euch, Kollegen in allen Länder,“ Mitteilungen. Akademie der Künste der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, November/December, 6/1973, 2.
(6.) In the aforementioned petition, the GDR collected more than 16,000 signatures from around the world. Mitteilungen AdK der DDR, January/February, 1/1974. They also attended two conferences convened in Helsinki, in late September 1973 and March 1974. See note 4. Information über die Tagung der Internationalen Kommission zur Untersuchung der Verbrechen der Militärjunta in Chile vom 22.3.-24.3.1974 in Helsinki. Bunde-sarchiv-SAPMO: DY 30 J IV 2/2J 5237
(7.) Marcus Kenzler, Der Blick in die andere Welt: Einflüsse Lateinamerikas auf die Bildende Kunst der DDR (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012), 309.
(8.) Gabriele Muschter, “Künstler helfen Chile,“ Mitteilungen. Verband Bildender Künstler der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, January 1974. See also Gabriele Muschter, “Grafik für Chiles Freiheit!“ Bildende Kunst 1 (1974): 9-12.
(9.) Emmerling, Die DDR und Chile (1960-1989), 379.
(10.) Protokoll Nr. 101 der Sitzung des Sekretariats des Zentral Kommittee vom 13. September 1973. Bundesarchiv-SAPMO: DY 30/J IV 2/3 2057.
(11.) Conversations by the author with curators, librarians, and artists from the former East Germany conducted between January and July 2013.
(12.) April Eisman, Bernhard Heisig and the Fight for Modern Art in East Germany (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018), 5.
(13.) For more about the relationship between art and the public in East Germany, see April Eisman, “Painting in East Germany: An Elite Art for the Everyday (and Everyone),“ in German Division as Shared Experience. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Postwar Everyday, eds. Erica Carter, Jan Palmowski, and Katrin Schreiter (New York: Berghahn, 2019), chapter 9.
(14.) Bernd Lindner, Verstellter, offener Blick, Eine Rezeptionsgeschichte Bildender Kunst im Osten Deutschlands, 1945-1995 (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1998), 70-81.
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(15.) For a study of East German literature as an alternative public sphere, see D. Bathrick, The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
(16.) David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005/2009), 7.
(17.) Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 13.
(18.) Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 9.
(19.) Lea Grundig, “Ich fürchte und hasse die Gleichgültigkeit. Gedanken nach dem ChileTribunal,” Bildende Kunst 7 (1974), 358.
(20.) Emmerling, Die DDR und Chile (1960-1989), 179-180.
(21.) Kenzler, Der Blick in die andere Welt, 311, 317.
(22.) “ZK der SED ruft zu Solidarität mit dem kämpfenden Volk Chiles,” Neues Deutschland, September 12, 1973, 1.
(23.) Title search on the word “Chile” in Neues Deutschland: http://zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/ddr-presse/suchergebnisse/.
(24.) Neruda had been in bad health already in the fall of 1973. The putsch was blamed for his sudden decline and death twelve days later on September 23.
(25.) Mitteilungen, AdK der DDR, January/February 1 (1974), 14.
(26.) “Grafik für Chiles Freiheit,” Wochenpost, November 2, 1973, 13.
(27.) “Galerie am Sachsenplatz: Solidarität mit Chile,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, September 29, 1973.
(28.) “Grafik für Chiles Freiheit,” Wochenpost, November 2, 1973, 13. A similar auction in Berlin raised 4,000 marks. “Grafik für Chiles Freiheit,” Wochenpost, October 19, 1973,
13. Presumably these funds were sent to the Communist Party in Chile. The details of this and how the money was actually used would be an interesting topic for further research.
(29.) Leipziger Maler, Kunsthalle Rostock, exhibition from September 26 to November 18, 1973.
(30.) Undated lecture by Rita Jorek held for the exhibition, “Leipziger Maler,” which took place at the Kunsthalle in Rostock from September 26 to November 18, 1973. Thank you to Rita Jorek for providing me with this document.
(31.) Erich Honecker, “Zu aktuellen Fragen bei der Verwirklichung der Beschlüsse unseres VIII. Parteitages,” Neues Deutschland, December 18, 1971.
(32.) Although East Germany was a socialist country, artists sometimes used Christian iconography in their work. This was not seen as a contradiction, but rather as drawing from artistic traditions that predated the GDR.
(33.) The series ran for twenty-nine issues, from October 12, 1973, until May 31, 1974.
(34.) Artists included Gerhard Bondzin, Fritz Cremer, Karl Georg-Hirsch, Lea Grundig, Ursula Mattheuer-Neustädt, Arno Mohr, Nuria Quevedo, Herbert Sandberg, Willi Sitte, Klaus Weber, and Walter Womacka. For two weeks in March 1974, the graphic works were donated by Soviet artists. In early May, there was also a collection (Mappe) of thirty-two prints by as many Chilean artists titled “Das Volk hat Kunst mit Allende” (The People Have Art with Allende).
(35.) Most of the prints were 40-50 marks.
(36.) “Grafik für Chiles Freiheit,” Wochenpost, January 11, 1974. There was also a sales exhibition at the Berlin Publisher's pavillion near the Friedrichstrasse train station in Berlin that opened on May 17, 1974, shortly before the Wochenpost series came to an end. “Grafik für Chiles Freiheit,” Wochenpost, May 24, 1974.
(37.) The amounts raised from the auction were printed in the Wochenpost on December 7, 1973, and February 15, 1974. Unfortunately I was not able to find a final total.
(38.) The two works from the United States were both by Charles White, an artist known for his engagement with African American struggles in his art.
(39.) East Germany created twenty-eight of the works; West Germany, nineteen; Cuba, five; Czechoslovakia, four.
(40.) At the time of the Chilean putsch, Heisig, Mattheuer, Tübke, and Sitte were at the beginning of their rise to prominence. Heisig, for example, had his first major solo exhibition in the GDR in 1973. Robert Rehfeldt created Image for a Latin American Singer in 1983. It depicts a guitar, above which is the cast of a curled hand with blood-red brushworks around it. It was exhibited at the 1985 regional exhibition in Berlin.
(41.) Interview between Jürgen Schieferdecker and Marcus Kenzler in 2006, as quoted in Kenzler, Der Blick in die andere Welt, 317.
(42.) See Frank Eckhardt and Paul Kaiser, eds. Ohne uns! Kunst & alternative Kulture in Dresden vor und nach '89 (Dresden, Germany: efau-Verlag, 2010).
(43.) Paul Kaiser, “Bekenntniszwang und Melancholiegebot. Kunst in der DDR zwischen Historismus und Moderne,” in Abschied von Ikarus, 61-73. Compare to similar statements made in his articles in Ohne Uns (2011, 12) and Art of Two Germanys. Cold War Cultures (2009, 171).
(44.) Ibid. While Kaiser acknowledges that modern art was created in the GDR, he suggests it was only created by unofficial artists.
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(45.) For a more nuanced understanding of the development of East German art, see Ulrike Goeschen, Vom sozialistischen Realismus zur Kunst im Sozialismus (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001), Martin Damus, Malerei der DDR (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, 1991), and Lothar Lang, Malerei und Graphik in Ostdeutschland (Leipzig: Faber & Faber, 2002).
(46.) Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “How German Was It?” ArtForum (Summer 2009): 294-299, here: 296. Buchloh was born in Cologne in 1941.
(47.) Julian Stallabrass, writer. Free Enterprise Painting? The Contradictions of Abstract Expressionism. Dir. Tariq Ali. Telesur Presenta, 2016. Online video. https://tariqalitv.com/? s=enterprise. This is not to say that politically oriented and socially conscious art was not created in the West, but rather that such art tends to be created in nontraditional fields such as performance and installation rather than paintings. For more about the state of art today, see Julian Stallabrass, Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses about Art and Class (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013).
(48.) Wolfgang Streeck, “The Return of the Repressed,” New Left Review 104 (2017): 12.
(49.) Since unification, little has been published about the East German artistic response to the putsch in Chile. A rare exception is Marcus Kenzler's impressive dissertation, Der Blick in die andere Welt: Einflüsse Lateinamerikasauf die Bildende Kunst der DDR (University of Hildesheim, 2010), which focuses on East Germany's relationship to Latin America as a whole. He devotes seventy-six pages (307-383) to the artistic response to the putsch in Chile.
(50.) Rudolf Herrnstadt, as quoted in the title and text of Eckhart Gillen, “‘Unser Ziel mag eine Utopie sein. Aber was wäre das Leben ohne Utopie?' Kunst und Leben in der DDR zwischen Utopieerwartung und Utopieermüdung,” in Abschied von Ikarus, eds. Karl-Siegbert Rehbert, Wolfgang Holler, and Paul Kaiser (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2012), 51-59, here: 51-52. In the article, the Herrnstadt quote comes at the end of a paragraph that compares the fate of two journalists after the war: one went to West Germany, where he became a successful publisher; the other, Herrnstadt, remained in East Germany and lost everything. This is one of several unsubtle juxtapositions used in the article to undermine those who chose to stay in East Germany.
April A. Eisman
April A. Eisman, Associate Professor of Art History, Iowa State University
Beauty and Qualityfor All: A Vision of Fashion under Cuban Socialism a
María A. Cabrera Arus
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Jul 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.20
This article focuses on sartorial visions put forth by institutions and representatives of the Cuban regime throughout the 1960s to the 1980s, in particular the visions of modernity produced by and circulated through the institutions of fashion and clothing production of the Cuban state. It presents these visions as oriented to put forth a figured world of power aimed at persuading individuals to participate in the construction of the communist future by catering to the aspirational dreams of the middle class. The article concludes that such an imaginary helped in the short term to consolidate and legitimize the Cuban state socialist regime, allowing the new socialist middle classes to reinvent themselves as consumers, while participating in the construction of socialism. Yet, at the same time, for many people these visions were mostly a mirage, as fashionable clothes were not for sale.
Keywords: figured world of power, fashion, socialist fashion, Cuban socialism, socialist distinction, socialist consumption, state socialist regimes, Cuba, socialist brandscapes
Two years after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro declared his government socialist. The country embarked on a fast-track route to communism that, after radical reforms, bankrupted the economy and, by the turn of the 1960s, exhausted most of the Revolution's political capital.1 The government moved then closer to the Soviet Union, and under Castro's authoritarian style of leadership, the Sovietization of Cuban politics and economy gained momentum in the mid-1970s with the celebration of the first congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) in 1975 and the enactment of a socialist constitution in 1976.2 Cuba remained more or less under Soviet tutelage until the mid-1980s, when the government drove a nationalistic turn as a means to counter the impact of the Soviet movements of perestroika and glasnost, which was translated into a package of political and economic reforms known as the Rectification Campaign. The later collapse of the state socialist regimes of Eastern Europe after 1989 and the disintegration of the USSR in 1991 further isolated the country when the leadership persisted on the state socialist path and, still under Castro's rule, decreed a period of economic
Page 1 of 23 austerity euphemistically called the Special Period, which eventually brought further reforms that put under question the socialist character of the regime.
Throughout the three decades in which Cuba more or less closely sided with the USSR and the Soviet Bloc, many developments took place in the country in the realm of fashion that had great impact on the sartorial practices of Cubans. Some of them took place in the industrial and commercial spheres—for example, the nationalization of industries after the revolutionary victory, the mass production of work clothes and uniforms to support the new economic programs and expanding army, and the imposition a rationing system on clothes and footwear. Other developments were mostly circumscribed to the ideological sphere, such as the critique and persecution (p- 456) of individuals who donned “extravagant” and thus, in the officials' view, counterrevolutionary clothes.3
This essay focuses on sartorial developments that took place mostly in the symbolic realm, put forth by institutions and representatives of the Cuban regime throughout the 1960s to the 1980s. Understanding fashion as “a visual and material system of symbols and meanings,” not as the systematic production of novelty and change, the following pages survey the visions of modernity produced by and circulated through the institutions of fashion and clothing production of the Cuban state.4 These visions, it is argued, provided a platform for Cuban political elites to put forth a figured world that advanced the notion of socialist progress, to a certain extent succeeding in persuading individuals to participate in the construction of the communist future. For the majority, however, these visions were mostly a mirage, as nothing fashionable was sold at stores. Still, the dynamics discussed contributed to the consolidation of Cuba's state socialist regime and to the cooption of the socialist middle classes for participation in the socialist project.
Several works in the social sciences and the humanities have explored the politics of images and political spectacles in post-1959 Cuba. Photography and film, it has been said, reified the revolutionary ethos and helped Castro consolidate his rule.5 Artistic and literary representations of revolutionary symbols, including the olive-drab fatigue uniform, have also been studied with the aim of better understanding the Cuban postrevolutionary society and culture, both during the Cold War era and the present.6 Yet no other work has dealt with the sartorial imaginary the Cuban regime produced, leaving us but to guess the role that fashion—and, notably, sartorial visions other than the widespread presence of military chic—played in persuading citizens to participate in the construction of a communist society in the Caribbean.7
In my research on the politics of fashion in socialist Cuba, I have found that, in spite of the visibility of the olive-green uniforms and work clothes during the 1960s (and throughout the two following decades) and the prevailing scarcity of fashionable clothes, the sartorial landscape under socialism was far from dull or even homogeneous.8 Periods can be detected of prevalence of proletarian, egalitarian, and nationalistic discourses, or of systematic state critique of foreign styles as “eccentricities,” yet still Cubans strove to dress fashionably: they donned miniskirts and slim pants in the late 1960s and 1970s, bellbottoms and colored shirts in the 1970s, and bangs and flashy accessories in the 1980s. Anna Veltfort, a US teenager who arrived in Havana in 1962, staying for a decade until graduating from college, does not recall noticing any difference between what Cubans wore all those years and what was fashionable in the United States, except that Cuban women expressed their gender more visibly in their clothes than US women in general.9
The revolutionary youth managed, in sum, to alternate militia uniforms, work clothes, and the latest styles, in both private and public spaces, including in those highly regulated by the state, such as youth labor camps (Figure 19.1). A reportage the Cuban Institute of the Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) produced in 1969 to celebrate the International Women's Day shows students from the School of Architecture of the University City José Antonio Echeverría (CUJAE) wearing outfits that vary from military fatigues to fashionable casual wear.10 Architects Joseph L. Scarpaci, (p- 457) Roberto Segre, and Mario Coyula recall, as well, that on any regular morning in downtown Havana state employees boarded “buses and trucks at cosmopolitan La Rampa in Vedado neighborhood, clad in a ‘rural' uniform composed of gray khaki pants and shirts, black boots, and shapeless straw hats,” together with administrative workers and other Havana residents dressed in casual and formal attire.11
Author's personal archive
(p. 458) And there were, too, few subcultural styles: colorful Manhattan shirts, gold jewelry, big mustaches, and Afros identified working-class “tough guys” (guapos); canvas dresses, wide cotton skirts, leather sandals, and beaded or threaded accessories styled young Nueva Trova followers called faranduleras. Even the members of the state security personnel could be identified by their checkered shirts and safari suits. What people wore
depended, in sum, on preferences shaped by their social milieu, age, profession, income, taste, retail offer, and international fashion trends.
And still, the Cuban government came to great lengths to influence what people donned.12 Leaders put forth a vision of fashion crafted through modern outfits and styles that was mostly representational, as the historian of socialist fashion Djurdja Bartlett has identified to be the case across the Eastern Bloc.13 She defines as “representational” a sartorial universe produced in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union that was almost exclusively based on unique prototypes, promoted in brochures, store windows, catwalks, and women's magazines, yet unavailable at stores for people to buy.14 Only in a few cases were these outfits commercialized, in limited quantities, in boutiques that catered to the professional and artistic elites. The identification of similar dynamics in Cuba contributes to a wider understanding of the history of fashion and visuality under socialism and in Cuba in particular.
In 1961, the same year when the Cuban regime endorsed socialism as its official ideology, the ICAIC's Latin American Newsreel featured a segment on Polish winter outfits (including furs) produced by the Warsaw fashion house Moda Polska. The narrator comments on the similarities between socialist and capitalist fashions, with the added benefit under socialism of universal availability of fashionable clothes for women of all social classes to consume. Under capitalism, however, the narrator continues, fashion is a privilege only rich women can afford.15 Beginning in 1964, Cuban authorities endeavored to create institutional ventures with the mission of putting forth this vision of sartorial modernity for all.
In 1964, the government inaugurated the Bureau of Fashion Guidance (BFG) under the administration of the Ministry of Domestic Commerce (MINCIN), with offices in the commercial Galiano Street, in Havana.16 The BFG's mission was educating consumers and producers on the latest fashion tendencies, for which it published trend brochures (folletos de tendencia) (Figure 19.2) and organized catwalk shows and TV presentations.17 Active until the early 1980s, the BFG later opened subsidiaries in provinces.18
Author's Cuba Material collection
Brochures with sketches and catwalk shows featuring unique prototypes were meant to inform consumers on the latest styles, yet they did not offer any advice or guideline for people to reproduce on their own the outfits promoted.19 Different from prerevolutionary and foreign magazines and from the sewing patterns retailed before the Revolution, the BFG's brochures did not include patterns or offer any practical information about (p- 459) sizes or the fabrics best suited to copy the styles proposed. Their role was merely informative: telling Cuban consumers what was suitable to wear according to the government's view.20
Socialist fashion arbiters strove to interpret the latest tendencies abroad and to adapt them for Cuban consumers, as the brochure in Figure 19.2 shows, mediating between the interests of the regime and the consumers' demand for fashionable clothes, including, criticized by the leaders, miniskirts. But the BFG-domesticated styles were not real clothes. They were sartorial visions crafted to convey the government's interest in satisfying people's aspirations to modern fashion, in many cases promoting political ephemerides. In 1966, for instance, the BFG organized four catwalk shows in the Havana province—in Marianao, Guanabacoa, Güines, and Havana—to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the creation of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). The shows promoted the idea, already expressed in the 1961 ICAIC's Latin American Newsreel “The Feminine Fashion,” premiered on the occasion of the CDR's first anniversary, that “socialism means beauty and quality for all.”21
Around the time when the BFG was created, Vilma Espín, the president of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) and wife to Castro's brother and minister of (p- 460) defense, Raúl Castro, asked the Spanish-born fashion designer Fernando Ayuso to create and direct a workshop and retail space for the production of contemporary clothing, under the administration of the FMC.22 In 1965, one year after the creation of the BFG, the Experimental Design Workshop (TED) opened to the public in a modernist building designed by Ayuso's wife, Cuban architect Ana Vega, furnished and decorated by architect, sculptor, and stage designer Fernando Pérez O'Reilly.23 The building, in the ultra-modern La Rampa district, in downtown Havana, had a showroom and retail area with a glass facade, and a production workshop in the basement.24
A Latin American Newsreel featuring the collection created by the TED for Expo '67, in Montreal, describes the atelier as “a small industrial production center that follows the principles of the big industry, giving special importance to the design of prototypes and the creative possibilities of combining different colors and fabrics.”25 The clothing produced was displayed in the store showroom, and showcased on a catwalk on Saturday nights, which passersby could watch from the sidewalk. Clothes were modeled amid displays of modern furniture, painting, and photography, and accompanied by contemporary music composed by the avant-garde ICAIC's Experimental Sound Group.26 Models were trained by Norka and Norma Martínez, who worked as fashion models since the capitalist era.27 The newsreel dedicated to the collection depicts models walking on a multileveled stage, affecting theatrical movements and poses, and wearing military caps made with a glossy synthetic material, with a background orchestra providing the soundscape.28
Like the BFG, the TED was invested in creating the vision of fashionable clothes, complemented with experimental artistic proposals and an avant-garde retail experience.29 But the latter produced real clothing as well, although on a small scale. Ayuso experimented with local textiles, adapting foreign styles to the conditions of everyday life in the country, as he did before at Corinto y Oro, a store of his own the government had nationalized.30 The TED produced, for instance, outfits made with the canvas of the sacks used for industrial packaging, with jute, with the gauze used to cover tobacco fields, and with zephyr cloth, a fabric traditionally used to produce work clothes, combined with other materials or adorned with crocheting and silkscreen.31 The use of such unconventional elements not only responded to the problems of scarcity the country was facing, but also aligned with the government's nationalistic discourses.32 The TED also designed clothing for special state programs, such as the uniforms of the operators of the piccolino tractors used in the Havana's Greenbelt agricultural campaign of 1968; the uniforms of the Centennial Youth Column (CJC), a task force created in 1968 that recruited youth to work in the sugarcane harvest and the construction of secondary boarding schools in the countryside; and the Coal Festival, a jubilee celebrated since 1960 in the Zapata Swamp, a former impoverished region the government targeted for development.33
However, due to their sheer number and lack of practical advice, TED proposals were unable to satisfy the consumers' demand for modern fashion. Being of little help to consumers who wanted to buy or reproduce the outfits promoted, both the BFG and the TED
Page 6 of 23 mostly had a representational function. These ventures conveyed the vision of modern clothing, rather than actual garments for people to consume.
(p. 461) To achieve this goal, they had the support of the nationalized media. A former model recalls that the clothing made by these and other production facilities administered by the state was weekly showcased during the 1960s in the TV program Music and Stars (Música y Estrellas), hosted by Eva Rodríguez and directed by Manolo Rifat, two TV celebrities famous since the prerevolutionary years.34 The weekly ICAIC's Latin American Newsreel, screened in cinemas before feature films, often promoted the BFG and TED designs as well, along with occasional reportages on foreign capitalist fashion—in 1964, the Latin American Newsreel introduced Cuban audiences to the latest Parisian winter hats, wool socks, cold-weather blazers, and furs (unavailable at stores and an oxymoron of sorts in a Caribbean country and a socialist society of workers and peasants).35 Since the government never intended to commercialize those garments, this newsreel plotted a vision of fashion glamour that, by all means, contrasted with what was in stores, mostly stocked with work clothes and military uniforms.36
With the textile industry mostly dedicated to producing uniforms for students, workers, and the military, the BFG, the TED, and the state media crafted an alternative, avantgarde vision of fashionability, modernity, and progress that countered both the adverse conditions of Cuba's socialist commerce and the ideological restrictions imposed on capitalist styles.37 Until today, the TED is credited with introducing the miniskirt to Cuban consumers, as well as with introducing shorts and denim fabrics in causal outfits for daily use in the city.38 According to journalist Pedro Contreras, this workshop produced “revolutionary clothes ... as beautiful as ... economical and functional,” the kind of outfits “those who were part of a revolution should have.”39 While Cuban leaders denounced consumption as a frivolous capitalist instrument to maximize profits, the BFG and the TED conveyed the idea that socialism did also entail the consumption of fashionable and modern outfits.40
By the end of the 1960s, the government called for a massive mobilization to produce 10 million tons of sugar during the 1970 harvest, to finance economic development. The failure to achieve this goals plunged the economy into a crisis that exhausted the enthusiasm many people had in the political project.41 Cuba adopted then policies borrowed from the Brezhnev administration in the USSR, known as “real socialism.” Having to deal with a decrease in the number of agricultural workers and a considerable growth in the number of both workers in the industrial sector and white-collar professionals, the government needed more than just sartorial visions and avant-garde prototypes to satisfy the consumerist wishes of the expanding urban middle-class sectors.42 In particular, the “revolutionary intelligentsia”—an amalgamation of new professionals educated under socialism— had been promised and aspired to more than the minimal quota of basic garments and work clothes that could be obtained through the rationed market.43
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(p. 462) In 1971, a state-owned free market parallel to the rationed, subsidized market began to operate with goods mostly imported from the Soviet Bloc countries.44 Leaders projected the end to the rationing system, gloating at the first PCC congress about the economic “success” achieved after 1971, which would in turn allow the state to reduce the number of goods distributed under the rationing system only to “those essential items whose sales are still insufficient to meet the growing needs of the population,” and increase the amount of goods for sale at the still limited free market.45
On occasion of the celebration of the first PCC congress, the government stocked the stores of the capital with imported clothing and cosmetics.46 Doctors, military officials, and teachers were pampered with special material privileges and wages, including access to sought-after goods, from automobiles to imported accessories. In 1973, doctors were “awarded” the right to buy an automatic Seiko wristwatch (Figure 19.3) at a retail price of 100 pesos (more than the average monthly income at the time, and more than half a doctor's monthly income).47 Scholars of Stalinism and the Brezhnev era associate (p- 463) these material privileges with what they call a “tacit deal” between the government and the new socialist middle class.48 Such a deal would have guaranteed higher living standards and “some of the trappings of bourgeois life” to the latter in exchange for political loyalty and participation.49 As sociologist Jukka Gronow puts it, while “dissatisfied or dissident individuals could always be arrested and annihilated ... the system also desperately needed ... [to] offer some gratification.”50
Author's Cuba Material collection
Accompanying these developments, starting in 1968, the Department of Product Research and Development in the newly created Ministry of Light Industry (MINIL) began to invest in brand names, logos, and consumer campaigns to improve the perception of local industrial products among Cuban consumers.51 This gained momentum in the
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mid-1970s, when many new fashion labels applied for licenses to the Cuban Bureau of Industrial Property (OCPI)'s registry of commercial trademarks.52 Between 1976 and 1985, 107 clothing and footwear labels were licensed, and many more made it to the stores, some of them under names alluding to the state socialist imaginary and the victory of socialism over capitalism, such as the women's pantyhose Victoria (victory), or names borrowed from socialist flagship projects, such as Alamar, the residential project built in the outskirts of Havana using prefabricated technology.53
In the Eastern Bloc countries, according to design historian David Crowley, the branding of everyday spaces, objects, and mass consumer goods—including fashion—with monikers associated with the communist dogma helped to domesticate ideology through commercial “names and images that carried strong associations with the new regime.”54 Rather than representing corporations, socialist brands put in circulation semantic categories directly linked with “the grand cause of building socialism,” he concludes.55
Cuban authorities also invested in a brandscape that linked socialism and socialist institutions with a vision of modernity and progress.56 Like the Soviet wristwatches Raketa (rocket) and Poljot (flight), which conveyed the idea of technological progress, pivotal for the legitimation of the state socialist regimes, some Cuban fashion labels licensed in the 1980s borrowed their names from the vocabulary associated with the space race. This is the case for Ôrbita (orbit) and Cometa (comet), labels inspired by the 1980 Joint Space Flight USSR-Cuba, organized under the sponsorship of the Soviet space program In-terkosmos.57 Other labels quite literally conveyed the idea of renovation and modernization, such as footwear Lo Nuevo (the new), men's shirts Futura (a derivative of “future”; Figure 19.4), and the fashion line Nueva Linea (new line). Visually, the Futura brand logo even reproduced the symbol for the atom, which also connoted a state-of-the-art industry and design. Other brands simply conveyed the idea of moving forward and upward, such as Avance (leap forward), Horizonte (horizon), Cima (summit), and, to a certain extent, Faro (lighthouse). In all these cases, the garments commercialized had an ostensibly simple design, as Figure 19.4 illustrates.
Author's Cuba Material collection
Still, another group of labels licensed by the OCPI between 1968 and 1985, such as Perro, Taca, Sedanita, Casino, and Once-Once (Figure 19.5), were well-known quality undergarment brands commercialized in the prerevolutionary years, which lent their (p- 464) prestige to the socialist products commercialized under their names. The fact that, more than fifteen years after nationalizing those companies, state-owned enterprises continued producing garments under those brands suggests not only the lack of development of the domestic industry, but also an interest in profiting from the reputation of quality associated with the prerevolutionary brandscape, although it was limited to the less visible sphere of intimate clothing. The government's symbolic appropriation of the cutting-edge brands that Cubans knew and liked from before the Revolution, and subsequent improvement of their image and quality with technological innovations (such as the Lastiflex technology; Figure 19.5), contributed, moreover, to the vision of progress authorities were interested in conveying.
Another group of labels introduced spellings and names from other socialist countries, notably the USSR (Yak, Likonda) and the People's Republic of China (Panda), whereas fashion labels with Anglophone names and spellings, such as Letty, Lyn, Lamay, Olimpic, Flexil, Delta, Continental, Scarlet, and Vernal, touted a conception of modernity as imported from abroad, particularly the United States, in spite of the postrevolutionary radical efforts and campaigns to Cubanize consumption.58 The English spelling of these brand names might have responded as well to the government's interest in (p- 465) producing goods for export or for sale in local foreign-currency stores, the so-called diplostores and technistores.59
Finally, another group of fashion labels connoted elegance, refinement, culture, and even luxury, which can be associated with a notion of progress as accomplished through the acquisition of cultural capital and wealth. This is the case of clothing labels such as Giselle, Ballet, Conart, Oro (gold), Dandy, and Premier, or beauty products alluding to classical symbols and mythological characters, such as the lines of cosmetics Venus and Cirene.
And yet Cuba was visibly far from achieving the material utopia the government had promised. Cuban publicist Mirta Muniz describes the consumer landscape of the 1970s as characterized by store windows “filled with artificial flowers, Cupids, Donald Ducks, dust, and dirt” in the absence of real commercial offerings.60 The selective commercialization of modern fashion and other sartorial goods and beauty products, and its accompanying brandscape connoting modernity and progress, was in itself a consumerist vision. Selective consumption not only addressed the aspirational demands of the new socialist middle class, but also conveyed the material comfort everybody would enjoy in the future if everybody worked hard enough and invested themselves in building communism. And that vision of prosperity, authorities wagered, would compensate for Cuba's actual shortcomings.
(p. 466) The idea of sartorial modernity was also promoted in the pages of women's magazines and fashion brochures, which featured contemporary casual outfits not available in stores. For instance, the fashion brochure Moda '75, Edición Especial, published in 1975, features images cropped from foreign magazines, promoting garments inappropriate for tropical climates, including cold-weather accessories such as scarves, gloves, and hats made of fabrics like corduroy, polyester, and wool.61 The vicarious tone of these promotional materials hints at aspirations to consumption not available in the country. Modas '75, Edición Especial also contains sketches of outfits that were never produced.62
Admittedly, except the clothing exhibited in the TED showroom, Cuban store windows were not stocked with prototypes of elaborate or fashionable outfits not available in the stores, as was the case across the Soviet Bloc. However like in Eastern Europe and the USSR, women's publications reproduced aspirational images that conveyed lifestyles and a consumer landscape the domestic socialist industry was unable to produce.63 Even movies and television series began to project, by the turn of the 1970s, representational discourses of blatant consumerism, which gained them critiques from cultural arbiters and unsatisfied audiences that felt cheated when supposedly contemporary Cuban characters were depicted wearing foreign or fashionable clothes.64 Commenting on the film Habanera (Pastor Vega, dir., 1984), in which the main characters, two members of the Havana professional class, dress elegantly with garments of foreign origin and famous brands, humorist Héctor Zumbado sarcastically reasoned:65
There is a Brazilian girl, a scholarship student in sugar technology, who loves a married man, a diplomat who travels with outfits that Christian Dior would approve with a roguish wink.
The psychiatrist ... displays ensembles that rival the splendor of her husbands' ...
. In a tragic moment of great depression ... she puts on a little t-shirt with the brand LEE [in the front], [visible] all over the movie screen ... . And you have to see her running ... in her Coca-Cola red sweatpants, with white stripes on the side!
There's a moment in the film in which an ordinary woman ... wears a beautiful printed blouse, a Sunday blouse, with a magenta scarf on her head—yes, magenta —and a skirt—yes, also in magenta—that beautifully matches the scarf.66
Zumbado's critique did not spring solely from his dissatisfaction as a consumer. He was an employee of the Cuban Institute of Research and Orientation of Internal Demand (ICIODI), an institution the government created in 1971, based on similar institutions from the Soviet Bloc, to study and educate consumers' demand mostly in five key market
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areas: foodstuff, fashion, home appliances, services, and tourism and recreation. Packaged as a consumers' protection agency, the ICIODI mostly represented the interests of the state, Cuba's sole industrial producer.67
This institution arguably accomplished its consumers' protection mission by publishing information on the products for sale, in periodicals such as the tabloid Opina, edited by the ICIODI since 1979.68 Yet the ICIODI never addressed the government's harmful commercial practices, such as the sales of tobacco and alcohol through which (p- 467) authorities countered inflation—these products siphoned up to 20 percent of individual expenditures.69 This contradiction suggests that the portrayal of ICIODI as a consumerprotection agency was also part of a representational vision that searched to disguise the lack of agency and protection Cuban consumers actually had.
By producing a vision of progress based on the circulation of images of modern fashion and a consumer-oriented landscape, the Cuban regime catered to the aspirational dreams of the middle class, disguising the dire reality of Cuba's socialist commerce. The majority of sartorial purchases during the period analyzed, however, corresponded to goods acquired through the rationing system.70 As ICIODI research established, for some groups of consumers the parallel market was not just a stretch, but never a viable alternative.71 The vision of modernity Cuban authorities crafted in the realm of fashion far exceeded the reality of the country's stunted industry and commerce.
Strategies put in place to produce the vision of a modern socialist fashion included the portrayal of the ICIODI as an agency of consumer protection and market research, the publication of fashion brochures with vicarious proposals of outfits (not available in retail stores), the portrayal of Cubans in film and television as having access to fashionable clothes, the creation of fashion labels connoting the idea of socialist progress, the establishment of a parallel market with prohibitive prices and thus access restricted to the most remunerated groups, and the inauguration of institutional ventures dedicated to produce avant-garde sartorial prototypes to be exhibited in showrooms and on catwalks. They not only created the appearance of consumption of modern sartorial goods, but also domesticated foreign styles, adapting them to the state arbiters' views of national and gender identities, fashionability, and modernity, to the conditions of the nationalized textile and footwear industries, and to the socialist dogma.
This vision may have helped in the short term to consolidate and legitimize the Cuban state socialist regime, nodding to cosmopolitan Havana residents and to the emerging socialist middle class, as the study of sartorial dynamics under communism attests. Yet, as research also demonstrates, it may have equally played a role in delegitimizing socialism by giving shape to a conflicted vision of what citizens should aspire to and expect from the state.72 Knowing the details of this interplay in Cuba—and in Viet Nam and North Korea—is thus necessary to understand the role that sartorial visions and consumption played in the collapse of socialism.
As we have seen, by providing a representational vision of sartorial modernity, the Cuban government intended—and to a certain extent succeeded—to persuade individuals to participate in the construction of socialism. Like other products of state propaganda, the sartorial landscape created through experimental stores, catwalk shows, fashion brochures, and media broadcasts of fashion events produced an alternative reality that catered to people's aspirational dreams, was a source of distinction for the (p- 468) privileged few, and provided a source of employment and training to fashion designers, seamstresses, and models.73
The strategic use of the fashion discourse in postrevolutionary Cuba allowed the new socialist middle classes to reinvent themselves as consumers. In turn, the government coopted their support, in ways similar to the tacit deal observed in other regimes of the Soviet Bloc. By concocting a vision of sartorial modernity and consumerism, authorities enthused many Cubans to participate in the construction of socialism, in spite of the fact that most people would find nothing to buy at stores.
Askegaard, Soren. “Brands as a Global Ideoscape.” In Brand Culture, edited by J. E. Shroeder and M. Salzer-Morling, 91-102. London: Routledge, 2006.
Bartlett, Djurdja. Fashion East: The Spectre that Haunted Europe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.
Bloch, Vincent. “Les décades du régime Cubain.” In Cuba, un régime au quotidien, edited by V. Bloch and P. Létrillart, 9-62. Paris: Choiseul, 2011.
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Buchli, Victor. An Archaeology of Socialism. Oxford: Berg, 1999.
Buchli, Victor. “Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against Petit-bourgeois Consciousness in the Soviet Home.” Journal of Design History 10 (1997): 161-176.
Cabrera Arús, María A. “For Sale: Cuba's Revolutionary Figured World.” Age of Revolutions. January 22, 2018. https://ageofrevolutions.com/2018/01/22/for-sale-cubas-revolutionary-figured-world/.
Cabrera Arús, María A. “Pañoletas y polainas: Dinámicas de la moda en la Cuba soviética.” Kamchatka 5 (2015): 243-260. doi:10.7203/KAM.5.4577.
Cabrera Arús, María A. “The Material Promise of Socialist Modernity: Fashion and Domestic Space in the 1970s.” In The Revolution from Within: Cuba 1959-1980, edited by M. Bustamante and J. Lambe, 189-217. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
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Cabrera Arús, María A. “Thinking Politics and Fashion: A Material Culture Approach to the Cuban Socialist 1960s." Theory & Society 46 (2017): 411-428. doi:10.1007/ s11186-017-9299-x.
Cabrera Arús, María A., and Mirta Suquet. “The Representation of Fashion in Cuban Postrevolutionary Literature: Knitting and Undoing the New Man." Cuban Studies 47 (2019, forthcoming): 195-221.
Chase, Michelle. Revolution within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
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(p. 474) Gronow, Jukka. Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin's Russia. New York: Berg, 2003.
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Guerra, Lillian. Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018.
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Loss, Jacqueline. Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.
Loss, Jacqueline, and José M. Prieto (eds.). Caviar with Rum. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2012.
Medvedev, Katalin. “Ripping Up the Uniform Approach: Hungarian Women Piece Together a New Communist Fashion.” In Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers, edited by R. Lee Blaszczyk, 250-272. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Mesa-Lago, Carmelo. Cuba in the 1970s: Pragmatism and Institutionalization. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978.
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Price, Rachel. Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island. London: Verso, 2015.
Puñales-Alpízar, Damaris. Escrito en cirílico. El ideal soviético en la cultura cubana posnoventa. Santiago, Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2012.
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Reid, Susan. “Destalinization and Taste, 1953-1963.” Journal of Design History 10 (1997): 177-201.
Rivero, Yeidy M. Broadcasting Modernity: Cuban Commercial Television, 1950-1960. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
Stitziel, Judd. Fashioning Socialism. Clothing, Politics, and Consumer Culture in East Germany. Oxford: Berg, 2005.
Tikhomirova, Anna. “Soviet Women and Fur Consumption in the Brezhnev Era.” In Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc, edited by D. Crowley and S. E. Reid, 283-308. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010.
(1.) Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Carmelo Mesa-Lago, “Building Socialism in Cuba: Romantic versus Realistic Approach,” Latin American Perspectives 3 (1976): 117-121; Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s: Pragmatism and Institutionalization (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978).
(2.) Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s.
(3.) María A. Cabrera Arús, “Pañoletas y polainas: Dinámicas de la moda en la Cuba soviética,” Kamchatka 5 (2015): 243-260; María A. Cabrera Arús, “Thinking Politics and
Fashion: A Material Culture Approach to the Cuban Socialist 1960s," Theory & Society 46 (2017): 411-428; Guerra, Visions of Power.
(4.) Regina Lee Blaszczyk, “Rethinking Fashion," in Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers, ed. R. Lee Blaszczyk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 3. Terms like “clothing" and “garment" might be also used to avoid repetitions.
(5.) Michelle Chase, Revolution within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Duanel Díaz Infante, La revolución congelada. Dialécticas del castrismo (Madrid: Verbum, 2014); Guerra, Visions of Power; Lillian Guerra, “‘Una buena foto es la mejor defensa de la Revolución.' Imagen, Producción de Imagen y la Imaginación Revolucionaria de 1959," Encuentro 46 (2006): 11-21; Lillian Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); José Quiroga, Cuban Palimpsests (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Yeidy M. Rivero, Broadcasting Modernity: Cuban Commercial Television, 1950-1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
(6.) María A. Cabrera Arús, “For Sale: Cuba's Revolutionary Figured World," Age of Revolutions, January 22, 2018, https://ageofrevolutions.com/2018/01/22/for-sale-cubas-revolu-tionary-figured-world/; María A. Cabrera Arús and Mirta Suquet, “La moda en la literatura cubana, 1960-1970: Tejiendo y destejiendo al hombre nuevo," Cuban Studies (2018): 195-221; Jacqueline Loss, Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013); Jacqueline Loss and José M. Prieto, eds., Caviar with Rum (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2012); Rachel Price, Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island (London: Verso, 2015); Damaris Puñales-Alpízar, Escrito en cirílico. El ideal soviético en la cultura cubana posnoventa (Santiago, Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2012).
(7.) In 2012, I began conducting research for my dissertation on the politics of fashion under Cuban socialism and the role sartorial visions and practices played giving shape to narratives of nationalism, equality, and modernization. The book manuscript Dressed for the Party: Fashion and Politics in Socialist Cuba, which I am currently developing, is based on this research, as also are my other publications cited in this essay.
(8.) Cabrera Arús, “Pañoletas y Polainas"; Cabrera Arús, “Thinking Politics and Fashion"; María A. Cabrera Arús, “The Material Promise of Socialist Modernity: Fashion and Domestic Space in the 1970s," in The Revolution from Within: Cuba 1959-1980, ed. M. Bustamante and J. Lambe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 189-217.
(9.) Anna Veltfort, personal communication, June 14, 2018.
(10.) “Homenaje al Día Internacional de la mujer," filmed March 6, 1969, by ICAIC's Latin American Newsreel, http://www.ina.fr/video/VDD13021432/homenaje-al-dia-internacional-de-la-mujer-celebration-de-la-journee-internationale-de-la-femme-video.html.
(11.) Joseph L. Scarpaci, Roberto Segre, and Mario Coyula, Havana: Two Faces of the Antillean Metropolis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 151.
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(12.) Cabrera Arús, “Pañoletas y polainas”; Cabrera Arús, “Thinking Politics and Fashion.”
(13.) Djurdja Bartlett, Fashion East: The Spectre that Haunted Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
(14.) Ibid.
(15.) “Exhibición de moda polaca,” filmed October 16, 1961, by ICAIC's Latin American Newsreel, http://www.ina.fr/video/VDD13022479/exhibicion-de-moda-polaca-defile-de-mode-polonais-video.html.
(16.) Yeisa Sarduy, “Ensayo: Moda y medios de comunicación: Un bojeo insular,” Esquife, http://www.esquife.cult.cu/index.php?option=com:content&view=article&id=13:ensayo-moda-y-medios-de-comunicacion-un-bojeo-insular&catid=22&Itemid=112.
(17.) “Moda cubana,” filmed March 21, 1966, by ICAIC's Latin American Newsreel, http:// www.ina.fr/video/VDD13020670/moda-cubana-mode-cubaine-video.html; “La moda femenina,” filmed September 28, 1964, by ICAIC's Latin American Newsreel, http:// www.ina.fr/video/VDD13020195/la-moda-feminina-la-mode-feminine-video.html.
(18.) The latest mention I have been able to find of the BFG refers to the year 1983.
(19.) ICAIC's Latin American Newsreel “Moda cubana”; ICAIC's Latin American Newsreel “La moda femenina.”
(20.) Sewing patterns were commercialized in prerevolutionary Cuba under US brands such as Simplicity, McCall's, Vogue, Du Barry, and Advance, and the Cuban brand Sabrina, all in Cuba Material collection.
(21.) José A. Gell Noa, Cronología para la historia de los Comités de Defensa de la Revolución: 1962-1970 (Havana, Cuba: Editora Política, 2008); ICAIC's Latin American Newsreel “La moda femenina.” This and other Spanish translations are done by the author.
(22.) Fernando Ayuso, http://Fernando-Ayuso.blogspot.com. Upon his arrival in Havana in 1959, Ayuso opened the boutique Corinto y Oro, which was later nationalized. At Corinto y Oro, he designed and commercialized outfits for women, adapting European styles to the Cuban climate.
(23.) Fernando Ayuso, http://Fernando-Ayuso.blogspot.com.
(24.) I visited the TED in 1996 when, as a recent college graduate, I began working at the National Bureau of Industrial Design (ONDI), in Havana.
(25.) “Moda por el Taller Experimental de Diseño cubano,” filmed June 25, 1967, ICAIC's Latin American Newsreel, http://www.ina.fr/video/VDD13021074/moda-por-el-taller-exper-imental-de-diseno-cubano-mode-par-l-atelier-experimental-de-design-cubain-video.html.
(26.) Pedro Contreras, “Ayuso: La Revolución y el vestuario,” Opus Habana, http:// www.opushabana.cu/index.php/noticias/21-noticias-casa-de-papel/814-.
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(27.) Fernando Ayuso, http://Fernando-Ayuso.blogspot.com.
(28.) ICAIC's Latin American Newsreel “Moda por el Taller Experimental de Diseño cubano.”
(29.) Fernando Ayuso, http://Fernando-Ayuso.blogspot.com.
(30.) Contreras, “Ayuso: La Revolución y el vestuario”; Fernando Ayuso, http://Fernando-Ayuso.blogspot.com.
(31.) Contreras, “Ayuso: La Revolución y el vestuario”; Sarduy, “Moda y medios de comunicación.”
(32.) Cabrera Arús, “Pañoletas y polainas”; Cabrera Arús, “Thinking Politics and Fashion”; Cabrera Arús, “The Material Promise”; Guerra, Visions of Power; Louis Pérez, On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
(33.) Fidel Castro, “Discurso pronunciado por el Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz, Primer Secretario del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba y Primer Ministro del Gobierno Revolucionario, en la clausura del primer curso de operadoras de piccolinos, efectuado en cangrejeras, el 30 de septiembre de 1968,” http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discur-sos/1968/esp/f300968e.html; Fidel Castro, “Fidel Castro Speaks to Graduating Tractor Operators,” Castro Speech Database, recorded September 30, 1968, http:// lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1968/19681002.html. The Havana Greenbelt was an agricultural project Cuban leaders devised to produce some of the food staples Havana residents consumed in the city outskirts, for which they oriented surrounding the city with a green belt of mostly coffee trees and fruit crops. The TED designed uniforms for the CJC in Camagüey and Isla de la Juventud. Contreras, “Ayuso: La Revolución y el vestuario.”
(34.) Sarduy, “Moda y medios de comunicación.” Celia Sánchez, Castro's personal assistant and collaborator, also commissioned around that time the atelier Casa Verano, dedicated to the production of clothing in small batches, including fatigue uniforms for the revolutionary leaders. Omar Fernández Cañizares, Un viaje histórico con el Che (Havana, Cuba: Ciencias Sociales, 2005); Omar Fernández Cañizares, Primer viaje del Che al exterior. Aniversario 50 (Havana, Cuba: Ciencias Sociales, 2010). I have found very little information on Casa Verano: journalist Pedro Contreras dates to the 1960s some initiatives attributed by Sánchez's biographer to Casa Verano, such as the use in clothing design of the canvas of sugar sacks and the gauze used to cover tobacco fields. Contreras, “Ayuso: La Revolución y el vestuario”; Nancy Stout, One Day in December: Celia Sanchez and the Cuban Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013). In Sánchez's biography, however, Stout states that Casa Verano was administered by the EMPROVA, an industrial complex Sánchez commissioned in 1974 to produce domestic utensils and furniture, among other goods. If this is true, Casa Verano was either created in the 1960s and later brought under the administration of the EMPROVA, or created in 1974 and Contreras wrongly dates the sugar-sack and tobacco-net clothes to the prior decade.
(35.) “La moda francesa en París,” filmed November 2, 1964, by ICAIC's Latin American Newsreel, http://www.ina.fr/video/VDD13020245/la-moda-francesa-en-paris-la-mode-fran-caise-a-paris-video.html; Cabrera Arús, “Pañoletas y polainas”; Cabrera Arús, “Thinking Politics and Fashion”; Cabrera Arús, “The Material Promise”; Pérez, On Becoming Cuban.
(36.) Cabrera Arús, “The Material Promise.”
(37.) Cabrera Arús, “Pañoletas y polainas”; Cabrera Arús, “Thinking Politics and Fashion”; Cabrera Arús, “The Material Promise.”
(38.) Contreras, “Ayuso: La Revolución y el vestuario.”
(39.) Ibid.
(40.) Fidel Castro, “Castro Addresses Construction Workers Plenum.” Castro Speech Data Base, recorded December 21, 1971, http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/ 1971/19711221.html; Ernesto Guevara, “La industrialización de Cuba,” in Universidad Popular. Séptimo Ciclo: Economía y planificación, eds. C. Olivares, L. Soto, R. Anillo, R. Alarcón, and S. Fraile (Havana, Cuba: Imprenta Nacional, 1961), 15-65.
(41.) Guerra, Visions of Power; Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s.
(42.) Velia C. Bobes, Los laberintos de la imaginación. Repertorio simbólico, identidades y actores del cambio social en Cuba (Mexico, D. F.: El Colegio de México, 2000); Haroldo Dilla, “La Revolución cubana, a discusión,” EstePaís 292 (2015): 22-25; Mayra P. Espina Prieto, “Política social en Cuba. Equidad y movilidad,” The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Working Paper Series No.07/08-3, 2007, http:// drclas.harvard.edu/files/drclas/files/mayra_espina_cover_yr_0.pdf; Mayra Espina Prieto and Lilia Núñez Moreno, “The Changing Class Structure in the Development of Socialism in Cuba,” in Transformation and Struggle: Cuba Faces the 1990s, edited by S. Halebsky and J. M. Kirk (New York: Praeger, 1990), 205-218; Frank T. Fitzgerald, “The ‘Sovietization of Cuba Thesis' Revisited,” in Cuban Political Economy: Controversies in Cubanology, edited by A. Zimbalist (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), 137-153; Frank T. Fitzgerald, “Cuba's New Professionals,” in Transformation and Struggle: Cuba Faces the 1990s, edited by S. Halebsky and J. M. Kirk (New York: Praeger, 1990), 189-203.
(43.) Espina Prieto and Núñez Moreno, “The Changing Class Structure,” 211; Ariel Hidalgo, Cuba: El estado marxista y "la nueva clase” (Miami, FL: U.S. General Printing, 1988); Juan L. Martín, “La juventud en la revolución cubana: notas sobre el camino recorrido y sus perspectivas,” Cuadernos de Nuestra América VII (1990): 137-143.
(44.) Cabrera Arús, “The Material Promise”; Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s.
(45.) First Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba. Memoirs (Havana, Cuba: Department of Revolutionary Orientation of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, 1976).
(46.) José L. Llovio-Menéndez, Insider: My Hidden Life as a Revolutionary in Cuba (New York: Bantam, 1988).
(47.) Vincent Bloch, “Les décades du régime Cubain,” in Cuba, un régime au quotidien, edited by V. Bloch and P. Létrillart (Paris: Choiseul, 2011), 9-62.
(48.) Bartlett, Fashion East; Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Victor Buchli, “Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against Petit-bourgeois Consciousness in the Soviet Home,” Journal of Design History 10 (1997): 161-176; Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford: Berg, 1999); Sheila Fitzpatrick, “‘Middle-class Values' and Soviet Life in the 1930s,” in Soviet Society and Culture. Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham, edited by T. L. Thompson and R. Sheldon (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), 20-38; Jukka Gronow, Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin's Russia (New York: Berg, 2003); Karen Kettering, “‘Ever More Cozy and Comfortable:' Stalinism and the Soviet Domestic Interior, 1928-1938,” Journal of Design History 10 (1997): 119-135; James R. Millar, “The Little Deal: Brezhnev's Contribution to Acquisitive Socialism,” Slavic Review 44 (1985): 694-706; Susan Reid, “Destalinization and Taste, 1953-1963,” Journal of Design History 10 (1997): 177-201; Anna Tikhomirova, “Soviet Women and Fur Consumption in the Brezhnev Era,” in Pleasures in Socialism. Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc, edited by D. Crowley and S. E. Reid (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 283-308.
(49.) Kettering, “‘Ever More Cozy,'” 127.
(50.) Gronow, Caviar with Champagne, 142.
(51.) Wilfredo Benítez, personal communication, August 3, 2012.
(52.) Between 1965 and 1968, seventy fashion labels filed for, and obtained, licenses form the OCPI. Not a single one filed during the years between 1959 and 1965. The new interest was probably due to the expiration of licenses obtained before 1959. The discussion on fashion labels is based on data the OCPI provided in 2015.
(53.) In the Soviet Union, the wristwatch Pobeda (Russian for “victory”) and the perfume Red Moscow conveyed similar meanings.
(54.) David Crowley, “Warsaw's Shops, Stalinism and the Thaw,” in Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, edited by S. Reid and D. Crowley (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 34.
(55.) Ibid.
(56.) Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Soren Askegaard, “Brands as a Global Ideoscape,” in Brand Culture, edited by J. E. Shroeder and M. Salzer-Morling (London: Routledge, 2006), 91-102.
(57.) María A. Cabrera Arús, “Una plantilla de zapatos y el Vuelo Conjunto Cubano-Soviético: un pequeño relato,” in El fin del gran relato, exhibition catalogue, edited by Henry E. Hernández, forthcoming 2018.
(58.) Chase, Revolution within the Revolution; Guerra, Visions of Power; Pérez, On Becoming Cuban.
(59.) Diplostores sold capitalist merchandise in US dollars for foreign visitors and diplomats. Technistores were also restricted-access stores that operated on a different kind of convertible currency, accessible to foreign technicians from socialist countries.
(60.) Mirta Muñiz, La publicidad en Cuba. Mito y realidad (Havana, Cuba: Logos, 2003), 95.
(61.) Moda '75. Edición Especial. Interviewees identify this brochure as a publication of Mujeres magazine, although the booklet itself does not provide editorial information or pagination. A similar brochure, printed in 1979, was edited by Empresa Editorial de la Mujer, the publisher of Mujeres magazine, which might suggest this one was also published by Mujeres. Moda (Havana, Cuba: Empresa Editorial de la Mujer, 1979). Cabrera Arús, “The Material Promise.”
(62.) Cabrera Arús, “The Material Promise,” 196.
(63.) Bartlett, Fashion East.
(64.) Yasiel Pavón, personal communication, August 7, 2016.
(65.) Habanera, directed by Pastor Vega (Havana, Cuba: ICAIC, 1984).
(66.) Héctor Zumbado, Kitsch, Kitsch, ¡Bang, Bang! (Havana, Cuba: Letras Cubanas, 1988), 164-165.
(67.) Eugenio Rodríguez Balari, “Antecedentes sobre la protección al consumidor en Cuba,” Red Observatorio Crítico, http://observatoriocriticocuba.org/2014/08/25/an-tecedentes-sobre-la-proteccion-al-consumidor-en-cuba/.
(68.) Ibid. Opina published news and advice on consumption, including a popular Classifieds section. In the mid-1970s, the magazine Magacín covered similar issues.
(69.) Wilfredo Benítez, personal communication to Maylén García Amador, April 30, 2011.
(70.) Ibid.
(71.) “Tema Científico ED-81 del CAME. Elaboración de las direcciones para la formación de la estructura de consumo y el surtido de productos, teniendo en cuenta las exigencias de los diferentes grupos de consumidores. Informe correspondiente a la Tipología de Consumidores de Vestuario y Calzado para los adultos,” ICIODI. VII IE, 1988.
(72.) Bartlett, Fashion East; Gronow, Caviar with Champagne; Katalin Medvedev, “Ripping Up the Uniform Approach: Hungarian Women Piece Together a New Communist Fashion,” in Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers, edited by R. Lee Blaszczyk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 250-272; Judd Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism. Clothing, Politics, and Consumer Culture in East Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2005).
(73.) Fernando Ayuso, http://Fernando-Ayuso.blogspot.com.
María A. Cabrera Arús
María A. Cabrera Arús, Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor, Brown University
Disappearing from the Picture?: Female Figures in Pattern Books of the Mao Years a
Antonia Finnane
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Oct 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.1
This article explores a lesser known source of graphic images of male and female figures produced during the early decades of the People's Republic of China. Propaganda posters, stage performances, and cinema suggest a high level of visibility for women in Mao's China. In contrast, how-to-sew manuals and pattern books, which in Japan, Western countries, and even the Eastern Bloc were dominated by images of women and designs of clothing for them, in China show an overwhelming preponderance of designs for men's clothing, and graphic drawings of the male figure. The main exceptions were privately authored manuals produced in the early 1950s, preceding socialist transformation. The article argues that the associated development of an everyday “regime of invisibility” for women was linked to the development and intensification of the Mao cult, and the obliteration from the emotional (affective) landscape of objects of desire that might rival Mao himself.
Keywords: gender, clothing, patriarchy, desire, visibility, androgyny, pattern books, dress design, Mao cult
When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) assumed power as the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, it embarked on the creation of a “New China,” based on the Marxist-Leninist principles of the Party in the vanguard and the workers as the owners of the means of production. This new entity was designed to obliterate the old China of imperialism (foreigners), feudalism (landlords), and bureaucratic capitalism (the former ruling Nationalist Party), putting in place instead a “New Democracy” that was meant to provide the foundations for a socialist revolution. Resources were poured into creating a new visual field that would help impress on the minds of the Chinese people a fresh image of their country, one in which they were the masters (zhuren), bent on creating a socialist future under the guidance of the Communist Party, with Mao Zedong at the helm.
In the mix of materials produced for this purpose were how-to-sew manuals and garment pattern books, necessarily overlapping genres in a context where the sewing machine industry, the labor force employed in the production of apparel, and the national wardrobe itself were all in the throes of transformation. Here I shall refer to them variously as manuals or pattern books. Although reasonably prominent in the extant corpus of works produced in the Mao years (1949-1976), these pattern books have not attracted much attention from anyone since the patterns themselves became outdated. They were modest publications, printed in black and white, sometimes running to only a few pages containing even fewer patterns. Perhaps on this account their value as sources of graphic images has gone largely unnoticed even by historians of fashion.1
In a survey of the socialist visual field in China, Xiaobing Tang identifies the significant sites of image production in the Mao years as “paintings, posters, billboards, pictorials, newspapers, illustrations and photographs.” The boldness, brilliance, and scale of many of these products allow him to conclude that “the creation of a socialist visual (p- 476) culture was a grand, exhilarating project ... ”2 Pattern books, by contrast, draw attention to the mean proportions and drabness of other aspects of visual culture. “Look along the streets [of Beijing],” complained the poet Ai Qing in 1955, “and all you see is a great sheet of blue and black.”3 He was referring to what people were wearing, variations on a standard coat and trousers ensemble which Western observers were later to dub the “Mao suit.” Pattern books provided professional tailors and home dressmakers with instructions on how to make this unremarkable ensemble. The books themselves were not very remarkable in terms of design and presentation. On the shelves of a second-hand bookshop they are now easily overlooked.
As documents of their time, however, pattern books are useful as sources of information about many aspects of China's great socialist experiment, including design, aesthetics, technology, and advertising over the years from New Democracy (1949-1952) to the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Their core subject matter, bearing on all these features, was concerned with an important aspect of crafting socialist subjects. Socialist bodies in China were covered or exposed according to particular politico-cultural precepts, and they were differentiated from each other in sartorial terms according to their different roles in the socialist economy.4 The contents of pattern books, through a mix of textual descriptions and graphic designs, illuminate the process by which a new clothing regime was created to provide for the persuasive performance of these roles. The illustrations comprise a mix of simple sketches of the human figure and technical drawings of garment pattern pieces. In a society where most forms of representation were instrumental, drawings in pattern books were doubly so, serving the garment maker in practical terms and the Party and the “people” (renmin) in ideological terms. For women they show, above all, the ambiguities attendant on the so-called emancipation or liberation formally championed by the CCP.
The core body of knowledge and assumptions about women's status, sexuality, dress, and representation within Chinese socialism, against which practice needs to be measured, is built around Mao Zedong's revolutionary writings along with the Party policies that were
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aimed at extracting women from the patriarchal family, with whatever attendant ambiguities. Mao early identified the patriarchy as a source of oppression specific to women, and women's conventional dress and adornment (their skirts, their hair-knots) as signs and tools of their oppression.5 His statements on these topics were reinforced after 1949 by the romanticization of the revolutionary Yanan period (1935-1947), the prestige of Party cadres and PLA soldiers in the eyes of the populace,6 and the privileging of hardship and simplicity (jianku pusu) as the guiding principles in daily life.7 These values all received graphic expression in propaganda posters.
There were many contradictions between CCP policy and practice in relationship to the position of women in Chinese society. These were manifest through the Mao years in the virtual absence of women from the Party leadership, in sexual relationships within the Party, in the wage differentials between male and female workers, and in the double burden of work carried by women in the socialist economy. In Yanan in 1941, the writer Ding Ling spoke frankly of these contradictions, at great personal cost;8 and the All-China Women's Federation, a mass organization of the CCP, also recognized (p- 477) them.9 Corresponding contradictions are evident in pattern books, not least because women are on the whole severely underrepresented in them.
Published in the tens to hundreds of thousands, designed for daily use by ordinary people, pattern books provided precise instructions about constructing what might be called “visible selves”—the clothed “people,” en masse and individually, who populated the imagined-cum-actual realm of the People's Republic. The character of this realm was gradually being worked out in the 1950s, a process both reflected in and expressed by the variety of patterns for clothing available in this decade. In the 1960s the scope for development narrowed: at odds with the Soviet Union, the United States, and its own past, China was hemmed in culturally from all sides. During the dynamic phase of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1968), few pattern books were published, and from the time they began to roll off the presses again until after the death of Mao, the range of designs they contained was small indeed, extending not much beyond basic socialist styles already available in the early 1950s.
The term androgyny is often used in discussions of clothing in Mao's China, especially but not only in the context of the Cultural Revolution. Evidence from pattern books is only partially supportive of the term. In Chinese the technical term for androgynous is literally “middle sex” (zhongxing), a word common in discussions of fashion in contemporary times but less often to be found in statements about dress practices during the Mao years. In the latter context, the descriptive phrase “not distinguishing men from women” (bufen nannu) is more usual. Exception has been taken by some scholars to the characterization of dress by any of these terms, English or Chinese, on grounds that the dress styles of the period were not androgynous at all, but definitively masculine in char-acter.10 To the extent that the clothing worn by women might have confused the beholder as to the sex of the wearer, “androgynous” seems not an inappropriate descriptor, but whether people on the street were ever confused is open to question. Clothing designs on the whole were meant to prevent such confusion.
In what follows, I provide a brief history of pattern books as a publishing genre in twentieth-century China, with specific reference to developments in the Mao era and with a focus on graphic representations of the female figure and clothing for women. From the existing literature, including my own earlier work, certain trends were predictable in advance of the research being undertaken. One was the narrowing of the range of clothing designs provided over time; a second was the proportional decline in designs of overtly feminine garments, including any sort of skirt or dress. Both of these trends are consistent with broad-brush descriptions of clothing in China as androgynous, or for that matter as masculinized.
The two key findings of the research are at variance with these generalizations, although marginally more consistent with the masculinization argument. First, it is obvious from the patterns that distinctions between male and female clothing were steadily maintained in garment designs right through to the end of the Mao era. Visual evidence from photographs, film, and garments in museum collections confirms the distinctions, which may not look great to the naked and untrained eye but were no doubt very obvious to people within the society.
(p. 478) Second, the reduction in the number of designs specifically for women, while obvious, is less striking than another feature of pattern books, which is a dramatic decline in the number of drawings of the female figure published in their pages, especially in the context of guidelines for measuring bodies. From this perspective, the problem posed by clothing in the Mao era is less one of style (how the clothing looked) than of visibility, whether of clothed women, or of the clothes as worn by women. Needless to say, the “regime of visibility”11 within which the pattern books were produced was a Maoist one. It is within this regime that the cultural logic governing the designs for clothing has to be mapped.
How-to-sew manuals and clothing pattern books were not an entirely new genre in 1950s China. Japanese guides to drafting and cutting in the Western style are known to have existed at least since the 1910s,12 and it seems probable that the many old Japanese pattern books now found in the Chinese second-hand book market were actually in use in China during the Republican era (1912-1949). Japanese influence on the development of the genre is otherwise clear. The earliest known Chinese pattern book, published in 1933, was by a tailor called Gu Taiyun (1883-1963), who had many years' experience of working in Japan.13 A pattern book of women's and children's clothing by Waseda University graduate Jiang Naiyong (1913-1996) in 1940 likewise shows strong Japanese influence.14 These are among the very few pattern books known to have been compiled and published in China before 1949. So many more were produced in the next thirty years that it seems no exaggeration to describe the pattern book as a characteristic product of Chinese so-
Page 4 of 27 cialism, although Japanese influence continued to be evident. As late as 1971 Edgar Snow reported seeing Chinese women looking at a Japanese fashion magazine in the privacy of home.15
Pattern books produced in the early years of the PRC were linked to sewing schools. The establishment of the communist government in 1949 entailed a large-scale retooling in ideology, technology, and the economy. Newly established vocational schools ran evening or short courses to train up a workforce capable of building the New China.16 These schools helped to acculturate city people to the new regime, providing classes in ideology as well as in practical skills. At the Great Victory Vocational School for Women, established in Beijing in March 1949, this meant six hours of classes on New Democracy and three hours spent learning songs of communist liberation out of a total of thirty-four classroom hours per week.17 Great Victory was a specialist sewing school. It was typical of what was available to women as the Women's Federation, a Party organization, went about the business of drawing them out of the home to participate in the new society.
There has as yet been no systematic survey of these schools and their founders, but surviving pattern books identify the links between them and the authorship of sewing books. In Beijing, one Fu Yingfei “responded to an invitation from Beijing Municipality to teach in the Peace Vocational School” before proceeding to establish the Beijing (p- 479) Private Professional Tailoring School. By May 1951, between one and two thousand students had reportedly come under his instruction.18 He was the author of a number of pattern books, mostly designed as primers for his students.19 Similarly, Sun Po's Sewing Manual, based on teaching notes made during his time as instructor at the Benefit-the-Masses Vocational Evening School in Beijing, served as textbook for his students at Tianjin's Minde Vocational Night School, where he took a post in 1951.20 In Shanghai, Lin Zhengbao's Guide to Cutting served as a textbook for the students of the Meilin School of Tailoring, Sewing and Embroidery, located in Hongkou district, in Shanghai,21 while Wang Guizhang compiled a series of manuals on sewing, cutting, and embroidery for students at her King Fair Sewing School, not far from Jingan Temple in the former French Concession.22
These various publications, all produced in the first five years of the communist era, came in a variety of shapes and sizes. They were sometimes handwritten, and all were self-published. Lin Zhengbao's Guide to Cutting looks the most professional, reflecting the author's training. Lin held diplomas from tailoring academies in Tokyo and offered advanced, scientific methods of measuring and drafting. The technical drawing in other manuals often lacks expertise. They all carry clear signs of adjustments in vocabulary and values to the new regime. Colleagues and readers have become “comrades” (tongzhi). The “great mass of people in the entire nation” (quanguo dazhong) is invoked. Yet they are not collective works or produced by government offices. Each publication bears on its cover or title page the name of the author, who was in all cases a tailor and also the principal of a sewing school. Prefaces provide testimonials and biographical details. Wang Guizhang's various booklets even carry a photograph of her in graduation dress (she studied chemistry at St John's University in Shanghai). Such features anchor the publications in the enterprise of the individual tailor and identify the enterprise with him or her. In formal respects, they are not dissimilar to pattern books published outside of the PRC.
Pattern books were used in classrooms and posted out to distance students for correspondence lessons. They were also available commercially. Wang Guizhang's King Fair series was sold in “every large bookshop,” and Fu Yingfei's two-volume set could be purchased “in every large bookshop throughout the country.”23 Their contents suggest two reasons why there might have been a popular demand for them outside of sewing schools. First, they served to acquaint garment manufacturers across the spectrum with a new, progressive wardrobe; and second, they provided detailed instructions as to how to make the garments, which not only looked different to conventional Chinese clothing but were put together by different techniques. Before 1949, home-made clothes basically consisted of Chinese-style coats and gowns and trousers. Whether for men or for women, they were essentially simple garments, with sleeves continuous from the body of the garment and hardly any shaping required. Even the qipao, usually depicted as a figure-hugging garment with slits up the side and a mandarin collar, was rather sack-like if made cheaply and quickly for everyday wear. Tailors were known to adapt new-style cutting methods to make these old-style garments, but the basic techniques were simple. After 1949, the pressure was on to adopt a new wardrobe, especially among townspeople. At its simplest this consisted of coats with fitted sleeves and pockets, together (p- 480) with “Westernstyle” trousers, the latter cut to sit flat at the front and fit the buttocks at the rear. Such garments could not be cut by what English tailors called “rock of eye.”24 Garment manufacturers, whether professional or amateur, needed paper patterns and training in sewing skills: how to fit a sleeve, how to make darts and gathers.
The prominence of men among authors of pattern books is observable. It is not always easy to tell from a personal name who is male and who female; but of the aforementioned authors only Wang Guizhang is obviously a woman. A sex ratio of 3:1 or greater would be consistent with the fact that in the past, whatever the number of women who actually made clothes for love or money, tailoring was a definitively male occupation. The same was true of graphic design. In the 1920s and 1930s, designs of women's clothing published in newspapers and pictorials already included some by women, but the most prominent were undoubtedly by male artists and cartoonists such as Cao Hanmei (1902-1975), Ye Qianyu (1907-1995), and Guo Jianying (1907-1969). The CCP wanted this to change. The view in Beijing was that the tasks of tailoring should be handed over to large-scale cooperatives run by women, making male muscle available for heavy industry.25 This meant that sewing schools were often for women only. Likewise, the artists recruited to oversee a dress beautification campaign launched in 1955 were not men such as Ye Qianyu and Cao Hanmei (Guo Jianying having fled the country), but rather their female contemporaries: Yu Feng (1916-2007), Qiu Ti (1892-1958), and Xiao Shufang (19112005), among others.26 In Shanghai, Wang Guizhang, who had been forced to close her sewing school in 1952, was brought back into the fold to write and illustrate new pattern books, specifically of clothing for women. One of these remained in print until at least 1959.27
Nonetheless, the feminization of the industry was at best only partially achieved. Data collected in the course of socialist transformation in the middle of the 1950s show examples of garment-making (tailoring) cooperatives consisting entirely of men, of whom some were quite young and had obviously done their training since 194 9.28 The design and authorship of pattern books seem likewise to have been carried out largely by men. From the late 1950s onward it was rare for the name of anyone, male or female, to be connected to a publication, but when Shanghai Culture Publishing brought out Garment Making Methods in 1963, it was with an editorial team headed by well-known tailor Dai Yongfu.29 Dai was an old associate of Gu Tianyu and one of the famous “Red Group” tailors who in the first half of the twentieth century dominated the suit-making sector in Shanghai. Wang Guizhang, one of the most popular clothes designers in 1950s Shanghai, was overlooked for this role and indeed disappears from the record in 1959. She may have fallen foul of the regime in the course of the anti-rightist movement (1957-1959).
Whatever the gender balance of personnel within the industry, pattern books show a decidedly skewed gender balance in clothing designs, and in a reverse direction to Western fashion publications. Beginning in 1949, pattern books in China served to put (p- 481) in place a core socialist wardrobe. Its centerpiece was the Zhongshan coat worn with Western-style tailored trousers, an ensemble commonly known in English as the Mao suit. The Zhongshan coat was the most prestigious and also the most complex of available and approved garments in Mao's China. It was a definitively male garment, with no real female counterpart. With thirty-one pieces to the pattern, it had more parts to it than any other piece of clothing, and the technical specifications of its assemblage, including French seams, made its construction a more demanding undertaking than any other piece of clothing.30 It supplied the blueprint for a range of male coats, including the Lenin coat;31 the informal army coat (junbianfu), also called the Liberation coat (jiefangfu); the youth coat; and the student coat (see Figure 20.1). Tailoring instructions confirm the common structure: “measurements and cut are the same as for the Sun Yatsen suit; differences lie only in [such-and-such].”32
Wuhanshi sili Shenghua Xinqun fengren buxi xuexiao bianji weiyuanhui
ed., Caifengfa jiangyi (Materials on
tailoring methods) (Wuhan, 1956), 53, 61, 64.
This set of coats constituted a vestimentary order roughly corresponding to distinctions between civil and military, age and youth, in the male political-cum-social hierarchy of the PRC. In the early 1950s, however, its rigidity was not yet fully established. At that time, operators of private sewing schools were experimenting with a possible mix of clothing and providing designs for a greater variety of garments. Along with iconic garments such as the Zhongshan coat, the Lenin coat, and the bulaji (frock) were various sorts of shirts and blouses; pleated, gathered, and A-line skirts; jackets and coats in various styles; bathing suits; jodhpurs; and culottes. The qipao, although readily associated by cartoonists with decadent counterrevolutionary elements in society, was also occasionally (p- 482) depicted, and it was revived in force during the dress beautification campaign initiated in 1955 (see Figure 20.2).
Tianjinshi fuzhuang fengren gongye gongsi
Fuzhuang yangben (Catalogue
of clothing patterns) (Tianjin, 1956).
Even in the early years, however, the pivotal importance of the Zhongshan coat was evident. In Shenyang, the heart of heavy industry in the PRC, the municipal clothing research office produced one of the earliest pattern books to emerge from a government office, published in 1953. The title informs the reader that the contents cover “various sorts of clothing” (gezhong fuzhuang), but the book is largely devoted to patterns for the Zhongshan suit (coat and trousers) here referred to as the cadre suit (ganbufu), drawn up for various sizes in both unlined and cotton padded (winter) versions. The other styles covered include a women's coat, jodhpurs (a garment that deserves research because it appears in pattern books right up to and during the Cultural Revolution period33), a man's jacket, and a Lenin coat, this last a style usually associated in the scholarly literature with women but here a man's garment. This set of clothing is consistent with the content of pattern books produced during the Great Leap Forward (beginning in 1958) and during the Cultural Revolution. In 1970 the Nanchang Clothing Factory provided patterns and instructions for six basic garments, of which four were for men. The Zhongshan coat was given pride of place: it came first in order of contents, and it was allocated ten of the book's forty pages, taking up a quarter of the whole.34
Pattern books were aimed not only at providing clothing designs but at supplying technical instructions in fitting, cutting, and sewing, including the use of a sewing machine. Of these, fitting was the greatest challenge. Accurate measurement was the key to successful tailoring, its importance emphasized in all early professional works. Customized garments require a precise fit for bodies of various shapes and sizes, so that the shoulders sit snugly and the back smoothly, with the front easily accommodating the chest and girth. Gu Tianyun's classic pattern book replicated the variation of male body types identified in tailoring manuals in the West and Japan: stooping, standing, overly erect. Chinese pattern books of the Mao years, including during the Cultural Revolution, sometimes picked up on these types, with terminology and sketches apparently modeled on Gu Tianyun's pattern.35
This is not a well-documented area of social history, but the complications associated with a woman being fitted by a male tailor can be imagined. In a rare reflection on the psychological or emotional aspects of fitting, Laura Ugolini remarks that “the physical intimacy brought about by the process of measuring” could be “troubling,” especially for the customer.36 If this was so of British men in the nineteenth century (Ugolini's subject), we can well imagine it to be the case of Chinese women in the twentieth. Yet given that guidelines and illustrations for measuring up women are found in dressmaking materials from the pre-1949 period,37 the tendency toward avoidance of such illustrations in the Mao years is striking. The variation is visible along two axes: first, the tendency is (p- 483)
(p. 484) stronger among male- than among female-authored works; second, it is more evident in the later than the earlier years, becoming very apparent during the Cultural Revolution.
The first of these observations can be illustrated by comparing manuals compiled by Wang Guizhang and Lin Zhengbao, respectively. From these works, it seems clear that for a female tailor to be depicted measuring up a female client was acceptable. Wang Guizhang was a woman and a tailor. Her sewing students were all women, other than the few who might have taken correspondence lessons. Her illustrated guides appropriately show a female tailor in all cases. They are depicted taking measurements not only of height, length of arms, breadth of shoulders, but of the customer's bust, waist, and hips, areas of the body which typically distinguished female from male physiques.38 Similar illustrations are shown in the Wuhan pattern book of 1955 (see Figure 20.3).39 The latter was produced by and for a joint venture formed from the combination of a private and a municipal sewing school during the socialist transformation of trade and commerce. It is possible that the private sewing school was, like Wang Guizhang's King Fair Sewing School, run by a woman.
Lin Zhengbao's Guide to Cutting also shows female figures being measured up. In this case, however, we can see that the approach to depicting tailor-customer interactions differs in accordance with the gender of the customer. In brief, the male customers are shown as being measured by male tailors, the female figures only by detached hands holding the tape. The inference to be drawn is that the tailor in both cases was imagined as male. That a male tailor could not be shown in the act of measuring a woman's body speaks to the general difficulties of representing male-female contact in Mao's China, epitomized in the avoidance of the pas de deux in revolutionary ballet.40 But regardless of the sex of the imagined and depicted tailor, it is noteworthy that these early 1950s pat-
Page 10 of 27 tern books, and others as well, show the female form as anatomically particular and technically representable.
Wuhanshi sili Shenghua Xinqun fengren buxi xuexiao bianji weiyuanhui
ed., Caifengfa jiangyi (Materials on
tailoring methods) (Wuhan, 1956), 27.
Factory-made garments in a range of sizes should have eliminated the need for measuring customers' bodies individually. Accordingly, industry publications in the late 1950s tended to forgo instructions on body measurement in favor of standard measurements for ready-to-wear clothing. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, however, the limits of the mechanization and mass production of clothing were obvious. Private sewing schools and associated publications had by this time disappeared from China. The publication of pattern books was now undertaken by the municipal clothing companies that oversaw the production and supply of garments in any given city or town. In 1970s Shanghai, clothing was made by tailoring departments in large stores, by tailors in cooperatives, by peddlers, and by women at home—or more precisely, by women after they returned home from work. In 1981, making clothes at home (that is, mostly by wives and mothers) was still standard, even in Shanghai.41
Pattern books of this era must, then, have been read by women, and at a time when “women held up half the sky” and “whatever men could do, women could do,”42 it is worth wondering how they read them. We can see what they read, even if we cannot imagine what they would have been thinking. On turning the first page, they were met with “the highest directive” of the time, uttered by Mao, printed in the People's Daily
Page 11 of 27
(p. 485) (p. 486) newspaper, and then reprinted in publications all across the country. In an extreme case, the pattern book might carry quotations or directives from Mao at intervals throughout the work.43 Later publications, printed after the cessation of the highest directives in 1970, carried at least a quotation or two from the works of Mao. Most pattern books also carried an introduction, which typically paid homage to the guidance of Mao Zedong and then referred to the basic significance of clothing in people's lives, the importance of the labor undertaken in its provision, the service being rendered to the workers, peasants, and soldiers, and the errors inevitably made by the group or committee in compiling the work. This was typical of publications of the era and meant that as with all other activities in life at that time, the act of making clothes (insofar as undertaken with a pattern book at least) was undertaken within a framework of devotion to Chairman Mao and faith in the revolution.
The section on how to take measurements follows next, the acts described endowed with a peculiar formality by the preceding devotional materials. The effect is enhanced by the severity of the graphic style and the predominance of male figures in the illustrations. The process of measuring up is usually illustrated with a series of diagrams showing the tailor with tape in a step-by-step process of measuring neck, shoulders, chest, waist, hip, leg length, and so on. The tailor and the client are almost invariably male, and indeed a majority of garment designs are also for men. The ratio of male to female in both images and patterns varies from one pattern book to the next. A Tianjin pattern book of 1971 depicts thirty-eight male figures and eight female;44 a Nanchang publication of 1968, twenty-nine and one; and a 1970 Beijing publication, thirty male figures and no female at all.45 In a Shanghai pattern book of 1981, male figures still outnumber female by sixteen to twelve,46 despite discussions at the municipal level as early as 1975 for radically increasing the number of new designs for women.47
Although the elimination of women altogether is rare, the trend is graphically apparent in multiple cases. In one highly technical chart of variation in body shapes, a female body is depicted as just one of eleven possibilities, all others (fat, thin, stooped, hunched) being men (see Figure 20.4).48 Here, rather than the “abstract invisibility of the white man” theorized by feminists in Western contexts, we have a good example of the actual near-invisibility of the Chinese woman.49 Andrea Mubi Brighenti describes visibility as “the element in which social sorting of people takes place, relegating some social groups into invisibili-ty.”50 Invisibility in this context naturally means something different from the “abstract invisibility” that white men might enjoy. As Brighenti goes on to say, “all kinds of minorities and exploited classes experience the effects of invisibility as lack of recognition.”51
Jiangxisheng fuzhuang xie mao yanjiusuo, ed., Fuzhuang liangcai jiben zhishi
(Garment measuring and cutting: basic knowledge) (Nanchang: Jiangxisheng fuzhuang xie mao yanjiusuo, [1968]1969), 44.
Counterintuitively, Brighenti seeks to avoid a critical account of visibility “as bad or simply soaked in power,”52 yet “soaked in power” is a term very applicable to the field of social visibility in Mao's China. This was a field in which power struggles were conducted. In illustrating the principle that “people's physiques develop differently,” the editors of one early pattern book from the Cultural Revolution era, apparently from Shanghai, pointedly replaced all the male figures with female figures.53 In the context of the garment design literature produced at any time in the Cultural Revolution, this is a (p- 487) rare and perhaps unique example of the female body being used as the standard. The same book, although published in the same landscape format as used by most pattern books emanating from Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin in this period, is distinguished from most others by showing breast, waist, and hip measurements on female (clothed) figures. The poor quality of the printing, the detailed illustration of the technique for hand-sewing cotton padded jackets, and the unusual inclusion of a pattern for a child's “red guard” uniform all suggest an early and transitional year for this publication, which was perhaps being designed at a time when the Cultural Revolution was opening up room for change rather than closing it down.
The sartorial scheme presented in the pattern books of this period is otherwise overtly patriarchal: serious, structured male garments—the Zhongshan coat, the Youth coattake precedence over shapeless female garments such as the Spring and Autumn coat.
(p. 488) The range is epitomized by the contents of the Dressmaking Diary (Caijian riji) published by Wuxi Department Store Purchasing Department probably in anticipation of the 1977 Spring Festival. Apparently designed for the female customer, the diary features photos of young women with permed hair and colorful modern clothes, interleaved with patterns and instructions for the cutting and sewing of a range of garments. The photos show that modern fashions are now visible on the horizon of the Chinese world and point to a late date of publication, perhaps the eve of the Spring Festival in 1977. The introduction begins with a quotation from Chairman Mao: “Reading is learning; practice is also learning and is a more important form of learning.” Printed in a brightly illustrated format plainly directed at women, the book contains eighteen patterns, of which fourteen are for men's clothing and four for women. The first in order is the Zhongshan coat, presented together with its close companion, the informal military coat. The last, one of the four patterns for women, is hardly a garment pattern at all, but merely a set of instructions for the making of an “economical collar”—an abbreviated shirt top designed to give the impression of a garment without really being one.54
The term “patriarchal” takes us only so far in describing the social structure reflected by and expressed in these pattern books. It is axiomatic that, in a patriarchy, women have a place, without which the patriarchs would have no point of reference. In these books, however, it is difficult to see what that place might be. The women are both there and yet barely there. Their clothes are different, and yet not profoundly different. Their designated costumes for everyday life—the Spring and Autumn coat, the women's army coat—are mere shadows of male clothing. Strangely, at a time when skirts and dresses were never ordinarily to be seen on the streets, a female figure in a skirt is sometimes presented, as if the generic trope of modern dress patterns—men in trousers, women in skirts—had proved too strong to resist. Otherwise, it is more common for a waist to be indicated on a fitted man's garment than on a woman's, which seems hardly to be fitted at all (see Figure 20.5). The general shapelessness of women's garments is consistent with the fact that in figure drawings of women, to the extent that they exist, the waist, bosom, and buttocks are barely evident, or not at all evident. In instructions for measuring and fitting, suggestions of chest measurements for women are avoided. The contrast with drawings in the early 1950s pattern books published in the PRC is marked.
Guangzhoushi fuzhuang jishu yanjiusuo, ed., Yangcheng fUzhuang 1965-1966 1965-1966
(Guangzhou garments, 1965-1966) (Guangzhou, 1966).
Pattern books of this era are worth comparing with other genres of publication bearing images of women. One, already mentioned in these pages, is the propaganda poster. Harriet Evans comments of propaganda posters of the Cultural Revolution that “a first reading of these images would suggest that they fully exemplify the Cultural Revolution discourse of gender ‘sameness' defined according to the masculine standard.”55 This might also be said of clothing designs in pattern books. But when Evans goes on to say that “women [in propaganda posters] are proudly displayed as the agents and creators
(p. 489) (p. 490) of history,”56 the difference from pattern books is clear. The implicit narratives are categorically different. The figures in propaganda posters are perhaps best imagined as characters in a theatrical performance on a grand scale, dressed in costumes appropriate to their roles, eyes shining, shoulders squared, fists clenched. They seem not to be telling a story about women, but rather a story about service to the Party being performed by members of a generation who have cut loose from the bonds of family and the chains of the feudal past.
Magazines are the second relevant genre, with Women of China, the publication of the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF), an obvious source of images of women. This magazine ceased publication between 1967 and 1978, but before the Cultural Revolution was
Page 15 of 27 noted for its cover photos, in color, of women from rural or minority backgrounds. These suggest a very different story again. The rural women have been photographed wearing jackets of colorful printed cloth, and the ethnic minority women are shown in their highly gender-specific folk costumes: there is no possible gender confusion. They are mostly shown in agrarian or pastoral contexts, and in the case of minority women these are often also exotic contexts: picking grapes in Xinjiang, riding ponies on the Inner Mongolian steppe. The women are rarely named and the images are usually extraneous to the contents of the magazine. Sometimes they are given no context at all apart from the self-evident titles: “Banana Harvest” (July 1964) or “Picking Peaches” (May 1965).
Wang Zheng reads these photos as evidence of agency exerted by members of the ACWF, who recognized the overweening power exercised by men in the Communist Party and confronted it through the creation and operation of a “cultural front” (the magazine itself) for women within the Party-State apparatus.57 Images that in a Western context would be described in terms of “Orientalism” or “the white woman's burden”58 (in other words, images of subaltern subjects produced by members of a privileged elite) are in this analysis explained as an expression of specifically feminist socialism: members of the ACWF assumed responsibility for including underrepresented women. In Wang's view, they “contributed to the formation of a new symbolic order that unambiguously disrupted entrenched gender, class, and ethnic hierarchies.”59 An alternative view would be that the deployment of such images was part of the process by which rural and minority women were being absorbed into the category of “women of China,” somewhat at the cost of recognition of these same specific class and ethno-cum-racial positions.60 Whatever the case, the story they tell seems to be about women in general being on the margins of society. The rural and/or minority status of the photo subjects simply makes the story plainer.
Pattern books show neither bold revolutionary heroines of propaganda posters nor the cheerful subalterns of Women in China. Rather, they show something that was probably depressingly close to everyday life. A woman looking at a pattern book was unlikely to see in its pages anything approximating a mirror image or even an aspirational image of herself. What presented itself to her eyes was a world populated largely by men, who mostly looked like officials, army officers, or students. Any figures of women were obvious mainly by their lack of male characteristics, but since they were also largely lacking in female characteristics they offered nothing to the female reader in terms of social, (p- 491) political, or personal identity. Mostly they seem to suggest that it was better for a woman not to be noticed. To the extent that the clothed male was the default figure for use by the graphic designers working in clothing companies, it may be appropriate to think in terms not so much of androgyny as androgeny; that is, a tendency in the revolutionary society to produce only men.
The avoidance of breasts and hips in figure drawings of the 1970s renders the sexualized female body conspicuous by its absence. Like a Victorian silence, this feature prompts
Page 16 of 27
questions about sex, love, and desire in the Mao years. As Tuo Wang remarks, “the idea that emotion and desire will somehow contaminate and unsettle the revolution was a prevailing idea in the 1960s and 1970s,”61 yet paradoxically, these were years of intense emotion. Young people poured out their hearts to the tunes of revolutionary songs. They denounced their teachers, left their homes, travelled thousands of miles, fought class enemies, and sometimes lost their lives. In the midst of all this, sexual relationships invariably took place.62 No doubt the very clothes drawn up by garment designers, for all their relative shapelessness, came to be infused with sexual meaning by virtue of their association with women—not unlike the burka, “full of lurid sexual suggestiveness” in the words of Polly Toynbee.63 But if so, this was in the absence of a legitimizing discourse, or indeed of any official (public) discourse about sex at all.64 For a man to harbor longings for a woman meant that he had succumbed to bourgeois individualism.65
What was absent needs to be considered in conjunction with what was present and available to fill up the vacated space. In her survey of the cover images for Women of China, Wang Zheng came face to face with just this issue, because in 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, rural and minority women ceased to grace the covers of the magazine. Their place, as Wang notes, was taken by images of Chairman Mao.66 In the case of pattern books, a comparable effect was achieved by the insertion of front matter consisting of the “highest directive,” as mentioned earlier. Introductions explained the task of garment making as a response to Chairman Mao's call to “seize revolution and advance production,” the better to “serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers.”67 Research, design, and the actual work of tailoring were underpinned by a commitment to a “national, scientific, and mass [culture],” in keeping with Chairman Mao's statement in “On New Democracy.”68 Shortcomings were due to “insufficient study of Chairman Mao's works.”69
Mao was the key agent of visuality in the revolutionary realm that emerged from the Civil War of the late 1940s. His supremacy within the Party and the country, the “slavishness” of his colleagues toward him,70 his sense of himself as visionary evident especially in his poetry,71 the religious-style cult that developed around his image and words,72 and his actual interventions in the visual realm all point to his dominant role in shaping the visual order. He reportedly once humiliated his former groom, Ma Tianxiang, by (p- 492) laughing when the latter appeared before him wearing leather sandals and silk shirt. Ma went home, changed back into his old army uniform and straw sandals, and gave the leather sandals to his father.73 The story shows how the presence of Mao served to negate the presence of anyone else.74 Hegel's master-slave dialectic seems instructive here, since the master tries “to negate and marginalize the slave's otherness,” but whereas for Hegel the slave “finally subverts the master ... by asserting a difference, an otherness, which then is no longer ranked as inferior and unimportant,”75 this does not, did not, happen in the world that revolved around the great red sun of Mao Zedong.
Paradoxically, as Hu Angang has noted, Mao, the great critic of patriarchy, proved to be the supreme patriarch.76 In terms of archetypes available within the Chinese cultural repertoire, this meant that he became the focus of all the obligations of the three Confucian relationships (emperor-subject; father-son; husband-wife), now consolidated into
Page 17 of 27
one. The only discursive rival was the Party, anthropomorphized as “mother” in many a revolutionary song. The familial structure explicitly indicated by the “Party-as-mother” positions Mao, by implication, as the father figure, and it relegates the people to the roles of children. It is no surprise that these “children” should dress more like boys than girls, because children in a Chinese family were normatively boys. Asked how many children they had, a couple was very likely to answer with the number of sons, omitting the daughters altogether.77
With affective ties for parents conventionally transcending those for spouse, it is also unsurprising that in the charged atmosphere of the Cultural Revolution, Mao should become the unrivalled love object in China. For young Red Guards making their way to Beijing from the steppe, to gaze upon Mao's visage was “the greatest happiness.” The people of Yanbian, near the Korean border, “dearly loved Chairman Mao.” For the whole country, “dearly beloved Chairman Mao” was like “the great red sun in our hearts.”78 The songs of praise and devotion were endless. There were no other songs: love songs had become songs about Mao. To mark their relationship with him, the broad masses of the people used the marital double happiness symbol (shuangxi), carrying it aloft in parades and meetings. It was a sign that the duties and bonds once preserved for the wedding of a man and woman now marked instead their relationship with the Chairman.79 In the affective economy, women had in fact become superfluous.
The tendency toward invisibility of the clothed woman in pattern books seems best explained by the development and intensification of the Mao cult. If women were highly visible in other media such as film, stage performances, and propaganda posters, it is surely because of the contrast between performative pieces made in the service of the cult and the performance of gender roles in everyday life. The tendency toward invisibility of female figures, evident already in pattern books of the late 1950s, became marked in the period of the Cultural Revolution and gives pause for thought about the characterization of Chinese art in the Mao years as showing a “relative indifference to gender and the body as such.”80 The deliberate avoidance of drawing female bodies and designing women's clothes could not be a product of indifference.
Mao's death in 1976, like Stalin's in 1953, opened the way for change. Lined up in chronological order, pattern books of the late 1970s and early 1980s show the gradual
(p. 493) change of norms in tailoring and associated technical drawing. Women's styles become more numerous, are cut closer to the body, and shaped with darts at the bust. Bust measurements are taken, although with due circumspection: in 1981 it is a female rather than a male tailor who does the measuring.81 Graphic designers gradually became bolder, showing the effects of exposure to the brazen body culture of the capitalist West. In 1983, even as a campaign against “spiritual pollution” from the West got underway, a new collection of patterns published in Shanghai showed a female figure from front and rear with breast and buttocks outlined.82 This trailed the change in actual fashions by some margin, but importantly, confirmed the change. With anatomically detailed female bodies emerging back into plain sight, a new regime of visibility with its attendant complications was evidently in the making.
Brighenti, A. Mubi. Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research. Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.
Chen, Tina Mai. “Proletarian White and Working Bodies in Mao's China.” positions 11, no. 2 (2003): 361-393.
Evans, Harriet. “‘Comrade Sisters': Gendered Bodies and Spaces.” In Picturing Power in the People's Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, edited by Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, 63-78. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
Evans, Harriet. “Defining Difference: The ‘Scientific' Construction of Sexuality and Gender in the People's Republic of China.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 20, no. 2 (January 1995): 357-394.
Finnane, Antonia. Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation. London: Hurst, 2007.
Finnane, Antonia. “Sewing Manuals in 1950s China: Socialist Narratives and Dress Patterns from New Democracy to Socialist Transformation.” In Transglobal Fashion Narratives: Clothing Communication, Style Statements and Brand Storytelling, edited by Anne Peirson-Smith, and Joseph H. Hancock II, 115-136. London: Intellect, 2018.
Fu, Yingfei Xinfa jiancai: fengren jiaobenffiii^^,: (New cutting methods:
sewing primer). Beijing: Beijing Xinsheng Zhiye Xuexiao, 1951.
Gu, Tianyun Xifu caijian zhinan (Guide to Western tailoring). Shang
hai: Gu Tianyun, 1933.
Honig, Emily. “Socialist Sex: The Cultural Revolution Revisited.” Modern China 29, no. 2 (2003): 143-175.
Lin, Zhengbao ^^^. Caijian zhinan (Guide to garment cutting). Shanghai: Meilin
caijian fengxiu zhuanxisuo, 1954.
Rofel, Lisa. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Sun, Peidong. “The Collar Revolution: Everyday Clothing in Guangdong as Resistance in the Cultural Revolution.” The China Quarterly 227 (September 2016): 773-795.
Tang, Xiaobing. Visual Culture in Contemporary China. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Wang, Guizhang Caijian dianfan (King Fair instructions—cutting and
dressmaking). Shanghai: Jinghua hanshou xueyuan, 1951.
Wang, Zheng. Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1964. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016.
Zhou, Xiaoyi “1950-1980 Nian Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou diqu de fuzhuang kuanshi yu caijian gongyi 1950-1980 (Clothing
styles and tailoring techniques in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou areas, 1950-1980).” Master's thesis, Huanan nongye daxue, 2016.
Ai Qing
bufen nannu
Cao Hanmei W;2iM
Dai Yongfu
ganbufu
gezhong fuzhuang
Gu Tianyun
Jiang Naiyong
jianku pusu
jiefangfu
junbianfu
Ma Tianxiang
quanguo dazhong
shuangxi
tongzhi
Xiao Shufang
Ye Qianyu
Yu Feng
zhongxing
Page 20 of 27
zhuren
(1.) The present chapter is a product of research undertaken by the author as part of a Discovery Project funded by the Australian Research Council. In China, the only existing study appears to be a postgraduate thesis. See Zhou Xiaoyi “1950-1980 nian Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou diqu de fuzhuang kuanshi yu caijiang gongyi 1950-1980 (Clothing styles and tailoring techniques in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou Areas, 1950-1980),” master's thesis (Huanan nongye daxue, 2016), See also Antonia Finnane, “Sewing Manuals in 1950s China: Socialist Narratives and Dress Patterns from New Democracy to Socialist Transformation,” in Transglobal Fashion Narratives: Clothing Communication, Style Statements and Brand Storytelling, ed. Anne Peirson-Smith, and Joseph H. Hancock II (London: Intellect, 2018), 115-136.
(2.) Xiaobing Tang, Visual Culture in Contemporary China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 19.
(3.) Xinguancha banyuekan, April 16, 1955, 24.
(4.) Tina Mai Chen, “Proletarian White and Working Bodies in Mao's China,” Positions 11, no. 2 (2003): 361-393.
(5.) Mao Zedong, “The Women's Revolutionary Army (July 14, 1919)” in Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912-49, ed. Stuart Schram (Abingdon, UK: Routledge), vol. 1, 353; “Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912-49, ed. Stuart Schram (Abingdon, UK: Routledge), vol. 2, 338.
(6.) Ding Zheng, “Tan fuzhuang de bianhua he fuzhuang gaijin wenti”
(On the problem of changes and advances in clothing), Meishu, April 1956, 8.
(7.) Gail Hershatter, “Getting a Life: The Production of 1950s Women Labor Models in Rural Shaanxi,” in Beyond Exemplar Tales, ed. Joan Judge and Ying Hu (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 47.
(8.) Ding Ling T^, “Sanbajie yougan =A^W!^” (Thoughts on March 8th) in Ding Ling quanji T^^M (Complete works of Ding Ling), ed. Zhang Jiong Jiang Zulin and Wang Zhongchen I^tt, vol. 7, 10 vols. (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 2001), 62-63.
(9.) See Zheng Wang, Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1964 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), especially Chapter 3, “Creating a Feminist Cultural Front,” 78-111.
(10.) See discussion in Susan Brownell and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, eds., Chinese Feminini-ties/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 251.
(11.) A. Mubi Brighenti, Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 5.
(12.) Hissako Anjo, “Japanese Tailors and Tailoring Techniques: Focusing on the Reception of Western Tailoring Methods in the Early 20th Century” (Dressing Global Bodies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, 2016).
(13.) Gu Tianyun Xifu caijian zhinan (Guide to Western tailoring)
(14.) Jiang Naiyong Nannu yangfu caifengfa (How to cut and sew
Western garments, male and female), ed. Zong Lianghuan (Changsha: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1940).
(15.) Edgar Snow, The Long Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 24.
(16.) Ye Liqun Df^¥, Ji Zhixin and Tang Haitao eds., Zhiye jishu jiaoyuxue
(Vocational and technological education) (Fuzhou: Fujian jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995), 12.
(17.) “Chengqing chuangshe Beiping Dasheng sili zhiye xuexiao zhunyu beian
(Record of grant for petition to establish the Beiping Dasheng private vocational school), 24-3-1949. Beijing Municipal Archives 152-001-00001.
(18.) Fu Yingfei Xinfa jiancai: fengren jiaoben (New cutting meth
ods: sewing primer) (Beijing: Beijing xinsheng zhiye xuexiao), 1951 preface.
(19.) Ibid. See also an expanded, two-volume edition, Fu Yingfei Xinfa jiancai: fengren jiaoben (New cutting methods: sewing primer), 2 vols. (Beijing:
Beijing xinsheng xhiye xuexiao, 1954).
(20.) hh® Sun Po, Caifeng shouce (Tailor's manual) (Tianjin: Minde zhiye buxi
xuexiao, 1951).
(21.) Lin Zhengbao ^^^, Caijian hinan (Guide to cutting) (Shanghai: Meilin cai-
jian fengxiu zhuanxisuo, 1954).
(22.) See Wang Guizhang I±l^, Caijian dianfan (King Fair instructions—cutting
and dressmaking) (Shanghai: Jinghua hanshou xueyuan, 1951); Wang Guizhang I±l^, Fengren nanzhen (King Fair instructions—sewing and stitching) (Shanghai:
Jinghua, 1950).
(23.) Wang, Caijian dianfan, inside back cover; Fu, Xinfa jiancai, inside back cover.
(24.) K. L. Seligman, Cutting for All!: The Sartorial Arts, Related Crafts, and the Commercial Paper Pattern: A Bibliographic Reference Guide for Designers, Technicians, and Historians (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 7.
(25.) Antonia Finnane, “Tailors in 1950s Beijing: Private Enterprise, Career Trajectories, and Historical Turning Points in the Early PRC,” Frontiers of History 6, no. 1 (February 2011): 127.
(26.) Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 211.
(27.) Wang Guizhang Funu fuzhuang caizhifa (Cutting methods for
women's dress) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 1956).
(28.) 1956 nian Shanghaishi dier qinggongyeju guanyu di qishiyi zhi bashi she fuzhuangye shenqing chengli shengchan hezuo di sige baogao, zhangcheng, pifu 1956
(4th report, with regulations, and response, by Shanghai Municipal No 2 Light Industry Bureau concerning request by garment industry associations nos. 71-80 to establish production cooperatives, 1956). Shanghai Municipal Archives B158-1-216.
(29.) Dai Yongfu M^^, Zhu Xixiang Lin JiUA, eds., Fuzhuang fengren fa (Garment sewing methods) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 1963).
(30.) Beijingshi fuzhuang xiemao zongchangjt^^E^lifll&r, ed., Fuzhuang caijian jieshao (Garment cutting: an introduction) (Beijing: Beijingshi fuzhuang
xiemao zongchang, 1970), 8.
(31.) This style is frequently mentioned in association with women but was made in both male and female styles, and also in summer and winter styles. See Wei Qiming Xin-shi fengren jiancai fa (New style cutting and sewing methods) (Beijing: Bei
jing wenhua chubanshe, 1954), 47-48; Wang, Caijian dianfan, 57.
(32.) Nanchang fuzhuang zongchang yanjiushi ed., Fuzhuang fengren
gongyi caozuo (Technical processes for garment making) (Nanchang,
1970), 11, 13.
(33.) Fu Yingfei Xinfa jiancai: fengren jiaoben (New cutting meth
ods: sewing primer). Beijing: Beijing Xinsheng zhiye xuexiao, 6th ed., vol. 2 (Being: Fu Yingfei, 1954), 79; Wuhanshi sili Shenghua Xinqun fengren buxi xuexiao bianji weiyuan-hui ed., Caifengfa jiangyi (Materials on
tailoring methods) (Wuhan, 1956), 18; Shanghaishi fuzhuang gongye bangong bandu xuexiao geming weiyuanhui ed., Gongnongbing
fuzhuang caijian (Garment cutting for the workers, peasants and soldiers)
(Shanghai: Shanghaishi fuzhuang gongye bangong bandu xuexiao geming weiyuanhui, 1969).
(34.) Nanchang fuzhuang zongchang yanjiuzhi ed., Fuzhuang fengren
gongyi caozuo: buliao nannuzhuang shiyongben
(Dressmaking skills: men and women's clothing in cotton cloth, trial edition) (Nanchang: Nanchang fuzhuang zongchang, 1970).
(35.) Tianjinshi dier qinggongyeju fuzhuang shejishi, Tianjinshi Hepingqu dier fengren fuwu hezuoshe Yimin
eds, Fuzhuang caijian (Garment cutting) (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin
chubanshe, 1972), 124.
(36.) Laura Ugolini, Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain 1880-1939 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 53.
(37.) Jiang, Nannu yangfu caicengfa (How to cut and sew Western gar
ments, male and female), 9.
(38.) Wang, Caijian dianfan, 6-8.
(39.) See also Wuhanshi sili Shenghua Xinqun fengren buxi xuexiao bianji weiyuanhui
Caifengfa jiangyi (Materials on tailoring
methods), 8, 27.
(40.) Rosemary Roberts, “Intersections: Performing Gender in Maoist Ballet: Mutual Subversions of Genre and Ideology in the Red Detachment of Women,” Intersections: Gender & Sexuality in Asia & the Pacific, no. 16 (March 2008), http://intersections.anu.edu.au/is-sue16/roberts.htm.
(41.) Sun Xiong ^Met al., eds., Caijian yu fengren (Cutting and sewing) (Shang
hai: Shanghai kexue jishu chubanshe, 1981), foreword.
(42.) Wenqi Yang and Fei Yan, “The Annihilation of Femininity in Mao's China: Gender Inequality of Sent-down Youth during the Cultural Revolution,” China Information, no. 31 (February 13, 2017): 61, doi:https://doi-org.ezp.lib.unimelb.edu.au/ 10.1177/0920203X17691743.
(43.) See Shanghaishi fuzhuang gongye bangong bandu xuexiao geming weiyuanhui
Gongnongbing fuzhuang caijian (Garment
cutting for the workers, peasants and soldiers) (Shanghai: Shanghaishi fuzhuang gongye bangong bandu xuexiao geming weiyuanhui, 1969).
(44.) Tianjinshi hepingqu erfeng yimin fuzhuang jiagong menshibu
¥nP, ed., Fuzhuang caijian jiben fangfa (Basic methods of garment cut
ting) (Tianjin: Tianjinshi hepingqu dier fengrenshe yimin fuzhuang jiagong menshibu, 1971).
(45.) Beijingshi fuzhuang xiemao zongchang, Fuzhuang caijian jieshao.
(46.) Sun, Caijian yu fengren.
(47.) Shi diyi shangyeju geming weiyuanhui baogao (Report of
the municipal No 1 commerce bureau revolutionary committee), June 28, 1975. SMA B123-8-1400-2
(48.) Jiangxisheng fuzhuang xie mao yanjiusuo Fuzhuang liangcai
jiben zhishi (Garment measuring and cutting: basic knowledge) (Nan-
chang: Jiangxisheng fuzhuang xie mao yanjiusuo, 1969), 4.
(49.) Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 76.
(50.) A. Mubi Brighenti, Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 51.
(51.) Ibid.
(52.) Ibid., 5.
(53.) Anon., Fuzhuang caijian fengren jiben zhishi (Basic knowledge
of garment cutting and sewing (Shanghai: 1968/1969), 8.
(54.) Wuxi baihuo caigou gongying pifazhan^^S^^^^^ffi^^, Caijian riji (Dressmaking diary) (Wuxi: Chunyuan yinshuachang, 1977). One the economical collar, see Peidong Sun, “The Collar Revolution: Everyday Clothing in Guangdong as Resistance in the Cultural Revolution,” The China Quarterly 227 (September 2016): 773-795.
(55.) Harriet Evans, “‘Comrade Sisters': Gendered Bodies and Spaces.” In Picturing Power in the People's Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, edited by Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 66.
(56.) Ibid.
(57.) Wang, Finding Women in the State, 78.
(58.) A. M. Burton, “The White Woman's Burden: British Feminists and the Indian Woman, 1865-1915,” Women's Studies International Forum 13, no. 4 (1990): 295-308.
(59.) Ibid.
(60.) Cf. Jesús María Herrera Salas, “Ethnicity and Revolution: The Political Economy of Racism in Venezuela,” Latin American Perspectives 32, no. 2 (March 2005): 76-77.
(61.) Tuo Wang, The Cultural Revolution and Overacting: Dynamics between Politics and Performance (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 63.
(62.) Emily Honig, “Socialist Sex: The Cultural Revolution Revisited,” Modern China 29, no. 2 (2003): 143-175.
(63.) Polly Toynbee, “Behind the Burka,” The Guardian, September 28, 2001, https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/28/religion.afghanistan.
(64.) Harriet Evans, “Defining Difference: The ‘Scientific' Construction of Sexuality and Gender in the People's Republic of China,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 20, no. 2 (January 1995): 365.
(65.) Shan Windscript, “Agendas of the Self: Conformity and Deviations in Diaries of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” Unpublished paper presented at the Australian Historical Association (AHA) Conference, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, July 2-5.
(66.) Wang, Finding Women in the State, 109.
(67.) Beijingshi fuzhuang xiemao zongchang, Fuzhuang caijian jieshao, 1.
(68.) Jiangxisheng fuzhuang xie mao yanjiusuo Fuzhuang Liangcai
Jiben Zhishi (Garment measuring and cutting: basic knowledge) (Nan-
chang: Jiangxisheng fuzhuang xie mao yanjiusuo, 1969), front matter.
(69.) Qingdaoshi qinggongye xitong fuzhuang chukou fuwuzu
Fuzhuang Liangcai (Garment measuring and cutting) (Qingdao: Qingdaoshi
qinggongye xitong fuzhuang chukou fuwuzu, 1969), front matter.
(70.) Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun, The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics during the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972-1976 (New York: Routledge, 2014).
(71.) Tony Barnstone and Ping Chou, eds., The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 354.
(72.) On quasi-religious rituals developed around Mao, see Tuo Wang, The Cultural Revolution and Overacting: Dynamics between Politics and Performance (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 10-12.
(73.) Zhong Zhang, “Jiao Mao Zedong ‘Dage' de Mafa Wang Tiangxiang
(Wang Tianxiang: The Groom Who Called Mao Zedong ‘Elder Brother'),” Zhongguo gongchandang xinwen (News of the Communist Party of China), 2008, http://cpc.people.com.cn/GB/85037/8307731.html.
(74.) This is close to a point made by Harriet Evans Harriet Evans, “‘Comrade Sisters': Gendered Bodies and Spaces,” in Picturing Power in the People's Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, ed. Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 70.
(75.) Philip J. Kain, Hegel and the Other: A Study of the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 56.
(76.) Hu Angang, Mao and the Cultural Revolution (Honolulu: Silkroad Press, 2016), vol. 1, 93.
(77.) Zhang Weiguo, Chinese Economic Reforms and Fertility Behaviour: A Study of a North China Village (London: China Press, 2002), 167, n.11.
(78.) The references here are to songs sung in praise of Mao: “Caoyuanshang de renmin jiandao Mao zhuxi” (The people of the steppe see Chairman Mao),
composed in 1971; “Yanbian renmin reai Mao zhuxi” ^^AK?$S^£^(The people of Yan-bian dearly love Chairman Mao), again composed in 1971; (Wishing
Chairman Mao long life without end), composed in 1967.
(79.) There are many examples, whether in the form of propaganda posters or actual events. See, for example, a photograph by People's Daily former editor of Xu tak
en in Haidian, Beijing, in August 1966, at www.wenxuecity.com/news/ 2015/04/01/4152011.html
(80.) Mary Bittner Wiseman, “Gendered Bodies in Contemporary Chinese Art,” in Beauty Unlimited, ed. Peg Zeglin Brand (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 386.
(81.) Sun, Caijian yu fengren, 2-3.
(82.) Shanghaishi fuzhuang yanjiusuo, ed., Shanghai xinying fuzhuang: sheji, caijian, fengren. (New styles of clothing from Shanghai: designing, cutting,
sewing) (Shanghai: Shanghai kexue jishu chubanshe, 1983), 2.
Antonia Finnane
Antonia Finnane, Honorary Professor in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne
The Subject Who Knows: Photographers and the Photographed in the Late East Germany n
Sara Blaylock
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Aug 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.21
This article complicates the history of East German photography through an examination of works by Gundula Schulze Eldowy and Karin Wieckhorst, two contemporaries who navigated the realms of official and unofficial culture in the late eighties. The images selected are specifically drawn from series that focus on less than ideal bodies. Schulze Eldowy's nude portraits are set in conversation with her images of labor. Wieckhorst's series frames the subject of disability. The text demonstrates that both the photographers and their subjects were aware of how their images contested East Germany's fairly prescribed and predictable official image culture. This article argues, finally, that these photographs represent not simply a disidentification of the East German public with official state culture but also an increasing eagerness to redefine it.
Keywords: East Germany, photography, portraiture, nude, disability, worker photography, socialist realism, unofficial culture
East Germany's official aesthetic project followed the conventions of Soviet socialist realism, in particular its call to elevate and educate the masses through a schematic and iterative form of culture. The communist Germany (the German Democratic Republic, GDR) thus engaged the visual as an ideological instrument. State culture was an educational as well as an instructional tool. Central to the GDR's aesthetic education was a prioritization of the subject of labor.
The idealization of the laboring body is perhaps most apparent in East Germany's photographic culture.1 Even when state culture adopted photography as a form of fine art in the 1980s, the medium was still predominantly treated as a documentarian form to be leveraged as a weapon in the class struggle.2 Because photography entered the GDR's artistic vernacular quite late, nearly all of the country's photographers had been educated in the state's ideological definitions of the medium, which favored images with clear, didactic content, particularly in the photo essay form.3 At the same time that photogra-
Page 1 of 21 phers active in the 1980s began to break free from the confines of a prescriptive photographic culture by adopting more spontaneous and less ideological practices than their predecessors, they nevertheless maintained a socialist-inspired aesthetic. In fact, many photographers in the late GDR continued to embrace the state's priority to represent the everyday person. However, their representations differed starkly from the state's gilded approach. From the rampant alcoholism that plagued East German society to the toil of labor on the body to the less than idealistic shape of both able-bodied and disabled citizens, these photographers showed what the state had carefully excised from its official visual culture.
This chapter offers a historical overview of photographic culture in the GDR to illustrate how the medium was used to reflect and buoy the communist vision of an (p- 501) emancipated proletarian society. It complicates this history by looking at the work of Gundula Schulze Eldowy4 and Karin Wieckhorst, two contemporaries who represented less than ideal bodies in their photo essays. I draw from multiple series by Schulze Eldowy, including her nude portraits and images of labor, to consider how the artist embraced a critical documentary style to capture everyday life in the GDR. I place Schulze Eldowy in conversation with Wieckhorst, paying special attention to her series on people with disabilities.
More than an examination of the inherent—and well-storied—contradictions between state culture and lived reality, this text argues that work by Schulze Eldowy and Wieckhorst must be interrogated as reciprocal engagements between the photographer and her subject. I define these images as reflections of agency, as opposed to victimization. My analysis borrows implicitly from Martha Rosler's critique of “victim photography,” which she defines as photography that “has been much more comfortable in the company of moralism than wedded to a rhetoric or program of revolutionary politics.”5 I invoke Rosler as a reminder of both the East German state's own instrumentalization of image culture (that is to say, its use of moralizing images to legitimate its ideology), as well as to counter the West's Cold War warrior narrative, which has come to define East Germans as victims, rather than agents, of history. In contrast, as citizens who had been subjected to a highly ideological and manipulative visual culture, the East Germans that Schulze El-dowy and Wieckhorst capture on camera are both aware of their subjectification and in control of it.
A small naked man named Lothar sits on a daybed covered by a dark plaid bedspread (see Figure 21.1). The head of the bed is slightly upturned. Lothar nods his face downward and gazes at the space where the feet of his photographer stand. A cabinet filled with trinkets shielded by smudged glass and topped by no fewer than nineteen liquor bottles is mounted behind him. Many small cutout images of naked women consume the wall beneath this fixture. At his bedside, hung horizontally and at eye level, is a three-quarter portrait of a clothed woman. This is Lothar's imaginary companion.
This is the second of two portraits Schulze Eldowy made of Lothar, who worked as a courier for the East Berlin public transportation service. Her first photograph, taken shortly after their first encounter in 1982, depicts Lothar in his professional uniform and a woolen ushanka with the ears tied up. From a description Schulze Eldowy includes with her diptych, we know that somewhere tucked within Lothar's loosely fitting jacket is a second bag, in which he carries a few personal effects—pictures of naked women but also postcards from all over the world—“the same clutter as in his bedroom.”6
We know from Schulze Eldowy's description that Lothar is obsessed with the naked female form. We also know that he is a virgin, and that he has explicitly asked Schulze Eldowy to take his naked portrait. “Little one,” he inquired in her studio one day, “would you also make a nude photo of me? I've never had one taken before.”7 After trying a few
(p. 502) shots in Schulze Eldowy's apartment, the two elected to move to Lothar's home. In the portrait, his small body blends into its environment—as if we are seeing a man at the end of his day, or perhaps its beginning.
Regina Reichert appears in the middle of a street in East Berlin. She casts both arms joyfully to the left and right of her wheelchair. Regina's body is small within the picture, which flanks her between a sidewalk to her left and a row of cars to her right. In the distance, a lone woman walks toward the camera. Further behind her still, at the end of the road, the sky appears clear and bright; it is spring, maybe summer.
Regina celebrates a sunny day, as well as a newly gained independence. Wieckhorst has captured her at the end of a several-year process of moving from a small town in the GDR to its capital. She had photographed Regina for four years, producing a handful of images that document her life as a paraplegic advancing toward greater independence in East German society. The photographs cast Regina as a happy and uninhibited person. We see her nude and toweling off her stylish blonde hair in one image and getting a piggy-back ride from a roommate in another.
Regina is one of two disabled people Wieckhorst would follow between 1981 and 1985 for a series on disability initially commissioned by the East German government as part of its participation in a worldwide advocacy campaign. Both Regina and Siegmar Schulze, also paraplegic, participated actively in this project. They invited Wieckhorst into their private lives, helped her to select which images to include in the series, and contributed to texts that accompanied their images.
(p. 503) These two sets of images act as a hinge that opens to multiple interpretive models of East Germany's photographic culture. Gundula Schulze Eldowy's photographs of Lothar are both biographical and emblematic of their photographer's objective to capture everyday life through intimate exchange with her subjects. Wieckhorst's images of Regina are unique within the pantheon of East Germany's idealistic visual culture. Finally, both sets of images represent the collaborative, rather than illustrative, spirit of their authors. That exchange evinces a degree of agency that problematizes state hegemony— both real and mythologized.
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
—Susan Sontag, On Photography
As W P. Jefanow, the secretary of the Union of Soviet Artists, would explain in 1953, the thematic principle of socialist realism required artists to “represent reality in its revolutionary development, in its most progressive appearances.”8 Culture in state socialism was thus not only charged with representing but actually producing a communist future. East German state culture espoused a dogmatic view of photography's objectivity. Photography's relationship to reality—precisely its ability to “furnish evidence” as Susan Sontag notes—could be leveraged in support of socialist ideology.9 Press photography played a particularly important role in this regard. “Systematically staged,” as T.O. Im-misch writes, official photography of East Germany was meant to appear “as a natural and immediate representation of reality.”10 The use of photography as a technology of socialism was rooted in historical precedent. As Sarah James has demonstrated, theorists of photography looked to Weimar-era photo essays, including images from the Arbeiterfotografie (worker photography) movement, as a model for representing and critiquing social relations and inequalities. In particular, August Sander's 1929 photo essay Face of Our Time became standard material for students of photography in the GDR. James calls this work a visual “instruction atlas,” explaining that “Sander's typologizing series and the sober, frontal style of his photography ... provided a central model for the photographic representation of social life through portraiture and, by proxy, a crucial means of photographically fashioning the socialist self.”11 Face of Our Time included figures like the communist revolutionaries Erich Mühsam and Paul Frölich who would become important icons to socialist and revolutionary culture in the GDR.12 Such figures conformed neatly to socialist realism's penchant for visualizing and universalizing an ideal socialist character.
Photography's indexical relationship to reality, as Hermann Exner would write in the state-run photography journal Fotografié in 1961, distinguished it as a more (p- 504) psychological, technical, and economical medium than other creative forms.13 The photograph represented not only a more efficient and effective mode of representation than any other cultural form. Officials also considered it to be less vulnerable to manipulation than other media.14 Certainly, as Sontag demonstrates, the faith in photography's facticity is not unique to East Germany. “The camera record justifies,” she writes, becoming “incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened.”15 And, although she allows for some degree of skepticism (“the picture may distort”), “there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture.”16 Maintaining photography's evidentiary status remained central to its utility in the GDR's public culture. Sontag calls this the camera's “aggression,” a characterization that helps explain the almost bullish role that photography can play, particularly in a context where open debate and contestation were summarily absent, in fact prohibited, from public life.17 Of course, because official culture selected the images it saw fit to print, and trained its photographers in a specific documentary mode, the truth of East German photography must be filtered through the heavy hand of state socialist ideology. Socialism's success resounded because its images “proved” that success.
In fact, the GDR's official photography unrealistically affirmed state power to the bitter end. As John P. Jacob's research on Fotografié demonstrates, images of the toppled Berlin Wall or the massive civic protests that preceded this event in the fall of 1989 did not appear in the pages of the publication until the end of 1990. Observing that the magazine folded in March 1991—more than six months before German reunification—he writes that “in its failure to recognize this most spectacular event through the photography of everyday life, [F]otografie lost its opportunity to stay relevant to East Germans living and working in a fundamentally altered world.”18 Certainly, this lack of relevance of the GDR's official photographic culture to the average citizen may be explained by a number of historical circumstances—not least of which was the sudden unrestricted access to Western culture, which would have significantly challenged the GDR's only professional photo publication. Be that as it may, recalcitrant cultural bureaucrats who refused to support photography that challenged the status quo had sown their own irrelevance long before these dramatic changes. In fact, even while the state notably relaxed its restrictions on art and culture, the public face of photography remained quite dogmatic.19 As Matthew Shaul writes, “even into the 1980s, cultural theorists ignored the increasingly significant photographic art being produced at the fringes of official culture by such artists as Gundula Schuze Eldowy ... and remained fixated on an agitational socialist photojournalism.”20 For instance, although photographs by Schulze Eldowy appeared in a 1981 issue of Fotografié, the editors selected the artist's landscape photographs instead of her signature nude portraiture. Speaking more generally of the disconnect between individual style and publication opportunities, Shaul observes “that official press photography, of course, conveyed images not of life as it was lived, but as it was supposed to become.”21 Here, Shaul
Page 5 of 21 identifies the continued importance of the dialectical methodology of socialist realism, specifically the way that the state instrumentalized art and visual culture.
(p. 505) Whereas the catalogue of ideal types and narratives of worker heroes may have made sense as part of the post-World War II recovery, these didactic representations became contested categories for many artists living in the late GDR. For photographers, the contestation was particularly pronounced as the opportunities to nuance official representations of lived reality remained almost entirely outside the scope of public culture. “This explains,” Bernd Lindner writes, “why many well-known East German photographers began their careers as picture journalists and often kept this function as a second string to their bow even when they achieved artistic recognition.”22 Here Lindner refers to the generation of artists who came before Schulze Eldowy and Wieckhorst, specifically, Evelyn Richter and Arno Fischer, who actually taught both photographers at the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts. His observation also signals the importance of distinguishing not the official (or state) photographers from the unofficial or experimental ones, but, as Christoph Tannert has suggested, distinguishing the published from the unpublished photographs.23 This designation invites a more nuanced understanding of photographic practices by artists whose work may be deemed experimental, but who sometimes appeared in state journals or exhibitions. The published/unpublished distinction also invites a discussion about the idiosyncratic nature of state support for artists. In this case, Schulze Eldowy and Wieckhorst are exemplary figures. Both trained at one of the GDR's few art schools and were accepted, no less, into a line of study that by Sigrid Hofer's account typically only invited four to six students per year.24 Both artists were members of the staterun Union of Fine Artists (Verband Bildender Künstler, VBK), an absolute necessity for professionalization as an artist in the GDR. At the same time, Wieckhorst documented the exhibitions of one of the GDR's most notorious independent art galleries, Leipzig's EIGEN+ART. Under threat from the Stasi who once planned to imprison her, Schulze El-dowy hid her negatives in a bedframe or had them smuggled across the border to be printed in West Berlin. The ability for both artists to be at times supported and at other times vilified by the state demonstrates fluidity between categories that characterized experimental art, especially in the late GDR.25 It also, as Candice Hamelin has argued, demonstrates the difficulty East German cultural and state officials faced in defining appropriate forms of photographic practice.26
The GDR experienced two strains of experimental photography in its final decade. The first, which played with subject more than form, includes the work of Schulze Eldowy and Wieckhorst. It is much more challenging to synthesize the second more media-oriented experimentations with photography as exemplified by artists such as Thomas Florschuetz, Micha Brendel, Kurt Buchwald, Jörg Knöfel, and Klaus Hähner-Springmühl. Nevertheless, as I have argued elsewhere, the attention these artists paid to the body in relation to the camera also embraces the implicit critique of state culture's unrealistic representations of the East German subject.27 In contrast, the experimentation with subject matter exemplified by Schulze Eldowy and Wieckhorst renders a much more explicit critique. Historical precedent in part explains that clarity. Photographers like Evelyn Richter, Arno Fischer, and Roger Melis began working in a critical documentary form in the early 1950s.
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Their images, which deliberately contrasted the ideological vision of status quo photography while still maintaining a socialist ethic, referred (p- 506) to Weimar-era social critique, the straight photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson and his Magnum studio, as well as the American photographers Diane Arbus and Robert Frank.28
Series that adopt a less schematic, didactic, and predictable approach to a conventional socialist subject best illustrate photographers' efforts to create an alternative socialist idiom for photography. Beginning in the 1950s, Richter began shooting images of women at work, typically as they engaged with some form of heavy industry. These portraits follow a traditional worker-portrait style popular in East German painting and photography but distort the heroism of the genre. For example, as James has observed, both At the Linotype Machine and At the Die Cutter reveal the women “in all their exhaustion and frustration either deliberately dwarfed by the claustrophobic machinery or with their bodies prosthetically extended and encased by the cogs and wheels.”29 Richter pursued this project into the 1980s, but she was never permitted to publish the images. Comparison of her images to photos of work that appeared in publication in the late GDR highlights the uniqueness of Richter's camera eye as well as the extent to which official culture maintained idealistic images of labor without regard for new vocabularies such as hers. For example, an untitled image by Thomas Klaber, a photography student, which appeared in a 1986 issue of Fotografie, exemplifies the clear and didactic content preferred in official culture. In this case, Klaber's portrait of a man on the job at a natural gas plant is clearly posed and framed to convey a narrative of progress and job satisfaction. The pipe at the right of the frame directs the viewer to the backdrop of industry from which this man emerges. His face is clear, the robustness of his slightly chubby body (in fact, the ideal body type for a worker) highlighted by his contrapposto stance, which is clearly contrived.30 In comparison, Richter's photographs of work would continue to obscure the faces of their ostensible subjects, thus drawing attention to the anonymity, the toil, the boredom, and so on that many experienced in work. The significance of her imagery, which influenced photographers for years to come, demonstrates their realism. Those who dared to defy convention did not have to search for marginalized or hidden subjects. In this sense, East Germany's less than ideal reality was hiding in plain sight.
Photography is privileged to help man view himself, expand and preserve his experiences, and exchange vital communication—a faithful instrument whose reach need not extend farther than that of the way of life it reflects.
—Rudolf Arnheim, “On the Nature of Photography”
In his path-breaking text from 1974, Rudolf Arnheim contests the purported objectivity of the photographic medium, but nevertheless stresses its significance as a bearer of
(p. 507) truth. Arnheim draws attention to the subjects of documentary photography who watch their captor consciously by “displaying themselves for him cheerfully or ceremoniously or by watching him with suspicious attention.”31 “This is a man under observation,” he continues, “concerned with his image, exposed to danger or to the prospect of great fortune by simply being looked at.”32 Arnheim—a German-Jewish World War Il-era émigré —writes from a landscape of American visual culture, where documentary photography's vulnerability to politicization and instrumentalization had grown increasingly evident in the wake of the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement. Although photography had historically been used as an instrument of power, as John Tagg has observed, and Michel Foucault has foregrounded, at the time Arnheim wrote his text the subjects of the camera were becoming increasingly aware of their instrumentalization.33 (Of course, less than a decade later Martha Rosler would publish her critique of how photographs could lead the well-intentioned liberal to pity and victimize inequality rather than confront it.34) On the other hand, the awareness of photography's political potential also lends a degree of agency and intentionality on the part of the photographer's subject. This is Arnheim's thesis. Photography is an instrument that may also help “man view himself” in his best light —literally filtered through the lens of his preference.35 While Arnheim's text directly theorizes American visual culture, it also helps to explain a visual literacy emerging in the Eastern Bloc's photographic culture in the same era. More precisely, the agency Arnheim observes in the sitter is also observable in the subjects of experimental photography of the late GDR.
The work of photographers like Schulze Eldowy and Wieckhorst offers demonstrable evidence of a culture of self-aware sitters: “man and woman after they have eaten from the tree of knowledge.”36 Lothar, photographed by Schulze Eldowy, in effect, literalizes Arnheim's Adam and Eve metaphor in his desire to be depicted nude. He is not ashamed of his body; he wishes to show it off. That desire confronts what I term the GDR's taboo of the ordinary—drawing attention to a fundamental irony of East German visual culture.37 The “mindless, blissful smile that is the constant factor throughout the visual imagery of the GDR”—what Stefan Wolle calls “the smiling face of dictatorship”—had revealed itself to be unrealistic, transparent.38 And that transparency revealed a fundamental irony in East Germany's national culture, which depended on, but could not maintain, a predictable and prescriptive unity. Lothar's awareness of Schulze Eldowy's status as a photographer suggests that he sought an audience for his naked visage. It may be argued that Lothar's desires were perverse, even predatory. Nevertheless, the possibility that Schulze Eldowy could place him on full display, and thus reveal his sexual misbehavior, clearly did not subdue him. In fact, Schulze Eldowy established herself a few years after meeting Lothar with the success of a solo exhibition at the Galerie Weißer Elefant (White Elephant Gallery) in East Berlin. An exhibition at the gallery, an official space administrated by the Union of Fine Artists, featured the artist's nude photographs, including those drawn from the thesis project she had successfully defended in 1984. The series includes an array of body types—from Lothar's shrunken mass to a young woman posing contrap-posto with an elegant cigarette holder to a trans person with genitals as carefully tucked as eyes are painted and wig is coifed. In all cases, Schulze (p- 508) Eldowy's nudes appear in their own homes and pose uniquely: seated, standing, at repose, always surrounded by, with, or in front of domestic objects such as radios, plants, and fur pelts. These are subjects who know, that is to say, who are in the know. Exposure suggests a self-awareness, even a self-confidence, which in other contexts might be less political. In the GDR, however, the images that Schulze Eldowy gathered represented lives not simply absent, but excised from official life. As Josie McLellan has observed, “Under socialism, the responsibility of the photographer was to contribute to social progress, not to highlight its shortcom-ings.”39 Of course, this begs the question of a shortcoming. Schulze Eldowy saw her subjects as derelict and forgotten: “How could so many people live in the most degrading circumstances?”40 This question motivated her to venture into the private enclaves of her East Berlin neighbors, the dirty bowels of factory buildings, and the dying landscape of hospital wards. Schulze Eldowy sought to underscore the divide between the country's stated support for its citizens and their lived reality. And yet her images and the texts that narrate them reveal a human tenacity that calls degradation a circumstance and not a diagnosis. In these photos, shortcomings define the state and not its subjects.
More to the point, Schulze Eldowy's photographs of imperfect bodies, like Wieckhorst's images of the disabled, demonstrate a range of representation that contested status quo photographic culture. The rebellion may not be defined simply by the content of the images. Since 1958, as Karl Gernot Kuehn notes, East Germany's Kulturbund (Cultural Association), which administered the guidelines for organized culture and clubs,41 had made it “acceptable to depict the disadvantaged.”42 That acceptance must be contextualized within a state culture, which produced images that underscored the centrality of the state. The difference between images by Schulze Eldowy and Wieckhorst and those produced by and for official culture defines their political claim. Theirs is not “victim photography” that reaffirmed the necessity of the state. These are portraits of citizens with self-ascribed dignity made manifest by the evidence of the photograph. These are ordinary East Germans, as they saw themselves, and as they saw each other.
Scholars have carefully considered the power of editorial boards and functionaries who worked within associations like the VBK or the Kulturbund, including the impacts their decision making had on East German culture. Texts by people such as Esther von Richthofen, Matthew Shaul, and John P. Jacob demonstrate that a lack of consistency or responsiveness to the actual interests of East Germans severely diminished the authority of state culture.43 What remains to be explored is the impact an inconsistent cultural authority had on the East German public. More pointedly, I propose that an increase in
(p. 509) citizen-led culture-through amateur cultural clubs, for example—accompanied by a diminishing presence of the socialist hero iconography in mass culture, contributed to a more self-aware and, in turn, agentic public.
Although East German culture continued to valorize work using the same conservative schematics of socialist realism, the divide between its idealistic representation and lived reality increased irreparably over time. Naming the late GDR a “workerly society,” Wolfgang Engler diagnoses this rift between state representation and lived reality as a crisis
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of power and subjectification.44 He identifies the continued dependence that East German officials had on a national identification with the proletariat even as they increasingly failed to serve this public:
Rarely has a political system held its public on such a short leash, the responsibilities of its most important class more harshly reduced, its idealism more harshly tested as this one ... And seldom has leadership in modern times incapacitated the working class for so long and to such an extent, while at the same time depending on it.45
While Engler's suggestion that the working class had little political agency is certainly true in terms of the GDR's hierarchical governance, East Germany's "workerly" society was nevertheless clearly aware that the state it depended upon often neglected to fulfill its promises. Thus, even as visual—and especially photographic—culture continued to address the proletarian subject, the identification of the average East German with these images became increasingly tenuous. This bears out in photography as well as film and fine arts, which challenged the ideas of state socialism on a very public scale. For example, the East German cinema's move to everyday themes in the late 1960s demonstrates that state culture actually supported a distancing from state politics and worker heroes.46 Painting, the most lauded of fine arts, likewise saw a shift toward everyday and even implicitly state-critical themes in part as a result of the party leader Erich Honecker's 1971 proclamation for a "broader and more diverse" artistic culture.47
Amateur culture clubs likewise helped to cultivate greater creative autonomy and critical awareness around image production in East German society. Hobby photographers had ample opportunities to exhibit their work in regional exhibitions as well as in a publication dedicated to nonprofessional photography, Fotokino Magazin. Sizable grants and other financial incentives also promoted hobby photography. Around the same time as citizens gained more autonomy in their free time—indeed, no doubt in response to this free-dom—the Ministry of State Security (Stasi) increased its reliance on citizen spies.48 Moreover, Esther von Richthofen argues that the expansion of amateur cultural clubs permitted the state to have increased control over people's leisure time through "organized cultural life."49 Nevertheless, an unanticipated consequence of hobby circles was the emergence of more critical modes of artistic production. This has already been demonstrated within experimental film, which partially originated in local film clubs.50 It stands to reason that as people gained more access to producing and discussing culture on their own terms, they also became more aware of the stakes and vulnerabilities inherent in image production. Ironically, the attention to equipping average (p- 510) citizens with the tools to produce culture fulfills socialist realism's materialist premise—namely that providing cultural actors with the means of production would inspire a more critical culture.51
Amateur cultural groups flourished as an outgrowth of the so-called Bitterfelder Weg (Bitterfeld Way). The state program began in 1959 and aimed to put cultural actors in closer contact with the proletarian subjects of their work. East German artists and writers received grants and contracts to place themselves in the actual work environments of “real existing socialism.” In these environs, artists were to teach the working class about high art and culture through classes, discussions, and participation in the production of artworks. Likewise, workers were to teach the artists what it meant to be a worker. Then Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland, SED) leader Walter Ulbricht envisioned that these exchanges would lead to more heroic images of the worker, while also increasing the interest of the average person in culture. The irony of Bitterfeld is that it worked too well as a tool for educating artists on the harsh realities of the labor they were meant to valorize. Artists became more attuned to the experience of the subjects of (and audience for) their work. They translated the reality of untidy or inconsistent economic policy or cultural and class inequality onto the pages, canvases, and film of the era, which began to not only shed the layers of socialist realism's dogma but also to critique the state.52
Although the government shuttered the Bitterfeld program in 1965, just six years after it began, artists still could rely upon governmental contracts or allowances to enter worksites. This support explains in part the decades-long scope of Richter's portraits of women at work, which she began as part of the Bitterfeld program and pursued independently into the 1980s. Schulze Eldowy likewise received indirect support from the VBK to produce a series of worker-portraits. When she went to a rubber factory in the small Thuringien town of Bad Blankenburg to begin her “Work” series, Schulze Eldowy presented the foreman with an official reference letter from the Union of Fine Artists, to which she had recently gained membership. Of course, she went to the factory on her own volition; her interest in photographing the men at work was one way to address her fascination with everyday people and their lives. Nevertheless, the letter from the professional artists' union gave her access to the worksite that would have surely been otherwise restricted. That legitimation actually made her at first suspicious to the men she photographed. Reflecting contemporaneously, she would write:
Artists aren't thought highly of because they fall to their knees for the state. Journalists, photographers, and writers usually praise and sweet talk the socialist paradise. I don't see any paradise. At the beginning, I had to run the gauntlet with the workers. They avoided the camera, presumed that I was a state artist.53
Schulze Eldowy ultimately earned the trust of her subjects through multiple visits to the factory, including ventures into its dirty bowels and caverns of industry.54
The rubber factory photographs picture workers buried in their work. Sometimes, in similar fashion to Richter's series of women, the laborers look entombed by the factory.
(p. 511) They toil behind machinery or bend their bodies over its interminable metal. The human body appears vulnerable and at risk of breaking in these candid black-and-white photos. In other images Schulze Eldowy's subjects look at the camera. Several wear masks or dark glasses, feeble protections alongside the mass of steel they operate and steam they inhale. Portraits that capture expressions of exhaustion at moments of rest are some of her most affecting. In one untitled image, a man and woman in coveralls, white caps, and jackets appear seated together (see Figure 21.2). Fatigue is legible on both of their faces. The man leans his back against a window frame behind him, his body collapsing onto his left side. He smokes and looks distantly into the camera. His companion, who appears younger owing to her long curly blonde locks, cups her face in her hands. Her elbows seem as if they may slip off their perch on her left and right knees. She stares at the floor in front of her. This image of work is conspicuously void of work. On a break, the man and woman are in between duties. They are not rejuvenated by their labors, but exhausted by them.
Schulze Eldowy's photographs of work may represent the dehumanizing quality of hard labor, but this is not their signature message. By highlighting the unheroic reality of work, she underscores the illusion of any image of work that occludes, distracts, or erases this reality. Yet, even as they return the human body to labor, these photographs do not dwell on a message of victimization. These are not passive subjects, but men who willingly appeared for Schulze Eldowy's camera. They are not heroes, as the state would wish them to be, but they are also not its victims. The photographs are then small acts of
(p. 512) self-determination—moments when workers are allowed to just be people on the job, rather than the builders of utopia.
While such images of labor demythologize work by showing it for what it is—messy, exhausting, dirty, dull—Schulze Eldowy's uncomplicated nudes and Wieckhorst's quotidian images of disability offer a more direct claim to self-determination in the face of official photographic practice. Josie McLellan has argued that the emergence of a new generation of artists in the 1980s, particularly those working with nude photography, evinces a shift in the public attitude toward state idealism, particularly its cult of the youthful, healthy, and vigorous body. She observes that when artists took “as their subjects men, children, the old, the overweight and the physically disabled, not only did their photographs point out the hypocrisy of mainstream nude photography, but they also drew at-
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tention to the regime's social and economic failures.”55 Regina Reichert and Siegmar Schulze rarely appear nude or even partially undressed. Nevertheless, their portraits draw explicit attention to their bodies in ways that mirror the work at play in Schulze Eldowy's unidealized nudes.
Wieckhorst includes four images in a sequence on Siegmar Schulze published in the West German arts magazine Niemandsland (No Man's Land).56 The first depicts him in his living room with his wife. She holds his bare chest and appears to whisper or nuzzle into his ear as he grips a coffee mug in his right hand. Signs of a disability are markedly absent in the image, which documents a tender and familiar moment between lovers. In the second photograph, Schulze lies in bed reaching his head over a basin as a nurse washes his hair. The flaccid drape of his body contrasts the rigid band that he tightly grasps with his left hand to secure his position. A wheelchair to the left of this scene also figures prominently in the final two images. In these, Siegmar appears in the midst of transport. First, a woman—likely his wife—wheels him backward between a path of furniture through a living room and into a brightly lit kitchen. Next, two men hoist him in his chair down a stairwell. For the first time, Siegmar looks at Wieckhorst's camera. His gaze is poignant, framed by a bevy of intent onlookers observing his body: the man behind him who guides his chair, the man in front of him who bears it down the stairs, and two small children who stand across from each other at the top of the wide stairwell and grip the bannister. Wieckhorst includes a text written by Siegmar with these four photographs. In it, he glosses the previous two decades, from the freak swimming accident that left him a paraplegic in June 1964 to his many moves into and out of nursing homes, to his marriage, and the recent purchase and renovation of a home he is readying for his imminent occupation.
The series belies nothing of its East German context. This, like the photo essay of Regina, documents a man's life told from his perspective. Its subject is, of course, disability. These photographs in fact humanize the subject of disability in part by granting it an audience. Specifically, people can gaze at images of disabled bodies without feeling (p- 513) ashamed and, in that opening, begin to see a range of emotion beyond pity. By permitting people to look at them, Siegmar and Regina claim control over their own image. In so doing, they define themselves as agents, not victims. This right to be seen likewise grants what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls “the right to look”—a political claim that recalibrates the power of vision by redefining both what is worthy of being seen and who is worthy of doing the seeing.57 Onlookers participate in the creation of a more dynamic visual culture by looking at Siegmar and Regina. Their experience with disability is specific, but nevertheless metaphorical—a reminder of the heterogeneity that lay beneath the surface of typical representations of everyday life in East Germany.
Karl Gernot Kuehn describes Siegmar as a socialist antihero: “He is essentially unproductive and thus incapable of embodying the virtues of socialism.”58 In his estimation, Wieckhorst's portraits testify “to an indifferent destiny—a completely unfamiliar worldview in the GDR.”59 Kuehn's analysis is consistent with how the Soviet Union determined the rights of the disabled to social services and other benefits, which, according to an
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thropologist Sarah D. Phillips, reflected a privileging of “work capacity as the primary criterion for citizenship.”60 It is thus unsurprising that the disabled faced profound physical and social marginalization, including limitations on education and career advancement couched as protections that ultimately reinforced their erasure from public life and effectively denied them “a common humanity.”61 Although Phillips's cases are drawn from Russia and Ukraine, it is safe to assume that a comparable pathologizing of disability existed in the GDR. Clearly, Wieckhorst's impulse to present images that celebrate rather than pity disability responded to this tendency. Moreover, it is not Siegmar's disability, but his interest in putting that disability on display, which reveals the “indifference” to the GDR ableist worldview that Kuehn observes. Similarly, Schulze Eldowy's workers, as well as her nudes, reveal a sense of self-worth that contradicts the heroic proletarian worldview associated with the GDR. This raises an important question of the dominance of that worldview, that is to say its familiarity or relevance. The viewpoint that Schulze Eldowy and Wieckhorst, as well as Richter and others before them, present on film, with the cooperation of their sitters, is arguably more familiar than that promoted in East Germany's official visual culture. These are subjects who have eaten from the tree of knowledge. They have harnessed the power of photographic evidence to redefine reality. In short, the subjects of Schulze Eldowy and Wieckhorst's photography are not outsiders, but insiders. They are subjects who know and subjects who are in the know. Their imperfections are thus not only hegemonic but dominant-expressions of the shared experience of East German state socialism. To misrecognize their agency is to reaffirm the authority their portraits contest.
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Jacob, John P. Personal interview. February 5, 2016.
James, Sarah. Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures across the Iron Curtain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
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Kuehn, Karl Gernot. Caught: The Art of Photography in the German Democratic Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Löser, Claus. Strategien der Verweigerung: Untersuchungen zum politisch-ästhetischen Gestus unangepasster filmischer Artikulation in der Spätphase der DDR. Berlin: DEFA-Stiftung, 2011.
Martin, Anne, ed. Foto-Anschlag: vier Generationen ostdeutscher Fotografen. Leipzig, Germany: E.A. Seemann, 2001.
McLellan, Josie. “Visual Dangers and Delights: Nude Photography in East Germany.” Past & Present 205 (November 2009): 143-174.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look. A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Muschter, Gabriele, ed. DDR Frauen fotografieren. Berlin: Verlag, 1989.
Niemandsland (“Angehaltene Zeit / Fotografie aus der DDR”) 2, no. 7 (1988).
Phillips, Sarah D. “‘There Are No Invalids in the USSR!': A Missing Soviet Chapter in the New Disability History.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2009), http://dsq-sds.org/ article/view/936/1111.
Ribalta, Jorge, ed. The Worker Photography Movement (1926-1939). Madrid: TF Editores & Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2011.
von Richthofen, Esther. Bringing Culture to the Masses: Control, Compromise, and Participation in the GDR. New York: Berghahn Books: 2009.
Rosler, Martha. In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography) (1981), http://web.pdx.edu/~vcc/Seminar/Rosler_photo.pdf
Schierz, Kai Uwe. “Im Auftrag des Staates: Die Gesellschaft für Fotografie im Kulturbund der DDR. Ein potent-impotentes Allmachtssystem der 1980er Jahre.” Fotogeschichte 102 (Winter 2006): 25-30.
Schierz, Kai Uwe, ed. Die andere Leipziger Schule: Fotografie in der DDR. Bielefeld, Germany: Kerber Verlag, 2009.
Schulze Eldowy, Gundula. Berlin in einer Hundenacht (Berlin on a Dog's Night). Leipzig, Germany: Lehmstadt Verlag, 2011.
Schulze Eldowy, Gundula. Am fortgewehten Ort. Berliner Geschichten. Leipzig, Germany: Lehmstadt Verlag, 2011.
Shaul, Matthew. “The Impossibility of Socialist Realism: Photographer Gundula Schulze-Eldowy and the East German Stasi” In Conspiracy Dwellings: Surveillance in Contemporary Art, edited by Outi Remes and Pam Skelton, 19-34. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Rosetta Books, 2005.
Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Tannert, Christoph. Personal interview. May 11, 2015.
Wolle, Stefan. “The Smiling Face of Dictatorship: On the Political Iconography of the GDR.” In German Photography 1870-1970, eds. Klaus Honnef, Rolf Sachsse, and Karin Thomas, 127-138. Cologne, Germany: Dumont, 1997.
(1.) The foundations of the ideological use of photography in images of labor in the GDR have its origins in the pre-World War II genre of Arbeiterfotografie (worker photography). For more on this movement, see Jorge Ribalta, ed., The Worker Photography Movement (1926-1939) (Madrid: TF Editores & Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2011).
(2.) Significantly, photography would not be professionalized as a fine art form until the early 1980s. For example, the Union of Fine Artists first established a photography working group in 1981, which led to the admission of photographers into this organization, which represented fine arts professionals. Photography first appeared in the national art exhibition in Dresden in its ninth iteration, which took place in 1982/83.
(3.) Sarah James identifies these legacies but nevertheless defines the East German party's use of the Weimar-era photo essay as a “straight-jacketed conception.” Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures across the Iron Curtain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 121.
(4.) In East Germany, Schulze Eldowy went simply by “Schulze.”
(5.) Martha Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography) (1981), http://web.pdx.edu/~vcc/Seminar/Rosler_photo.pdf, 1.
(6.) Gundula Schulze Eldowy, “Lothar,” Am fortgewehten Ort. Berliner Geschichten (Leipzig, Germany: Lehmstadt Verlag, 2011), 21.
(7.) Ibid., 20.
(8.) W. P. Jefanow cited in John P. Jacob, Recollecting a Culture: Photography and the Evolution of a Socialist Aesthetic in East Germany (Boston: Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, 1998), 6.
(9.) Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Rosetta Books, 2005), 3.
(10.) T. O. Immisch, “Appearance and Being: GDR Photography of the 1970s and 1980s,” in Do Not Refreeze. Photography Behind the Berlin Wall, eds. Nicola Freeman and Matthew Shaul (Manchester, UK: Cornerhouse, 2007), 24.
(11.) James, Common Ground, 200.
(12.) In Antlitz der Zeit, Sander used these men to visualize the social schematics of “Revolutionaries” and “Communist Leader,” respectively.
(13.) Hermann Exner cited in Sigrid Hofer, “Experimentelle Fotografie in der DDR. Edmund Kestings Porträtaufnahmen,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 34 (2007): 313.
(14.) See Friedrich Harneck, “Concerning the Question of Socialist Realism in Photography,” Die Fotografie no. 8 (1960), reprinted in Jacob, Recollecting a Culture, 98-99. For example, Harneck writes that “The photographer is indeed able to paint directly with his eyes,” and that “it is remarkable that the representational character of photography makes its misuse for formalist experiments more difficult” (98).
(15.) Sontag, On Photography, 3.
(16.) Ibid.
(17.) Ibid., 4.
(18.) Jacob, Recollecting a Culture, 9.
(19.) In my dissertation, “Infiltration and Excess: Experimental Art and the East German State, 1980-1989” (2017), I argue that the state's direct and indirect support of artists (via educational and exhibition opportunities, for example) actually facilitated greater experimentation in the GDR's final decade.
(20.) Matthew Shaul, “Once Thawed—Do Not Refreeze,” Do Not Refreeze, 13.
(21.) Ibid.
(22.) Bernd Lindner, “Pictorial Contradictions: Press Photography in the GDR,” in The Shuttered Society: Art Photography in the GDR 1949-1989, eds. Jana Duda, Gabriele Muschter, and Uwe Warnke (Bielefeld, Germany: Kerber Verlag, 2012), 321.
(23.) Christoph Tannert, personal interview, May 11, 2015.
(24.) Hofer, “Experimentelle Fotografie in der DDR,” 315.
(25.) This is a central argument of my dissertation. See Sara Blaylock, “Infiltration and Excess: Experimental Art and the East German State 1980-1989, doctoral thesis, University of California—Santa Cruz.
(26.) Candice M. Hamelin, “The Diversification of East Germany's Visual Culture,” in The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History, eds. Jennifer Evans, Paul Betts, and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 228.
(27.) Sara Blaylock, “Aufstand des Materials. Körperbilder im Prenzlauer Berg der 1980er Jahre” (A Material Revolt: Body Portraits in the Prenzlauer Berg of the 1980s) in Gegenstimmen: Kunst in der DDR 1976-1989 (Voices of Dissent: Art in the GDR), ed. Christoph Tannert (Berlin: Deutsche Gesellschaft & Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2016), 394-401.
(28.) The Centre Culturel Français, which opened in East Berlin in 1984, introduced a new range of especially French photographers from the early to mid-twentieth century. The American curator and erstwhile mail artist and photographer John P. Jacob likewise helped to connect Schulze with Robert Frank by smuggling copies of her prints over the Berlin border in 1985. John P. Jacob, personal interview, February 5, 2016.
(29.) James, Common Ground, 109.
(30.) See Wolfgang Engler's discussion of Kartin Rohnstock's research on the phenomenon of the “beer belly” as a sign of masculinity: Die Ostdeutschen (Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002), 200.
(31.) Rudolf Arnheim, “On the Nature of Photography,” Critical Inquiry 1, no. 1 (September 1974): 155.
(32.) Ibid.
(33.) See, for example, John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).
(34.) Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts,” 1-10.
(35.) Arnheim, “On the Nature of Photography,” 160.
(36.) Ibid., 155.
(37.) I first introduced this concept in my dissertation, “Infiltration and Excess,” 64-67.
(38.) Stefan Wolle, “The Smiling Face of Dictatorship: On the Political Iconography of the GDR.” In German Photography 1870-1970, eds. Klaus Honnef, Rolf Sachsse, and Karin Thomas (Cologne, Germany: Dumont, 1997), 127.
(39.) Josie McLellan, “Visual Dangers and Delights: Nude Photography in East Germany,” Past & Present 205 (November 2009): 169.
(40.) Gundula Schulze Eldowy, “In the Autumn Leaves of Oblivion,” Berlin in einer Hundenacht (Berlin on a Dog's Night) (Leipzig, Germany: Lehmstadt Verlag, 2011), 24.
(41.) Along with the Union of Fine Artists, which was responsible for the creation and dissemination of fine art, members of the Kulturbund were the arbiters—and the purse strings—of state culture.
(42.) Karl Gernot Kuehn, Caught: The Art of Photography in the German Democratic Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 156.
(43.) See Esther von Richthofen, Bringing Culture to the Masses: Control, Compromise, and Participation in the GDR (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009); Nicola Freeman and Matthew Shaul, Do Not Refreeze: Photography behind the Berlin Wall (2007); John P. Jacob, Recollecting a Culture: Photography and the Evolution of a Socialist Aesthetic in East Germany (1998).
(44.) Engler, Die Ostdeutschen, 194.
(45.) Ibid.
(46.) See, for example, Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary. Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema 1949-1989 (Chapell Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
(47.) See, for example, Martin Dumas, “Der ‘reale Sozialismus'—Vielfalt der Kunst als Programm,” Malerei der DDR. Funktionen der bildenden Kunst im Reaien Sozialismus (Reinbek bei Hamburg, Germany: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991), 246-320.
(48.) Jens Gieseke has demonstrated that the Stasi's introduction of greater interpersonal forms of observation (i.e., “Zersetzung”) from the mid-1970s onward reflected a new strategy for the state to control the East German public, while it still maintained a ruse of civil liberties. Jens Gieseke, The History of the Stasi. East Germany's Secret Police, 19451990 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 147.
(49.) Von Richthofen, Bringing Culture to the Masses, 176.
(50.) Claus Löser, Strategien der Verweigerung: Untersuchungen zum politisch-ästhetischen Gestus unangepasster filmischer Artikulation in der Spätphase der DDR (Berlin: DEFA-Stiftung, 2011); Seth Howes, Moving Images on the Margins: Experimental Film in Late Socialist East Germany (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2019).
(51.) For more on this, see Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer (1934),” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2, 1931-1934, eds. Michael W Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 768-782.
(52.) In film, for example, the works of this period inaugurated the so-called East German New Wave cinema. On this see, for example, Joshua Feinstein, “Straddling the Wall: Socialist Realism Meets the Nouvelle Vague in Der geteilte Himmel,” The Triumph of the Ordinary, 110-136.
(53.) Gundula Schulze Eldowy “Die Plaudereien des Scharfschützen,“ Am fortgewehten Ort. Berliner Geschichten (Leipzig, Germany: Lehmstedt, 2011), 192-193.
(54.) According to Schulze Eldowy, the foreman allowed her access to all parts of the factory with the exception of the location where prisoners labored. Schulze Eldowy, “Die Plaudereien des Scharschützen,“ 198.
(55.) McLellan, “Visual Dangers and Delights,“ 163.
(56.) This publication, subtitled Zeitschrift zwischen den Kulturen, featured artists from both Germanys. Importantly, its editor and cofounder, Eckhart Gillen, would break ground on the research and exhibition of art from East Germany both before and after the two Germanys reunified in 1990. His most significant achievement for the study of the art and culture of the GDR has thus far been the 2009 exhibition Art of Two Germanys. Cold War Cultures, which he cocurated with Stephanie Barron from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
(57.) Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look. A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
(58.) Kuehn, Caught, 159.
(59.) Ibid.
(60.) Sarah D. Phillips, “‘There Are No Invalids in the USSR!': A Missing Soviet Chapter in the New Disability History,“ Disability Studies Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2009), http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/936/1111.
(61.) Ibid.
Sara Blaylock
Sara Blaylock, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Minnesota Duluth
Two Worlds: Boris Efimov, Soviet Political Caricature, and the Construction of the Long Cold War a
Stephen M. Norris
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Oct 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.22
This article analyzes the political cartoons of Boris Efimov, one of the most significant Soviet propagandists, and how they helped to construct a Soviet way of seeing the world. Published in major newspapers and journals, Efimov's caricatures, along with those of his fellow political cartoonists, attempted to create a sense of belonging by fostering an “emotional truth,” one conveyed through key symbols and concepts that would be repeated across the Soviet century. Efimov's rendering of “two worlds”—one safe, strong, and masculine; one decrepit, weak, and scheming—served as a powerful means to construct Soviet sensibilities and Soviet truths.
Keywords: Boris Efimov, Soviet political caricature, propaganda, emotional truth, politics
In 1972, the venerable Soviet political caricaturist Boris Efimov wrote the introduction to an album of political cartoons that in turn accompanied a Moscow exhibition. For Efimov, who was born in 1900, and by that time was nearly synonymous with official Soviet propaganda, the introduction was in part an explanation of his life's work. The exhibit and subsequent book were both entitled Satire in the Struggle for Peace (Satira v bor'be za mir). Efimov characterized the works on display, including his own, as “weapons” meant to attack the falsehoods generated by Soviet enemies. The implicit task of Soviet visual satire, therefore, was to reveal the “truth” by “pulling back the guise of the interventionists and colonialists, revealing their true physiognomy, and to ridicule their attempts to cover up their dark deeds.”1
Efimov's words were repetitions of those he had used again and again to describe Soviet visual satire. The images reproduced in the album and displayed in the international exhibition were also quite familiar to most Soviet viewers. Mark Abramov's 1969 caricature “Peace Symbol,” to take one representative example, featured a large white dove formed from a hammer and sickle looming over a short capitalist clutching a bomb emblazoned with the dollar sign. Aside from the title of the cartoon, no other text appears (nor is it
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needed). The image divides the world in two: the Soviet world represents peace and progress, while the Western world, fostering conflict, remains trapped in the past. Efimov's visual contribution to the catalog, which was edited by Abramov, further characterizes the war-mongering capitalist world: his 1968 cartoon “Filling Station” depicts the United States Capitol as the titular entity for continuous war, with an American militarist wearing a cowboy hat filling tanks named “For Vietnam” and “For South America.” By 1972 (and certainly well before that date), as these examples help to capture, the Soviet Cold War culture had produced and disseminated an array of patterns, tropes, images, and words, devised to wage rhetorical war.
(p. 520) This chapter uses the 1972 exhibition and catalog as an initial window into a larger picture of Soviet propaganda and the role of artists within it. More specifically, Efimov's work affords us an opportunity to explore a key form of visual propaganda that has remained understudied; namely, the role of political caricatures within Soviet visual culture. Artists such as Efimov used their work to help Soviet citizens see the world. Satire in the Struggle for Peace represents just one battle in the larger war to establish ideological fronts, a propaganda campaign Efimov fought for his entire professional life. Efimov's first Soviet cartoons appeared in 1918 and his last appeared in 1991. Above all, the works he drew—along with those by his fellow propagandists—attempted to foster a sense of belonging summoned by the new socialist system. Efimov's cartoons did not comment on factual truth; instead, they sought to foster an emotional truth (it might also be termed a “Bolshevik truth”), one where key symbols would help viewers gain political consciousness about the new world and how best to interpret it.
In the introduction to their edited volume, The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies, Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo identify some approaches to the study of propaganda. Above all, they urge us to treat it “as a field of study in its own right,” as a “coherent set of practices,” for propaganda is about “nothing less than the ways in which human beings communicate, particularly with respect to the creation and widespread dissemination of attitudes, images, and beliefs.”2 To understand propaganda, they argue, requires viewing it as “a mass phenomenon,” which “must circulate in public, reaching and drawing together large numbers of individuals who are largely unknown to each other.”3 “To be effective,” they conclude, “propaganda must harness a rich affective range beyond negative emotions such as hatred, fear, and envy to include more positive feelings such as pleasure, joy, belonging, and pride.”4
Efimov's cartoons created a coherent, emotionally appealing vision of the world that reached millions of viewers. In communicating messages to the Soviet populace, Efimov maintained a consistent, well-sharpened arsenal of satirical arrows, using weaponized symbols and language in his cartoons as well as the meta-discourse about his work. His images contained emotions deemed to be “Soviet”: anger at the antics of ideological enemies combined with joy for the continual achievements of the Soviet state. The weapons of satire Efimov drew, and then wrote about, attempted to shape these attitudes and create a distinctly “Soviet” viewer.
To do so, Efimov relied on repetition, or what Thierry Groensteen has called “braiding” in the register of comics, which acts as an organizational and explanatory tool. In his work, Groensteen identifies how comics provide fixed, static, and often repetitive images for the viewer. Comic artists plant clues, recurring motifs, symbols, and other visual identifiers deliberately meant to provoke recall and recognition (Charlie Brown's striped shirt from Charles Schulz's Peanuts Series, for example, served as a visual motif that made him instantly recognizable). Groensteen sees comics as a system, a “dominantly visual narrative species,”5 one that has its own characteristics. Braiding is part of what he terms “iconic solidarity,” which can be best explained as the viewer's expectation of recognizable characters from previous works, and is therefore a “foundational principle” of the system.6 In planting recurring images and themes, comics impose their (p- 521) own logic, one the viewer inevitably takes up (e.g., we know to expect Lucy always to draw the football away from Charlie Brown's attempts to kick it, action always accompanied with “Aaugh,” thus linking text and image in the act of solidarity).
As Efimov's work and that of his fellow cartoonists makes clear, Soviet Cold War visual culture engaged in a remarkable braiding exercise that aimed to create familiar characters and themes in order to promote an emotional truth about the world. To an extent this exercise was predominantly visual: the top-hatted, tuxedo-wearing capitalist in Abramov's cartoon referenced earlier, for example, had become an iconic figure in Soviet cartoons, just as the cowboy-hat-wearing American warmonger was. Further, Efimov's words and those written by others about the meanings of his cartoons also braided familiar patterns, descriptions, and characterizations. Efimov's construction of his caricatures as “weapons” in a battle for peace was routine by 1972. In what follows, I will braid the words from Efimov's introduction to the 1972 Satire in the Struggle for Peace alongside the drawings by Efimov in order to demonstrate how they helped to create the Soviet sense of seeing and promote a Soviet vision of the world. Efimov's output was prodigious: he published at least 9,000 cartoons between 1918 and 1991 (and would himself often give a figure of 35,000). More narrowly, this chapter will focus on one theme Efimov braided throughout his professional life, the way he and his fellow artists drew a conflict between two polarized worlds. In doing so, on one side, they crafted a consistent, coherent, peaceful, and safe world, one that was emphatically consolidated against the equally consistent yet dangerous Western world. Relying on conceptual, formal, and aesthetic binaries, Efimov and his comrades simplified and flattened the complex world by conjuring a “Soviet” reality to explain it. This “reality,” paradoxically, was almost exclusively masculine, for Efimov and his fellow caricaturists overwhelmingly populated their images with men. Through repetition and saturation—it must be mentioned that political caricatures were ubiquitous, published daily in the major papers and journals—Efimov's caricatures constructed Soviet sensibilities and Soviet truths.
The sharp, provocative, attacking art of political satire, the effective and accurate weapon directed against the enemies of peace and the security of nations, has long and firmly won the recognition of millions of people in all countries of the world.
The public duty of satirical art is the struggle for peace, the relentless exposure of provocateurs and instigators of military conflicts in any part of our planet.
—Boris Efimov (1972)7
(p. 522) In his contribution to the 1972 catalog, Satire in the Struggle for Peace, Efimov noted that the primary aims of a political caricature were to identify Soviet enemies and expose their ugly plans. In writing these words, Efimov reminded readers (as he so often did) of one of the founding principles of Bolshevik propaganda. In the well-known characterization of Peter Kenez, the Bolsheviks created the world's first “propaganda state,” one where agitation and mass mobilization were central components—if not the central com-ponents—to their political system.8 From the outset, as Laura Engelstein has recently argued, the Bolsheviks also carefully crafted their own self-image, one where only they possessed the truth about the world. More than any of their rivals, they were “clarifiers and monopolists” who “created a distinctive brand” by simplifying the political landscape and identifying who was for them and who was against them.9 Identifying enemies proved crucial to their success. It also formed an essential component of their political ethos and, with it, their political system. In his classic study, Kenez argues that the Bolsheviks “introduced a new approach to politics” through their central use of propaganda in an effort to transform people and society.10 Where the Bolsheviks stood out was in their devotion to thinking about the role of propaganda and its twin, agitation, as well as the way they organized resources and created institutions dedicated to spreading their messages. They had developed, as Kenez summarizes, a “special brand of propaganda.”11 The Bolsheviks, who would rename themselves the Communist Party in 1918, before establishing the USSR in 1922, thus pioneered the use of mass propaganda as a form of politics.
Kenez examines the early years of Bolshevik efforts, focusing primarily on the press, agitation efforts, political organizations such as the Komsomol, campaigns against illiteracy, and the political use of books, films, and posters. By 1929, he concludes, it still was difficult to assess how successful these efforts were among the population at large. What was undeniable, however, was the fact that mass mobilization through propaganda became “an essential aspect of the propaganda state.”12 Soviet propaganda “taught people a political language and a pattern of behavior.”13 The Soviet state ensured that their propa-ganda—whether posters, newspapers, films, or other forms—saturated cities and villages.
These early propagandistic efforts tended to focus on class, on ideology, and on translating Leninist and Marxist ideas to the Soviet public. As David Brandenberger has pointed out, the initial “propaganda state” reached a crisis point in the 1930s, one that forced party leaders to find new ways to mobilize people and new concepts around which to build support. The most significant change, Brandenberger argues, came in the party's “heavy investment in Russian national imagery, rhetoric, and iconography.”14 Beginning in the mid-1930s, Soviet propaganda incorporated Russian historical figures such as Alexander Nevsky and prominent literary figures such as Alexander Pushkin (to name just two examples) as a way to foster belonging. The state still committed resources to propaganda; the brand just changed, for Soviet propaganda began to feature what Brandenberger terms “national Bolshevism.”15
Early Bolshevik propaganda may have reached a crisis point in the 1930s, but Soviet efforts to use propaganda to influence behavior and shape reality survived right to the
(p. 523) very end of the communist experiment. Surprisingly, given the ubiquitous nature of Soviet propaganda, few scholars have traced its survival during the second half of the state's life.16 The case study of Efimov's creative output, which he produced without interruption for most of the twentieth century, allows for such an investigation.
One important feature of Bolshevik propaganda, which has remains largely unstudied, yet one present at the beginning and still there at the end, was the political cartoon. Part of the larger project of creating an official “Soviet satire,” the political caricature, as its creators and interpreters characterized it, functioned as a “weapon” in the struggle to build socialism.17 In their words, caricatures revealed the ugly side of enemies and cut through their rhetoric like a surgical scalpel. By exposing the enemy's “true” nature in an easy-to-comprehend image, the satirical cartoon, at least in the official language used to interpret it, could destroy the attempts to sabotage the Soviet socialist project more effectively than any other weapon.
In this landscape, Boris Efimov established himself as the most well-known political caricaturist in the Soviet Union. From 1918, when he first published a pro-Bolshevik cartoon, Efimov's stock in trade consisted of identifying and visualizing the enemies of the Soviet state. The nationality and identities of Soviet enemies changed across the century, but their attempts to undermine socialism did not. Efimov consistently unmasked these efforts, publishing his caricatures in major publications such as Izvestiia (Efimov served as principal political caricaturist for the paper), Krokodil (Efimov helped to found this popular satirical journal in 1922), and other outlets. In a sense, Krokodil served as the weapons storage facility of Soviet satire: founded the year the USSR was officially founded, it was the shining star in the constellation of Soviet satire, reaching a circulation of 5.8 million by 1975.
Initially Efimov's output consisted exclusively of lining up, identifying, and exposing the enemies of the fledgling Soviet state. His 1918 cartoons from the frontlines of Civil War in Ukraine capture the goal of Soviet visual satire to be prickly, rough, and sharp (as Efimov himself would later describe it), to tear off the masks enemies wore in order to reveal their “true physiognomy,” and to ridicule their attempts to justify their deeds. His “White Guard Types” from 1918, to focus on one example, reveled in the ugly facial features of the anti-Bolshevik forces, their mean expressions, and their willingness to engage in violence. Enemy forces came heavily armed, carrying knives, pistols, rifles, and the hated Cossack nagaika (whip). They may have used noble words such as “citizen” (grazhdanin), but when properly exposed they were defined by their brutishness and their reliance on old methods of coercion.
The early enemies of the Soviet state also consorted with foreign enemies. “White Guard Types” features a British soldier in his recognizable Brodie helmet standing alongside the violent brutes trying to prevent socialism from taking hold. The enemy lineup present in Efimov's caricature, in other words, recognized porous borders and correctly noted that the British, along with the Japanese, Americans, and French, intervened in the Russian Civil War in hopes of preventing the spread of Bolshevism. By revealing enemies and their plots against the Bolshevik attempts to create socialism, Efimov helped to create a “Bolshevik truth” about the world.
(p. 524) Efimov would braid this kind of visual pattern throughout the existence of the Soviet state. Again and again, he lined up enemies, tore off their masks, and revealed their ugly physiognomy. The enemies could be European capitalists, Nazi thugs, American militarists, or colonialists. Efimov's job as principal political caricaturist for the newspaper Izvestiia meant that he was responsible for clarifying world affairs. Efimov and his fellow caricaturists focused on individual enemies, on exposing the hidden agendas of the West and its agents, and on personifying the destructive forces of capitalism. Yet Efimov's cartoons also encompassed more positive traits. He would identify friends of Soviet socialism, the people struggling against the forces of colonialism, fascism, and capitalism and thus in need of Soviet help. He would frequently juxtapose the awful, dark, decrepit, bankrupt West with the bright, clean, forward-looking USSR. By drawing healthy, hearty characters representing the “right” sort of people and contrasting them with the dark, dirty forces out to sabotage socialism, Efimov and his fellow satirist-soldiers attempted to harness a range of emotions among their audiences. They visualized the ideal of the “right” people so that viewers would see themselves as part of this group. They sought, in short, to use their visual text to create a sense of belonging, a key component to the emotional truth the cartoons conveyed.
One of the braids Efimov and his fellow visual satirists wove throughout their careers was an ongoing attempt to define the split world. The ideological division could not be identified by human-made borders as much as through the focus on class and race: a Chinese worker in the 1920s, an African American man subject to institutional racism in the 1950s, or a Latin American farmer resisting colonial power in the 1980s (to identify just three of the numerous “friends” Efimov drew) could belong to the Soviet collective, too. Paradoxically, given the way other forms of Soviet propaganda included women in the revolutionary project, the world of political caricature was an exclusively masculine domain.18 The international friends resisting Western powers were all male, depicted as strong, virile, larger-than-life figures. The enemies they fought were also exclusively
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male, typically depicted as emasculated, small, flabby, and old. If we draw on scholarly accounts of gender politics and read Efimov's images as statements about how power can be embodied in imagery, his cartoons disclose the process of constructing the two antagonized worlds as deeply informed and shaped by masculine stereotypes.19 From beginning to end, Efimov's brand of Soviet visual satire and its most significant register—the political caricature—created a world populated almost exclusively by men.20 Furthermore, the weaponized rhetoric used in both the cartoons and the meta-commentary about them was distinctly and unabashedly masculinist.
Efimov's propaganda efforts were always primarily visual, their message meant to be easily grasped, even by those whose reading literacy was minimal. In “Two Worlds” (Figure 22.1), Efimov draws clearly defined borders between the West (more specifically, the United States) and the Soviet Union. In it, a strong, large, male Soviet worker protects the Second World, one identified with “peace and democracy,” as the book he is holding reads. The enemy is one of Efimov's stereotypical capitalists. He sits in the midst of American skyscrapers holding a dollar coin and clutching a paper with the words “aggressive plans and pacts.” Efimov was a self-taught caricaturist, and he drew inspiration (p- 525) from the influential nineteenth- and twentieth-century German satirical journal Simplicis-simus. Caricaturists working for this publication began to draw capitalists with top hats and striped pants: Efimov adapted this characterization and made it into a quintessential-ly Soviet one. By the time this 1949 image appeared, the figure on the left would have been familiar to any Soviet viewer: ironically, or perhaps appropriately, given the repetitiveness at the heart of his braiding exercise, Efimov would draw American capitalists in similar attire throughout the 1980s. The hero symbolizing the Second World was equally familiar, having evolved from Efimov's 1920s caricatures of Red Army soldiers and Soviet workers: the Lenin-style flat cap and overalls he wears underscore the positive characteristics of those who defended socialism and, with it, peace.
Reprinted with permission from Ne boltai! Propaganda Archive, Prague
"American Contrasts” (Figure 22.2), from 1948, contains similar visual identifiers but opens up the borders of the Cold War system. In the center of the cartoon, a sign stating (p. 526) "Attention! The Boss does not have time to talk to every job seeker” and a policeman divide the world. To the left, a well-fed American capitalist wearing a striped suit strolls by, ignoring both the policeman and the American worker on the other side of the image. Wearing a flat hat and bearing a striking resemblance to the familiar Soviet worker seen in cartoons such as "Two Worlds,” this American counterpart holds a sign that reads "War veteran willing to work any job!” His clothes are threadbare and patched; in the Soviet world his comrade's clothes are new and whole. This distinction, marked in the drawing by a few economic lines, would not have escaped the Soviet viewers' attention.
Reprinted with permission from Ne boltai! Propaganda Archive, Prague
There is no greater joy for the artist, including the poet, than the feeling of a close, organic connection between his art and the life of the people. That is why the deepest creative satisfaction is experienced by a political cartoonist (p- 527) who has the joyful opportunity of sharing his feelings and thoughts with his people, expressing them immediately, without delay, in the hot pursuit of events ... .
The effectiveness of political satire is determined, I believe, by two equally significant indicators. On the one hand, there is a moral satisfaction, pleasant and (I'm not afraid of this word) gloating emotion, which the reader of the newspaper feels, looking at the drawing, which taunts, mocks, and ridicules the enemy. On the other hand, that degree of fury and impotent anger experienced by the enemy, considering his reflection in the satirical mirror ... .
—Boris Efimov (1972)21
Efimov frequently spoke about the reception his political caricatures enjoyed. Echoing words and phrases that had become familiar, the cartoonist spoke of the “organic connection” between artist and viewer, noting that it rested on emotional appeal. The right sort of viewer, one who had already started to embrace Soviet ideals and had them reinforced by gazing at these caricatures, Efimov wrote, laughed and gloated, confirming that they belonged to the Soviet world. In his writings, along with those written by numerous other state artists and Soviet critics, this language served as a means to guide the viewer, to create the words and phrases one needed in order to be “Soviet.” Efimov's repetitive cartoons created a familiar world, one where you could look at them, glimpse recognizable
Page 9 of 24 figures, and see how you belonged to the imagined peaceful community. The words in his meta-commentary named the moods and emotions you should feel while viewing his cartoons: this combination of image and word, and the affect it would create, as he would write, provided the basis for belonging that would remain in the Soviet imaginary right up to 1991.
Sergei Khrushchev once wrote that “the caricature is like a crooked mirror, at once reflecting and distorting the world around us.”22 His father, Nikita Khrushchev, once stated that “satire is like the surgeon's scalpel: you find harmful growths inside a human body and like a good surgeon you remove them right away.” He further argued that “to know how to wield the weapon of satire skillfully the way a surgeon uses his knife, to remove the deadly growth without harming the organism—that requires mastery.”23
As defined through these words, Soviet caricature reflected a desired world. Viewers looked into the images and saw how they mocked, ridiculed, and exposed enemies. This look elicited emotional responses that in turn helped to create a sense of belonging. And good Soviet citizens, as well as sympathizers abroad, when viewing them, laughed. Arguably, in doing so, they contributed to the health of their society and became “Soviet.” Reacting the proper way to the images also brought the viewer into the truth-making exercise these cartoons engaged in: you understood the world and embraced the Soviet vision of it.24 Outside the borders of the USSR, the cartoonists hoped, people who supported the dream promised in the October Revolution, including fellow caricature artists, also understood their drawings, embraced them, and laughed at the enemies of socialism.
(p. 528) Two caricatures from the 1972 catalog and exhibition can serve as examples of the international impact of Soviet satirical propaganda. The Mongolian artist Arnain Gursed's “Colonialism's Collapse” (1960) turns the African continent into a giant hand that squeezes a ridiculous white colonialist wearing a pith helmet. The villain cries out, dropping his whip and chains. The East German cartoonist Alfred Bayer-Red's “Global Strategy” (1967) is dominated by a representation of the globe. On the top, perched over North America, a man in a cowboy hat holds a lit torch underneath South Asia. He peeks over his shoulder and realizes the flame has spread, igniting his rear on fire. Both images contain familiar characters and themes pioneered by Efimov and his fellow caricaturists. Efimov repeatedly drew fists squeezing enemies and regularly mocked militarists for the unintended consequences their actions produced. Both can be easily understood—neither image contains text aside from the title, thus communicating the message about communist internationalism across language divides. The two artists who authored these examples came from the friendly socialist world—Gursed and Bayer-Red adopt the forms and techniques from their Soviet colleagues to reiterate the split vision of the Cold War world. Both cartoons reified a “truth” for their viewers: the Western world engages in nefarious practices, while the friendly, peaceful socialist world and its friends could fight back when needed. Looking at these cartoons, in other words, was like looking into a moral mirror: you saw reflections, distortions, but the “right” people saw the truth.
The propagandists understood that in order to facilitate the viewers' reception of the drawings a vocabulary had to be provided as well. The words used to narrate the Soviet caricature were braided throughout the Soviet experiment. Read as guidelines meant to interpret the meanings of Soviet caricatures, this language quickly became familiar, providing ritualized scripts that could explain the function of this form of propaganda. In 1929, Journalist (Zhurnalist) published a short series entitled “Our Caricaturists.” The first feature was on Viktor Deni and Dmitrii Moor, two luminaries who had helped to establish Soviet visual satire. The second was on Boris Efimov. L. R. Varshavksii, who wrote the piece, opened by stating “the first page in the history of Soviet political caricature will no doubt be taken up by the work of Boris Efimov, who occupies an important place among the constellation of caricaturists related to the generation of October.”25 Varshavskii would go on to expand his short essay into a book-length study in 1931, which hailed Efimov and his contemporaries as practitioners of the weaponized Soviet satire.
Efimov appeared in all three editions of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. In the first, published in 1932, in volume 24, Varshavskii's book is referenced. Efimov is described as someone whose “creative imagination is inexhaustible, his ability to work is enormous.” Efimov's cartoons are deemed “expressive” and “full of political content”; they “appear daily in the pages of the Soviet press and can often replace a long article because they are fully consistent with the ideological and organizational work of the newspapers.” The images themselves are “for the mass reader” and demonstrate “an outstanding mastery of the portrait genre.” The entry concludes that “as a political caricaturist, Efimov characterizes the warlike intransigence of the fight against and irrepressible hatred toward
(p. 529) the revolution's enemies, which enhances Efimov's agitational, effective satire and places it infinitely higher than the entertainment caricatures of bourgeois publica-tions.”26 The 1952 edition of the encyclopedia more or less follows this script, adding that “Efimov has created thousands of caricatures that respond to the important events in international politics. His sharp lashes delivered in his satire are directed against fascism, against reaction and against warmongers. They enjoy great popularity in the Soviet Union and are widely known abroad.”27
Feliks Kon would highlight Efimov's political weapons of laughter in 1931. E. Gnedin would do the same in introductions to cartoon collections published in 1932 and 1935, concluding in the latter publication that “[t]he effect Efimov achieves is because of a special feeling of healthy humor, which, in our opinion, forms the distinguishing feature of his creative work.”28 In the 1937 article reviewing an exhibition of political caricaturists that included Efimov, Iurii Neiman declared that “every touch, every squeeze of the pencil from these artists is a strike against the enemy,” one that would expose his true face for the spectator.29 In the first short biography written about Efimov, M. Ioffe would declare that “Boris Efimovich Efimov knows and loves the Soviet people” and that his drawings are nothing less than “a truthful chronicle of events in international life,” told in the language of political satire, and fired as weapons in the struggle to build socialism. As such, Ioffe argued, they embody what “Soviet caricature” is—“a strong weapon in our political fight and an efficient means in the ideological training of the masses.”30 Just as Efimov's cartoons contained striking repetition meant to foster familiarity, so did the offi-
Page 11 of 24 cial publications about them: again and again they coached readers on how to be viewers, how to look into the cartoon as a mirror and see its message as part of a larger attempt to build socialism.
The repetition in language about Soviet caricature in general and Efimov's weapons in particular extended to the published letters the artist received from his fans. In 1935, Efimov received a letter from a Soviet citizen that stated he could not live without Efimov's cartoons in Izvestiia, which made him “laugh the healthy laughter of a healthy person.” Efimov's drawing, the writer concluded, “is the arrow that flies into the enemy's heart, striking or heavily wounding him.”31 Three soldiers wrote from the front in 1944 that Efimov's “cartoons not only bring a smile” to their faces, but “they strengthen our contempt and hatred toward the enemy.” The soldiers urged the artist to continue to “bludgeon the fascists even more strongly with your weapons of satire.”32 In these examples, however problematic they are, we can grasp how viewers were brought into the process of interpreting Efimov's caricatures, using the very language that had been made available by the propaganda apparatus.
The 1952 exhibit on Soviet satire in Moscow that featured works by Efimov, Kukryniksy, Lev Brodaty, Iulii Ganf, and others received a thorough write-up in Pravda. The author, Gr. Koniakhin, called the caricature one of the most popular forms of Soviet art because of its close connection to the people while also noting that as a genre it engaged in “well-defined combat missions” and that visual satire ultimately functioned as a “sharp weapon.”33 A 1956 article on Soviet satirical journals noted yet again that satire functioned as a “weapon,” while Soviet satire was sharp, critical, but also produced a certain brand of humor.34 Another article from that year, this time written by Efimov (p- 530) himself, cast the caricature as an important weapon in the Cold War, for it represented one of the “weapons of an artist.”35
In the first 1962 issue of Voprosy literatury, Efimov published an article on satire and its meanings in the USSR. He entitled it “The Weapons of Laughter” (Oruzhie smekha). He opened by reminding readers about the fiery words and sharp pens that educate Soviet citizens in a “communist consciousness.” Satire, Efimov claimed, connected with people in part because it is “a warlike genre.” Its success rested on its militant nature, the fighting laughter it evoked, and the moral principles it formulated, which in turn bound people together in a communist society. Efimov would conclude that consumers of satire needed to continue to sharpen it in order to ensure it remained full of “patriotic passion, ideological soundness, and high artistic skill.”36
To understand Soviet visual satire, in short, requires us to pay attention to the laborious, if tedious, process of repetition in words meant to interpret the repetition in images: the examples discussed earlier represent a small sampling of how Soviet publications saturated readers with comments about satire as a militant discourse that would connect with the masses.37 Soviet political caricature and, with it, Soviet Cold War propaganda sought to create an emotional truth and reiterate it endlessly. Good Soviet citizens and good people around the world had to gaze into the mirror of Soviet satire, see familiar tropes, and then read familiar words about them. Doing so, as numerous publications underscored, connected “the thoughts and feelings” of artist and viewer (as one 1968 publication about Efimov claimed).38 The affective aspect at the center of Efimov's (p- 531) visual construction of two worlds—a construction that sought to bind together a community-extended to the language used to evaluate Soviet satire: readers were reminded that Efimov's cartoons connected them to the artist and his privileged position of visualizing the “truth.”
Efimov often included mirrors in his cartoons and also deliberately mirrored his own work as the Soviet century wore on. In doing so, Efimov coached his viewers in the proper ways of looking at, and engaging with, caricature. His 1945 and 1946 cartoons from the Nuremberg Trials, which he covered as a graphic journalist, serve as a frame of reference in this endeavor. His “Twelfth Hour of Nazi Criminals” (Figure 22.3) lambasted the war criminals on trial while also declaring “Happy New (and Their Last) Year!” Twenty years later, Efimov's “The Nuremberg Mirror” featured contemporary enemies such as Konrad Adenauer and Francisco Franco gazing at the 1946 cartoon, seeing themselves and their actions mirrored in it. His 1975 “Imminent Retribution” repeats this pattern, this time including Augusto Pinochet, German revanchists, and others. In these and other examples, the moral mirror that was Soviet satire can be looked into and understood as a process of strategic duplication and repetition in service of mass propaganda.
Reprinted with permission from Ne boltai! Propaganda Archive, Prague
An interesting test of the remarkable qualities of political satire was the 1969 International Exhibition in Moscow. The first group of artists-fighters stood shoulder-to-shoulder in a broad and representative composition. The works of almost two hundred satirists from different countries of the world, exhibited in the halls
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of the Academy of Arts of the USSR, became, as it were, a battle show of caricaturists ... . Continuing to adhere to the military terminology, it can be said that at this show all the satirical troops were represented—and the operative intelligence of the front line—a newspaper caricature, and a more solid medium-caliber weapon—a magazine drawing, and heavy satirical artillery—a monumental agit-plakat [agitational-poster] ... .
Naturally, some satirical motifs are repeated at the exhibition ... .If their methods sometimes coincide, then, from my point of view, this only reinforces the picture of a single position, a single military aspiration, a single hatred of the dark forces of reaction and militarism.
—Boris Efimov (1972)39
In February 1959, the USSR and China held the first major exhibitions of art from the two socialist countries. The idea was to showcase the unity of the communist world (p- 532) (even as the Sino-Soviet split was deepening) and to proclaim that visual art expressed this unity. Hu Mang, in an article from the Moscow News entitled “Main Theme is Man,” extolled the virtues of this first exhibition by arguing that socialist art centers on “man, his creative endeavors, the powerful beauty of labor, hope for a radiant future and struggle for a free and happy life.”40 Hu praised the Soviet section of the exhibit and castigated Western critics for saying Soviet art is monotonous and narrow, concluding that China has much to learn culturally from the USSR. At the end of his article, Hu noted that “a Soviet cartoon exhibition is now open in Peking and two of your well-known artists—B. Efimov from Moscow and V. Litvinenko from Kiev—have accompanied it.”41
This otherwise banal episode captures an important aspect of how Soviet caricature evolved during the Cold War. It retained its role as a “weapon,” yet its sharp stabs became interpreted as necessary in order to preserve peace and foster socialist diplomacy. Soviet Cold War cartoons continued to contain the basic motifs that had been present since the 1920s, when Soviet caricatures drew the world divided into two sides. Yet these themes evolved across time. Beginning in 1948, as the Cold War intensified, Soviet officials launched a “peace offensive” aimed at combatting anti-Soviet propaganda from the West.42 The tone for this policy was established most clearly in the 1949 speech by Mikhail Suslov, then head of the Central Committee's Propaganda Department. Speaking to the Communist Information Bureau, Suslov warned about the “two camps” present in the world, with “two lines in world policy becoming even more clear and sharp.”43 Suslov railed against one camp, led by the United States and its allies, who sought another war and aimed at world domination. Ominously, the Soviet Propaganda chief noted that the West engaged in simple yet effective propaganda against the other camp, the peaceful USSR and its allies. In order to prevent war and to combat the West's propaganda, Suslov concluded, the forces of “peace, democracy, and socialism” needed to go on the offensive, to wage a “peace campaign,” one meant “to mobilize all forces of the people for active defense of peace and for the struggle against the warmongers.”44
This “peace offensive,” as Melissa Feinberg has recently argued, served as a means to create “non-negotiable truths about the world” in language that was “repeated ad nauseam.”45 Efimov and his fellow satirist-soldiers participated in these operations from the beginning: in 1950, Efimov would edit and contribute to a collection entitled For a Stable Peace, Against Those Who Would Ignite a New War.46 In it, Efimov republished his caricatures that had sought to expose the “true” nature of the imperialist West, including his 1949 “Balance of Power” (Figure 22.4). The cartoon is dominated by the strong arm of the peaceful world, marked with a hammer and sickle, weighing down a scale with warmongers such as Winston Churchill. One side of the scale is labeled “for a new war” and the other “for a stable peace.” In a sense, however, Efimov's participation in this Cold War-era “truth campaign,” to adapt Feinberg's argument, was just a refurbishing of ideas and concepts he had always tried to clarify in his images. From 1918 to 1991, in other words, Efimov's cartoons attempted to create nonnegotiable truths about the world.
Reprinted with permission from Ne boltai! Propaganda Archive, Prague
The Cold War-era peace campaign included artistic exhibitions where those who supported the peaceful socialist world could come together. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing through the 1980s, during the era of so-called mature socialism, Moscow (p- 533) regularly hosted exhibitions of communist caricatures as part of the ongoing “peace offensive.” These exhibits and accompanying catalogs once again braided repetitive motifs, this time under the name “Satire in the Struggle for Peace.” Once again, Boris Efimov played a starring role both in the images on display and in the promotion of their meanings on the page. Efimov would again publish introductions and articles under the title “Satire in the Struggle for Peace.”
In these writings, which have been quoted throughout this chapter, Efimov explained how caricatures worked: they mocked enemies, but with the specific purpose of bringing about peace. He also helped to define the boundaries of the socialist world, the world
(p. 534) on the side of peace. This exercise in mental geography included vague borders, for the wielders of the weapons of peace could come from the USSR, from the Soviet Bloc countries such as Hungary and Poland, from socialist countries such as Vietnam and Cuba, but also from capitalist countries, including the United States. The battle, as the drawings and writings maintained, used visual satire as a means of exposing the “dark forces of reaction and militarism” (to use Efimov's own words). Efimov would also acknowledge the cartoon culture's strategic use of repetition when he argued that “naturally, some satirical motifs are repeated at the exhibition.” At the same time, in his writing for peace, Efimov recycled the language that had always been used to explain Soviet visual satire: cartoons remained “weapons,” and viewers were still encouraged to laugh a “healthy laughter.”
The exhibits, and with them the ongoing “peace offensive,” further illustrate how Soviet caricature attempted to create an emotional truth. During the Cold War, as Feinberg has argued, “truth was an absolute that could be possessed by only one side.”47 The enemy could only tell lies and spread propaganda; paradoxically, Efimov and his fellow propagandists used their own works in an attempt to lay claim to truth about their peaceful intentions. Efimov's 1959 cartoon “Vain Efforts” captures this aspect of his work well: in it, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer tries to stifle a proposed overture by Nikita Khrushchev to the German people. In this caricature, Efimov provided the visual interpretation to a Pravda article characterizing Khrushchev's 1959 note sent to Adenauer about “eliminating the remnants of war.” The letter came during the so-called Berlin Crisis, when Cold War tensions threatened to boil over. Khrushchev had delivered a speech on November 10, 1958, that called for all Western forces to leave Berlin within six months (the speech came because of the continued flow of Berliners from the eastern side to the western one). Heated discussions ensued. The crisis itself culminated in the decision to build the Berlin Wall in 1961, ostensibly to protect East Germans from the ills of the West. An East German radio broadcast from August 14, 1961, declared that the Wall had to be built to “protect children from baby-snatchers, to stop the work of kidnappers, informers, human traffickers, rabble-rousing arsonists, trouble-makers, and speculators.”48
Khrushchev's August 1959 letter came in the midst of this crisis, one largely of the Soviet leader's creation. In a direct appeal to Adenauer, the Soviet leader suggested that West Germany should recognize the current situation of two German states as permanent, cementing a more stable situation in Europe. Khrushchev also suggested an end to the “Berlin question,” noting that the Federal Republic had no legal rights to deal with this “occupied city.” Debate swirled within diplomatic circles about the meanings of the letter. Khrushchev would travel to the United States in September 1959 to meet with American President Dwight Eisenhower, a visit better known for the Soviet leader's visit to Los Angeles and denied trip to Disneyland. The trip and discussions yielded a joint communiqué, but little more to end the crisis.
Soviet newspapers and Soviet caricaturists simplified these complex events by slotting them into familiar patterns. Pravda announced Khrushchev's appeal as one where the Soviet leader strove to “consolidate peace and security for the world.”49 West German
(p. 535) (p. 536) leaders, the newspaper reported, must now give an answer to what world they want to belong to: “are they in favor of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union and other states in the socialist world or does their political policy include calculations of force?”50 If West German leaders listened to Soviet overtures and with them, listened to the “wishes of the German people,” they could, as the report concluded, bring about “a stable peace on earth.”51 Efimov's image accompanied another newspaper report (Efimov himself clipped it and attached it to his original drawing) entitled “Afraid of the Truth” (Figure 22.5). V. Mikhailov, the Pravda reporter covering the 1959 address, suggested that the West German media tried to silence Khrushchev because his overture “was far too powerful and convincing.” The newspaper reports and cartoons provided the same words that had been applied to other political events: Soviet leaders and the Soviet people fought for peace; Western leaders promoted war.
Reprinted with permission from Ne boltai! Propaganda Archive, Prague
In the ranks of people of goodwill who stand for the cause of peace, a large international brigade of caricaturist artists operates and fights actively with their weapons. They work daily and work tirelessly—the intrigues of the imperialists, the barbarity of the aggressors, the impudence of the neo-fascists—all this, unfor-
Page 17 of 24 tunately provides enough fodder for the satirical pencil. The public duties of political satire remain topical and responsible. Its weapons must remain sharp, its eyes sharp, its powder dry. And the evil, poisonous, scorching images are created by the hands of satirists precisely in order to protect the peaceful existence of everything good, beautiful and bright, so that the gardens blossom, the children play, so that the people of the Earth can conduct themselves peacefully and joyfully.
—Boris Efimov (1972)52
The familiar polarized world drawn by Efimov and his fellow caricaturists fell apart when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. In 1999, at the age of ninety-nine, Efimov gave an interview about the meaning of his cartoons for an American documentary that aired on PBS.53 His answers serve as a useful first conclusion.
Efimov first describes his images as “a mirror to reality.” As such, he states that his primary job was to depict the West and characterize it as a place that “contradict[ed] the order and values we had in our country.” To make his images attract viewers, Efimov claims in the interview, they had to be “fast, funny, and persuasive.” He explains that “the thoughts and feelings I put into my cartoons were the thoughts and feelings of millions of people.” Propaganda, he concludes, helped people to “believe in something,” “to consolidate society, [hold] it in some kind of unified, strong community.” It was a system, he argues, that “propagated truth, decency, and kindness.”54
(p. 537) While not everyone would agree with them, Efimov's words do capture crucial components of how he viewed Soviet propaganda as a coherent set of practices, one that aimed to reshape society and reach millions. For Efimov, his images provided not just meaning to the world, but emotional belonging within it. In his view, they helped to create citizens who could use them to grasp “stable truths” in the often turbulent process of building the socialist state.55
Efimov's caricatures also illustrate a fundamental paradox about the system of propaganda and the way it attempted to create new people in a selective manner: while his images included positive depictions of foreigners who sympathized with the Soviet project, they also largely excluded women. Although he published thousands of caricatures, women featured rarely, and when they did, they tended to be purely symbolic (i.e., the Statue of Liberty, or Marianne as a representative of France) or members of a crowd. Efimov published more images mocking men dressed as women than he did of women as embodiments of the virtues demanded by the revolution. The striking absence of women from his oeuvre (and that of his fellow visual satirists) does not necessarily mean it failed in its aims of fostering a sense of belonging as much as it illustrates a larger truth: namely, that the Soviet experience, including its propaganda system, was one filled with paradoxes.56
Althaus, Frank and Mark Sutcliffe, eds., Drawing the Curtain: The Cold War in Cartoons. London: Fontanka, 2012.
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Berkhoff, Karel. Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Brandenberger, David. Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927, 1941. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
(p. 541) Engelstein, Laura. Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Etty, John. Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil's Political Cartoons. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019.
Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Kenez, Peter. The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Magnusdottir, Rosa. Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Norris, Stephen M. “Laughter's Weapon and Pandora's Box: Boris Efimov in the Khrushchev Era.” In Cultural Cabaret: Russian and American Essays in Memory of Richard Stites, edited by David Goldfrank and Pavel Lyssakov, 105-138. Washington, DC: New Academic Press, 2012.
Norris, Stephen M. “The Sharp Weapon of Soviet Laughter: Boris Efimov and Visual Humor,” Russian Literature 74, no. 1-2 (2013): 31-62.
Stites, Richard. “Heaven and Hell: Soviet Propaganda Constructs the World,” In Cold-War Propaganda in the 1950s, edited by Gary Rawnsey, 85-103. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.
Wolf, Erika. Aleksandr Zhitomirsky: Photomontage as a Weapon of World War II and the Cold War. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2016.
Wolf, Erika. Koretsky: The Soviet Photo Poster, 1930-1984. New York: The New Press, 2012.
(1.) Boris Efimov, untitled introduction to Mark Abramov, ed., Satira v bor'be za mir (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo, 1972), 3-6.
(2.) Jonathan Auerback and Russ Castronovo, “Introduction: Thirteen Propositions about Propaganda,” in The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 2.
(3.) Ibid., 5-6.
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(4.) Ibid., 10.
(5.) Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics, translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 7.
(6.) Ibid., 17-20.
(7.) Boris Efimov, untitled introduction to Mark Abramov, ed., Satira v bor'be za mir, 3.
(8.) Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
(9.) Laura Engelstein, Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), xxii, 189.
(10.) Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State, 1.
(11.) Ibid., 13.
(12.) Ibid., 251.
(13.) Ibid., 255.
(14.) David Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927, 1941 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 5.
(15.) David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
(16.) For the role of propaganda in World War II, consult Karel Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). The exceptions to this rule are the two richly illustrated books of Erika Wolf cited in the bibliography. More recently, and since this chapter was first drafted, Rosa Magnusdottir's Enemy Number One traces the evolution of America's image in the postwar USSR, and John Etty's Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union analyzes Krokodil during the Khrushchev era.
(17.) Other genres of official Soviet satire included literature (Mikhail Zoshchenko's stories most famously), theater, and newspaper pieces. The journal Krokodil (Crocodile), founded in 1922 with Efimov as a founding contributor, served as the official satirical journal of Soviet satire.
(18.) In an album of his work published to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1917 Revolution, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of Efimov's work, of the 194 cartoons reproduced, only 8 contain representations of women. These characterizations are telling: two are symbolic representations of “Europe” (“Evropa,” a feminine noun in Russian), four consist of men dressing as women in order to mock them, one is of the Statue of Liberty (by far the most-used female form in Efimov's cartoons), and one is of the Eiffel Tower as
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Marianne. See Bor. Efimov v "Izvestiiakh": Karikatury za polveka (Moscow: Izvestiia, 1969).
(19.) I am particularly thinking of R. W. Connell's classic study, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Efimov's cartoons represent an important source for understanding how masculinity got produced and reproduced in the Soviet setting, illustrating a striking paradox given the Soviet language on women's emancipation and participation in the socialist project. Efimov created political worlds where only men participated, relegating women to a separate sphere of activity.
(20.) Efimov's fellow caricaturists did not differ significantly in this regard. In a recent compilation accompanying a London exhibition of Cold War cartoons, the Statue of Liberty was the only significant female symbol represented, mostly as a downtrodden or shamefaced figure. One cartoon featured a poor, starving American mother; a second characterized the “Cold War” in female form (“war” [voina] is a feminine noun in Russian). The only positive drawing of a woman came in S. Chistyakov's 1958 caricature, “Science,” which divides the world into two. “Here,” capturing the Soviet world, contains three scientists conducting an experiment that “tackles the question of extending life.” One of the three is a woman, who stands behind an older, more experienced man (unlike her two male counterparts, she is not physically taking part in the experiment). The other panel, “there,” features three Western scientists all wearing gas masks, “looking for means of destroying life.” Drawing the Curtain: The Cold War in Cartoons (London: Fontanka, 2012).
(21.) Boris Efimov, untitled introduction to Mark Abramov, ed., Satira v bor'be za mir, 4.
(22.) Sergei Khrushchev, “A Visual History of the Cold War,” in Frank Althaus and Mark Sutcliffe, eds., Drawing the Curtain: The Cold War in Cartoons (London: Fontanka, 2012), 8.
(23.) Quoted in Richard Stites, “Heaven and Hell: Soviet Propaganda Constructs the World,” in Cold-War Propaganda in the 1950s, ed. Gary Rawnsey (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 85-103. In his article, Stites argued that Soviet Cold War propaganda built upon the “good vs evil, heaven vs hell imagery of the revolutionary era” as well as the World War II era propaganda, which “swelled the Manichean element to frightful, though understandable, proportions.” The “visual and verbal lexicon of that war's propaganda,” he concluded, “was almost wholly adopted for the Cold War,” which in turn was “rooted in primal notions of heaven (the Soviet Union) and hell (the capitalist world, and especially its superpower leader).” Stites analyzed Ogonek and Krokodil and noted that “The cartoon was the main and probably most noticed vehicle of the two-sided Cold War narrative ... .” They were also “painfully repetitious.”
(24.) Here (and elsewhere) I am drawing on the works of Jeffrey Brooks and Evgeny Do-brenko. In his study of official culture, particularly the newspaper Pravda, Brooks argues that the Party “imposed a structure of thinking” (xiv) on readers. At the same time, as Stalin himself acknowledged, readers needed to be cultivated through emotion, for “every
Page 21 of 24 issue of Pravda is an address, an appeal” (xix). The paper, in short, wanted to create the “exemplary reader” (15). It did so in part by creating a sense of belonging, by appealing to “we,” and did so, as Brooks writes, through repetitive metaphors: “front,” “struggle,” “task,” “path,” and “building.” Its title, of course, captured this overall aim (pravda means “truth”). See Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Soviet political caricatures took part in this project, what I have labeled “truth building,” seeking to eliminate nuance in how Soviet viewers understood the world by also relying on repetitive symbols and tropes. In doing so, they sought to create a Soviet viewer in the way Do-brenko has explained how literature sought to create a state reader. Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature, translated by Jesse M. Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
(25.) L. R. Varshavskii, “Nashi karikaturisty. 2: Bor. Efimov,” Zhurnalist 5 (1929), 138.
(26.) E. Kronman, “Efimov, Boris Efimovich,” in O. Iu. Shmidt, ed., Bol'shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia (Moscow: OGIZ, 1932), 591-593.
(27.) “Efimov, Boris Efimovich,” in B. A. Vvedenskii, ed., Bol'shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 2nd ed., vol. 15 (Moscow: Iz-vo BSE, 1952), 566-567.
(28.) Karikatura na sluzhbe oborony SSSR (Moskva: Ogiz, 1931); Vykhod budem naiden: Politicheskie karikatury (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo i zobrazitel'nykh iskusstv, 1932); Politicheskie karikatury, 1924-1934 (Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel', 1935).
(29.) Iu. Neiman, “Iskusstvo, raziashchee vraga,” Smena 12 (1937), 36.
(30.) M. Ioffe, Boris Efimov (Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1952).
(31.) Quoted in Politicheskie karikatury, 1924-1934, 14-15.
(32.) Quoted in Boris Efimov, Rabota, vospominaniia, vstrechi (Moscow: Sov. khudoznik, 1963), 39.
(33.) Gr. Koniakhin, “Vystavka Sovetskoi Satiry,” Pravda, October 23, 1952, 3.
(34.) D. Zaslavskii, “O satiricheskikh zhurnalakh,” Pravda, September 5, 1956, 4.
(35.) B. Efimov, “Oruzhiem khudozhnika,” Vecherniaia Moskva, October 20, 1956, 3.
(36.) Boris Efimov, “Oruzhie smekha,” Voprosy literatury 1 (1962), 22. I have written about Efimov's use of the “weapon of laughter” in “The Sharp Weapon of Soviet Laughter: Boris Efimov and Visual Humor,” Russian Literature 74, no. 1-2 (2013): 31-62; and his life during the Thaw, when he published this article, “Laughter's Weapon and Pandora's Box: Boris Efimov in the Khrushchev Era,” in David Goldfrank and Pavel Lyssakov, eds., Cultural Cabaret: Russian and American Essays in Memory of Richard Stites (Washington, DC: New Academic Press, 2012): 105-138.
(37.) To take one representative example: in a book about Mark Abramov, whose caricature from the 1972 exhibit is mentioned earlier, published in the series “Masters of Soviet Caricature,” the well-known children's author and author of lyrics to the Soviet national anthem Sergei Mikhalkov described Abramov's work as a “military arsenal” that, like “ideological rockets,” “strike the enemy.” Mikhalkov lauds Abramov for his long-standing work, dating back to 1930, and urges him to “keep it up”! While recycling these words, Mikhalkov also cites Efimov, who is termed “the patriarch of Soviet caricature.” Sergei Mikhalkov, “Master politicheskoi karikatury,” in Mastera Sovetskoi karikatury. Mark Abramov (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1988), n.p.
(38.) Kherluf (Herluf) Bidstrup, untitled introduction to Bor. Efimov v "Izvestiiakh": Karikatury za polveka (Moscow: Izvestiia, 1969), 8.
(39.) Boris Efimov, untitled introduction to Mark Abramov, ed., Satira v bor'be za mir, 5-6.
(40.) Hu Mang, “Main Theme Is Man,” Moscow News, February 14, 1959, 4.
(41.) Ibid.
(42.) This campaign also developed from earlier initiatives. During the First Five Year Plan, the Stalinist state sought to explain how its policies—and indeed the entire revolutionary project—was a “battle for peace.” See, for example, Bor'ba za mir (Moscow: Izo-giz, 1931). The book narrated a history of the USSR as one where the facts and documents revealed that the Soviet state sought peace. Naturally, it included several caricatures by Efimov and other Soviet propagandists.
(43.) Mikhail Suslov, “The Defense of Peace and the Struggle against the Warmongerers,” translated at https://www.marxists.org/archive/suslov/1949/11/x01.htm
(44.) Ibid.
(45.) Melissa Feinberg, Curtain of Lies: The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 40.
(46.) Boris Efimov, ed., Za prochnyi mir: protiv podzhigatelei voiny: risunki (Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1950).
(47.) Feinberg, Curtain of Lies, x.
(48.) Quoted in Pertti Ahonen, Death at the Berlin Wall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 18.
(49.) “Glavnaia problema—likvidatsiia ostatkov voinu,” Pravda, August 28, 1959, 1.
(50.) Ibid.
(51.) Ibid.
(52.) Boris Efimov, untitled introduction to Mark Abramov, ed., Satira v bor'be za mir, 6.
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(53.) Red Files, “Soviet Propaganda,” produced and directed by Elizabeth Dobson (PBS, 1999).
(54.) “Interview with Boris Efimov” for PBS Red Files (1999): https://www.pbs.org/red-files/prop/deep/interv/p_int_boris_efimov.htm.
(55.) Ibid.
(56.) The argument that the Soviet Union should be understood in part through its many paradoxes is one made persuasively by Stephen Lovell, The Soviet Union: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 14.
Stephen M. Norris
Stephen M. Norris, Walter E. Havighurst Professor of Russian History and Director of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University
The Lyrical Subversions of Socialist Realism in Dang Nhat Minh's New Wave Cinema a
Dana Healy
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Jan 2020 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.23
This article looks at the career and work of a prominent Vietnamese film director, Dang Nhat Minh. By taking a closer look at his film When the Tenth Month Comes, this article challenges the Cold War perception of communist art as a mere servant to politics and ideology, with little aesthetic ambition beyond its didactic and propagandist duty. It explores Minh's use of lyricism as an effective tool of subversion and means to assert his autonomy as a communist artist. It is through the lyrical that the film director reaches back to the core of Vietnamese cultural identity and ancient traditions to provide a poetic affirmation of the resilience of his nation's culture, while mobilizing a sense of belonging and loyalty to the communist project.
Keywords: Vietnam, Vietnamese film, the Cold War, communism, visual cultures, socialist realism, lyricism, Dang Nhat Minh
Vietnam has long occupied a prominent space within the Cold War discourse, with the Vietnam War providing a particularly potent symbol of the ruptured world. The bipolar mindset that dominated the Cold War era has done much to obscure the complicated dimensions of the conflict on both sides of the Iron Curtain. At its extreme manifestation, it reduced this complex event to a crude ideologically driven caricature where heroes and villains were neatly classified and respectively lauded or ostracized. Yet the longer we scrutinize the war's causes, analyze its results, and debate its consequences, the more complex and elusive it appears. But where conflicts are divisive, human suffering is unifying. Stripping away the hostile rhetoric of political campaigns, military strategies, and publicity crusades reveals a much simpler story of human strife, which transcends physical and ideological borders and allows the former adversaries to realize that their fates have had more in common than the acrimonious political vocabulary suggests.
The ideological ceasefire that marked the end of the Cold War unleashed a process of reorientation of Cold War studies, allowing for dialogue. The debates on Vietnam and the
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Vietnam War have benefited from this process of global convergence that helped to draw attention to the Vietnamese perspective, egregiously neglected in Western scholarship. The Hollywood Vietnam War genre, through its Orientalist subjugation of the Vietnamese “Others,” has largely excluded the Vietnamese from the great American tragedy, deeming them invisible, faceless and mute, demons without identity. The (North) Vietnamese, at the same time, concealed their own suffering from the outside world under the veil of the triumphant rhetoric of glorified national salvation. The (p- 543) shattering of these myths proved to be a precarious process, whose progress seems to be in jeopardy again as the Cold War rhetoric regains currency on the political world stage of today.
This chapter looks at the career and work of the prominent Vietnamese film director Dang Nhat Minh. Film, as indeed other creative expressions, has been utilized as a mighty weapon on both sides of the ideological battleground of the Cold War. Subsequently, it has proved to be an equally powerful instrument in the process of debunking of the propaganda and amending our understanding of the Cold War dynamics. The trajectory of Dang Nhat Minh's work challenges the story of communist filmmaking as a servant to revolution, with little aesthetic ambition beyond its didactic and propagandist duty. Minh's films resist such one-dimensional categorization. Few Vietnamese artists have been able to forge an illustrious career applauded by the regime while at the same time becoming palatable to highly critical international (Western) and Vietnamese diaspora audiences (both traditionally fiercely dismissive of socialist art); similarly, not many of them have acted as advocates and simultaneous indicters of the regime. Given the tensions between the official communist collective history and individualized private histories of his film characters, how did a celebrated national filmmaker manage to produce films that offer a harsh critique of the communist regime yet remain lauded by the same regime? How does he reconcile highly individualized description of private fates in his films with the demands of cohesive collectivism advocated by the communist party's style du jour, socialist realism? How did Minh align his lyrical style with the stern unsentimental mold prescribed by socialist realism?
By taking a closer look at the film When the Tenth Month Comes (1984), this chapter explores the ways in which Dang Nhat Minh the artist and Dang Nhat Minh the revolutionary, patriot, and Communist Party member are reconciled through his unique cinematic vision.
Importantly, When the Tenth Month Comes was made and released before the political and ideological thaw of the renovation era and reflects Minh's determination to uphold his creative autonomy and identity as an artist, despite the highly politicized cultural environment. Although his films were generally commended by the communist state, political efficacy, as prescribed by the regime, was never at the forefront of his creative endeavor. On the contrary, as this chapter argues, he frequently destabilizes the uniform, propagandistic and laudatory aspects embedded within the tenets of socialist realism. His complex and ambiguous position as a regime supporter—yet, at the same time, an independent and even subversive artist—shows that artistic production in Vietnam cannot be bracketed within neat and simplistic Cold War binaries.
Impassioned by Vietnam's long poetic tradition, Minh reaches for the lyrical as he navigates the vexing interaction of art and ideology. It is through the lyrical that Minh the artist reclaims his voice and asserts his autonomy. Lyricism in this sense is not just a genre or style but as David Der-Wei Wang asserts in his discussion of Chinese lyricism, it is “a set of values or a ‘structure of feeling' that registered a social episteme.”1 It is a rich depository of ancient cultural values, traditions, and ethics of the nation that reverberates in the hearts of the people to anchor their lives and configure their integrity.
(p. 544) In Minh's films, lyricism becomes a productive force to destabilize and correct the homogenous visions of reality proffered by socialist realism; it empowers the director to personalize the country's history, validate private experiences, and awaken emotions buried beneath the collective ethos of communism. His lyrical evocations of the eternal rhythms of life in the countryside, harmony with nature, the bond between the people and their land, the native village, the family ties—all reflect profound and everlasting values which make the political and ideological appear transient, trivial, and almost irrelevant.
The subversive character of Minh's lyricism does not stem from adopting an openly dissenting stance against the regime but from his resurrection of the individual, from his affirmation of individual fates, experiences, and emotions. It is not state or communist ideology which offers solutions to the tribulations of the people; rather it is the lyrical that harks back to ancient traditions and values, delving into the core of Vietnamese identity to provide solace in the face of hardship and suffering and serves as a poetic attestation to the resilience of the nation. The lyrical in Dang Nhat Minh's films is also instrumental in generating complex affects which contravene the monolithic function of political art, invoking melancholy, nostalgia, empathy, and trauma. Arguably, Minh's lyrical subversions liberate his audiences, compelling them to assert their individuality and participate in the construction of the film's meaning.
Beginning his filmmaking in the 1960s, Dang Nhat Minh, who is still active today, has witnessed the dramatic evolution of Vietnamese cinema in the twentieth century, and his career reflects the myriad influences, upheavals, hierarchies, and allegiances that were instrumental in forging the shape of filmmaking in Vietnam.
Vietnamese cinema has always had a strong political orientation and was inextricably bound with state politics. Its birth is linked to the period of colonization and decolonization, and the early stages of its existence are inseparable from the turbulent historical circumstances that mark the twentieth century in Vietnam. Following the establishment of a socialist state, Vietnamese Democratic Republic, in 1945, the communist authorities immediately took “a deep and abiding interest in cultural issues, both in a theoretical sense as well as in more substantive terms.”2 They incorporated culture into the broader political agenda, creating and disseminating a new canon of culture that would contribute to the realization of their revolutionary goals. This period marks the beginning of a film industry in the North, which was thus born to serve the revolution.3 Decree 14/SL, signed by Ho Chi Minh on March 15, 1953, launched the (North) Vietnamese film industry in a more official sense by establishing the Photography and Cinematography State Enterprise (Doanh nghiêp Quoc gia chieu bong và chup anh). Even though film in Vietnam was still in its infancy, the communist leaders had recognized early on the need to detach
(p. 545) this new medium from any bourgeois cultural tradition. Filmmakers were charged with making their art accessible to the masses—films centered on stock social themes and characters to convey a coherent ideological viewpoint and prop up the political regime.
The emerging Vietnamese film industry was also quickly embedded in the socialist state economy. As any other branch of industry, film production was incorporated into the centrally planned economy and was managed according to a five-year planning cycle. Film production and distribution-exhibition units received operating budgets allocated by the state. The centrally controlled system of cultural production enabled the state authorities to oversee all aspects of the filmmaking process: films were financed by the state, produced at the state-owned studios by state-employed filmmakers, advertised and distributed by the state, and scrutinized for their ideological correctness by state censors. The establishment of state film organizations, film periodicals, and professional associations cemented total control over film production.
Also important for the development of the local film industry and for Minh's own career was Vietnam's gradual move into the orbit of the Soviet Bloc. The year 1949 saw the formation of Comecon (The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), an international economic organization linking the Soviet Union with its East European allies, and later also developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that embarked on the path toward socialism. Comecon coordinated economic, trade, research, and development activities of its member countries. Vietnamese officials were eager to align themselves with Comecon, gaining observer status for 1956-1958 and becoming a full member in 1978. Consequently, Vietnamese cinema was gradually entwined in the framework of international transfers and exchanges shaping the culture of the socialist camp, creating a distinct and interconnected socialist culture. The Soviet cinematic internationalism functioned as a transnational enterprise to “influence, coordinate and cooperate with socialist filmmakers” in their search for “a successful film aesthetic to portray the ideals of socialism in a way attractive to mass audiences.”4 Practical aspects of this mission embraced a range of outreach activities, including film export and collaboration, artistic exchanges, regular forums, and film festivals (above all, the Moscow Film Festival, a prominent platform to parade the best films that embodied socialist values), as well as a transnational system of financial and technical funding, co-productions, and film distributions. These cultural affinities led Vietnamese cinema, in spite of its geographical distance, to forge a close
connection to the cinematic traditions of the Socialist Bloc countries, including Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Russia.
The 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, an event that visualized the dismantling of the Iron Curtain, marked a fundamental shift in global geopolitics and opened new paths for a comprehensive reappraisal of the Cold War. Romero provides a succinct summary of the new trends:
(p. 546)
Almost a quarter of a century later, historians are [ ... ] expanding, dissecting, and complicating the very notion of a Cold War into a kaleidoscopic multiplication of prospects, contextualisations, methodological approaches, and meanings. We obviously situate the Cold War in longer-term perspectives of international and global transformations. We construct new hierarchies of significance—at times inspired by a rather more problematic presentism—from the long-term legacies that our current perspectives tend to prioritise. We decentre from a primarily Euro-Atlantic focus to the complex heterogeneity of the global South, and from a close frame on the superpowers' decision-makers to the agency of a variety of actors in Latin America, Asia or Africa. And we enlarge the field from the customary subjects of diplomacy, security and ideology onto a bracing assortment of trans-national and domestic, cultural and social, human rights and media, economic and intellectual history approaches.5
The greater integration of the countries of the Global South and the re-evaluation of the agency of these “peripheral” actors represents a vital shift, attesting to their agency rather than perceiving them as passive recipients of superpower politics. The understanding of how the peripheral others experienced and recount the history of the Cold War is central in liberating the debates from what Kwon labels the falsity of uniformity. In The Other Cold War, he challenges the construct of a “unitary global cold war” which creates a false impression of a single or predominant Cold War experience. “Instead of one global cold war,” he argues “the history of the global cold war consists of a multitude of locally specific historical realities and variant human experiences which conflict with the dominant as a single, encompassing geopolitical order.”6 With reference to Southeast Asia, scholars have also helped to underscore the agency of Southeast Asian countries, demonstrating that the conflict “was driven by regional historical imperatives as much as by global forces.”7 Similarly, Hack and Wade argue that the “‘South East Asian Cold War' was constituted by local forces drawing on outside actors for their own ideological and material purposes, more than by great powers seeking local allies and proxy theatres of conflict.”8
Meanwhile, an expanding body of critical writings turns attention to the examination of culture (including visual culture) as one of the major battlegrounds of Cold War ideological conflict. Debates on the cultures in the polarized world of the Cold War have been predominantly wrapped around issues of control and compliance with the respective political systems. As Scott-Smith and Segal explain: “two antagonistic power blocs defining their own interpretation of the world, contesting each other's utopian claims as dystopian designs, and manufacturing consent by a combination of soft power (coercion, intimidation, punishment) in the interest of collective security and identity.”9 Today's scholarship advances a more nuanced assessment demonstrating that, notwithstanding conflicting ideological foundations, cultural expressions in both blocs often shared numerous commonalities (facilitated by various forms of collaborations and cross border exchanges). Even though both blocs declared their art to be intrinsically connected to their political systems, a degree of autonomy of cultural expression was often possible and many cultural works were in fact at odds with the clear-cut interpretations (p- 547) of capitalist or communist doctrines.10 While the use of propaganda in the East has been mapped extensively, in recent years the use of culture as propaganda in the West has also become a productive line of research.11
In shifting the focus away from the central superpowers, the post-Cold War scholarship has helped to accentuate the Vietnamese experience. While the high degree of ideological intrusions into pre-1986 cultural production in Vietnam is irrefutable and well documented, scholars have increasingly cautioned against equating the entire cultural output to mere propaganda. Referring to Vietnamese cinema, John Charlot, for example, argues that although in the early 1970s a number of films were simplistic and formulaic, later a commitment to questions of humanity, beauty, and moral character came to the fore.12 Others highlight the emergence of authentic Vietnamese aesthetics, a distinctive national character of Vietnamese cinema, derived from a combination of historical circumstances, pronounced ideological concerns, and indigenous cultural tradition “with its vivid expression of the humanity, philosophy, and feelings of the Vietnamese.”13
Dang Nhat Minh started making films at an opportune moment in Vietnamese history—a period of a slowly approaching ideological thaw marked by gradual political and cultural liberalization which eventually culminated in the launch of the doi mói (renovation) reforms, which introduced widespread liberalization in economy, in 1986, and culture, in 1987.
Until Renovation, Vietnamese culture was dominated by socialist realism. The fundamental principles of politicized art were laid down in the 1943 pamphlet, Theses on Vietnamese Culture, penned by Truong Chinh, the Communist Party chief ideologue and a staunch follower of Marxism-Leninism. Socialist realism was elevated to become the only acceptable form of creativity. Art had to be realistic in form and socialist in content. Un
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embellished style guaranteed that the obligatory political messages would be easily understood by everyone and boastful language was to promote optimism and positive visions of the socialist future. As a result, cultural production became predictable, stereotypical, and superficial.
Within the considerably enlarged creative space facilitated by the Renovation, yet in the absence of total freedom, there was a stimulus for creativity to shatter the ideological strictures and offer an alternative to the monumental visions of socialist realism—a mission befitting Minh's inclination toward lyricism and emotional sensitivity.
Minh is a self-taught filmmaker. He was originally trained as a translator from Russian, but an opportune vacancy at the Cinema Department brought him closer to the world of filmmaking. In his new position, he was tasked with translating dialogues of Russian films (which formed the majority of films screened in Vietnam in the 1960s) and assisted
(p. 548) Soviet film experts in developing courses and tutorials for Vietnamese filmmakers. Here he became much closer to the world of filmmaking, relishing the lectures, theoretical articles, and films assigned to the students. His love for cinema ignited, Minh pursued every opportunity to become a filmmaker, managing to supervise student graduation films and eventually creating his first works, which were documentaries.14 His first feature films, Chi Nhung (Miss Nhung, 1970) and Nhung ngoi sao bien (Starts on the Sea, 1973), were followed by his most famous work: Bao gid cho den thang mudi (When the Tenth Month Comes), released before the Renovation reforms of 1986.
Although the communist authorities gradually turned Vietnam's artistic production into a eulogy to patriotism, revolutionary spirit, and national unity, Minh always searched for ways to imbue his films with emotions and empathy. With the end of war came a desire to recover the past from its ideological constraints, but it was not until November 1987 that the communist authorities formulated their doi moi cultural policies, abandoned socialist realism, and released artists from political control. The Renovation injected a fresh energy into Vietnamese culture and inspired a wave of literature and films that set out to rescue the “big” themes of war and revolution by peeling off the glossy collective ethos and rediscovering the private experiences obliterated within the earlier paradigms of socialist realism.
Minh's filmmaking was in many ways ahead of that of his peers. When the Tenth Month Comes, released in 1984, was one of the very first revisionist films contesting the official memories of war. By portraying the private process of mourning the dead soldier, Minh challenged the state's ennoblement of the war dead and reinstated the memory of the dead soldier to the private realm of his family kin. His later films remained focused on the portrayal of the fate of the individual, the most famous of them being Co gai tren song (The Girl on the River, 1987), Thuong nho dong que (Nostalgia for the Countryside, 1995), Mua oi (The Season of Guavas, 1999), and Dung dot (Don't Burn, 2009).
Discussions on Vietnam's cultural production from the Renovation period frequently accentuate the centrality of its criticism of the communist regime. While the wave of Renovation films is undoubtedly imbued with a strong critical potential, not all artists set out
Page 7 of 25 to be dissenting, certainly not always in a politically active fashion. Many, including Dang Nhat Minh, were driven by their individual creative ambitions and desire for innovation and experiment. In many ways, the nature of Renovation cinema in Vietnam echoes the reformist new wave filmmaking that emerged throughout Eastern Europe in the 1960s in response to the broader political and cultural de-Stalinization process. The Czechoslovak new wave, for example, that blossomed following Alexander Dubcek's inauguration of “socialism with a human face” unleashed an unprecedented burst of cinematic creativity, as well as social authenticity. The Czech film scholar Lubica Ucnik explains that young filmmakers at that time “rejected as lies film schematism and the socialist realism of previous years to assert their right to authenticity, originality, and a meaningful artistic standpoint. The most important criteria became truthfulness, the desire to show human emotions, and conflicts rather than class-defined narratives and schematic sketches.”15
(p. 549) Cultural production that grew out of Vietnamese Renovation, as Minh's example helps to illustrate, similarly desired to steer itself away from the restrictive formulae of socialist realism and explicit ideological grounding toward cinema of moral rather than political concerns; cinema of individual fates rather than collective crusades; cinema of sober critical reflection rather than boastful proclamation. Moreover, by refusing to voice explicit messages complementary to socialism and by directing works of art toward ambiguity and multiple meanings, Renovation art empowered its audiences by coercing them to think for themselves, cautioning against blind acceptance of authority. Scott's assessment of the more recent Romanian new wave also rings true for Vietnam's Renovation cinema:
There is almost no didacticism or point-making in these films, none of those characters are easily sorted into good guys or bad guys. Instead, there is an almost palpable impulse to tell the truth, to present choices, conflicts and accidents without exaggeration or omission. This is a form of realism, of course, but its motivation seems to be as much ethical as aesthetic, less a matter of verisimilitude than of honesty.16
Although the censors and audiences find ample political messages in Minh's Renovation films, a compelling argument can be made that his ambitions are creative rather than political, that he is pursuing his own personal sense of artistic truth and it is this creative impulse, and not a specifically political motivation, that provides the most fundamental impetus behind his films. What connected the various developments in the arts in Vietnam during Renovation was the rejection of the ideological servitude imposed by socialist realism. In its place, the filmmakers combined various stylistic and thematic methods with indigenous Vietnamese cultural influences. Bradley, for example, notes that filmmakers employed
a diverse repertoire of rich visual imagery that reached back to ritual forms of family and village life long suppressed by the state, the metaphorical and subversive uses of gender in traditional literary idioms, and the discursive strategies of anticolonial political discourse familiar to much of their intended audience.17
There is much in Dang Nhat Minh's work that defies the conventional expectations of the communist state's most celebrated film director working in historically and ideologically restraining circumstances. His films (and for that matter, his professional life) in many ways resist the predicament of an artist working in a communist regime. Whereas (p- 550) Western Cold War scholarship has been inclined to designate artistic production under socialism as belonging at either end of a spectrum of ideological compliance—either as apologist/propagandist or as dissenting/confrontational, in truth, as Minh's case helps to show, the range of approaches adopted by the majority of “working” artists was usually more nuanced and frequently involved a degree of compromise and strategizing. Within the supposedly monolithic artistic front, individual artists nevertheless adopted different tactics of compliance or resistance in coping with the demands of being an artist in a communist state.
Minh never allowed the trying historical and political milieu to incapacitate his imagination; if anything, he was spurred on by the challenge it presented. In his determination to maintain his artistic agency while still staying alert and relevant to the complicated reality around him, Minh frequently summoned the aesthetics of poetic realism, infusing his films with lyrical mode as a way to counteract the dispassionate conventions of socialist realism. In his work, lyricism becomes a productive tool he calls on in his attempt to reconcile the political/collective with the intimate/individual.
Most of Minh's films are imbued with a kind of poetic ambience that rises above transient ideology and directs the spectators toward more profound and eternal values of humanity. This is not to say that the director shies away from engaging with the decisively unpo-etic reality around him. Not only would it be unimaginable given the magnitude of historical events that provide a backdrop to his career, it would also mean disregarding his genuine patriotic feelings and empathy with his suffering nation. His lyricism is not a form of irrelevant romantic escape from the dramatic circumstances but a sensual meditation on reality, which enables him to incorporate into his films diverse voices and legitimize previously marginalized aspects of the past. Paradoxically, by softening the coarseness of ideology, by placing emphasis on imagery and emotions, by featuring contemplative scenes that compel people to mull over their actions, he crafts films that evoke a sense of commitment and solidarity with the nation in a more powerful way than could ever be achieved through plain political servility.
Dang Nhat Minh's distinct artistic language draws its inspiration from several sources. Much of his lyrical sensibility is directly rooted in Vietnam's long poetic tradition, both its oral as well as classical scholarly forms, and is heightened by the director's deep attachment to his homeland, its people and cultural traditions.
Fondness for poetry is an innate part of Vietnamese sensibilities. Poetic expression has dominated Vietnamese culture from ancient times and poetry always enjoyed high prestige. At the time when Vietnam was engulfed in the “epic” eras of war and social upheavals, Minh's incantation of the lyrical may seem anachronistic or inapt. Yet, as demonstrated by many scholars, in Vietnam, poetic discourse has long played a significant role in the larger process of historical change as it helped shape Vietnamese society (p- 551) through its moral, philosophical, and political guidance. As Chinese literary historian David Der-Wei Wang points out in reference to China, the concept of Chinese poetics “has always indicated an interaction between the self and the world and beyond” and artists in China often “invoke the lyrical as they came to ruminate on the stakes of selfhood vis-à-vis solidarity, pondering historical contingencies and poetic/artistic assertions and experimenting with forms that they believe best cast light on and responded to the time of cri-sis.”18 Similarly in Vietnam, in turbulent times, poetry assumed a crucial role in “preserving and transmitting the national identity without which Vietnam couldn't have survived a thousand years under Chinese rule.”19
In his contemplation on the relationship between history and poetry in Vietnam, Jamieson asserts that poetic discourse humanizes history, expands our moral imagination, and stimulates our capacity for empathy by sensitizing us to deeper levels of meaning.20 Equally important is the ability of poetic expression to imbue ambiguity, incorporate a multiplicity of voices and perspectives within a single text, which, even in the heyday of socialist realism, incited audiences to read between the lines and collaborate in the production of meaning. It is precisely through this multiplicity of perspectives and spectrum of possibilities of interpretation that Dang Nhât Minh's films become free from a fixed ideological meaning and achieve such emotional potency.
Another crucial influence that was instrumental in shaping Minh's artistic style comes from Soviet cinema. By the time he started making films, the Vietnamese film industry was already imbued with the Soviet filmmaking tradition, which provided a powerful source of inspiration for Minh and his contemporaries. As Minh's experience shows, most film cadres in Vietnam in the second half of the twentieth century, both artistic and managerial, were new recruits, with few skills and no formal education in film. Their training, or to use the political terminology, “the cultivation of cultural cadres,” became an urgent task for the Vietnamese authorities, and in the absence of a domestic film school, the Vietnamese government dispatched in 1956 a first group of students to be trained in Moscow at the All-Soviet State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). VGIK became an important training ground for filmmakers from developing countries, so much so that Ngô Phuong Lan, director of the Vietnam Cinema Department under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, a VGIK alumni herself, refers to VGIK as the “cradle” of Vietnamese film and credits it with the subsequent successes of Vietnamese cinema. Nearly all filmmakers holding key positions in Vietnamese cinema had been educated at VGIK. In spite of its political allegiances, VGIK gradually became an important creative hub, “a relative-
Page 10 of 25 ly protected artistic sanctuary.”21 It was a rare place in the Soviet Union where students could encounter Western cinema. As Naripea explains,
The institute of cinematography had put them into contact with Western cinema's history and its newest trends, both directly—through films that were shown as part of their coursework but whose screening was prohibited to the general public —and indirectly—through the works of their teachers who were among the best filmmakers of their times.22
(p. 552) It was a long-held aspiration of Minh to study at VGIK. When his job as a translator brought him into the proximity of VGIK alumni, he soon began to yearn to join their ranks and gain a professional training at VGIK. Having been repeatedly rejected by the Vietnamese authorities, Minh wrote to VGIK with a request to join a distance learning course, only to be again disappointed that VGIK did not offer any distance learning programs. The head of the Institute was nevertheless so impressed by Minh's determination that he sent him study materials, which the aspiring director perused with passion. He remembers:
I devoured these textbooks as if I was a student preparing for exams. I learnt the meaning of shot size, mise en scene, Eisenstein's understanding of the concept of mise en cadre, I learnt how to organize each sequence, the role of actors, and most importantly, I learnt about the importance of montage.23
In spite of the physical distance from VGIK, Minh was in close proximity to VGIK's artistic stimulus. Soviet film experts were coming to Vietnam to run courses for local filmmakers, and Vietnamese filmmakers trained at VGIK were returning home to impart their newly acquired knowledge of film craft. Among the films that were particularly popular at the time were Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying (1957), Grigori Chukhrai's Ballad of a Soldier (1959), and Sergei Bondarchuk's Fate of a Man (1959), as well as films by Mikhail Romm, Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Konchalovsky, and others. The artistic influence of these Soviet filmmakers was crucial for the development of Minh's own style as an auteur. He was attuned to their delicate lyricism, which suited his own sensitivity rooted in the poetic tradition of his homeland. He could relate to their expressive style, intensity of emotions, and emphasis on the visual radiating through their stories of love, loss, and individual isolation. On another level, he also took notice of how they navigated complex sociopolitical circumstances and made do with limited financial and technological resources; he also recognized the strategies necessary to balance the aesthetic with the political when working within a highly politicized cultural milieu.
A limited selection of “progressive” Western films also made it through the Iron Curtain, for example Italian neorealism or French nouvelle vague and their various later reincarnations from other countries. The vibrations of these “new waves” from both the Eastern Bloc and the West, with their tendency to focus on everyday life, daily struggles of ordinary people, and authentic environment and emotions, found their way into Minh's work and into Vietnamese cinema as a whole. These films with their realistic feel, portraying the tribulations of ordinary people struggling to make sense of their lives amid economic
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hardship, social upheavals, and oppression resonated with the Vietnamese reality (and with the realist artistic tradition). Later in his career, especially during his stay in France, Minh had more opportunities to draw upon inspiration from the acclaimed films of French directors such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Éric Rohmer, Maurice Pialat, and André Téchiné or other foreign filmmakers, including Roman Polanski, Milos Forman, Akira Kurosawa, Yasujirô Ozu, and Kenji Mizoguchi.
Dang Nhât Minh's significance as a powerful artistic voice derives from his ability to craft intricate, sensual, and moving films which ruminate over major events that have shaped Vietnamese society in the twentieth century—the most poignant among them is the war and its painful legacy. Its memories have become strategically important in the state's efforts to fashion a coherent narrative of the country's past, which served to legitimize the regime. Under the reign of socialist realism, the topic of war was reduced to an impersonal affair, which substituted genuine human emotions with impassive ideological proclamations. As I have illustrated elsewhere, while many artists in Vietnam were willing to sacrifice their freedom of creativity during the war in order to fulfil their patriotic obligations, passive obedience and conformity was no longer aceptable to them once the war was over.24 As a result, many artists strove to reclaim their freedom and rescue the topic of war from its formulaic treatment. In 1978, Nguyen Minh Châu, an influential Vietnamese soldier-writer, took a brave decision to voice in the essay Viet ve chien tranh (Writing about War) his disillusionment with the treatment of war in Vietnamese literature. Among the main weaknesses, he highlights the presence of one-dimensional characters lacking veracity and psychological depth, a simplistic concept of a hero, a sanitized version of the war, and a dream-like reality riddled with discrepancies between official accounts of war as a historical event and the personal memories of the participants.25
In agreement with Nguyen Minh Châu's critique, Dang Nhât Minh set out to liberate the topic of war from its ideological distortions. He employed his lyrical sensibility to rescue this subject matter from the paradigms of collective triumph and to explore it instead within the paradigms of loss and private trauma. His films do not take place on the battlefield, and the tragedy of war is expressed rather through its suffocating omnipresence in people's lives, irrespective of whether his film takes place during wartime or in its aftermath. His anchoring of memory of the war lies in the rendition of “private wars.” By turning to universal human concerns, such as love, family, sacrifice, forgiveness, and spirituality, and by sidestepping ideology, his films inevitably complicate and contest the state's simplified ideological construct of war.
Dang Nhât Minh's lyricism is clearly on display in When the Tenth Month Comes, his most celebrated film to date, shot in black and white and released in 1984. In the history of Vietnamese film, few works match the significance of this critically acclaimed masterpiece with prestigious accolades to its name, including the highest Vietnamese film
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award, the Golden Lotus in 1985, special prize at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival in 1989, and a distinction at the International Hawaii Film Festival in 1985.26 This film also occupies a unique position in the Vietnamese film canon by being arguably the most internationally famous Vietnamese film.
(p. 554) The original script, which Minh wrote himself, was inspired by a chance encounter with a village funeral procession. As he recollects in his film diaries, he was struck by the powerful image of a lonely widow walking in the procession, mourning a husband who in fact died several years ago. The film tells the story of a young widow, Duyen, who, upon learning of her husband's death in the war in Cambodia, conceals this news from her ill father-in-law and her young son to shield them from pain. She enlists the help of a local teacher who composes letters that she passes off as coming from her husband at the front, maintaining a pretense that he is still alive. Her deception, although well intentioned, becomes a source of major drama as it infringes on the complex commemoration practices of the war dead.
The film is constructed around the memory of a dead soldier, an issue which encapsulates in Vietnamese society a range of ideological, cultural, and emotional concerns. In communist Vietnam, the death of a soldier, one of the most potent symbols of war, is a predicament of major political maneuvering, as it is so demonstrably the result of political action. As Malarney illustrates, the politicians in Vietnam integrated fallen soldiers into a pantheon of national heroes in order to legitimize the war losses and the regime itself.27 By claiming the ownership of the soldier's memory and exploiting it as a vehicle for nationalism and communism, the authorities sacrificed the private grief of the families of the dead, encroaching on their private mourning and the traditional funerary rites of passage, which lay the soul of the deceased to rest within the familial ancestral line. Mourning for a fallen soldier assumes, as Bradley points out, “a central place in the symbolic vocabulary of the revisionist films of the 1980s.”28 In When the Tenth Month Comes, Minh constructs an intricate exploration of this theme, complicated further by the concealment of the soldier's death. While the official state commemorations glorify the death in combat, it is the private memory that reverts back to the paradigm of loss and pain—thus transcending the specific historical and geographical setting, ideological allegiances, or even nationality, to give this film a universal validity that holds true for all wars.
The director's poetic aesthetics serves to unsettle dogmatic ideology, and as Charlot notes, “it is this poetic sense which separates Dang Nhat Minh's films from conventional socialist realism.”29 Whereas socialist realism demanded that the war death be portrayed within the officially enshrined political clichés of glorified sacrifice, Minh privileges the subjectivity of emotions over ideology. Like the best poets before him, he invites the audiences to recognize their own subjectivity and submerge themselves in his film, finding echoes of their own wars. This is not an easy task in a cultural tradition built on prescriptive Confucian and communist ethics, which command discipline, uniformity, and unquestionable loyalty. Lyricism in Dang Nhat Minh's films functions both as a remedial and subversive tool: his probing sensitivity amends, complements, contests, casts doubt, discred-its—in short, complicates, the homogenous officially sanctioned account of war. His war is
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not an abstract war: he rescues the myriad of individual forms of grief, giving war loss an image that is tangible, palpable, and which resonates with the audiences, many of whom would have been through their own process of mourning.
(p. 555) Dàng Nhât Minh's type of lyricism is imbued with a profound sense of homeland and rootedness, yet his patriotism stands above ideology. This affection for the native land is visualized in When the Tenth Month Comes through a poetic rendering of the Vietnamese countryside and is further reinforced through the portrayal of the deep ties within a Vietnamese family and village community. The tormenting ordeals that plague his characters are contrasted by the unassuming calmness of the natural landscape or the monotonous cycle of rural life, heightening the emotional impact of his films. The clichéd pastoral imagery of rice fields, rivers, trees, or village alleys reproduces a sense of stability in otherwise uncertain times of crisis facing the protagonists of his films. This seemingly “boring” visual monotony becomes aspirational and dreamlike for the characters whose lives have been irrevocably upset. The trauma of war, death, betrayal, or loss of home/ homeland is invoked poignantly, not through screams, weeping, or animated confrontations but through the forfeiture of ordinary life.
The recurring landscape shots invoke a sense of nostalgic tranquility and frame deceptive moments of respite, unbound from time, history, and ideology. Yet these expressionistic poetic interludes are soon exposed as false when the underlining narrative of trauma invades the mise en scène provided by the landscape images. The ominous cues of the looming tragedy—the recurrent close-ups of Duyên's eyes filled with pain and panic, the sudden sound of a toy gun, the figure of a soldier in the distance or a close-up of an ancestral altar—reintroduce the seemingly absent historical circumstances, imprinting a sorrowful melancholy on the idyllic pastoral images. Therefore, landscape in Minh's film is not just an object of the visual gaze, but serves as an additional semantic source extending the narrative space. In her discussion of Italian melodramas of the 1990s, Rosalind Galt emphasizes the politics of cinematic landscape and its capability to code spatial, political, and psychological transformations. Rejecting the role of a filmic landscape as simply aesthetically decorative and separate from the narrative, she argues for an ideological complexity of the spectacle where landscape images are not just heritage shots or static moments of spectacular freezing.30
The use of landscape images enables Minh to cut through the major issues of space, time, and identity to retrieve the film's central trope of mourning from its political misappropriation. His landscape shots become the depositories of a natural authentic way of life untainted by ideology. While the landscape in Minh's film still preserves the contours and parameters of the national space with its reverberations of history, tradition, rituals, and spirituality, it is simultaneously a deeply private intimate space. The spirituality encapsulated in his landscape, filled with shrines, altars, and spirits, privileges intimacy and hints at the redemptive possibility offered by the landscape. The political events as well as the state's authority fade into insignificance in the presence of the eternal natural cycle of life. The fact that the film evolves against the backdrop of the Vietnam War in Cambodia is barely noticeable. For example, the opening sequence, underpinned by highly lyrical
Page 14 of 25 musical score, shows Duyen returning to her home village and there is nothing that immediately betrays the fact that she has just learned of her husband's death.
Frame capture
In the absence of any plot to speak of, the film's dramatic action derives almost entirely from the portrayal of Duyen's overwhelming emotional ordeal. Minh turns a seemingly
(p. 556) innocent and well-intentioned lie into an inspired rumination on the profound issues at the heart of Vietnamese identity. Through recurring close-up shots of Duyen's face, the director captures a sense of her escalating panic as the gravity of her decision to keep her husband's death a secret dawns on her (see Figure 23.1). Each seemingly innocent question about her husband pulls her deeper into a web of lies, resulting in a suffocating guilt. Her secret isolates Duyen from others, and the director accentuates her loneliness by frequently positioning her at the edge of the frame, in the corner of the room, out of sight of others, through her lack of eye contact or the distant look on her face. Her intense anguish stems not only from her personal loss, but more crucially from denying her husband the mandatory process of worship, entrapping him as a restless wandering spirit. The family and village gatherings, especially the death anniversary feast for Duyen's mother-in-law, reflect the importance of ancestor worship.
Duyen's emotional strain reaches its climax during the scene of the village performance of cheo (traditional opera), which is among the most compelling moments in the film. Duyen's stage role resonates with her own fate: a wife weeping over her husband who was sent to war. The traditional cheo genre often dramatizes ancient stories of war heroism canonized in history, which are presented to the audiences through a highly stylized form of acting, staging, and movement. It evokes Vietnam's protracted history of war and aligns Duyen with countless women in Vietnam's history who faced the same tragedy, turning her character into an archetype of a bereaved wife who lost her husband to war. Her act also echoes a famous eighteenth-century Vietnamese poem, Chinh phu ngam (The Lament of a Warrior's Wife) in which a Confucian wife, left behind when her husband went off to war, laments her fate. Through these reverberations with an old and well-known poem, Minh directs us again to the historical tradition rather than to the political presence. As we listen to Duyen's declamations and watch her stylized gestures, the camera guides us to a series of small signs that signal her impending psychological collapse.
For example, as she raises the edge of her costume to her eyes in a stylized dramatic gesture, which traditionally symbolizes weeping, we sense that she covers her eyes (p- 557) for a fraction of a moment longer than the scene demands. Does she stay turned away from the audiences to conceal her own agony? Minh gradates the tension leading up to her breakdown when she rushes off the stage, unable to bear the pain anymore. Her abrupt departure destabilizes the diegetic performance: her private grief having infringed upon the choreographed stage act, awakening the film audiences to her individuality and humanity—she is no longer a stereotyped character but a real widow consumed by grief. Duyen's public display of sorrow unsettles the fixed narrative of war sacrifice, casting doubt on its veracity. By exposing her own pain, she metaphorically retrieves the memory of her fallen husband, and the cheo performance, repeated thousands of times before, suddenly acquires a different meaning—rather than reinforcing the state's narrative of glorified war, it appears compromised.
Another important method of recovering the memory of the dead soldier is to link it to the familial space back home. In When the Tenth Month Comes, this return is facilitated through the figures of ghosts and through the construction of the space in between real life and the afterlife. The spirits serve as a metaphor for the omnipresence of an unresolved past that still haunts the present. Upon its release, the intense spirituality pervading Minh's film—especially the presence of the ghosts—alarmed the authorities as elements at odds with the atheist ethos of communism. Yet Vietnamese culture and religious tradition place the utmost importance on the spirits of the deceased, and the worlds of the living and the dead are intimately bound together. In his anthropological study of war death and memory, Heonik Kwon explains that these ghosts of the war play an important part in postwar Vietnamese historical narrative and imagination as lingering reminders of historical injustice, social inequality, and Cold War division.31 More important, as he also notes, the spirits suffer from historical amnesia: they no longer recollect the ideologies, violence, enemies, heroes, cowards, combatants, or civilians. This ideological amnesia is significant as it locates the spirits among their family kin rather than in the communist family-state and thus polemicizes yet again the state's account of war.
The authoritative role of the ghosts as moral guardians gives them power over the living that diminishes the state's effort to control commemorative practices, and it is this supremacy of the spirits that gives the film its dissenting character. Whereas the state's commemorative practices privilege selfless heroes and altruistic martyrs, the private worship by the families and communities is unconditional and nondiscriminatory. Dang Nhat Minh generates much of his film's powerful emotions from reflecting on this deep bond and filial piety.
Frame capture
Dang Nhat Minh's penchant for the lyrical comes to the fore in his rendering of the spirits. The interconnectedness of the living and the dead is alluded to in the film through the seamless transitions between the two realms. Minh avoids creating any (p- 55«) robust demarcation lines between the two worlds: the spirits merge with the living effortlessly, which heightens the sense of unity between them. It is only through a contrast between the light and the darkness, paler facial coloring, ancient costumes, or eerie speech that the director gently alerts the audience to the presence of the spirits, making the boundaries between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, extremely fluid and natural. The scene at the annual spirit market (an annual gathering when worlds of the living and the dead are believed to intermingle), for example, shows the living and dead blending together in a bustling atmosphere typical of a regular market day, making it difficult to distinguish the dead from the living. When Duyen notices her husband sitting at the table with other people, nothing seems to suggest that he is not just another regular man taking a rest from his busy day. Only a close-up shot of his paler face exposes him as a ghost. Similarly, in a later scene at the spirit market showing the emotional reunion of Duyen and her husband, we watch them embrace and hold hands, yet a close-up shot reveals that their bodies never physically touch (see Figure 23.2). Even though their physical coexistence is no longer possible, their spiritual connection is enduring.
The presence of ghosts in the film is reassuring rather than menacing. No dramatic music or sinister sound effects signal their arrival, and the musical score remains soft and lyrical throughout their appearances, invoking a sense of their natural belonging (p- 559) in the world around us. Notwithstanding their nonthreatening presence, the spirits possess a commanding influence over the living and act as powerful “figures of critique.”32 The spirits—rather than the state—steer Duyen's recognition of the family's claim on the memory of her husband. When her husband exercises his combined authority as a spirit
Page 17 of 25 and as a male by ordering her to rectify her mistake by informing the family of his death, he asserts the supremacy of the kinship over the state.
The cohabitation and social intimacy with ghosts, enacted through ritual acts and votive offerings, is of great significance for the Vietnamese, and Minh uses a recurring symbol of a paper kite to reinforce this issue in his film. Before they are married, Duyen's husband makes a kite and they share a carefree afternoon playing with it. Yet soon, the kite assumes a more serious significance, when Duyen's husband decides to burn it in a ritual offering to honor the village spirit (see Figure 23.3). It is a gesture of powerful symbolic importance: on the eve of his medical examination for his military service, when he ceases to be a boy and becomes a soldier, he burns a kite as a votive offering, thus establishing a connection with the past dead warriors enshrined in the figure of the village spirit. The kite, a popular toy of the rural children, is also a symbolic thread that connects the different generations in the family. “Your father was a good kite maker,” the grandfather tells his grandson, Tuan, keeping his father's memory alive while at the same time
(p. 560) remembering his son. Furthermore, in addition to connecting the past and the present, the kite in this scene poignantly ties together the living and the dead, a fact that remains at this stage in the film's narrative still unknown to Tuan and his grandfather.
The kite features again prominently in the film's finale, soaring high in the sky to evoke new beginnings, hope, and a bright future (it is reasonable to assume that censorship might have influenced this ending). The order has been restored and the kite has once again assumed its meaning as a joyful pastime in the countryside. This final sequence represents one of the scenes where the film seems to be reconciled to a partial restoration of the socialist realist imagery. It is the first day of a new school year and, as Duyen walks with her son to school, life goes on without any trace of the war; only Duyen's white band of mourning hints at her loss. The close-up shot of Vietnam's national flag surrounded by cheerful children wearing young pioneers' scarves reinstates the state's authority over the future of Vietnam. Similarly, the character of the soldier who visits the dying grandfather reintroduces into the film an idealized state hero—brave and empathic: the soldier is the only person brave and honest enough to disclose the truth, but he is at the same time sensitive enough to help assuage the old man's dying moment by standing in for his deceased son.
Minh's propensity for poetic discourse permeates even those scenes, which are more directly cognizant of the political reality. For example, the ubiquity of the war in the lives of the Vietnamese is alluded to through brief close-up shots of small trivial objects—a child's drawings showing a family with a soldier holding a gun, Tuan's toy gun, the communist flag in front of the school, the school children with their pioneer neck scarfs—these images help to restore the film's link to the political reality.
As the film illustrates, embracing the lyrical does not necessitate a detachment from historical reality and a withdrawal from complex social situations. The lyricism helps ignite a more intricate and multilayered engagement, which acts on the deeper, personal level, which is necessarily contained within any collective historical action. Through the nurturing of subjectivity, heightened register of emotions, and the lyrical evocation of public and private traditions, the film speaks more emphatically about the war legacy, transcending the specific political milieu to gain a universal relevance. In projecting the lyrical onto history, Minh stimulates a mediatory interaction between politics and aesthetics: the lyrical humanizes the political, thereby paradoxically lending his film a patriotic consciousness so much desired by the official system. Yet his film is provocative rather than compliant: its lyrical ambiguity dispels singular interpretations of the war and validates the suffering of everybody caught in its chaos.
As Viet Thanh Nguyen eloquently argues, “all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”33 The battlefields of memory are clearly still ablaze as the burgeoning canon of works reinterpreting the Vietnam war(s) testifies.
(p. 561) Westadt's assertion that “US and Soviet interventionisms to a very large extent shaped both the international and the domestic framework within which political, social, and cultural changes in the Third World countries took place”34 prompts further investigation into the nature of the specific dynamics within and across individual ideological alliances. The new scholarship exposes a far more elaborate pattern of relations in the international arena of Cold War than had previously been recognised. Bayly's anthropological research on intellectual endeavor in Vietnam and India, for example, sheds light on the complex cultural connections within the “global socialist ecumene.” By stressing that socialism existed in a “broad spectrum of political and cultural modes,”35 she helps to illuminate the intricate deployment of cultural production in a broader system of socialism and shows that socialist cultures were much less isolated, insular, and uniform.
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Dang Nhat Minh became one of the most influential film directors in Vietnam—according to Charlot, “an authentic cinema genius,”36 whose filmmaking is enduringly intertwined with the history of Vietnam. In spite of, or perhaps because of, working in times of upheaval and restricted creative conditions, curtailed not only by ideological demands but also by technical limitations and spartan working conditions, he created films whose emotional intensity and subdued yet penetrating commentary encapsulate the pressing concerns of life in Vietnam and exude his own deep attachment to his country and its people. His haunting and deeply sensual treatment of war loss in When the Tenth Month Comes reflects the difficulty involved in reconciling the past with the present, myths with reality, the private with the collective, and the local with the international. In his films, it is not the politics that brings resolution to life's tribulations but humanity, spirituality, nature, and time-tested traditions.
Dang Nhat Minh's work has become important in the process of softening the Cold War polarization, helping to facilitate reconciliation and recognition of the shared humanity between the former enemies. It contributes to the wider contention over representation of Vietnam's past, which has fallen victim to the phenomenal penetration of the Vietnam War by the Hollywood paradigm, whose global discursive dominance continues. Through his work, Minh has helped to make the “invisible and absent” Vietnamese reclaim their voice.
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Marr, David. “A Passion for Modernity: Intellectuals and the Media. In Postwar Vietnam: Dynamics of a Transforming Society, edited by Hy V Luong, 257-295. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
McMahon, Kathryn. “Gender, Paradoxical Space, and Critical Spectatorship in Vietnamese Film: The Works of Dang Nhat Minh.” In Trans-status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia, edited by Sonita Sarker and Niyoki De Esha, 108-125. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Naripea, Eva. “National Space, (Trans)National Cinema: Estonian Film in the 1960s.” In A Companion to East European Cinema, edited by A. Imre, 244-264. Malden, MA: Wiley, 2012.
Ngo Phuong Lan. “The Changing Face of Vietnamese Cinema during Ten Years of Renovation 1986-1996.” In The Mass Media in Vietnam, edited by D. Marr, 91-96. Canberra: The Australian National University, 1998.
Ngo Phuong Lan. Modernity and Nationality in Vietnamese Cinema. Yogyakarta: Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival, 2007.
(p. 565) Pelly, Patricia. Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Romero, Federico Romero. “Cold War Historiography at the Crossroads.” Cold War History 14, no. 4 (2014): 685-703.
Romijn, P. Scott-Smith, G. Scott-Smith, and Joes Segal. Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
Shaw, Tony, and D. J. Youngblood. Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010.
Siefert, Marsha. “Soviet Cinematic Internationalism and Socialist Filmmaking, 1955-72.” In Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War: Exploring the Second World, edited P.
Babiracki, Patryk and Austin Jersild, 161-194. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016.
Turner, Karen G. “Shadowboxing with the Censors: A Vietnamese Woman Directs the War Story.” In Cinema, Law and the State in Asia, edited by C. K. Creekmuir and M. Sidel, 101-122. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Ucnik, Lubica. “Aesthetics or Ethics? In Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, edited by L. E. Ruberto and K. M. Wilson, 54-71. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007.
Viet Thanh Nguyen. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Westrup, L. “Toward a New Canon: The Vietnam Conflict through Vietnamese Lenses.” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 36 (Spring 2006): 45-51.
(1.) David Der-Wei Wang, The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists Through the 1949 Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), x.
(2.) Patricia Pelly, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 113.
(3.) Dumont notes that Vietnamese cinema has experienced “several births.” The French brought film to Vietnam at the end of the nineteenth century, using it to support their colonial rule. They also offered the local audiences a selection of censored foreign films. Indigenous cinema started in 1924 with an adaptation of Kim Van Kieu. Other films were made in Hong Kong with Vietnamese actors. Between 1954 and 1975, the cinema in South Vietnam developed along a separate trajectory than the North Vietnamese cinema —revolutionary film production in the North and commercial film industry in the South.
(4.) Marsha Siefert, “Soviet Cinematic Internationalism and Socialist Filmmaking, 195572,” in Patryk Babiracki and Austin Jersild (eds.), Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War: Exploring the Second World (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 161-162.
(5.) Federico Romero, “Cold War Historiography at the Crossroads,” Cold War History 14, no. 4 (2014): 686.
(6.) Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 15.
(7.) Tony Day and Maya H. T. Liem (eds.), Cultures at War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 2010), 2.
(8.) Karl Hack and Geoff Wade, “The Origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40, no. 3 (2009): 443.
(9.) Giles Scott-Smith and Joes Segal, Introduction: Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 2.
(10.) Charlot explains the more accommodating attitude of the officials in the Vietnamese film by the fact that the key posts were mostly occupied by film professionals who knew each other rather than by political managers, creating what Gainsborough calls “patronage networks,” which were often able to mitigate a range of contentious issues without dramatic repercussions. In a similar vein, Kerkvliet notes that state control over culture in Vietnam was never absolute.
(11.) Tony Shaw, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 6.
(12.) John Charlot, “Vietnamese Cinema: First Views,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 22 (1991): 33-62.
(13.) Charlot, “Vietnamese Cinema,” 40.
(14.) For example, Theo chan ngubi dia chat [In the footsteps of geologists, 1968], Ha Bac que huong [Ha Bac—My native land, 1969], Thang nam nhung guong mat [The faces of May, 1975], and Nguyen Trai (1980).
(15.) Lubica Ucnik, “Aesthetics or Ethics? In Italian Neorealism and the Czechoslovak New Wave Cinema,” in Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson, Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 55.
(16.) A. O. Scott, “New Wave on the Black Sea,” The New York Times Magazine, January 20, 2008.
(17.) Mark P. Bradley, “Contests of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting War in the Contemporary Vietnamese Cinema,” in The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, edited by Hue-Tam Ho Tai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 198-199.
(18.) Der-Wei Wang, The Lyrical in Epic Time, x.
(19.) Nguyen Ba Chung, “Between Banks of Truth and Untruth.” in Nguyen Duy, Distant Road (Willimantic: Curbstone Press, 1999), xxiii.
(20.) Neil Jamieson, “Shattered Identities and Contested Images: Reflections of Poetry and History in 20th-Century Vietnam,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 7, no. 2 (1992).
(21.) Eva Naripea, “National Space, (Trans) National Cinema: Estonian Film in the 1960s,” in A Companion to East European Cinema (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2012), 249.
(22.) Ibid.
(23.) Dang Nhat Minh, Hoi ky dien anh [Cinema diary] (TP Ho Chi Minh: NXB Van nghe, 2005).
(24.) Dana Healy, “From Triumph to Tragedy: Visualizing War in Vietnamese Film and Fiction," South East Asia Research 18, no. 2 (2010): 325-347.
(25.) Nguyen Minh Chau, “Writing about War," The Vietnam Review 3 (1997), 435.
(26.) In 2008 it was selected as one of the eighteen best Asian films of all times by the CNN.
(27.) Shaun Kingsley Malarney, “The Fatherland Remembers Your Sacrifice: Commemoration War Dead in North Vietnam," in The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 46-76.
(28.) Mark Bradley, “Contests of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting War in the Contemporary Vietnamese Cinema," in The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 196-226.
(29.) Charlot, “Vietnamese Cinema," 202.
(30.) Rosalind Galt, “Italy's Landscapes of Loss: Historical Mourning and the Dialectical Image in ‘Cinema Paradiso', ‘Mediterraneo' and ‘Il Postino'," Screen 43, no. 2 (2002): 158-173.
(31.) Heonik Kwon, Ghosts of War in Vietnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
(32.) Lan Duong, “Diasporic Returns and the Making of Vietnamese American Ghost Films in Vietnam," MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 41, no. 3 (2016): 165.
(33.) Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 4.
(34.) Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3.
(35.) Susan Bayly, Asian Voices in a Post-colonial Age: Vietnam, India and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 8.
(36.) John Charlot, “Vietnamese Cinema: The Power of the Past," The Journal of American Folklore 102 (1989): 447.
Dana Healy
Dana Healy, Senior Lecturer in Vietnamese Studies, SOAS University of London
The Montage Connection between John Heartfield and László Lakner: Artistic Resistance and a New Leftism in Sixties Europe a
Cristina Cuevas-
Wolf
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Jul 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.25
This article argues that during the 1960s the Hungarian conceptualist and painter László Lakner defined through his works a paradoxical, yet distinctive lineage of a New Leftist visual culture. Based in the tradition of transnational communist, antifascist visual expression, Lakner's art responded and critiqued the communist regime in Eastern Europe during the 1960s. The German political photomonteur John Heartfield initiated such an alternative leftist visual language in Weimar Germany in his antifascist photomontages, published by the German magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung, to create a politically engaged viewer from within the communist international movement. This essay compares the work of Lakner and Heartfield to show how the montage connection between these two artists stemmed from a transnational cross-pollination between communist visual cultures in the West and East that shared an international and oppositional character informed by radical social movements in the thirties and sixties.
Keywords: László Lakner, John Heartfield, montage strategies, antifascism, New Leftism
John Heartfield was primarily known in 1960s East Germany for his antifascist photomontages that effectively ridiculed, in the 1930s, Germany's Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. His montages provided a new generation of postwar avant-garde artists with a universal language of resistance and opposition to any authoritarian character in power.1 This is evident particularly in the graphic designs and paintings of Eastern European artists, such as the Hungarian conceptualist and painter László Lakner, who appropriated and modified Heartfield's technique to his New Leftism. Lakner shared with his fellow avant-garde artists of the New Left a desire for radical democratization, an antagonism toward both Cold War superpowers, and opposition to Soviet-backed dictatorships in the region.
László Lakner, considered a protégé of the seminal sur-naturalist painter Tibor Csernus and a state-tolerated painter during Hungary's long sixties (1967-1972), encountered Heartfield's photomontages for the first time during his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1950s in Budapest, Hungary. Lakner found inspiration in their oppositional stance against dictatorial power.2 Every time Lakner saw reproductions of Heartfield's posters in a book or catalog, he admired his courageous, acute, and ruthless interpretations that saw right through the interrelationship between the social and political context of his time.3
(p. 567) Heartfield's work emerged within the context of communism as a radical social movement that existed in noncommunist countries, such as Weimar Germany, based on Lenin's notion of world revolution. Born Helmut Herzfeld, John Heartfield Anglicized his name in protest against German national chauvinism and Anglophobia, and as an expression of his internationalist and antimilitarist convictions during World War I. He would join the German Communist Party (KPD) in December 1918 and cofounded Berlin Dada, in the aftermath of a failed war and revolution. But not until the 1930s would he produce the photomontages for which he became legendary. His antifascist photomontages reached a diverse, international liberal-left public who sympathized with German antifascism at the height of the Popular Front due to their broad dissemination in the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (Worker-Illustrated Newspaper, AIZ) from 1929 to 1938. They came to symbolize antifascist solidarity in 1930s Europe, because artists imitated his montage technique and/or appropriated his photomontages in posters, book jackets, illustrated magazine covers and inserts, and in avant-garde graphics and little magazines throughout Europe and even as far away as Mexico City. Significantly, Heartfield's photomontages represented an international movement of antifascism and the possibility of a dissident culture in the 1930s and again in the 1960s for the avant-garde artists and intellectuals of the New Left.
Like his 1960s New Leftist contemporaries, Lakner was eager to reclaim civil society and his artistic independence from Soviet rule, a sentiment that fueled his desire to synthesize forms, categories, and techniques to confront communism's worn-out leftist ideology. His concept for revolutionary social transformation revolved around a critical, yet ironic use of media to articulate an alternative leftist stance that was critical of the Soviet communist system from within the communist community in East Central Europe. Lakner's ironic use of media differed from the spectacular and antispectacular forms of a Joseph Beuys or Douglas Heubler, which are key examples in the art historian Jonathan Harris's utopian global lineage. This lineage refers to “a tradition of visionary thinking and making that was avowedly utopian, gripped by an optimistic belief in the power of materialized imagination” that gave rise to a revolutionary modernist internationalism.4 Harris is concerned with those studies that focus on individual artists (sometimes pairs of artists) and that chart the distinctive history of a politicized revolutionary modern art in the twentieth century. Vladimir Tatlin's famous tower model provides the genesis of this tradition, because it was the first ambitious contribution to twentieth-century revolutionary modernist internationalism. However, I argue, Lakner's work constitutes a parallel, yet distinctive utopian global lineage, based on John Heartfield's photomontages, which re
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sponds to the state of communism and socialist culture in Eastern Europe during the 1960s by creating a new leftist visual language. Heartfield's montages initiated such an alternative leftist visual language in how they critiqued and parodied the veracity of the mass media image, used for capitalist advertising and communist propaganda, to create a politically engaged viewer from within the communist international movement.5 This particular lineage inspired the work of other artists, such as Aleksandr Zhitomirsky, Klaus Staeck, and Martha Rosler, among (p- 568) other conceptualists, and expands our notion of what defined transnational communist visual cultures in the postwar period.6
The language of mass media was central to Lakner's and Heartfield's work, because they both used mass-cultural images, namely photomechanical representations, as visual material to devise allegorical images to agitate for immediate political action or to provoke an ethical engagement with the past. This essay explores how Lakner's work builds on the tradition of Heartfield's montage technique and practice that conjoins historical referents and context-driven meaning to assist in recontextualizing the relationship between past and present, dream and reality. In Lakner's work, montage served as a strategic tool against the illusory images of socialist realism, yet as a means to create a new meaning in a new critical form. Although Lakner initially parodied mass media images (snapshots, postcards, illustrated press, and other printed matter), his exploration of montage would lead him to expand upon Heartfield's provocative technique to assert the autonomy of his own painterly practice to reveal not only the true nature of Hungary's soft dictatorship under János Kádár (1956-1988) but also the false promise of communism's international aspirations.
This case study of Lakner's montage strategies, based on Heartfield's montage technique, sheds light on how individual artists attempted to build on the precedent of an independent, international communist visual culture, as it afforded them a means to voice their personal protest against Soviet-backed dictatorships in postwar Eastern Europe.
Heartfield's and Lakner's work unexpectedly foil and mirror each other as the viewer looks at Hearfield's immediate, agitated responses to his time in relation to Lakner's backward gaze at the political past as it haunted the present. Heartfield's response to the onslaught of photographic messages in Weimar Germany was to create an agitational object, ephemeral in character, which stressed its immediate, yet momentary function of intervention and rupture into the capitalist, even communist social order. Like Heartfield who collected Zeitausschnitte (time clippings), Lakner collected snapshots of time to use them as the material-inspiration for his medium-conscious paintings, which had a sustained function of intervention and rupture into the communist past and present on a personal and public level. His montages of photo-based realism grapple with political montage, pop art, and conceptualist strategies, showcased in the international art scene of the 1960s, to fashion a system-critical leftist language.
In the early sixties, Lakner, like other European neo-avant-garde artists, was drawn to Heartfield's critical stance toward the mass media's use of photomechanical images and, in particular, to Heartfield's adroit ability to succinctly capture and contextualize the truth about social and political issues in his montages. Because Heartfield viewed photography with suspicion and dissociated himself from this medium of empirical history, he nested it in a visual constellation, which enabled the photograph to be seen as allegorical rather than merely verifiable.7 Similarly Lakner dissociated himself from painting, the medium of socialist realism. His “sublated painterliness" (to borrow Dávid Fehér's term), the montage of photo-based realism with experimental, surrealist techniques, enabled him to coax the observer to engage with uncomfortable historical, (p- 569) social, and political issues in a kind of memory work.8 Lakner's seminal painting Seamstresses Listen to Hitler's Speech (1960) demonstrates to good effect how Lakner with his “sublated painterly" method used an anonymous photograph titled “The Leader Speaks, 1937," published in the April 1960 issue of the German magazine Magnum, to create a modern-styled painting, which altered the original black-and-white photograph of seamstresses sitting at tables clustered together in a dining room into a color-filled picture.9 The painting, unlike the documentary photograph, emphasizes what Lakner considered the absurd features of the image: from the mass-produced uniforms, the women's expressionless faces, to the lack of sound.10 The absurdity of the situation is further concretized in the contrast between title and image. The title states that these female workers are listening to Hitler, but there is no sound, not even the presence of a radio, only the women's frozen, expressionless faces, which become a visual metaphor for the protracted obedience induced by the mechanisms of propaganda in authoritarian societies. Significantly, this painting deals with the historical issue of the Holocaust, a controversial subject in Hungary then and now.11 Heartfield and Lakner's montaged, yet illusionistic representations (as photomechanical or painterly illusionism) articulate a shared resistance to the communist system, its interpretative hold over history—blinding rather than informing its followers—and its overproduced doctrinaire realism (associated with Stalinism) that stretched from the 1930s to the late 1950s. Both political monteur and conceptual, hyperrealist painter strove to visualize an alternative method between the poles of Western modernism and socialist realism that would illuminate the public about the human condition under dictatorial rule.
Lakner's painting The Past of a Room Flying By (1960-1961), included as a black-and-white photomechanical reproduction in the catalogue for his exhibition at the Neue Galerie Sammlung Ludwig in Aachen, Germany, in 1972, reconstructs his grandparents' attic, based on an illustration he found in a 1936 Larousse Lexikon, and densely packs the surface of the painting with a montage of everyday objects.12 The attic is at once visually defined by the Lexikon, the source for the standard meaning of the word and its image, and Lakner's personal recollection of his grandparents' attic, which acts as a metaphor for the place of family memories. The past, the room that is flying by, is interwoven into the future-present, which is laden, thus densely packed, with unresolved issues. The catalogue's title Gesammelte Dokumente (Collected Documents) describes how Lakner regarded this collection of objects, as both research documents and photographic models, which served as the basis for his paintings in the exhibition. The black-and-white photomechanical reproductions included images of Hungarian and Russian revolutionary workers, Lenin's telegram to the Hungarian Räterepublik in German (the language of the revolution at the time), a postcard with the image of seamstresses listening to Hitler, photos of the barricades of the May 1968 uprising in Paris, and index cards from the card catalog of the Budapest Ethnographic Museum (Néprajzi Múzeum), as well as newspaper clippings, philosophical quotes, and everyday objects, such as piles of red bell peppers. Some of the images are of postcards that represent objects and materials—felt mats, bell peppers, cobblestones—and other images represent ephemera, such (p- 570) as the stamped and sealed documents, handwritten or typed texts. All these “documents” are reproduced in the catalogue, along with black-and-white reproductions of some of the paintings, which can be described as painted-documentary photographs as they appear to imitate photography's “truth-to-nature” (naturalist) style. This collection of documents, like an atlas, synthesizes the various stages of history and art history as they coincide synchroni-cally through time.13 It is here, in Lakner's visual atlas, that the contemporary viewer begins to register his search for a new leftist visual language, moving beyond the pastiche style of socialist realism, very much in the spirit of Heartfield's photomontages. And yet these painted documents activate cultural memory and focus on questions about the possible available relationships a person can have to the perpetually remade Hungarian past.
Rather than situate the work of Lakner within the history of political modernism,14 which it already inhabits, it is more relevant for the purposes of this essay to comprehend his work within the lineages, histories, and traditions of “utopian globalism,” a history of alternative socialist leftism. Utopian globalism, as theorized by Harris, established itself upon the traditions of verbal gestures of radical voluntarism, the radical pronouncements or statements of the Old Left, New Left, and countercultural activities, which have their roots in a ninety-year tradition that revolves around idealistic, social, and critical beliefs, values, and ideologies materialized in visual and physical forms throughout the twentieth century. It is “a culture of art thinking, envisioning and making bound up with the broader culture and society of modern capitalism in the West, as well as active, prior to that, within the early years of Bolshevik rule in revolutionary Russia.”15
These visual gestures of radical voluntarism interlocked with activist demonstrations, sitins, occupations, happenings, and performances, which were held during the mid- and late 1960s. They were part of “an emergent revolutionary idealism that pitted subjective imagination against the desperate realities and oppression of the world, and the heroic capacities of individuals and groups of ordinary people against state power and its barrage of military, security agency, and corporate forces arranged on both sides of the Cold War's ‘iron curtain.'”16 Key examples of radical voluntarism are collectivities synonymous with utopian totality—as seen in Christo's work, Joseph Beuys's Free University and German Student Party, and the partnership between John Lennon and Yoko Ono—and works that comprise the notion of “austerity globalism,” which is “shorn or shy of its utopianism [ ... ].”17 Such manifestations comprise a set of absences and “a set of moves into relative invisibility and intangibility, a retreat into internal mental, or close-to-physical body worlds.”18
These works represent some of the most strikingly spectacular and antispectacular examples of utopian globalism in Europe and the United States, which used the mass (p- 571) media of their day— global TV, pop music, and other media forms—to articulate alternative political, social, and cultural viewpoints in the “global village” of modern communication. Although these artists vigorously used the media, they also attempted to maintain something of a self-consciously critical relation to it. These principles of radical social transformation differed widely over the course of the twentieth century: “earlier in the twentieth-century, these [utopian globalists] were close or closer, to institutionalized communist beliefs, while others, later, and now in our own time, moved diversely, decisively, and self-critically away from these.”19
Harris's notion of radical voluntarism and its attendant lineage provides a relevant context for the work of the Hungarian conceptual, hyperrealist painter László Lakner, who used a range of media: from anonymous black-and-white photographs, films, body art, and ready-made book objects, to pay tribute, yet critique leftist political and aesthetic theory, reference his daily, claustrophobic experience under Kádár's soft dictatorship and shed light on the peculiar situation of leftist dissidents. His work speaks through an internalized dialogue that is ambiguous about its utopianism. This dialogue is evident in the way Lakner engaged with the mass medium of photography that served as a foil to the objectivity of socialist realism, as he sought to materialize his protracted existence through reconstructed personal memories, recreated and internalized historical situations, as a means to visualize and confront the depth of his isolation in Cold War Hungary. He endured this existence until his emigration to Germany in 1974.
Yet Harris's overarching framework does not adequately grapple with the situation of the “East European artist” and leaves unanswered the question of whether or not the East European neo-avant-garde represents a third narrative or is merely a further variation on the existing two great narratives of the twentieth century. East European art inevitably falls between these two great narratives, the Western avant-garde and the Soviet avantgarde, as East European art from these same historic periods was only recovered selectively and in fragments. Consequently, Eastern European artists achieved international recognition due to their artistic achievements, if their art politically fit into place in the Western context, as in the case of Gerhard Richter, for example. By comparison, the Eastern context either trapped the artist by its extreme politicization of culture or its failure to construct local, national, or regional narratives that would accommodate them, which has been remedied only very recently.20 Yet this does not clarify how the fragmented history of the Eastern European neo-avant-garde fits into this global utopian lineage. To begin to answer this question, this essay employs a transnational approach to explore side by side the use of montage in Weimar Germany and Cold War Hungary, as developed in Heartfield's and Lakner's work within communist visual cultures in modern Europe. 21
The New Left in Europe needs to be situated in relation to the new social movements concerned with an ever-widening gamut of issues: internationalism (antiwar, anticolonial), community democracy, political emancipation (civil rights, feminism), ecological activism and environmentalism, and spiritual regeneration (peace and love), among many others.22 The Western and Eastern European neo-avant-garde lineage and its relation to the Soviet avant-garde came to be anchored upon Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third (p- 572) International (1919-1920; also known as Tatlin's Tower), a visionary, iconic symbol of the Russian Revolution. This tower acted as both working building and contemplative monument, thus fusing artistic forms and categories, and transcending opposing artistic and sociopolitical functions. The art historian Éva Forgács specifically delineates how the meaning of this monument builds on the reception of early Soviet art in the 1960s, as it came to symbolize the New Left's hope in a future revolution in the aftermath of both the student movement in Paris and the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. This parallel between the early Soviet avant-garde and the New Left's aspirations for a new revolution would legitimate the research, collection, and dealing in Russian avant-garde art in the 1960s, which in turn led to the coining of the term “East European art” “to evoke an art similar to and even connected to the Russian [ ... ].”23 More specifically, scholars have begun to layout the “left-left situation” of Hungarian artists, who oriented themselves toward and identified with the core of European culture.24 These studies provide the basis for my consideration of how the transnational montage connection between Heartfield and Lakner evolved out of the cross-pollination between communist visual cultures in West and East, which share an international and oppositional character informed by radical social movements in the thirties and sixties.
John Heartfield and László Lakner are two artists whose work exemplifies how an alternative socialist leftist stance emerged from within the communist community in opposition to the Soviet communist system in the 1930s and again in the 1960s. To understand this cultural phenomena, it is necessary to acknowledge the historical distinction between communism as a radical social movement in noncommunist states, as in Weimar Germany during the interwar period, and communism in communist states, as in the Soviet Union under Stalinist dictatorship. Communism as a radical social movement in Europe was strongly against Adolf Hitler, unlike Soviet communism that remained loyal to Joseph Stalin's weak opposition to the National Socialists.25 This distinction assists in mapping the lineage, history, and tradition of montage that connects the work of Heartfield and Lakner, which became interlinked through communism, as an international radical social movement with roots in the 1930s, and which fueled the New Left across Europe, during the Cold War.
Heartfield's work encompasses Soviet communism's idea of utopian totality and the radical social alternative of antifascism aligned with the Communist International (Comintern). His work in many ways developed in the conflict between the German Communist Party and the Communist International (Comintern), between Soviet communism and the radical social movement of communism. Two Heartfield montages from the late 1920s and early 1930s make clear how, in effect, he captured this shift in national and international communist visual cultures in Weimar Germany.
The first image is Heartfield's 1927 cover design for the special issue of the journal Das Neue Russland, which projects an ambitious utopian image of world revolution realized through the media. It builds on the avant-garde dialectic between technology and mass culture, and not on his concept of photomontage, based on what he calls “photo-confrontations” (Fotokonfrontationen). Usually such juxtapositions of photographs (p- 573) pitted against each other were meant to reveal the contradiction inherent in them and produce a new idea of reality. This is evident in the second image, Adolf Hitler, Superman, Swallows Gold, from 1932.26
In Heartfield's cover design for the journal Das Neue Russland, the radio's loudspeaker, a metaphor for Soviet Russia, addresses the proletariat of the world as a unified collective in the form of a globe, instead of a mass of individuals subordinated to the voice coming from the radio. “This image conveys the idea of a unified international public sphere defined by the dialectic between the radio and the globe, the world of facts and their reception. Here Heartfield's reference to the radio ear, functioning metaphorically as did the camera eye at the time, acknowledges the German and Russian constructivists' experimentation with radio and camera as documentary recording devices. In this montage image, radio and globe do not contradict each other. Instead, the radio organizes the world's working class into a unified membership.”27
In contrast, his antifascist montages, for instance his well-known montage Adolf Hitler, Superman, Swallows Gold (1932), acted as a metamorphotic image that combined two different forms, keeping both visible, as he loaded these forms with additional meanings by positioning them in a complex sequence of logical associations.28 Heartfield does this by playfully integrating an authentic likeness of Hitler with an X-ray image of a torso, which exposes the ribs and esophagus, to show how Hitler, a gluttonous swallower of big industry's money, spouts meaningless words. In this abstract form of a digestive body, which symbolizes a system of ingestion and suggested regurgitation, monetary exchange is made physically real and at once repulsive.
Heartfield's montages not only shaped a leftist partisan consciousness in the pages of artistic and political publications in the late 1920s. They also came to represent a European-wide antifascist movement as early as 1931, long before Stalin became the champion of world communism under the flag of antifascism in 1936. As a result, Heartfield became enmeshed in a purge against emigrants from the West, when he returned to East Germany from exile in England in 1950.29 Further suspicion was cast upon him due to his former association with Willi Münzenberg, publisher of the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (Worker-Illustrated Magazine, AIZ, 1924-1938) and propaganda minister of the Comintern's Western European Bureau (WEB), who became a renegade and persona non grata for his substitution of antifascism for the image of Soviet Russia in his media campaigns in the 1930s. Additionally, Heartfield's chief medium of photomontage was considered suspect among the more orthodox advocates of socialist realism.30 This reception of montage in East Germany goes hand in hand with the way in which the Worker Photography movement (organized by Willi Münzenberg and associated with the AIZ) was received and perceived. Sarah Edith James points out: “ ... the ways in which such photography, and the photo-essay in particular, has been put to use by AIZ to formulate political campaigns and critiques of working conditions did not fit comfortably with most communist states' desire to represent the utopia of socialism, as seen in the socialist realist pursuit of happiness, beauty, and universalism.”31
(p. 574) Consequently, it took almost six years for the East German authorities to recognize Heartfield as one of the most original artists of his time. The year after becoming a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1956, a grand Heartfield retrospective was held at the Akademie der Künste in East Berlin, accompanied by an extensive catalogue. In 1958, a large Heartfield exhibition opened in Moscow. On the occasion of his seventieth birthday, the exhibition In Kampf Vereint (United in Battle) opened in 1961 at the Berliner Pavillon der Kunst. The exhibition fulfilled Heartfield's wish to display his work together with the work of Mieczyslaw Berman and Alexander Zhitomirsky, who learned from Heartfield about photomontage, and Antonín Pelc, with whom he was befriended during his Prague exile. In 1962, the same year Heartfield suffered his severest heart attack, his brother Wieland Herzfelde published his biography John Heartfield: Life and Work in Berlin. Other Heartfield exhibitions followed, which took place throughout Europe, like the 1965 Heartfield exhibition Meg mindig ... John Heartfield (And always ... John Heartfield), shown at the Ernst Múzeum in Budapest.
At first, the work of Lakner and Heartfield may seem to have little in common. Lakner's work may be based on a photograph or a mechanical reproduction, yet it culminates in a painting, whereas Heartfield's work is photo-based and results in photomechanical reproductions. They work thirty years apart and respond to two different cultures: Heartfield to the visual culture in Weimar and Nazi Germany, and Lakner to the visual culture in Cold War Hungary. Yet these two artists happened to work in postrevolutionary periods, marked by crisis. They each resorted to using found images, culled from the popular press, historical sources, advertisements, and illustrated magazines to dig deep into the nation's collective memory, to question the realism inherent in both national and international communist visual cultures which perpetuated a collective amnesia by concealing rather than informing its followers about the atrocities committed under fascism.
Upon closer inspection, what Heartfield and Lakner have in common is how they worked against the representational system of an ideologically driven realism in the West and the East. Heartfield reacted against the supposed “objectivity” of Weimar and Nazi Germany's visual cultures in the late 1920s and 1930s, and Lakner responded skeptically toward the imposed “objectivity” of Cold War Hungary's socialist realism in the late 1950s and 1960s. Consequently, they each despised how ideologically driven visual cul-
Page 9 of 25 tures manipulated what the viewer was to see as a beautiful, mechanized, egalitarian capitalist or socialist social order.
(p. 575) Lakner, like his contemporary European conceptual artists, was committed to a vision of the world beyond “the limits and values of tyrannical government,” capitalist or communist social order, and “acquisitive materialism,” and embraced the idea of a possible worldwide social transformation from within modernity.32 The neo-avant-garde movement in both East and West turned to the new Russian culture and its art before and immediately after the 1956 and 1968 revolutions. Because the New Left was in search of a new valid political and cultural model, Forgács argues, the exhibitions of the Soviet Russian avant-garde art in Western Europe, during the 1960s, emphasized its relevance to the politics of the present moment in terms of the anti-Soviet stance of the New Left.
It was the rediscovery of the Russian avant-garde and the Russian revolution, and then the nostalgia after the defeated movements of 1968 that set the scene for the reassessment of the entire progressive European artistic avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s. In the post-1968 period this art was invested with an aura it did not have during the previous decade. Nor had it been seen so closely associated to the present, as it was after 1968.33
Lakner may have dreamed of an ideal human collaboration and harmonious collectivity —“a complete ‘revolution,' a turning round, of the social and individual human order” as summed up in Tatlin's Tower.34 Yet his views on revolution were paradoxical, since he found himself to be both part of and outside of the Russian revolutionary tradition. In the montage, Me, One of Them (1970), he constructed a group portrait, showing himself seated among the Red Army soldiers, during the heady days of revolt, to invent his own revolutionary tradition. He relates to this historic event and its leftism with a sense of irony, which is seen in the relationship between the word “Ich” (“I” in German) and the image of the group, indicating his distinctive place in the group as well as his outsider status.35 In a sense, Lakner's parody of the Russian Revolution resonates with Heartfield's own tongue-in-cheek tribute to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and Tatlin's Tower. Having read about Tatlin's monument in the Vienna-based, Soviet journalist Konstantin Umansky's book Neue Kunst in Russland, 1914-1919, Heartfield devised, together with his fellow Dadaist George Grosz, a placard that read: “Art is dead, Long live Tatlin's machine art.”36 At the Berlin Dada Fair in 1920, they are both photographed holding this placard, as they stand in front of a headless tailor dummy, decorated with military medals and pseudo-prosthetic limbs, summing up their disdain for bourgeois art and culture. Each in his own way, Lakner and Heartfield confronted how progressive politics and cultural conservatism are irreconcilable. Heartfield's work addresses this point in relation to a national conservatism in Weimar culture and, later, in regard to Soviet communist conservatism in the 1930s. Lakner encountered socialist realist orthodoxy in the late 1950s, while studying at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, even despite the transition to a brief thaw under the soft dictatorship of János Kádár (1956-1988). These avant-garde artists attempted to establish an alternative method or “third way” between the poles of western modernism and socialist realism.
Lakner aimed to show uncontrived truth that was otherwise kept silent or merely lied about—a premise upon which Heartfield constructed his own work.37 In Lakner's own words,
I would like to produce works that strike the observer as a warning. The perception of the first impression should be a kind of “easy legibility,” something that attracts the eye, maybe an allusion to a different era when things were easier to understand, including art. Only in the “second phase” does he start to apperceive that something is wrong, that he is beholding perplexing elements, grotesque features, criticism or even antinomy. I'd like the absurd to appear natural and “beautiful” at first sight.38
In a similar vein, Heartfield's organic illusionism not only internalized and mimed photography's means through photomontage but also spurred a conceptual understanding of how that seamlessness weaves the viewer into the image through various psychological and corporeal tactics. Yet Heartfield breaks “the seamless integrity of the real,” conjured by the unitary image, by using such devices as cognitive disjunction, word play, parody, and direct address, since he aimed to produce an active subject.39 Lakner's use of a unitary surface suggests that he might have found further inspiration and artistic affinity upon seeing Heartfield's montages and their seamless illusionism. Lakner's trompe l'oeil paintings, like the mechanical reproductions of Heartfield's montages, invite the viewer to identify with the picture's reality.40 In so doing, Lakner could induce the viewer to reflect on Hungarian society's mechanisms of political manipulation through a “socialist realist” painting, which the artist has called his “historical pop paintings.”41
For Heartfield and Lakner, artistic technique became a necessary tool to resocialize strategies of representation and thus express in accessible images the contemporary human condition. Technique itself, whether derived from photography, film, or modern printing, enabled these artists to reclaim meaning in the visual arts, in particular in modern photography (for Heartfield) and in modern painting (for Lakner).
For instance, Lakner readily adapted Heartfield's technique of using a mass media image to transmogrify a political figure and thus reveal through mockery the truth about the contemporary political situation. The growling, savage tiger head in his painting Metamorphosis (Figure 24.1) suggests that Lakner appreciated how Heartfield (p- 577) captured the moral dilemma at the heart of a nation's crisis by depicting a capitalist as a sav-
Page 11 of 25
age tiger with white teeth bared, yet civilized by a black jacket and tie, as seen in Heartfield's montage On the Occasion of the Crisis Party Conference of the SPD (1931).42 The art historian Dávid Fehér has deftly described how Lakner appropriated Heartfield's motif of the tiger head in his painting Metamorphosis, which he painted earlier (19641965) than his painting Obediently (1966) but completed later in 1967. Lakner used this idea for a hybrid animal-human head, placed on a man's body, to lay bare the bestial character in humankind for the world to see and become aware of the contemporary political situation that his generation experienced between 1945 and 1956: from the Holocaust, the suppression of this history, and the apparent return to normalcy after the war, since Hungary, as one of the Soviet satellite states, considered itself a victim of fascism rather than its perpetrator. In Hungary, this period was also marked by political crisis, which culminated with the Communist Party falling apart, as it faced an incensed population in the midst of the 1956 revolution and its own moral malaise. The Hungarian people suffered through a horrific repression in the aftermath of their revolution, which resulted in an imposed collective amnesia about this uprising against (p- 578) Soviet rule. Not until the amnesty of 1963 did the Hungarian people begin to experience a thaw in their social and political life, as political prisoners were released.
Roland Gassmann Collection, Budapest, Hungary. Photo Miklós Sulyok. © László Lakner, Berlin
Lakner therefore strategically used the concept of metamorphosis as “a parable about the basic experience of [his] generation after [the events of] 1945 and 1956, about how the tigers of yesterday can assimilate into lambs, innocent citizens.”43 In his painting Metamorphosis, Lakner situates three seated grotesque men in a room. The first figure's head references Heartfield's tiger-capitalist, which Lakner transformed into a tiger-tyrant; yet he, too, was civilized by a black suit and tie. The head of this tiger-tyrant, which is based on a magazine clipping of a tiger's head, is framed by the outline of a white square, which
Page 12 of 25 appears to emphasize its ferocity as well as contain it. This tiger-tyrant represents Hitler's regime as well as the obedient Stalinists (the loyal “moscovites” in Hungary), who over time transformed into innocent bureaucrats, which are represented by the other two grotesque figures, a bird-reformer and a lamb-citizen, who also wear black suits and ties.44 These three grotesque men sit next to each other in a row with their legs crossed in the foreground of the picture. A red line outlines the bottom part of their seats, upon which they sit, subtly demarcating them as distinctly communist. The room's atmosphere is dark with the exception of the middle section, where bright green and blue lined wallpaper, suggestive of decorative prison bars, appears on the wall in the background. In fact, the picture is framed at the top and bottom by panels painted with wide blue and green diagonal lines in a postpainterly geometry.
Lakner's generation of artists experienced the tight grip of repressive communism for five years under the arch Stalinist Mátyás Rákosi. They witnessed how this totalitarian rule was followed by a short period of reform under Imre Nagy (1953-1956), who improved the economy, relaxed repressive measures, and released thousands of political prisoners. Nagy was a mediator, clearly making him, in the citizens' eyes, the peaceful communist. He faced the hopeless task of isolating the Stalinists in the Hungarian Communist Party and appeasing the citizenry with his reform program. During the 1956 revolution, he embodied hope and change for both the rebels and the people. Because Nagy represented the only existing link with the people, “the obtuse and obstinate leaders of the old regime” saw him as “a life raft, a reprieve—that might enable them to carry on without or with only little change.”45 Nagy was therefore brought into the party's confidence to only be cast out and assassinated at the end of the revolution. János Kádár reinvented the Communist Party as the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party in the aftermath of the 1956 revolution. His new regime may have preserved several of the ideas and institutions produced during the revolution. Yet it was unable to prevent itself from sliding back into the old party's methods, when it felt it needed to.
The historian Miklós Molnar has argued that the weight of history prevented the Communist Party in Hungary from standing up to the incensed citizenry during the 1956 revolution and even sustaining a new course of action. He argues:
The collapse in 1956 was the direct outcome of a whole series of crises, conflicts, and shortcomings that had manifested themselves more or less acutely throughout the preceding decade. It had all begun with the Rajk affair and the other rigged trials of (p- 579) thousands of party militants. The vicious attacks on all forms of heterodox thought, notably that of George Lukács, were, to say the least, further signs of a profound malaise. Finally the horrors of the Rákosi regime became increasingly clear from 1953 to 1956, following a spate of revelations concerning police brutality, denials of justice, and continued Stalinist attacks on the reformers, including Imre Nagy and his collaborators.46
János Kádár not only reinvented the communist party as the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party in the aftermath of the 1956 revolution, he initiated more “liberal” political, social, and cultural policies. This more tolerant form of communism is evoked in Lakner's painting as the legs of the third grotesque figure in Metamorphosis break out of the picture frame.
The title of Lakner's painting Metamorphosis, therefore, not only refers to the Kafkaesque manner of humans transmogrified into animals to tellingly reveal their true nature (in this case, as politicians).47 It refers just as much to the political transformations that defined 1950s Hungary in the aftermath of World War II. This is evident in the three words that appear written in yellow block, capital letters below the seat of each grotesque male figure. The word “Einmal” (at one time) is written below the seat of the tiger-tyrant, suggesting that at one time totalitarian rule governed in the West under Hitler and in the East by Stalin. Then the word “Danach” (afterward) is written below the seat of the birdreformer, implying the short period of reform in Hungary and under Khrushchev's thaw. Finally, the word “Später” (later) is written below the lamb-citizen, suggesting that moment when these beastly rulers became innocent bureaucrats in the West, after World War II, and in Hungary, after the 1956 revolution.
Lakner's painting Obediently (Engedelmesen, 1966) (Figure 24.2) picks up where Metamorphosis leaves off, pointing to the duplicity of the Kádár regime, as it confronts the viewer with a juxtaposition between two human faces. This juxtaposition suggests that the two faces are different, possibly of different people. Yet the two faces, as we shall see, are of the same person. The viewer is asked to look critically at an enigmatic person, who Obediently has done the Communist Party's bidding.
King Saint Stephen Museum (Szent István Király Múzeum), Székesfehérvár, Hungary. © László Lakn-er, Berlin
Dávid Fehér has interpreted this diptych painting as representing Lakner's personal protest against the conditions of his limited individual freedom. At the same time, it deals with the larger political problems plaguing society in the 1960s: this includes the Hungarian condition under Kádár, the atmosphere of the Cold War, and the events in Vietnam. Fehér describes Lakner's diptych as follows:
The picture Obedience symbolizes this complex question: From the dark background of the picture marked “number 1,” a mysterious masculine figure emerges, holding his hands in his pocket, his posture conveys the impression that he demands accountability from someone: he grins undistortedly and looks aggressively at the viewer. On the left picture (number 2) the unknown, distant figure can be seen again, but this time his head is covered by a crumpled bag applied to the surface of the picture, which turns his head into a version of the prisoner figures Lakner painted at that time, waiting for execution (Execution of the Revolutionaries, 1965; (p- 580) Fleeing, 1966; Cloud and Prisoner, 1967). The inscription Engedelmesen (Obediently) at the lower edge of the painting, written with capital letters, does not solve the tension between the two picture fields, on the contrary, it only reinforces them: A laconic statement, a brief invitation: unambiguous, yet enigmatic. A modus vivendi formulated with lyrical density and biting ridicule, a Kafkaesque absurd model of the attitude of contemporary Hungarian society.48
In a sense, this painting therefore represents “the face” of the Kádár era. To understand how this image can express both a dream-like artistic expression and a more social orientated collective utterance, it is necessary to view each picture in the diptych separately and then together in the end.
In this diptych, the duality of the figure's character is suggested not only in the pairing of the two pictures but also in the figure's face. In the picture marked number 1, the figure's face is partly in shadow and in the spotlight, giving him a menacing demeanor. In the picture marked number 2, the figure's face is obstructed by a crumpled bag that has been applied to the surface of the picture. It smothers facial particularity, as it violently silences this antihero. As a whole, the diptych has been described as referring to “a Kafkaesque representation of power, the spectral dimension of namelessness, and the complex relationship between the observed and the observer.”49 The two distinct faces reveal a complex sequence of associations, just like the conceptual rubric of “metamorphosis,” utilized (p- 581) by Kafka in his story Metamorphosis, which features a man that turns into an insect. The figure's face appears to mask his true character, underneath his scornfully smiling expression. Yet the second picture seems to reveal the essence of the real figure.
Starting with picture number 1, Lakner's use of a specific technique of traditional realism, namely his citation of Rembrandt and portraiture, evokes Heartfield's own practice of appropriating older artistic devices as an active and deliberate strategy of mimicry “to expropriate the capital of the ‘cultural heritage.'”50 Lakner's citation of Rembrandt ironically mimics socialist realism, which is itself a pastiche practice, like montage. Imitating Rembrandt, Lakner reframes his subject and transforms it into a higher order representation, as an art form of what existed before.
Yet this anonymous, general image of a person demonstrates the threat that generalization poses to the individual and to the conceit of humanism generally. This general phys-iognomy/likeness interlocks with Heartfield's strategy of defacement in the way that it becomes a dual countenance: at once an abstract type in the form of a photographic likeness, on which Lakner has superimposed a transforming face that blurs the underlying general physiognomy. Consequently, the anonymous figure's face acts as both a mask of a true self and as an abstract type that utterly absorbs the individual face. Comparing this “overexposed” scornfully smiling face to Heartfield's montage The Face of Fascism, which superimposes a skull over Mussolini's face yet retains the recognizability of Mussolini's features, makes clear how a photograph gathers all the distinct faces of a place and time together into a single face, like a composite image. In this sense, a smiling face of a man can capture the atmosphere of an era, as in the smiling face representative of the Kádár era and its socialist humanism.51 Yet Lakner paraphrases (to use his word) Francis Bacon here in using a free painting to evoke a vision.52 Thus, the technique of superimposing a painted portrait of an anonymous man on a photographic likeness underscores the defacement of the individual by an abstract type, which in turn is in the process of transforming into another, its animalistic alter ego.
In the second picture, Lakner fuses Heartfield's strategy of defacement with surrealist imagery, thus translating photomechanical defacement into a painterly strategy, taking it to another level. Where the first image suggested things lurking underneath the surface, picture number 2 captures a figure transmuting into another and demonstrates how these two seemingly unrelated phenomena interpenetrate. Paradoxically, this second picture conjures the simultaneous presence of other forms; as Dávid Fehér noted, the masked face resembles Man Ray's packaged object in EEnigma d'Isidore Ducasse (1920), or the heads covered with a cloth in René Magritte's Ehistoire centrale (1928) and his Les Amants (1928), which deal with the duality of life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness.53 Even Heartfield's Blind Justice (1933) comes to mind, as it plays on the relationship between justice and executioner, and his montage I'm Cabbage. Do You Know My Leaves? (1930), in which a young man's head is wrapped in the pages of the German Social Democratic Party's newspaper Vorwärts, thus suggesting that he has been blinded and deafened to the reality that surrounds him. The production of meaning is achieved through this sequence of associations. Yet in this picture, Lakner's strategy of defacement simply conceals the face of his subject by physically covering the head (p- 582) with a crumpled paper that resembles a sack. Lakner references visual material that was already circulating in the public imaginary (such as the prisoner figures waiting for execution) to confront the public discourse of the time and question if this reality is a joke or a dream. Rather than differentiate between the joke (picture number 1 with its references to mimicry and metamorphosis) and the dream (the object as word), abstraction and figuration, Lakner synthesizes these different artistic strategies to represent how the individual is caught in the dialogical joke and, at the same time, obfuscates artistic expression, relegating it to a private dream.
Lakner's use of the dual countenance in his diptych is akin to the use of the face—by Heartfield, Bacon, Ben Shahn, among other artists—a physiognomic sign, that reflected “ ... the transition from a symbolic economy based on the referential sign to one based on the simulacrum. This global mutation in the structure of signification was caused by the saturation of everyday life with technical media such as photography and film, means of serial reproduction that subverted the ontological distinction between original and copy ... ” during the twenties and thirties.54 This situation returns in the society of the spectacle, to borrow Guy Debord's term, that appeared again in the 1960s and led to new signifying practices that linked phenomena to signs through lateral relations of likenesses.55 Hence, Heartfield courted semantic excess, resulting in overcoding, due to the plural meanings carried in found photographs and ready-made images and language. In Obediently, Lakner synthesized strategies of defacement and mimicry, found in both Heartfield's and Bacon's work, with his own artistic technique of synthesizing abstraction (fragments) and figuration, which are held together by his realistic illusion, his trompe l'oeil brushwork, as well as the larger capitalized word “Obediently,” which reinforces the association between the two images in the diptych.
Significantly, Lakner returns to the physiognomic sign of the face in the film poster Palm Sunday (Virágvasárnap, 1969) (Figure 24.3). Lakner, commissioned to design this film poster, found himself in familiar territory in dealing with the film's theme of revolution. The film tells the story of two brothers, the rebellious priest Simon and the communist school teacher Uránusz, who are both similarly moved by the sufferings of the villagers who are their neighbors. However, Uránusz is the one prepared to use force to achieve the egalitarianism and justice, which he sees as the only solution. Lakner places the face of this revolutionary leader at the center of his poster: a face depicted figuratively, following the outlines of a photographic image, yet violently defaced by the red color splattered across it (suggestive of the bloodshed in the midst of revolutionary violence). This fusion of figurative and abstract forms describes the uncertain outcome of revolution and this antiheroic leader's fate— captured in the layered transformations of his face. Yet this poster also represents Lakner's attempt to recuperate the print medium's expressive qualities, as autonomous of politics and consumerism, in the form of (what the censors considered) a nonthreatening film poster in the process of addressing a mass public. The poster's subject matter and theme about the violent fate of revolutionary citizen-leaders subtly relates this image to the people's revolution of 1956 and Lakner's efforts to work through Hungary's historical traumas, which is integral to his critical New Leftism.
(p. 583)
Wende Museum of the Cold War, Culver City, California. © László Lakner, Berlin
Lakner's historical pop art paintings from the 1960s resonate equally with historical processes such as the Holocaust and the 1956 revolution (and the suppression of their memory) as well as with current political events, such as the student movements in Paris and Poland, or the anti-Vietnam protests. They employ artistic strategies, in particular montage structures drawn from John Heartfield, the influence of the American artist Robert Rauschenberg (in particular his combine paintings), and share similarities with the British pop artist Peter Blake, in their mission to “oppose structures of power that bound reality and the language of art.”56 However, above all, Heartfield's montage strategies contributed to the richness of Lakner's ready-made visual experiments, which spill over into his practical work as a graphic designer. If anything, Heartfield reminded artists in the 1960s how realism's humanist agenda—its unblinking analysis of human folly, uncertainty, and morality—could operate on the level of artistic technique and, in turn, how to prompt a return of an ethical, even humanist vision in a period of crisis. Such an ethical, humanist vision would promote understanding, judgment, eloquence, and compassion among people.
Heartfield's montage technique and its rich legacy eloquently speaks to how valuable an artist's interventions are in keeping alive human values, a sense of solidarity, and the belief in a dissident culture in the face of authoritarian power. His influence on (p- 584) European artists both in the 1930s and in the 1960s underscores the significance of the crosspollination of Heartfield's montage motifs and techniques for the development of a transnational communist visual culture, which anchored Lakner's montage method in a distinctive tradition of an independent, critical Leftism. As Lakner's post-1964 paintings addressed the disjuncture between “the spectacular imagery from the West and less than spectacular Hungarian realities,” they attempted to supersede this disconnectedness by reaching toward an internationalist New Leftism.57
Becker, H. Wolfgang. László Lakner: gesammelte Dokumente: 1960-1974;
Byskov, Gunner, and Bodo von Dewitz, eds. Marinus—Heartfield: Politische Fotomontagen der 1930erJahre. Köln: Museum Ludwig, 2008.
(p. 588) Conseil de l'Europe and Monika Flacke. Verfuehrung Freiheit: Kunst in Europa seit 1945 (The Desire for Freedom: Art in Europe Since 1945): 30th Council of Europe Exhibition. Berlin: German Historical Museum, 2013.
Cuevas-Wolf, Cristina. “John Heartfield's Insects and the ‘Idea' of Natural History.” In Elective Affinities, edited by Catriona MacLeod and Charlotte Schoell-Glass. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008.
Cuevas-Wolf, Cristina. “Montage as Weapon: The Tactical Alliance between Willi Münzenberg and John Heartfield.” In Dada and Photomontage across Borders, edited by David Bathrick, Andreas Huyssen, and Anson Rabinbach, 185-205. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
Fehér, Dávid. “Consonants of Karl Marx: Left versus Left in the Hungarian Neo-Avantgarde; the Case of László Lakner.” Acta Historiae Artium Academiae Scientiarum Hungar-icae LVI (2015): 343-353.
Fehér, Dávid. László Lakner. Budapest: Hungart, 2016.
Fore, Devin. Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 2015.
Forgács, Éva. “How the New Left Invented East European Art.” Centropa 3, no. 2 (May 2003): 93-104.
Forgács, Éva. Hungarian Art: Confrontation and Revival in the Modern Movement. Avantgarde and Modern Movements. Los Angeles, CA: DoppelHouse Press, 2017.
Gillen, Eckhart. Das Kunstkombinat DDR: Zásuren einer gescheiterten Kunstpolitik. Köln: DuMont-Literatur-und-Kunst-Verl, 2005.
Guasch Ferrer, Anna, and Nasheli Jiménez del Val. Critical Cartography of Art and Visuali-ty in the Global Age. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=1819241.
Harris, Jonathan. The Utopian Globalists: Artists of Worldwide Revolution, 1919-2009. Somerset, MA: Wiley, 2112.
James, Sarah E. “A Family Affair: Photography, the Cold War, and the Domestic Sphere.” Family Politics: Photoworks Annual, Photoworks 20 (2013): 166-177.
Kriebel, Sabine. Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield. Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2014.
Peter Chametzky.“From Anti-Nazi Postcards to Anti-Trump Social Media: Laughter as Resistance, Opposition, or Cold Comfort?” In Art and Resistance in Germany, edited by Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Elizabeth Otto. New York and London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019.
Sasvári, Edit, Sándor Hornyik, and Hedvig Turai, eds. Art in Hungary: Doublespeak and Beyond. London: Thames and Hudson, 2018.
Wolf, Erika, and Johann Baptist Krumpholtz. Aleksandr Zhitomirsky: Photomontage As a Weapon of World War II and the Cold War. Chicago: The Art Institue of Chicago, 2016.
(1.) I have shown in my research on John Heartfield and his alliance with Willi Münzenberg, the Comintern's minister of propaganda, that through Münzenberg's foresight Heartfield's montages came to be seen by a broad coalition of noncommunist socialists, artists, intellectuals, and activists, who sympathized with the communist cause as well as his loyal European proletarian, communist readers. See Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, “Montage as Weapon: The Tactical Alliance between Willi Münzenberg and John Heartfield,” in David Bathrick, Andreas Huyssen, and Anson Rabinbach, “Dada and Photomontage across Borders,” New German Critique 107 (2009): 185-205.
(2.) See Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, “John Heartfield's Thälmann Montages: The Politics behind Images of International Antifascism.” New German Critique 131 (2017): 1-24.
(3.) Author's correspondence with László Lakner, February 12, 2018.
(4.) Jonathan Harris, The Utopian Globalists: Artists of Worldwide Revolution, 1919-2009 (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 3.
(5.) The reader should keep in mind that Heartfield developed as a graphic designer within the world of modern media and advertising due to his studies at the Königliche Bayerischen Kunstgewebeschule in Munich and early professional work as a designer for advertising, posters, packaging, and publications. As a Berlin Dadaist, Heartfield ruptured and fragmented this commercial world in his Dada montages.
(6.) See Kerstin Stremmel, “'Zwischentöne sind nur Krampf im Klassenkampf': John Heartfield Fotomontagen für die AIZ and die Folgen,” in Marinus—Heartfield: Politische Fotomontagen der 1930erJahre, eds. Gunner Byskov and Bodo von Dewitz (Köln: Museum Ludwig, 2008), 184-186.
(7.) Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, “John Heartfield's Insects and the ‘Idea' of Natural History,” in Catriona MacLeod and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Elective Affinities (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 340.
(8.) Dávid Fehér, László Lakner (Budapest: Hungart, 2016), 38.
(9.) Ibid., 38. Dávid Fehér, László Lakner, and Szépművészeti Múzeum, Host Institution, Issuing Body. Lakner László : Varrólányok Hitler Beszédét Hallgatják = Lakner László : Seamstresses Listen to Hitler's Speech / Fehér Dávid (Az 1800 Utáni Gyűjtemény Kabinetkiállításai ; 4. 2011), 18.
(10.) See H. Wolfgang Becker, Laszlo Lakner: gesammelte Dokumente, 1960-1974;
(11.) Hungary had not yet confronted the trauma of the Holocaust during Kádár's dictatorship. These suppressed traumas have been left to fester up to the present day. See Dávid Fehér's essay “The Dream of Reason” and his first endnote, which references the essays by Imre Kertész in Dávid Fehér, Lakner László: Seamstresses Listen to Hitler's Speech (Budapest: Museum of Fine Arts, 2001), 63 and 91.
(12.) See Becker, H. Wolfgang. Laszlo Lakner: gesammelte Dokumente, 1960-1974;
(13.) Fehér, László Lakner, 34.
(14.) Orthodox historiographies of politicized revolutionary modern art in the twentieth century; these include studies of constructivism, Dadaism, and surrealism (the so-called historical avant-garde), “as well as the institutionalized groupings and movements of artists, critics, and administrators associated with proclaimed revolutionary socialist and communist parties and states, such as in Russia after 1917, Germany, the USA, and Mexico in the interwar period, and the Soviet Union after Stalinist rule during the 1930s-50s, in the period of historical Socialist Realism.” Jonathan Harris, “Utopian Globalists, Modernism and the Arts of Austerity in the 1970s,” in Critical Cartography of Art and Visuali-ty in the Global Age, eds. Anna Maria Guasch Ferrer and Nasheli Jiménez del Val (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 69-70. In particular, the Hungarian art historian Dávid Fehér has argued in his essays on Hungarian pop art that Lakner's work was informed by Western pop art, yet deviated from it, because he deals foremost with human existence rather than the reality and hyperreality of a consumer society (which never manifested itself in Hungary). At the same time, his work was very much informed by John Heartfield's photomontages from the 1930s. See Dávid Fehér, “Where Is the Light? Transformations of Pop Art in Hungary,” in Darsie Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan, International Pop [Exhibition], Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, April 11-August 29, 2015; Dallas Museum of Art, October 11, 2015-January 17, 2016; Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 18-May 15, 2016 (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015),
Page 21 of 25
131-148; and Dávid Fehér, “Pop beyond Pop: Some Exhibitions of the Hungarian 'Iparterv-Circle,'" in Annika Öhrner, Art in Transfer in the Era of Pop: Curatorial Practices and Transnational Strategies (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 2017), 343-372.
(15.) Harris, The Utopian Globalists, 17.
(16.) Harris, The Utopian Globalists, 17.
(17.) See Harris, The Utopian Globalists, 25; and Harris, “Utopian Globalists, Modernism, and the Arts of Austerity in the 1970s," in Critical Cartography, 71.
(18.) Harris critiques his own framework of Utopian Globalists, which he presented in his book of the same name, in his essay “Utopian Globalists, Modernism, and the Arts of Austerity in the 1970s," in Critical Cartography, 69-90. He posits the need to contrast the spectacular facets of utopian art with antispectacular art that addresses the condition of austerity in the world as of the 1970s.
(19.) Harris, “Utopian Globalists, Modernism, and the Arts of Austerity in the 1970s," in Critical Cartography, 6.
(20.) Éva Forgács, “How the New Left Invented East-European Art," Centropa 3, no. 2 (May 2003): 103.
(21.) A succinct description of current approaches to a Global East, European art history can be found in the introduction to Beata Hock and Anu Allas, eds., Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present (New York: Routledge, 2018), 3-7.
(22.) Harris, “Utopian Globalists, Modernism, and the Arts of Austerity in the 1970s," in Critical Cartography, 79.
(23.) Éva Forgács, “How the New Left Invented East-European Art," Centropa 3, no. 2 (May 2003): 100.
(24.) See Dávid Fehér, “Consonants of Karl Marx: Left versus Left in the Hungarian NeoAvant-Garde: The Case of László Lakner," Acta Historiae Artium/Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 56 (2015): 343-353; and Éva Forgács, Hungarian Art: Confrontation and Revival in the Modern Movement (Los Angeles: Doppelhouse, 2016).
(25.) Willi Münzenberg and his supraparty organization the International Arbeiterhilfe (International Workers' Aid [IAH]) made it their mission to struggle against fascist danger and especially the murder terror of the National Socialists. See Kasper Braskén, The International Workers' Relief, Communism, and Transnational Solidarity: Willi Münzenberg in Weimar Germany (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 229-230.
(26.) For image, see https://www.johnheartfield.com/John-Heartfield-Exhibition/john-heartfield-art/famous-anti-fascist-art/heartfield-posters-aiz/adolf-the-superman-hitler-por-trait
(27.) See Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, “Montage as Weapon: The Tactical Alliance between Willi Münzenberg and John Heartfield," New German Critique 107 (Summer 2009): 192.
(28.) Devin Fore, Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 292.
(29.) Eckhart Gillen, Das Kunstkombinat DDR: Zäsuren einer Gescheiterten Kunstpolitik (Köln: Dumont, 2005), 53.
(30.) As the art historian Peter Selz pointed out, “While he was celebrated as a cultural leader, his chief idiom, photomontage, was still suspect during the 1950s among the more orthodox advocates of socialist realism." See Micheal Töteberg, John Heartfield (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlts, 1978), 118.
(31.) Sarah James, “A Family Affair: Photography, the Cold War, and the Domestic Sphere," Photoworks 20 (2013): 176.
(32.) Harris, The Utopian Globalists, 2.
(33.) Eva Forgács, “How the New Left Invented East-European Art," Centropa 3, no. 2 (May 2003): 95.
(34.) Harris, The Utopian Globalism, 10.
(35.) Fehér, László Lakner, 44.
(36.) John Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Knopf, 1998), 92.
(37.) Dávid Fehér, “László Lakner: Gehorsam," in Monika Flacke et al., Verfuehrung Freiheit: Kunst in Europa seit 1945 (The Desire for Freedom: Art in Europe Since 1945); 30th Council of Europe Exhibition; 17 October 2012-10 February 2012, Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM), Berlin (Berlin: DHM, 2013), electronic catalogue, without page numbers.
(38.) Fehér, László Lakner, 45-46. Also see Katalin S. Nagy, “Beszélgetés Lakner László festó'múvésszel" [A conversation with the painter László Lakner], Életünk 1972/1, p. 72; reprinted in Katalin S. Nagy, Más-kor. Festők, képek, kiállítások [Other times. Painters, pictures and exhibitions] (Budapest: Gondolat Kiadó, 2009), 214.
(39.) Sabine Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 13.
(40.) “His brushstrokes made trompe l'oeil a unique and indirect reflection of political manipulation and a reflection of the mechanisms of society, while still keeping its close connection to the most traditional ways of creating a picture: the large network of references to allusions in the history of art, that is a characteristic of Lakner." See Dávid Fehér, László Lakner's Conceptual Works (Gallery TRAPÉZ), 3.
(41.) Fehér, László Lakner, 41.
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(42.) Heartfield's montage “On the Occasion of the Crisis Party Conference of the SPD” comments specifically on the 1931 Social Democratic Party conference in Leipzig, Germany, which aimed to come to terms with the escalating world economic crisis. For Heartfield, the Social Democrats refused to see the threatening nature of capitalism, its ferocious white teeth, which they preferred to remove (deal with) once capitalism was well and healthy again. He therefore proceeded to represent these Social Democrats as a growling tiger-capitalist with white teeth bared, yet civilized by a black coat and tie. Lakner's painting Metamorphosis was included in the Ludwig Múzeum's exhibition Ludwig Goes Pop + The East Side Story, which was on display from October 2015 to January 2016 in Budapest, Hungary.
(43.) Fehér, László Lakner, 40.
(44.) Correspondence with László Lakner, February 12, 2018.
(45.) Miklós Molnar, From Béla Kun to János Kádár: Seventy Years of Hungarian Communism (New York: St Martin's Press, 1990), 164.
(46.) Molnar, From Béla Kun to János Kádár, 171-172.
(47.) Lakner's depiction of these politicians clearly recalls Franz Kafka's story “The Metamorphosis” (1915).
(48.) Fehér, “László Lakner: Gehorsam,” in Flacke, Verfuehrung Freiheit, electronic catalogue, without page numbers.
(49.) Fehér, László Lakner, 40.
(50.) Socialist realism established itself as a style “by qualifying pre-existing aesthetic traditions that were already familiar and known.” For Devon Fore, “Like the later [photography], socialist realism proceeds by reframing its subject and transforming it into a higher-order representation, an image of what existed before. The much-heralded organicism of socialist realism is thus belied by its pastiche practices.” See Devin Fore, Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 244-245.
(51.) The state-sponsored photo book 1965 Hungary (Magyarország 1965, Budapest: Corvina, 1965) vividly captures throughout its pages children and adults of all ages smiling in tacit accord with the pragmatic and dynamic image of Kádárism and its achievements.
(52.) Correspondence with László Lakner, February 12, 2018.
(53.) Fehér, “László Lakner: Gehorsam,” in Flacke, Verfuehrung Freiheit, electronic catalogue.
(54.) Fore, Realism after Modernism, 292, 295, and 296.
(55.) Fore, Realism after Modernism, 292, 295, and 296.
(56.) Fehér, László Lakner, 40.
(57.) “Lakner's post-1964 paintings—fragmented compositions recalling film montages and pseudo-collages akin to those of Rauschenberg—derive directly from his earlier paintings in terms of their retention of sur-naturalist elements and use of photographs. They focus on moments of everyday life that highlight the disconnect between spectacular imagery from the West and less-than-spectacular Hungarian realities.” Dávid Fehér, “Where Is the Light?: Transformations of Pop Art in Hungary,” International Pop, 146.
A special thanks to László Lakner for his invaluable input and to Dávid Fehér for encouraging me to pursue the connection between Heartfield and Lakner. I wish to also thank the editors of this volume as well as Anson Rabinbach for their careful reading of this essay and helpful comments.
Cristina Cuevas-Wolf
Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, Independent Scholar and Curator, Resident Historian, Wende Museum
Visual Regimesof Juche Ideology in North Korea's The Country I Saw a
Travis Workman
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Aug 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.26
This article discusses the North Korean film series The Country I Saw, focusing on transformations in the function of the Japanese colonial gaze in post-Cold War North Korean media. By comparing and contrasting the representation of fact-based empiricist journalism in Part One (1988) with the expression of a mediated sovereign exceptionality in the sequels (2009-2010), the essay shows how the series gives aesthetic form to North Korean juche ideology and spectacles of a realized communist utopia in the decolonized DPRK only through the repetition of generally modern visual regimes that are integrally tied to the history of Japanese colonialism and US neocolonialism. It asks us to rethink the history of communist visual cultures, particularly in formerly colonized countries, in relation to this kind of repetition and appropriation of colonial ways of seeing within the media of communist, postcolonial nation-states.
Keywords: North Korea, visual regime, sovereignty, journalism, socialist realism, juche, Japan, melodrama, spectacle, utopia
The five-film series The Country I Saw (Ko Hak Rim, Pak Jong Ju, 1988; 2009-2011) is remarkable in the history of the North Korean cinema because of the unique way that it articulates the nation's relation with the former Japanese colonizer.1 Each of the five feature-length films—referred to simply as The Country I Saw Part One, Two, Three, Four, and Fzve—idealizes the position of the repentant Japanese observer who, in recognizing and working through Japan's past colonial subjugation of Korea (1910-1945), simultaneously comes to embrace the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) as a historical alternative to the imperialist expansion of capitalism and as the actual fulfillment of the humanist ideals to which the Japanese Empire aspired but failed to remain faithful due to its colonial practices. In contrast to the persistent trope of the Japanese “evil coloniz-
Page 1 of 21 ers”—employed throughout the history of the North Korean narrative film, from its founding in 1947 until the present day—The Country I Saw develops Japanese characters who not only confront and overcome their past historical mistakes, or those of their family and nation, but also offer, through their political and moral appreciation for the decolonized DPRK, an outsiders' perspective that gives legitimacy to the state sovereignty of the Korean Workers' Party and its leaders.
In what follows, I will show how this recognition of past colonial violence and the legitimation of the DPRK state occur in the films through their enactment and representation of two, generally modern, visual regimes and their respective framings of historical truth: empirical journalism and political science. By tracing how these North (p- 590) Korean films engage with modern visual regimes in ways that resonate with the global history of communist visuality, while simultaneously expressing local specificities connected to the history of Japanese colonialism and anticolonial partisanship, I argue that in many cases of communist visuality, particularly in the “Third World,” we have to examine visuality and visual regimes in relation to both communism and the politics and culture of the postcolony, including the simultaneous supersession and repetition of the visual cultures of colonialism within a decolonized, communist nation-state. In this respect, analyzing “communist vision” in the context of North Korea requires a comparative framework that can accommodate a variety of appropriations and transformations of other national media— including imperial Japanese ethnographic filmmaking, Soviet socialist realism, and US televisual media—while also recognizing the particular mythical versions of national history and ideology that North Korean media aims to represent.
Analyzing the unique cinematic expression of modern regimes of knowledge such as empirical journalism and political science in North Korean films is one way to account for the DPRK film industry's comparable and definitively local aspects. In academic and popular discussions of the contemporary DPRK, the problem of vision and vision's relationship to knowledge emerges as a central issue. The country becomes an object of knowledge in political science, history, film documentary, and more recently cultural studies only through particular visual regimes. In a recent work on navigation and screen culture, Nanna Verhoeff defines regime as “a set of conditions considered valid at a certain time, under which usages of things are taken for granted as normal and legitimate.”2 Expanding on Martin Jay's discussion of Christian Metz's “scopic regime,” she emphasizes that ways of seeing are never autonomous from their use within a set of conditions for cultural practice that become normative and legitimate in a historical context.3 A visual regime refers, then, to both the physical way of seeing (including the means of technological reproduction, the physiological and somatic perception, and the positioning of the perspective), as well as the set of conditions that normalize and legitimate this way of seeing as a form of knowledge or cultural practice.4
The films in the The Country I Saw series situate generally modern acts of observation within the political, cultural, and historical norms of its film narratives. The series frames this revaluation of observation as an excavation into the hidden truths of East Asian history that are denied in the public spheres of Japan and South Korea, countries which are
Page 2 of 21 represented as beholden to US imperialist interests in the region. At the same time, in order to use the colonial past as a legitimating mechanism for the DPRK state, the films rely on highly dramatized spectacles of journalistic and/or political-scientific objectivity which originally belonged to the colonial visual regimes that the films ostensibly critique. In this sense, the films are marked by paradox: the repetition of norms and rules of the colonial and imperial visual regimes for the purposes of legitimating the decolonized nation-state.
It is productive to read The Country I Saw through its more general connections with modernity and modern modes of establishing historical facts and historical truths. In order to put to use the supplemental gaze of the former colonizer, the films portray journalism and political science as the conduits of irrefutable positive knowledge about (p- 591) history and politics. Without the films' tropes of journalism and political science as techniques for producing positive knowledge, the gaze of the Japanese observer could not be used as a way to legitimate the films' discursive claims to the realization of communist utopia in the DPRK, or the sovereign exceptionalism of its leadership. Likewise, the memory of colonialism and the guilt of the former colonizer could not be instrumentalized and made to facilitate the occlusion of the DPRK state's internal violence against its own population. In this way, the repetition of the colonial visual regime would not square with the narrative of oppression and liberation without the diegetic depiction of these generally modern techniques for establishing facts and truths. Journalism and political science serve as visual regimes that ground the films' fundamental claims to historical referen-tiality.
Part One relies on an empiricist notion of truth produced through fact-based journalism that is reminiscent of past socialist realist uses of journalism and Parts Two-Five rely on televisual media spectacles of sovereign leadership and militarism, deemphasizing the value of facts and borrowing from a certain US media paradigm to locate truth in the strategic intelligence of an exceptional sovereign power. Part One is about Takahashi Minoru (Pak Ki Ju), a leftist Japanese print journalist who visits northern Korea and Manchuria in the 1940s, toward the end of the Japanese Empire, and then returns to the DPRK in the 1980s, reforming his imperialist perspective of the first visit and gradually becoming a witness to a realized utopia. As postcolonial critics such as Edward Said, Ella Shohat, and Mary Louise Pratt have shown, the “colonial gaze” is a way of observing the colonized, of transforming the living, breathing, and subjective cultures of the colonized into mere objects of observation and perception; three prominent technologies or genres of the colonial gaze that have been valued for their empirical and anthropological objectivity since the onset of the era of modern imperialism are expert journalistic depictions of the colonized (Said), travel writing (Pratt), and ethnographic documentary filmmaking (Shohat).5 Part One appropriates the colonial gaze of the Japanese imperial subject by representing cinematically the figure and perspective of the foreign Japanese journalist, Takahashi Minoru, who engages in journalism and travel writing during his trip to the Japanese colony and a return trip to decolonized DPRK decades later. Through interviews he conducts with North Korean farmers and industrial workers, he collects ethnographic information about everyday life in the DPRK. A transformation occurs in this appropriation, which is also a historical repetition of the colonial through the postcolonial, because
Page 3 of 21 on his return trip Takahashi has to improve his empirical objectivity by learning from the former colonized. However, by relying on Takahashi's reformed colonial gaze to establish the objective fact of the DPRK's overcoming of Japanese imperialism and establishment of a decolonized, humanist utopia, the film and the national history it presents come to depend on the prosthesis of colonial journalistic and ethnographic visuality; in other words, it comes to depend on the colonial gaze of a Japanese character in order to articulate Korean national subjectivity.
Parts Two-Five, on the other hand, focus on Takahashi's daughter Aiko (Pak Jong Hwa), a professor of international politics at Tokyo University, who does not witness life in the DPRK directly, but instead learns about the country through her father's writings. (p- 592) She comes to recognize, from her position in the former imperial metropole, the political savvy of the North Korean leadership in maintaining its sovereignty and independence, as well as developing its nuclear capability in the face of US imperialism. Montage sequences in Part Two appropriate and recode footage from CNN and other international news networks, creating an unprecedented collision of political spectacles in DPRK film that allows for both a critique of Iraq War-era US national exceptionalism and an alternative deployment of its visuality and political discourse.
Although through different visual regimes and from different positions, both Takahashi Minoru and Takahashi Aiko come to see the DPRK as a perfected society, as a realized utopia. But what is the status of utopia here, and how might the idea of utopia in The Country I Saw contrast with other communist contexts? Toward the end of Part One, Takahashi Minoru's North Korean guide in North Korea, Mr. Ryu, defines the DPRK utopia as follows: it has overcome the morally indefensible colonial oppression of the Korean people by the Japanese Empire through a decolonizing revolution led by Kim Il Sung and actualized the primary tenets of Kim's system of thought, juche thought (juche sasang). Mr. Ryu presents juche thought (or “subject” thought) as an anticolonial, humanist ideology superior to all previous attempts at socialism and communism, which convinces the leftist Takahashi that despite the failure of other utopian projects, including those of the Soviet Bloc, the secrets to unleashing human creative potential had been discovered and implemented by DPRK leadership. In this way, just as Soviet socialist realism, according to Evgeny Dobrenko, transformed “actually existing socialism” into a spectacle to be witnessed and a product to be consumed, these films contribute to a spectacular and consumable cinematic representation of a decolonized and entirely egalitarian DPRK, an image of the nation-state that its film industry was tasked with producing from early in the Cold War.6 It is not surprising in this light that Kim Jong Il, in the DPRK's most important text on filmmaking, On the Art of the Cinema (1973), calls for the creation of a “cinema state” and discusses cinematic spectacle as the most important locus for the production of a North Korean-style communist utopia.7 In other words, the supposed realization of juche thought's tenets on national independence and sovereignty and its assertions to being an exceptional and superior version of communism—although both based on an actual historical process of decolonization in the late 1940s, at once revolutionary and an effect of geopolitical reconfigurations after World War II—have always also been effects of cinematic mediation, a kind of self-conscious and avant-garde displacement of
Page 4 of 21 socialist politics and economy into socialist aesthetics, which Dobrenko discusses as the primary problem within socialist realism in its original Soviet form. The most important difference between juche realism and socialist realism, however, lies in its primary concern with decolonization and, therefore, the spectacles of decolonization produced through cinema.
Despite The Country I Saw's claims to realized utopia on the basis of decolonization, however, a colonial structure remains in the way that the Japanese characters' recognition of this utopia offers stability and legitimacy to the North Korean regime within the volatile geopolitical narrative surrounding North Korean sovereignty in the aftermath of the Cold War. Parts Two-Five also displace any domestic political conflict from North (p- 593) Korea itself onto the Japanese space, using conflicts between Takahashi Aiko and the Japanese government over the North Korean nuclear issue as a way to dramatize the precariousness of the DPRK state in a politically safe manner. These repetitions of the colonial relationship, as well as the use of the Japanese domestic space as the primary site of conflict, are dependent upon visual regimes—empirical journalism and militarized spectacles of sovereign exceptionality—that shift the subject of the gaze from the North Korean leader to Japan, the former colonizer, and the United States, the main adversary. In these ways, in constructing spectacles of utopia, the film series actually repeats and reemploys many of the ways of seeing used in the visual regimes of Japanese and US imperialisms, despite its stated opposition to the specific sovereign powers behind those visual regimes.
The unique position of the Japanese characters in The Country I Saw is compelling and notable in part because of the timing of the production of the five installments. Part One (Dir. Ko Hak Rim) came out in 1988 and was produced, as all DPRK films are, by Korean Film Studios in Pyongyang. Considering the ongoing economic reforms in China and the imminent collapse of the Soviet Bloc, the DPRK was becoming more isolated politically and economically, at the same time as the first (and at that time only) ruler of the country, Kim Il Sung, was steadfast in his assertion of juche thought as the national ideology. The slogan of juche thought, first developed in the 1960s, is “Subjectivity in thought, independence in politics, self-reliance in economy, and self-defense in national defense”—a formulation that emphasizes the essential role of independence from any colonial occupation played in the DPRK state ideology.8 In addition to this formulation of political ideology, the self-proclaimed “architect” of juche thought, Hwang Jangyeop—who defected to South Korea in the mid-1990s—also contributed the humanist and idealist philosophical content to juche thought, including statements about the DPRK's complete liberation of human creative and productive potential.9 As put forward in the aforementioned On the Art of the Cinema, juche realism (juche sasiljueui) was to be the cinematic correlate to juche thought, the cinematic representation of subjectivity in thought, independence in politics, self-reliance in economy, and self-defense in national defense.10 This treatise on cinema makes many specific arguments about all facets of filmmaking, but its primary assertion is that the narrative and visuality of a film should convey the gradual sprouting and fruition of the film's “ideological seed”—that is, its main statement about national and class consciousness, the realization of a decolonized and humanist utopia in the form of the DPRK, and the sovereignty of the party, the state, and the leadership.
There are a number of historical reasons for the emphasis in juche realism on national independence, the unleashing of human creative potential, and the sovereignty of the DPRK leaders. The historical background leading up to the North Korean revolution and the establishment of the DPRK state helps to explain why the aesthetics of juche realism, and The Country I Saw more specifically, differ in some important respects from Soviet and Eastern Bloc filmmaking, particularly in how they frame and articulate modern visual regimes in order to address Japanese empire and colonization in Korean national history. The anti-Japanese guerrilla movement in Manchuria in the 1930s gave (p- 594) rise to and dramatically shaped the North Korean revolution and the DPRK state, which finally asserted national independence after the withdrawal of the Soviet Occupation in 1948.11 Along with its ally China, the DPRK fought to liberate South Korea from US occupation during the Korean War (1950-1953); however, it then remained neutral during the Sino-Soviet split and tried to maintain autonomy from China, particularly during social upheavals such as the Cultural Revolution.12 Despite the emergence of the anti-Japanese guerrilla movement within the Chinese Communist Party (1930s) and the Soviet Occupation of the North (1945-1948), the DPRK was founded primarily on principles of anticolonial national liberation and national independence—particularly from Japan—rather than on the international and communist proletarian identity. On the other hand, throughout the Cold War, the DPRK asserted this primary ideological concern with independence and sovereignty while remaining dependent on the international network of communist nation-states, with their political connections, trade networks, and cultural partnerships and influences. As the Soviet Bloc was heading toward dissolution and China was undergoing economic reforms toward market capitalism, the international legitimacy that this network provided for the DPRK state was gradually coming into question. My speculation is that this crisis of legitimacy toward the end of the Cold War contributed to Part One's turn to the perspective of the repentant Japanese colonizer as a source of international recognition, which involves the film in a complex repetition of the scientism of the colonial gaze, in the form of the cinematic representation of the visual regime of empiricist journalism. In relation to the visual cultures of communism understood within the global comparative approach, the focus of the present volume, Part One brings together the socialist realist use of journalism as a means of verifying factually the economic and social development (as implemented across the Soviet sphere of influence) with a postcolonial concern for an accurate accounting of colonial history (or, in actuality, the DPRK state's mythical version of the colonial-period partisan movement and its victories against the Japanese, presented through a repetition and rearticulation of the visual regime of journalism and the colonial gaze of the repentant Japanese journalist).
The Country I Saw, Part Two (Dirs. Ko Hak Rim, Pak Jong Ju), on the other hand, came out twenty-one years later, in 2009, after a number of cataclysmic historical events in the DPRK: the death of Kim Il Sung in 1994 and the passing of dictatorial control to his son, Kim Jong Il; the famines that ravaged the population throughout the mid-1990s, taking up to 3 million lives; the creation of a nuclear program that threatened the United States, its
Page 6 of 21 adversary and now a singular global superpower; and the US categorization of the DPRK as a “rogue state” and part of the “axis of evil” in the aftermath of September 11. Despite these radical discontinuities in the geopolitical position of the DPRK after the end of the Cold War, the film industry remained stable—production occurred under state and party control at the Korean Film Studios and many of the same elite directors, actors, artists, and producers continued their careers throughout the political turmoil. Therefore, Part Two's production team and cast, including the director Ko Hak Rim and the main actress Kim Jong Hwa, were mostly the same as those of Part One. Part Two also makes use of scenes originally filmed during the production of Part One in 1988, (p- 595) scenes in which the famous actor Pak Ki Ju appears in his original main role. The transformations that occurred in the visual regimes, appearing diegetically and formally in the films, as well as changes in the technological production and styles of the films, are revealing in terms of the continuities and discontinuities of DPRK politics and culture in the interceding decades between the original and the sequels. I trace these continuities and discontinuities primarily through an analysis of each film's respective visual regime and a discussion of the paradigm transition from empirical print journalism to spectacles of sovereignty and national exceptionalism. Despite this transition in paradigm, however, both Part One and Part Two belong to the history of juche-realist representation, which emphasizes national independence and sovereignty, the heroism of political leadership, and the DPRK as a realized utopia (validated cinematically). They also maintain the tradition in the DPRK of using the melodramatic mode—including its sentimentality, pathos, and moral and political Manichaeism—to present the narrative unfolding of the “ideological seed” in an embodied and affected fashion.
North Korean films like The Country I Saw are important because they belong to an alternative archive of East Asian history. They discuss ritually topics that cinema and mass media in Japan, the United States, and South Korea often ignore, including the history and historical memory of Japanese imperialism, US neocolonialism in East Asia, and the continuities between Japanese imperialism and Cold War East Asia. At the same time, the obvious limitation of this archive, and The Country I Saw specifically, is that in entering this storehouse of memories, we also enter a simulacrum of a highly mythologized national history that represses many of the important ethical and political questions surrounding the memory of past empire and an analysis of the present situation of empire. Yet this is not merely a problem of “North Korean ideology.” We come to reflect on a shared history of blindness made possible by the transfer and translation of modern ways of seeing, including their propagandistic applications, across capitalist, communist, and fascist societies. For example, The Country I Saw Part One accomplishes the visualization of a decolonized DPRK utopia only through a restaging of the site of Japanese imperialism, and a subsequent imaginary reconciliation with the Japan of the past, presented in the diegesis through an idealized vision of empirical journalism. The Country I Saw Part Two borrows the techniques of capitalist media practices, transforming their imported narratives into one compatible with DPRK claims to national exceptionalism and national sovereignty. If what Naomi Klein refers to as “disaster capitalism” began anew with Bush-era policies of corporate imperialism, the visual regime of this political system seems to have converged with the DPRK's state socialism in at least one respect—they both invoke the specter of future cataclysmic violence at the hands of external forces in order to legitimate their own forms of state repression.13 However, in rearticulating the gaze of the Japanese observer, and borrowing from US media, the series at the same time buries the complexity of what Japanese and US imperialism have meant for Koreans, as well as the “specters” of the colonial state and its prosthetic technologies, which, according to Pheng Cheah, haunt the organic community of the postcolonial nation.14
Most North Korean feature films dealing with Japanese colonialism are melodramatic stories set in the 1930s that build up a Manichean moral and political universe in which the oppressed Korean peasantry creates organic ties with guerrilla revolutionaries in order to combat the evil Japanese imperialists and the Korean collaborators of the landlord class. These classic films set during the period of Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945) include The Flower Girl (Dirs. Ch'oe Ikkyu and Pak Hak, 1972), Five Guerrilla Brothers (Dir. Ch'oe Ikkyu, 1969), and Sea of Blood (Dir. Ch'oe Ikkyu, 1968).15 These classics ofjuche realism provoke sentimental identification with Korean characters suffering under Japanese colonial rule through negative characterizations of Japanese colonizers as they attempt to transform the shared sentiment of victimization into identification with the redeemers of that suffering: the partisan fighter, the positive hero of socialism, the party, and, ultimately, the Great Leader of the guerrilla revolution, Kim Il Sung. They utilize a variation of the melodramatic mode of mimesis, as understood by theorists such as Christine Gledhill, Linda Williams, and Jan Campbell, which presents suffering bodies and provokes sentimental identification with the agents of their redemption in order to convey moral authenticity (and in the case of juche realism to establish historical referentiality and political truth).16
The Country I Saw Part One also provokes such sentimental identification with the victimized colonial nation and the agents of its redemption. However, it opens up another possible characterization that differs from the previously mentioned ethnicized images of the Japanese as conniving and brutal colonial oppressors. This new Japanese character is that of the conscientious foreign observer, whose colonial gaze is transformed from one that negates Korean identity, and against which Korean identity must struggle to assert itself, into a self-consciously postcolonial gaze that witnesses and recognizes both the damage and devastation of Japan's imperial project and the formation of the DPRK as a utopia, an entirely decolonized country where the human can fully realize its creative and subjective potential as per Kim Il Sung's doctrine ofjuche. The film dramatizes both the conscientious Japanese subject's negotiation of his national guilt and this same subject's recognition of the DPRK state as the real overcoming of Japan's imperialist past (an overcoming that Takahashi, despite his socialist politics, could not previously accomplish because he had not fully confronted and reconciled his previous complicity with imperialism.) However, in making the Japanese character's recognition of the DPRK utopia, and his supplication to its leadership, the preconditions for dealing psychologically with the guilt of colo
Page 8 of 21 nialism, the film appropriates and instrumentalizes the gaze of the Japanese foreign observer for the purposes of national government and national surveillance, which amounts to a kind of hybridization of the “colonial gaze” (discussed earlier) and the “socialist-realist gaze” as understood by Stephanie Donald.17 In her work on Chinese socialist realism, Donald argues that the frequent shots of characters looking dramatically off screen in Mao-era Chinese films (p- 597) emblematize a romantic desire for a present and/or future socialism. In films that emphasize the historical role of party leadership, such gaze toward off-screen space can also be framed, through dialogue, voice-over, or simple context, as directed toward the sovereign leader: Stalin, Mao, or Kim Il Sung. In Part One, Takahashi frequently looks off screen at moments of heightened awareness—when his journalist observations and his account of Mr. Ryu's discourse lead him to greater understanding of the DPRK's realization of a utopian society based in juche thought and Kim Il Sung's primary role in bringing it about. By the final scene, in which a teary-eyed Takahashi attends a speech of Kim Il Sung and finally sets his eyes directly on the sovereign leader (who still remains off screen), the colonial gaze of the former imperial journalist is imbricated with his socialist-realist gaze upon the leader and upon the DPRK form of society as the ultimate telos of human history.
How does the film arrive at this hybrid visual regime, at once colonial and socialist-realist? The cleverness of Part One is found in how it assigns to Takahashi Minoru a supplemental role within the juche-realist film style. The “socialist-realist gaze” directed toward the sovereign leader was central to global communist, and particularly socialist-realist, vi-suality. Although Kim Il Sung remains an important absent presence in scenes where characters declare their political loyalty to him, Takahashi's gaze upon the DPRK is more central to the visuality of the film and works in seemingly contradictory ways to provide sovereign legitimacy to the DPRK leadership. At times, Takahashi, as a repentant colonizer, must supplicate himself to the DPRK leader, appearing like any other loyal North Korean citizen in classic juche-realist productions. However, he is also another surveyor whose gaze functions similarly to the gaze of the leader in those productions; he is the Other for whom the North Korean characters perform their ideal national subjectivities. In this second case, North Korean characters appear to Takahashi as dutiful and proud members of a utopian society. In most other North Korean films, the Japanese are an external, hostile other constructed through the conventions of melodrama, but in The Country I Saw the conscientious Japanese observers are supplemental—by a logic of substitution they legitimate the DPRK regime by sometimes supplicating themselves in their guilt and humility about the colonial past and, at other times, serving as witnesses to North Korean workers' proclamations of their participation in the juche-centered utopian project of the DPRK. For example, at multiple points Takahashi Minoru gives teary apologies to his guide in North Korea, Mr. Ryu, for his past ignorance of Japan's colonial crimes, but he also comes to interview and to document, in his journalistic reportage, the North Korean workers who express their loyalty to the communist regime that liberated them. Worker characters typically serve as agents of verification for the DPRK's superior utopia in juche-realist films, but in this series these characters perform their loyalty not toward the invisible but omnipresent leader, but rather to the former repentant colonizer who gradually comes to see in the DPRK a form of society that transcends all other political projects, past and present, that frequently aimed to liberate the human creative potential, including, most important, the Japanese Empire.
In the first scene of Part One, the main character, the Japanese journalist Takahashi, is giving a lecture on the virtues of the DPRK political system to university students in
(p. 598) Tokyo. In response to a student's question about whether or not he has ever seen the DPRK firsthand, Takahashi responds that regrettably he has not. He then offers his motto for journalism and academic work: “Don't believe or write what you haven't seen with your own eyes.” This classroom interaction encourages Takahashi to apply for a ten-day return trip to North Korea, where he has not been in forty years, since the time when he served as a journalist embedded with Japan's Kwantung Army in the mid-1930s. In a subsequent scene, we discover that Takahashi has learned this empiricist motto “Don't believe or write what you haven't seen with your own eyes,” during his time in Manchuria, from a Korean newspaper vendor (Mr. Ryu), now working for the DPRK government. In applying this creed of objectivity on his return trip to North Korea forty years later, he becomes a witness both to the evils of the Japanese imperialist past and to the successes of juche-centered socialism in decolonized North Korea.
As Takahashi is flying into Pyongyang for his return trip, he sees the city of Changchun, now in the PRC, outside the window of the plane. In 1935, Changchun was the site of the most famous and mythologized guerrilla battle between Kim Il Sung-led Korean forces and Japan's Kwangtung Army. As he looks out at the airplane window, we transition to a black-and-white flashback sequence. Takahashi, the embedded journalist, is shown flyingover Changchun and discussing the war effort hesitantly with a Japanese army officer in 1935. He writes about the incidents in Changchun that he observes from the airplane and the information he receives from the Japanese military. After cutting back to Takahashi in his airplane seat in the narrative present (in color), the scene transitions to a colonial prison (in black and white) where a newspaper vendor, Mr. Ryu, tied up and badly beaten by soldiers, has been imprisoned for questioning Takahashi's published version of events in Changchun. When Takahashi, who is embedded with the military and appears in uniform, comes to the interrogation room, Ryu challenges Takahashi's version of the battle, which he claims was influenced by the Kwangtung Army's propaganda. In the next-to-last shot of this scene, Ryu tells Takahashi “to only write and believe what you see with your own eyes” (and, importantly, not from an airplane, but by reporting “on the ground”), which has subsequently become Takahashi's creed as a communist journalist.
The sequence dissolves out of the 1930s flashback and into the present, where Mr. Ryu, the former newspaper vendor, is now a high-ranking official in the DPRK government and has been given the task of guiding Takahashi Minoru during his ten-day trip (although Takahashi does not recognize him as the former vendor until the climax of the film). As the narrative progresses, Mr. Ryu elaborates on his first lesson about journalistic practice and continues to reform Takahashi. As Takahashi travels around North Korea with his Korean mentor, there are numerous flashbacks to the 1930s, interspersed with shots of Takahashi in the present, dealing uncomfortably with the guilt caused by these very lucid
Page 10 of 21 memories of Japanese oppression, exploitation, and colonial violence. His memories are filmed in black and white, and in the melodramatic mode of the Juche-realist style that a typical DPRK film would employ to represent the colonial period. As these images of the distant past appear to Takahashi in a transparent political logic of colonizer and colonized, he transforms from a naïve journalist who fails to see things for what they are into a witness of both (p- 599) the injustice of Japanese imperialism and the realization of DPRK's humanist utopia. However, this vision does not come naturally to Takahashi. Rather, he must learn how to see this way from Koreans, particularly Mr. Ryu, who in a dramatic conversation at the climax of the film reveals juche thought as the foundation for the DPRK society (see Figure 25.1). He then grants Takahashi his wish to visit Mt. Paektu, the supposed site of Kim Il Sung's secret guerilla base and the birth of his son, Kim Jong Il. On Mt. Paektu, Takahashi is shot in medium close-up, with the deep space of the caldera and its lake behind him. When the scene cuts to a point-of-view shot, one expects a sublime, panoramic image of the mountain, but the image is again in black and white and is followed by a rapid succession of cuts between the medium close-up of Takahashi in color, with his pensive and thoughtful face, and various black-and-white images that repeat all of the flashbacks of the film (including the story of Ryu's imprisonment and the Japanese Army's brutal colonial violence). The film's setting of the apotheosis of Takahashi's transformation on Mt. Paektu and cutting back to the previous images of colonial violence perpetrated by Japan highlight how much the film embeds the visual regime of empirical, investigative journalism—or “seeing with one's own eyes”—within the spectacle of a mythic national history.
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(p. 600) As Takahashi's memories of the imperialist past appear on screen, we see him struggle in the present with his guilt; however, this guilt results only from him seeing the past through the lens of a typical North Korean film, employing the narrative tropes and melodramatic affect of films produced in the 1960s and 1970s. The flashbacks utilize the melodramatic mode to present the suffering bodies of colonized Koreans through the well-established codes of the DPRK state's master narrative. Once he begins to “see things with his own eyes,” there is no possibility that Takahashi might remember the history of the colonial period differently from the DPRK's national narrative. The only sign of struggle with the facts of the past appears in close-ups of Takahashi's pensive and guilty facial expressions, which do not show doubt about which version of the past is true so much as a struggle to learn about and to recognize in the contemporary DPRK a complete utopian overcoming of the colonial past. The North Korean actor, Pak Ki Ju, rather skillfully portrays Takahashi's internal strife and eventual reconciliation of his colonial complicity through his total embrace of the DPRK and its leadership. In melodramatic expressions that oscillate between a conflicted guilt and an incredulous witnessing of the DPRK's embodiment of his long-held communist or socialist ideals, Takahashi's clear and positive vision of the past and present, authenticated by his position as a journalist, lend an air of realism to the fantasy of the film's national narrative. Arguably, without the modern figure of the investigative journalist, and his claim to empirical objectivity, the gaze of the Japanese observer could not become compatible with the DPRK's national narrative, nor could the guilt and the subsequent liberation from the colonizing impulse be apportioned according to the DPRK state's version of colonial and national history.
The narrative of foreign legitimation, postcolonial reconciliation, and nationalist narcissism requires the figure of the journalist as a witness who can document the facts of liberation and economic growth, record the story of how the party and the leader empowered the victims of Japanese colonialism to create an egalitarian society, and bring the news of realized utopia across national borders, back to Japan and out to the world.18 In one scene illustrating Takahashi's tour, he speaks with a peasant who has become a workteam leader, who explains to him how diligently she works, but also how grateful she is to Kim Il Sung for the agricultural reforms (see Figure 25.2). In such scenes, we can see how journalistic fact veers easily into the (moral) occult in juche realism, as Takahashi reaches out to shake the work-team leader's hand in order to absorb some of the revolutionary magic that Kim Il Sung once passed on to her.19 This scene is followed by one in which an overjoyed crowd runs enthusiastically toward the president's black car as he arrives for a surprise visit to the village. This interpenetration of the presentation of mere facts and the truth of sovereign dictatorship lends a hallucinatory quality to the film, but the authority given to journalistic empiricism allows the more occult scenes of leader worship to be presented as a continuation rather than disruption of historical facts.
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In an estranging way, Part One juxtaposes the sense of witnessing that we associate with political guilt and the desire to seek the forgiveness of the Other with another sense of witnessing that we find in socialist realist texts dating back to the Soviet Union of the 1930s (for example, in Evgeny Dobrenko's account of journalists who traveled to the
(p. 601) interior of the Soviet Union in order to witness and document “the facts of economic growth,” and therefore the creation of actually existing socialism).20 The fact of the injustice of imperialism that haunts the colonizer and the fact of the postcolonial nationstate's successful overcoming of colonial exploitation and its establishment of the socialist utopia both depend upon the idea of the journalist as witness to history. The film also effectively utilizes tropes of censorship and political coercion to dramatize the radical journalist's struggle to present the hidden truths of Japanese and Korean history within the capitalist and imperialist public sphere of Japan, deflecting all intimation of social conflict out of North Korea and onto the psychology and society of the former colonizer. In this way, North Korean national identity can appear unified under the gaze of the former colonizer, even as the former colonizer's own society is riven with political and social conflict.
Part One, in its attempt to displace the problem of colonialism onto the psychology of the former colonizer, and to purify the domestic North Korean space of social conflict, ends up superimposing the gaze of the Japanese observer with the socialist realist gaze of the sovereign leader. This superimposition of the psychologically reformed Japanese (p- 602) colonial gaze with the gaze of the sovereign leader is quite a feat of filmmaking, in the sense that the historical past of Japanese imperialism can be ritually invoked as both the historical origin of the current DPRK regime but also as a colonial past that has been entirely superseded and overcome by the decolonized nation-state—everything that Japan attempted but failed to be in the 1940s, North Korea has become.
In contrast to Part One, journalism in Parts Two-Five, produced in 2009-2011, is troubled by the influx of foreign televisual media and the contemporary crisis of political representation in North Korea. The observations of the conscientious Japanese no longer establish, in socialist realist fashion, the historical fact of the DPRK's utopia, but instead affirm the political acumen of Kim Jong Il, the necessity to protect sovereignty at all costs, and the promotion of the model of a world order centered on the DPRK. In other words, the later episodes of The Country I Saw appropriate the rhetoric of Iraq War-era media in the United States, declaring a state of exception in which historical facts, empirical observation, and objectivity are expressly subordinated to the maintenance of national security and the assertion of sovereign power in the world community. The face of George W. Bush, angry and maniacal, is prominent in the media montages of these later episodes, standing in as an irrational and dangerous threat to DPRK sovereignty, and mirroring the US media representations of Kim Jong Il or of Saddam Hussein. The appropriation of US media and state political discourse of the Iraq War years leads to a climactic assertion of national exceptionalism. The strategic use of dubbed montages of international media leads the viewer to believe that the world will “follow the DPRK.”
The later episodes of The Country I Saw would not begin appearing until 2009, but a number of scenes originally filmed in the late 1980s, as well as many of the same actors, appear in them despite the twenty-year hiatus. Part One is mostly set in North Korea. Parts Two-Five, however, are set entirely in Japan, which allow these episodes to displace any sense of social conflict within the DPRK to Japan. In these episodes, the journalist Takahashi Minoru's daughter, Aiko, is an international politics professor at Tokyo University. Part One portrays young Aiko, played by Kim Jong Hwa, reading her father's book on the DPRK, whereby she is convinced of the country's fulfillment of the humanist ideal. In Parts Two-Five, she struggles to carry on her dead father's legacy of loyalty to the DPRK by lecturing on the political savvy of Kim Jong Il at Tokyo University, under threats from the Japanese government and its agents. Because of Japan's colonial relation with the United States, the government forces her father Takahashi Minoru's resignation and continues to monitor his daughter's treasonous lectures carefully. In this way, setting the film in Japan allows any sense of social conflict in the DPRK to be symbolically transferred to Japan, which becomes the setting for confrontations with US imperialism (p- 603) through the highlighting of Aiko's struggles to critique US foreign policy and express her support for the DPRK.
These latest episodes of the film series contain montage sequences that are instances of a collision between North Korea's formerly hermetic domestic media spectacle and the more recent spectacle of international media organs such as CNN, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and Fox News. The scenes are fascinating in the way that they attempt to reassert, large
Page 14 of 21 ly through dubbed voice-overs, the master narrative of the DPRK-centered world order in the midst of the barrage of foreign media. They also reflect the growing access to outside media in North Korea. The use to which Part Two puts the spectacles of international media is an appropriation of the visual regime of “sovereign truth” in US media. Truth claims in the discourse of neoconservatism during the George W. Bush era did not refer primarily to facts established through observation but were more concerned with how a media narrative would serve an ideal future world, centered on the United States as the exceptional nation-state in the Middle East and the globe. In an analysis of Colin Powell's PowerPoint presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, the editors of Observant States write,
What is interesting here is that these slides present no prima facie evidence as such. Instead Powell tells the audience how to see what his administration desires: implicitly, “let the arrows stand in as evidence and we can all see the same thing.” If these signs of chemical munitions were indeed sure, then the arrows and captions would be largely superfluous. The arrows exist to veil the unsure sign.21
The way that much US televisual media sourced Powell's speech and used it to justify the second Iraq War tended not to question what the arrows might be pointing to. It was enough to mobilize the anger and animosity over the September 11 attacks, and the fear of a future nuclear war, to code the mobile units as elements of a nuclear program.
In Aiko's lectures to her students at Tokyo University, there is similar sense that the visual regime has become an outwardly strategic one that no longer needs to reference facts in the manner of investigative journalism. Montage sequences, including images of the US's militarization of South Korea and its placing of missiles there, are spliced into her lecture in order to convey the hypocrisy of US regulations on nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. More important, however, they create the sense of a country under siege, repeating the kind of strategic rhetoric of Bush's frequent mentions of a “mushroom cloud” in a major US city in order to gain the public's support for his unsubstantiated claims of foreign nuclear threat. The voice-overs function in a similar manner to Powell's arrow, because their primary effect is not to present events or images in order to arrive at empirical facts about the political situation, but rather to create a sense of an ongoing political crisis to which the only effective strategic response can be the stability offered by sovereign power in the state of emergency.22 The voice-overs also manufacture a binary framework for the discipline of political science in which the world is largely at odds with US foreign policy, and therefore must be in support of the strategies of the DPRK state. Much like Bush's rhetoric of being “for or against us,” the film leaves open (p- 604) no space where the condemnation of US foreign policy would not also mean a support for the nuclearization of the DPRK. In this way, Part Two of The Country I Saw appropriates the rhetoric and aesthetics of neocolonial media in order to center the entire world community and its media organs (however implausibly) around the DPRK state and its mission to maintain its sovereign leadership. However, because of its setting in Japan, the film presents the conflict within the binary political science through the dramatization of a Japanese subject caught between the political pressure of her national government and
Page 15 of 21 her support for the DPRK. Moving the setting from an investigative look at the DPRK's society to Japan displaces any ambivalent position the North Korean viewer might have toward the prospect of war, or the political science and televisual media that justify it. This type of wholesale displacement, which represents the domestic national space as unified and lacking in dissent, is another point of contrast from the empirical investigative journalism that defines utopia in Part One.
The final scene of Part Two shows Aiko, sitting down to her Sony Vaio, to write the history of North Korea during the Bush years. Again, the former colonizer as observer works as a supplement to the leader's gaze, but in this case the discourse is not primarily of empiricism, nor is there a professed need to see things firsthand. Aiko never travels to North Korea and learns about it only through her father's memoir. In place of empirical facts, the truth about history is rather established within the state of exception. A state of emergency calls for special measures not only for political action but for the manner in which the truth about the historical present is manufactured. Because of the mutually constructed national emergencies of the declaration of the Axis of Evil and the DPRK's response of withdrawing from the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, the technique of empirical investigative journalism falls away and televisual media both perpetuates the sense of emergency through its rapid movements and asserts the truth and necessity of sovereign power in the face of this emergency.
In the final voice-over of Part Two, Aiko thinks, “DPRK does not follow the world, the world follows the DPRK” (see Figure 25.3). The exceptionalist claim to the whole world in Aiko's final lines brings the film series' relation to Japan full circle, so that Aiko's adoration of the Kim Jong Il and her belief in DPRK's centrality in world history cast the country as the fulfillment of the dream of the Japanese Empire as the new center of world history as it was envisioned in the 1940s. Sonia Ryang has aptly drawn on Carl Schmitt's theorization of the sovereign as “he who decides on the state of exception” in order to discuss the representation of the sovereign national leadership in the DPRK.23 But what kind of rhetoric is used in North Korean mass media in order to establish this sovereign exceptionality of the state and its leadership? Like the rhetoric of world history during the Japanese Empire of the 1940s, Part Two appropriates an outside version of world history in order to make claims to the sovereign exceptionality of DPRK leadership.24 In place of the largely Hegelian claims for Japan's role in world history during the Japanese Empire, this film appropriates the rhetoric and visuality of American exceptionalism, while at the same time casting American exceptionalism as the enemy. What it maintains of Bush-era media culture is the idea that the world must revolve around a particular nation due to the national emergency. The overdubbing of international media by the voice of the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) report, and the images of world (p- 605) monuments like the Eiffel Tower, or people reading newspapers, create the fiction of a world that is united in solidarity with the DPRK. The imperialist fantasy of the US exceptionalism is recentered on the DPRK, but not without a discursive detour of reminding us of Japan's supposed revolt against the West, before it became a colony of the United States. In the process, any sense of conflicted memories of colonialism in Part One disappears into Aiko's nostalgia for a Japan that can stand up to foreign colonialism, projected onto the present DPRK.
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The concern with journalistic objectivity in The Country I Saw is significant in part because so much of the information we get about North Korea is presented in the form of print, digital, and televisual journalism. The crises and practices of representation in North Korea's cinematic culture are by no means entirely foreign, but belong to other modern histories, sometimes in surprisingly direct ways. For example, in the transition from journalistic empiricism to sovereign truth, we can track, through what Siegfried Kracauer called the “distorting mirror” of cinema, some of the history of late capitalist media.25 Therefore, when Part Three climaxes with the successful launching of a satellite depicted through computer-generated imagery, the viewer should not be surprised by the employment of contemporary blockbuster spectacle for the sake of political (p- 606) propaganda. Taking into account the generally modern visual regimes that structure our affective connection to the past, present, and future of national histories, the distance between Hollywood space films and such moments in DPRK film culture is no less narrow than the distance between the characterization of the investigative reporter in The Country I Saw and our own myths of fact-based journalism, or between US military and media spectacles of national exceptionalism and the image of a world that “revolves around the DPRK.”
The North Korean media archive is an alternative archive of East Asian history and visual culture, one that confronts the continuities among the Japanese Empire, the US Empire,
Page 17 of 21 and the broader politics of imperialism in a way that other national culture industries in East Asia have not performed consistently. There is great value in encountering this archive, but not only because it presents a communist worldview or other historical narratives that challenge those in the United States, Japan, Taiwan, or South Korea, which too easily cast the Cold War US sovereignty as a necessary bulwark against communism. Encountering this archive is equally valuable because it opens up the possibility for comparison between the visual regimes of the postcolonial nation-state of the DPRK and other modes of modern visuality, from the ethnographic images of imperial Japanese cinema, to Soviet socialist realism, to the spectacles of exceptional sovereignty proliferated by the United States. Just as Dobrenko located in Guy Debord's concept of the “society of the spectacle”—developed during capitalism's transition to the postmodern in the 1960s—a way to understand and interpret socialist realism in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, an encounter with the alternative media archive of North Korea demands an uncanny mode of comparison that recognizes the familiar in the foreign and the foreign in the familiar. While this approach may question the existence of a particularly “communist” form of vi-suality, the DPRK state—and particularlyjuche thought and juche realism—already translated and reformulated the meaning of the acting “subject” (juche) of communist politics and culture to fit the political situation of a national independence movement and a project of decolonization, and therefore required the appropriation and transformation of the existing visual regimes in order to create a new visual mediation for this new subject of history. Putting to use the technological and aesthetic prostheses of global visual regimes is a process that haunts the postcolonial nation—registers such as empirical journalism and media spectacle remain intimately tied to the history of colonial and imperial ways of seeing.
Armstrong, Charles. The North Korean Revolution (1945-1950). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2003.
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
The Country I Saw [Nae ga bon nara] Part 1-5, directed by Ko Hak Rim and Pak Jong Ju. Pyongyang: Korean Film Export and Import, 1988; 2009-2010.
Dobrenko, Evgeny. Political Economy of Socialist Realism. Translated by Jesse M. Savage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
Jay, Martin. “The Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” Vision and Visuality. Seattle: Bay Press, 1988.
Kim Jong Il. On the Art of the Cinema. Pyongyang, Korea: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1973/1989.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2008.
Ryang, Sonya. “Biopolitics or the Logic of Sovereign Love—Love's Whereabouts in North Korea.” In North Korea: Toward a Better Understanding, 41-55. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Schmitt, Carl. Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political. Translated by G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press, 2007.
Shohat, Ella. “Imaging Terra Incognita: The Disciplinary Gaze of Empire.” Public Culture 3, no. 2 (1991): 41-70.
Verhoeff, Nanna. Mobile Screen: The Visual Regime of Navigation. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
(1.) The Country I Saw [Nae ga bon nara] Part One, DVD, directed by Ko Hak Rim (1988; Pyongyang: Korean Film Export and Import, 2010). The Country I Saw [Nae ga bon nara] Part Two, DVD, directed by Ko Hak Rim (2009; Pyongyang: Korean Film Export and Import, 2012). The Country I Saw [Nae ga bon nara] Part Three, DVD, directed by Pak Jong Ju (2009; Pyongyang: Korean Film Export and Import, 2012).
(2.) Nanna Verhoeff, Mobile Screen: The Visual Regime of Navigation (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 15.
(3.) Martin Jay, “The Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 3-23.
(4.) David Shim and Dirk Nabers, “North Korea and the Politics of Visual Representation” German Institute of Global and Area Studies Working Papers 164 (April 2011).
(5.) Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008); Ella Sho-hat, “Imaging Terra Incognita: The Disciplinary Gaze of Empire” Public Culture 3, no. 2 (1991): 41-70.
(6.) Evgeny Dobrenko, Political Economy of Socialist Realism, trans. Jesse M. Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
(7.) Kim Jong Il, On the Art of the Cinema (Pyongyang: Foreign Language Publishing House [1973] 1989); Sunah Kim, “Yeonghwa gukka mandeulgi: ‘yeonghwa yesullon' eul tong hae bon sahoejueui yeonghwa mihak e daehan gochal,” in Juche eui hwanyeong: bukhan munye iron e daehan bipan-jeok ihae (Seoul: Doseo Chulpan Gyeongjin, 2011), 71-106.
(8.) Kim Jong Il, On the Juche Idea (Pyongyang: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1982).
(9.) I base this summary on the numerous works Hwang Jangyeop went on to publish on “human-centered philosophy” in South Korea after his defection.
(10.) Kim Jong Il, On the Art of the Cinema.
(11.) Charles Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution (1945-1950) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
(12.) Hwang Jangyeop, Nan neun yeoksa jilli reul bwatda (Seoul: Doseo Chulpan Gyeongjin, 1999).
(13.) Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007).
(14.) Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
(15.) The Flower Girl [Kkot paneun cheonyeo], DVD, directed by Ch'oe Ikkyu and Pak Hak (1972; Pyongyang: Korean Film Export and Import); Sea of Blood [Pibada], DVD, directed by Ch'oe Ikkyu (1969; Pyongyang: Korean Film Export and Import); Five Guerrilla Brothers [Yugyeokdae eui ohyeongje], DVD, directed by Ch'oe Ikkyu (1968; Pyongyang: Korean Film Export and Import).
(16.) Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 1-15; Jan Campbell, Film and Cinema Spectatorship: Melodrama and Mimesis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 7-22.
(17.) Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes; Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China (Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2000), 5967.
(18.) Dobrenko, Political Economy, 255-279.
(19.) Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).
(20.) Dobrenko, Political Economy.
(21.) Observant States, 9.
(22.) Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
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(23.) Sonia Ryang, “Biopolitics or the Logic of Sovereign Love—Love's Whereabouts in North Korea,” in North Korea: Toward a Better Understanding (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 57-84. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5.
(24.) For a discussion of the borrowing of Hegelian “world history” in the Japanese empire, see Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
(25.) Quoted in Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 8.
Travis Workman
Travis Workman, Associate Professor in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Television and the Good Times of Socialism á
Anikó Imre
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Television, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
Online Publication Date: Jul 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.27
This article builds on the assumption that studying television cultures under socialism thoroughly muddles the Cold War framework of two opposing, radically different world systems. The article examines features of socialist television in the Soviet Union and the former Eastern Bloc in order to revisit some of the valuable experiences of socialism that were automatically relegated to the dustbin of history in 1990. It shows how television recorded, reflected, and facilitated the shared experience of socialism's complicated temporality and helped make socialism manageable, redirecting its high ideals into the ethical principles of everyday habits. The article demonstrates how these principles worked through some exemplary program types and how they got stripped of their collective dimensions after the end of socialism, to be infused with paranoid, anxious nationalism.
Keywords: socialism, Eastern Europe, television, education, temporality, nostalgia
In the early 1990s, following the fall of the Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, few people would have believed that, twenty-five years later, Russia would re-emerge as an authoritarian country with imperial aspirations, expanding its worldwide spy operations over the Internet to influence the political futures of other countries. Even fewer would have believed that semiauthoritarian regimes would return and entrench their positions in the former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe; that countries that had been so eager to denounce their history of socialism and correct their path toward European democracy in 1989 would willingly realign themselves with Russia, barricade their populations behind walls and fences, and reject the path toward transnational cooperation within the European Union that they embraced with enthusiasm just fifteen years before.
Three decades after the Soviet Empire spectacularly imploded, we are also witnessing the resurgence of interest in the histories of socialism and the Cold War in popular media culture. Television dramas such The Americans (FX, 2013-), Counterpart (Starz Network,
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2017-), Comrade Detective (Amazon, 2017-), Homeland (Showtime, 2011-), Deutschland 83 (AMC and RTL, 2015-), or A Very Secret Service (Arte, 2015-), as well as recent blockbusters such as Atomic Blonde (2017) and Red Sparrow (2018), have resurrected the familiar narrative tropes of the spy series. Other popular TV shows reach back to dystopian novels about autocratic oppression written during the Cold War, such as the Amazon alternative-history drama The Man in the High Castle (2015-), based on Philip K. Dick's 1962 novel, or the Hulu series The Handmaid's Tale (2017-), adapted from Margaret Atwood's 1985 book of the same title. Such recent representations have infused the familiar nostalgic Cold War clichés with a decidedly contemporary sense of (p- 612) ambiguity, allegory, and dystopia. They probe themes of socialism and the Cold War for current, global political resonances of oppression, anxiety, and fear. These resonances include widespread digital state and corporate surveillance, Russia's performance on the international stage as a meddlesome power headed by a former KGB agent, fake news delivered by algorithms, and the CIA's increasingly contentious role in American and international politics. This reworking of the quintessential themes and sensibilities of the Cold War through its popular genres and tropes identifies the period as an important historical, philosophical, and affective resource for processing the overwhelmingly negative sensibilities produced by neoliberal capitalism.
Far from losing relevance with the demise of the socialist system, scholarship focused on the history of socialism and the Cold War has also flourished in the past ten to fifteen years. It has developed particular strength in historical and anthropological studies of everyday cultures of socialism, departing from the attention to political systems and to the struggles between party-led dictatorship and dissident intellectuals.1 In a similar vein, the study of socialist and postsocialist nostalgia has also generated a vibrant area of scholarship.2 Back in the early 1990s, it was fairly common to dismiss nostalgia as a sentiment cultivated by postsocialist populations who were unable to get past their attachment to the deceptive sense of safety provided by the socialist “nanny-state” and to adjust to the competitive demands of a market economy. Since then, the victorious world system we are all stuck with has proven itself to be fundamentally unwilling and structurally unable to provide for even a basic sense of security and well-being for most of the world's population. Anxiety has welled up worldwide in response to the exhaustion of neoliberal capitalism as the guarantor of democracy, a good life, or indeed, hope for a livable future for the majority of an increasingly compressed globe. The renewed interest in the Cold War and the formerly discarded model of socialism is an indication of a search for alternative values at a time when it has become blatantly clear that propaganda, demagoguery, primordial nationalism, corruption, and authoritarianism are not the exclusive properties of communism and that neoliberal capitalism does not inherently lead to democracy and social justice. While capitalism “won” the Cold War, it has failed to bring about an alternative; the widespread interest in socialism and postsocialist nostalgia is a symptom of a renewed search for an alternative vision.
The vantage point of the shocking historical developments of recent decades now allows us to reconsider the legacy of socialism in ways that are unburdened by what in 1990 was an uncontestable narrative of total victory versus total failure in a long-standing battle between two world systems.
Television has been a place where academic attention to everyday cultures of socialism and popular nostalgia has converged. This chapter examines features of socialist television in the Soviet Union and the former Eastern Bloc in order to explore some of the valuable experiences of socialism that were automatically relegated to the dustbin of history in 1990. Admittedly, it is impossible to generalize across the different phases, forms, and geopolitical manifestations of television under socialism. The values I wish to revisit have to do with the overarching communal and educational ethos of socialism that television dispersed more successfully than most other institutions, rather than with specific, local features. This ethos manifested itself in socialist television's earnest (p- 613) utopian impulse to educate while entertaining in the relaxed conditions of the home. It was also evident in its investment and success in developing a well-rounded person committed to cultivating their own faculties and in facilitating a community-oriented sensibility. Even during socialism's waning years, when socialism's original ideological principles were increasingly eroded in a capitulation to market-based competition and individualism, in most countries within the Soviet orbit, television sustained this sensibility.
Surveying the contemporary postsocialist media landscape provides stark evidence of what has been lost. This is so because, in its ownership structure and centralized ideological control, the current situation eerily mirrors the late socialist structure of state-adjacent centralization and ownership over state media. In the past ten to fifteen years, neoauthoritarian parties in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia have been using public money to consolidate media holdings among their loyal oligarchic networks, including television channels, local and national print media, and Internet sites. These centralized media networks are not unlike late socialist networks in their structure and politics, except for being more slick and powerful. Through accumulating economic power, concentrating ownership, and silencing opposition, they are able to institute control and even censorship, ensuring the uniformity of news, spreading propaganda and delegitimizing and restricting access to alternative news. Government propaganda has also been made more effective through extensive, carefully tailored public opinion campaigns that involve offshore, transnational right-wing campaign firms.3
Earlier efforts to create democratic media institutions and attract investment by foreign media companies in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War had slowed down by the end of the 1990s. Instead, a system of “paternalistic commercialism” prevailed,4 with governments increasingly reasserting their ownership and political control over the domestic news media that still holds the greatest sway over national political opinion making, particularly among less cosmopolitan, monolingual populations. Despite ostensible markers of freedom of trade, mobility, and expression, which postsocialist ruling parties are eager to demonstrate toward the outside to distinguish themselves from communist regimes, evidence is now incontrovertible that the transitional period has not produced the political and economic liberalization and pluralism that optimists had hoped for. Instead, the
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business climate has been marked by widespread political corruption and the interference of oligarchic networks in market competition,5 often led by media-industrialist tycoons who use media holdings to advance their political or financial interests, a phenomenon familiar from Southern Europe, most reminiscent of the career of Silvio Berlusconi.6 In addition, disappointment with Western interests and intensions in the media market also helped confirm a larger pattern of disillusionment with the European Union's failure to deliver on the rhetoric of inclusion and equality among the member states, which has been eagerly exploited by populist parties.
Today's state-controlled news media is populated by loyal employees, much like on Fox News in the United States or on Putin's Russian news media channels. In the most repressive “illiberal” countries, most notoriously Hungary, this has been paralleled by a purge of alternative media and voices. However, these media operations do not simply (p. 614) emulate socialist television's paternalistic attitude. While they build on the familiar authoritarian infrastructure and the ethos of nationalism, they replaced socialism's educational approach and communal orientation with divisive, carefully coordinated fear campaigns, embedded in a context of depoliticized entertainment content that is largely a mix of home-produced material and foreign imports. In an ironic twist, in a time of many competing terrestrial, cable, and Internet-based media services, and widely available broadband that links most citizens to the Internet, state news media in the former socialist countries has propagated a sense of defensive, nationalistic isolation. By contrast, while socialist TV and radio held a broadcasting monopoly through the mid-1980s, it was far from insulating or isolated in its operations in most countries. Rather, similar to Western European public broadcasters, it was thoroughly networked through both Warsaw Pact and Europe-wide collaborations, broadcast exchanges, television diplomacy, and a regular flow of knowhow, technology, and personal connections.7 The postsocialist recentralization of television around ruling parties' oligarchic networks holds up a dystopian mirror image to late socialist TV, resembling stereotyped or satirical images of communism rather than actual socialist realities.
Much of postwar Eastern European public television was meant to teach its viewers how to read and write; to understand math, physics, and geography; to appreciate fine national and European literature, film, and music; and to understand Marxist-Leninist philosophical principles. But it also offered a broader educational program in raising children and navigating legal issues; in cooking, sewing, and gardening; and in agricultural work, mining, and operating heavy machinery. It was anything but cheap in its intentions. It was driven by noble initiatives to democratize access to education, to create a level playing field among people of different class and educational backgrounds, and to socialize the individual as always primarily a community member. The pedagogical mandate imposed on television was so dominant that we can say socialist TV was meant to function as a massive school for the masses. Programs varied as to how explicit this educational intent was, from School TV an initiative most active in the 1960s-1970s that coordinated subject-specific programming with the centralized school curriculum to program types that moved from straightforward instruction to more audience-friendly formats, which allowed for more participation and emotional engagement.8
The future-facing, aspirational ideology of socialism was thus embedded in the very fabric of television and informed virtually every program. Of course, this did not automatically inject hope and motivation into viewers. Images of energetic factory workers, tractor-driving collective farm laborers, enthusiastic students bursting into collective singing, and attentive doctors would turn into a parody of themselves as the utopian ideals of revolutionary transformation drifted farther and farther away from the experience of daily lives. By the 1970s, in much of the Eastern Bloc, the failure of the utopian future to materialize produced a nostalgic structure of feeling. Television recorded, reflected, and facilitated the shared experience of this complicated temporality. It helped make socialism manageable, redirecting its high ideals into the ethical principles of everyday habits of mind and body in a way that was much more effective and lasting than political speeches. Let me examine how these principles worked through some exemplary program (p- 615) types and then return to how they got stripped of their collective dimensions after the end of socialism, to be replaced by paranoid, anxious nationalism ready to be exploited by opportunistic leaderships.
More than other cultural institutions, television under socialism was always in the middle of a tug of war between party authorities and citizens. Even though it borrowed many of radio's genres and forms of address and was seen as a venue to carry the high cultural mission of the cinema and theater, television's unique position as a home-based medium associated with relaxation, along with its low cultural value, constantly pushed against government control. Particularly in its first, formative decades of the 1960s, “television was in the paradoxical position of being celebrated and denigrated, pampered and ig-nored.”9
While the communist parties of the 1950s technically owned the new institution, its purpose and potential remained something of a mystery to them. Television's technological base as well as its programming was a mix-and-match of ideas imported and borrowed from Western European broadcasters, filtered through Soviet ideological directives. More centralized attempts at political control over television increased only in the 1970s.10 Communist parties then tried to mold the new medium to their own purposes: they developed centralized programming to standardize citizens' everyday, domestic life rhythms. As television was becoming a mass medium, authorities also attempted to instill in television the utopian ethos of socialism, which was propelled by the idea of ongoing revolution that would eventually lead to the radical egalitarian society of communism.11 Historian Kristin Roth-Ey evokes Russian theorist Vladimir Sappak who, in his 1962 book Television and Us, argued that television should capture everyday reality in the spirit of Dziga Vertov's kinopravda. It should be not so much an instrument for staging reality but, rather, a force of democratization and truth.12 In a way, television was romanticized and "futured," along with its imagined audience.
The operative term about television's temporality was "not yet." The goal of constant selfdevelopment oriented toward the communist utopia was served by offering a range of education-based programming that underscored work and self-improvement as unquestionable values. Every program was imbued with the overarching intention to educate. Teleeducation was seen as a key to the citizenry's erudition, from academic and ideological training through learning a variety of practical skills to "taste cultivation," rooted in the Kantian idea of aesthetic education. Heather Gumbert's apt term to describe East German TV, "education dictatorship," can be safely generalized across the socialist region.13
For instance, annual assessments of the operations of Hungarian television in the 1960s-1970s show a clear priority for tele-education, characterized by a "not yet" mentality. They issue the same wishful-thinking assessments year after year, driven by (p- 616) principles that shifted farther and farther into a nostalgic past as the utopian future receded on the horizon: they take a self-boosting count of the many hours of broadcasting devoted to news, education, factual and current affairs programming, documentaries, theater broadcasts, historical teleplays, adaptations of literary classics, and program exchanges within the Soviet camp. They express some carefully worded reservations about the "tentative" approach to teaching social sciences on TV caused by the many "unresolved" historical questions and the "inadequate courage" of some TV professionals. They also note "divided opinions" about popular entertainment programs, whether imported crime series or home-produced pop music talent shows or comedy programs, which are often deemed to be "in bad taste." They then set guidelines for the future: to increase the level of political awareness and expand political education.14 After the tenth annual Congress of the Hungarian Socialist Worker's Party, an article in the party newspaper states: "The hardest task for the leaders of our television is to find the right balance between providing cultural service and guiding the audience. This is because this right balance has not yet emerged with reassuring certainty" (emphasis mine).15 In a similar vein, a prominent critic writes in the journal Rádió és TV Szemle (Radio and TV Review) in 1971, "Society does not yet prescribe the mandatory behavioral models and achievement levels in the area of entertainment as it does in the areas of education and the acquisition of high cul-ture."16 The audience imagined by such assessments was always a bit disappointing: never quite sophisticated or enlightened enough, always falling slightly short of the standards marked out by science, literature, and art.
However, instead of becoming a vehicle for popularizing the idea of forward-marching progress, television became a site of permanent, self-reflective nostalgia for the revolution's lost potential. Its domestic, intimate context of watching, the lack of central control over its reception, and, indeed, the choice of viewers to ignore it altogether contributed to the medium remaining at odds with the goal of mass mobilization and ideological indoctrination. Instead, television foregrounded the stalled progress of socialism toward communism and became a platform for reflecting on socialism's faults and failures, often ironically, at least in the most politically liberal countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia,
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Yugoslavia, and Hungary. By the 1980s of late socialism, television had turned into the primary medium of ironic overidentification with official socialist rhetoric.17 This was exacerbated by the increasing leakage of information about capitalist lifestyles and consumer products despite even the most repressive states' efforts to keep it out. Television gave melancholic testimony to the permanently “transitional” state of socialism and its increasing emulation and incorporation of capitalistic, market-based features and ideologies.
Early attempts at forging a socialist character and turning television into a successful tool of agitation and propaganda on the road to communism were often heavy handed,
(p. 617) top down, and condescending.18 By the late 1960s and 1970s, the failure of Soviet-type socialism to compete on the international stage in the sphere of industrial production became evident. Following a political thaw, cultural policy in socialist countries shifted emphasis to extolling the superiority of socialist lifestyles. Television lent itself to emotional engagement and was an effective platform for implementing this turn.
By the 1970s, more and more educational programs began to solicit viewers' emotional engagement and participation, employing a playful or humorous tone, embedding their lessons in competitive game and quiz formats, mixing live footage with animation and studio conversations with dramatic reenactments, and employing well-liked, entertaining personalities as guides and moderators instead of academic experts. In the long run, these proved to be the most enduring types of programs, many of which survived socialism.
Leonid Brezhnev defined the concept of “socialist way of life” at the Soviet Union's Twenty Fifth Party Congress in 1976 as “an atmosphere of genuine collectivism and comradeship, solidarity, the friendship of all the nations and peoples of our country, which grows stronger from day to day, and moral health, which makes us strong and steadfast.”19 As Christine Evans explains, the concept embodied a new direction in Soviet ideology toward identifying a moral, spiritual, and emotional existence unique to socialism and superior to capitalism. On television, this new form of emotional engagement was to break up the boredom and ineffectuality of formulaic news and documentary programs. It was to serve as a form of passionate counterpropaganda that would bring ordinary people and their stories of everyday heroism to the screen. Evans analyzes the popular Soviet program Ot vsei dushi (From the Bottom of My Heart), launched in 1972 and hosted by legendary female Soviet Central Television hostess Valentina Leont'eva, as the most evocative showcase of the Soviet socialist way of life:
The show's central purpose was to evoke emotions, on screen and among viewers, and, most crucially, link those emotions with state myths and goals. The strategies the show used to accomplish these tasks, including creating a festive atmosphere, subjecting the featured community to intense surveillance both before and during the show, and relying on Leont'eva's own highly emotional performance, create strong continuities between late Soviet and post-Soviet cultural life in Russia.20
From the Bottom of My Heart packaged propagandistic messages about the strength of the working class and the peasantry in the form of a live, semi-religious traveling celebration, which was complete with sentimental music and imagery (close-ups, candles, pastoral scenes). It foreshadowed the explosion of talk and reality shows on post-Soviet television, several of which continued to feature highly emotional stories of past sacrifice and suffering in order to foster nationalism.21
While the mode of nationalistic sentimentality was fairly specific to Soviet culture, similar variety shows that invited the nation to participate in emotionally charged televisual moments also functioned as a regional format. For instance, the 1960s East German variety show Mit dem Herzen dabei (“With Open Hearts”), produced by the Entertainment Desk, was a live, traveling variety show intended to “celebrate socialism” and “honor ordinary East Germans for embodying ‘socialist' values such as hard work, (p- 618) devotion to Heimat and teaching children the value of Familientreue.”22 Like From the Bottom of My Heart, the show solicited audience involvement, from nominating coworkers and neighbors to viewer feedback in the form of letters. Both programs also relied on hidden cameras to surprise their unsuspecting protagonists, often showering them with prizes such as a new car or a vacation, in a way that was quite lavish for socialism and anticipated the manipulative reveals of reality shows to come. Heather Gumbert calls With Open Hearts a utopian “spectacle that ‘advertised' socialism.”23
Paulina Bren describes the post-1968 normalization period's televisual turn in Czechoslovakia in terms of pursuing “a more qualitative socialist lifestyle.”24 But she also identifies this turn as part of a European and even global shift in the 1970s and 1980s toward moving the exercise of politics into the sphere of private relations. Indeed, the same program types could be found throughout the region, many of them also variants of Western European PSB programs.25 Many of these programs increasingly mixed documentary realism with fiction and also reached into viewers' actual lives, making television the most vivid and organic platform for public engagement. While political and intellectual elites' resistance to finding cultural value in television remained steadfast throughout the period, it was also increasingly recognized among TV professionals and critics that television viewing was not simply a passive state unworthy of the active socialist citizen. Rather, it was interwoven with other activities socialist ideology deemed educational, such as reading, listening to classical music, or learning about the natural world.26 Thus, television's function was seen as a spark button that would ignite further inquiries, preferably pursued in a collective fashion, enhanced by playful and emotional engagement.
By the 1970s, television was seen not simply as a school house but also as a public forum. The tellingly titled Hungarian program Fórum (Forum, 1969) bypassed lectures and propaganda and invited artists, intellectuals, and politicians instead to a live town hall meeting held in varying locations. It put party leaders in front of the cameras and connected them with actual viewers, who asked questions about the economy and its reforms, political issues, and foreign relations. On the September 15, 1972 broadcast, for instance, Péter Vályi, vice president of the Council of Ministers, answered questions about foreign economic relations from the workers in the meeting room of the electric factory Egyesült Izzó and from viewers who called in. In this experimental format, “forum” meant an actual public forum, where party officials took a considerable risk: they realized they could not hide behind official releases any longer in the age of television; but once on TV, they were unprepared for the visibility it afforded, and it often exposed their own insincerity.27
Similar to the Hungarian Forum, the Yugoslav program Aktuelni Razgovori (Current Debates) (TV Belgrade, 1965-1969) was a participatory discussion program that revolved on current issues based on audience suggestions, including unemployment, living standards and political reforms. The East German Prisma (Prism) ran from 1963 to 1991. As Heather Gumbert explains, it was one of the most tangible outcomes of the Agitation Commission's appeal to television producers to create popular programming that would uncover and find solutions to the contradictions of socialism.28 The ultimate (p- 619) goal, of course, was to teach viewers to see themselves as part of a functioning socialist collective. Gerhard Scheumann, creator and first host of the show, modeled Prism after the West German current affairs magazine Panorama. Unlike Panorama, however, which focused on large-scale political issues, Prism was positioned as a liaison between the party leadership and ordinary citizens, inviting viewers to contribute questions, comments, and complaints about a variety of issues that affected everyday lives.29 Like Forum, Prism performed a delicate dance. On the one hand, it offered critical, participatory journalism that invited viewers to feel like they had a voice in shaping the system, and that the SED was on their side. On the other hand, Prism embraced the leeway to be critical of the party and did allow a range of previously unheard voices to be part of the national conversation. In one of the most memorable cases, Prism successfully intervened on behalf of a young woman who was disqualified from attending teachers' training college because she refused to swim due to a water-related childhood trauma and subsequently failed gym class.30
Programs like Prism opened the door to audience involvement wider than ever before. Television had begun to take advantage of its unique ability to let people observe and vicariously participate in others' lives. Propelled by the socialist ethos of collectivity, such programs directed attention to collective memory and systemic inequality rather than to displaying others' misfortunes for voyeurs. For instance, the popular Hungarian series Ebédszünet (Lunch Break), launched in 1971 and hosted by Mária Balogh, followed up on viewer letters that called attention to systemic social problems. One of the broadcasts in 1971 explored the inhuman conditions of a provincial industrial area, where factory leaders had refused to make even the slightest improvements for workers during the previous twenty years. Lunch Break's crew traveled to the location and interviewed the workers. A critic wrote, “Television's principle on Lunch Break is not cheap sensationalism. Rather, it uses the force of the public forum to press those in charge to make progressive deci-sions.”31 The same year also saw the beginning of another long-running program, Nyitott boríték (Open Envelope), where hostess Margit Molnár set out to solve problems raised by viewer letters. TV Guide explained that the program was prompted by the fact that
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viewers saw television as an institution that can bring remote locations and issues into public visibility. It is this collective responsibility that the program's creators took up and put into practice.32
This opening toward socially committed participatory TV was accompanied by television's experiments with mixing documentary and fictional genres as a way to reach viewers and loosen the definition of tele-education. From the clumsy, heavy-handed, and technologically burdened ambitions of mass tele-education through a variety of hybrid docu-fictional experiments, socialist TV reached its most effective educational formula in such hybrid, participatory programs. They underscore the fact that, in its most mature form, socialist educational TV was far from being the ideological mouthpiece of the party. At their best, these programs were more loyal to the stated goals of public service broadcasting than the original Western European programs that may have inspired them: they supported self-improvement and lifelong learning as goals always embedded in the collective interest rather than isolated as individual problems. (p- 620) They encouraged learning through participation and mobilized affective engagement without yielding to voyeurism or selfserving emotional display.
Other program types that successfully balanced socialist TV's educational mandate with an engaging format were quiz, game, and variety shows. The generic boundaries among these types tended to be muddled everywhere; but they all had competition and participation as their central attractions. Much like on Western European public service television, quiz shows were some of the earliest genres on socialist TV everywhere, introduced as part of live broadcasting in the late 1950s. If we trace their history,33 we see a transformation from the early, open-ended formats of the 1950s to more or less centralized attempts at instituting more rules and controls, which were to adjust the genre to serving the mass-educational policies of the 1960s.34 The earliest formats arose in an era of fairly low regulation and high confusion among socialist parties as to the purposes, potentials, and dangers of the new medium. This uncertainty gave TV professionals some leeway to experiment with the genre, which was cheap to produce. As entertainment increasingly came to define television in the 1970s and 1980s, quiz and game formats bore more and more of the pressure from capitalist competition and viewer demand. Direct, codified format borrowings began on a large scale in the 1990s.35
Quiz and game shows resolved the contradiction between two ethical legacies. One was the value of hard work, which meshed together a presocialist, bourgeois work ethic and early socialism's emphasis on competitive, numerically measurable production. The other legacy was the ethos of cultural nationalism, which embraced high art and revered the Romantic notion of creative talent. The joint effect of these two ethical mandates was the expectation that the socialist citizen's intellectual and physical condition had to be in continual training.
The purest form of continual training was, of course, sports. Every successful athlete from the Eastern Bloc carried the double burden of proving the competitiveness of their own nation and the viability of socialism at once. Broadcasts of international competitions such as world, European, and Olympic championships were cult events. More broadly, the structure of sports competition was often directly projected onto quiz and game show formats, which helped minimize the genre's ideological disagreement with the spirit of socialist collectivity. In other words, the competitive structure of quiz and game shows was ideologically neutralized by the association with the alleged ethical purity of sports. Many of these programs actively cultivated this association, registering their work as an extension of sports, a form of cultural or intellectual Olympics.
For instance, Soviet television's most successful game show of all time, Klub veselykh I nakhodchivykh or KVN (Club of the Merry and Quick-Witted, 1961-), was described by its cocreator Sergei Muratov as “intellectual soccer.”36 KVN continued the format developed by its predecessor, Vecher veselykh voprosov or VVV (Evening of Merry Questions,
(p. 621) 1957). Both shows borrowed from similar programs produced in Czechoslovakia, the United States, Poland, and the GDR.37 VVV was modeled after the most popular 1950s Czechoslovak program at the time, GGG, or Gadai, Gadai, Gadalshchik (Guess, Guess, You Guesser).38 VVV was created in 1957 as part of the activities that led up to the Moscow International Youth Festival. It was thus integrated into a quintessential socialist international event. It took place in front of a live audience. Random participants answered random questions for funny, token prizes. Its open-ended format and open-door policy made it a remarkably liberal phenomenon on 1950s Soviet TV. The producers assumed little control over whom or what appeared on stage.39
VVV came to a halt after a poorly conceived call for participants, which brought an uncontrollable, sweaty mass of people storming into the studio. The producers were fired immediately. This incident confronted the messy reality of Soviet socialism with the staged world of Soviet media space, something that could not be risked again. It visualized the number-one threat posed by the new medium: its own unpredictable audiences. This would prove to be a recurring problem with socialist game shows, something authorities had to learn to anticipate and navigate. Investigations following VVV's failure condemned its bourgeois vulgarity, lack of ideological principle, and mockery of Soviet citizenry.40
These charges haunted the socialist game show throughout its existence, particularly in the Soviet Union. Four years later, the successor program KVN was more overtly guided by socialist principles of democratic education. At the same time, it was enabled by a web of pro-competition ideologies, which underscored the working of Soviet society: the preSoviet, nationalistic, Romantic elitism of a creative class; the cultivation of work and the Stalinist legacy of competitive labor within factory and agricultural production; and the competition against the seductions of capitalist media. KVN was launched in 1961 as a monthly broadcast. It followed a format similar to VVV but with more centralized control over the rules: the participants, all students and almost all men, engaged in a contest of wit and satire, including plenty of improvisation. The format also lent itself to political satire, although it was heavily censored on the spot.41 The competition was organized by
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leagues, with early matches leading to playoffs, culminating in the annual championship round.42 Teams were led by a captain, with each member specializing in tasks that best matched their talents.43 KVN offered a microcosm of the hierarchical, militaristic, and sports-like organization of the socialist public sphere, led by male heroes. This was not so much because women could not be leaders but because they were not thought of as funny or witty. As Kristin Roth-Ey sums it up, “KVN delivered a neat and useful package by design: ‘the thinking person on the screen' (a male figure marked universal) as a model for Soviet viewers.”44
The program inspired regional competitions among KVN teams in factories, schools, agricultural collectives, the armed forces, and many other groups. Thus, it significantly fostered youth mobilization and mass recreation. Some KVN stars became celebrities. The program was discontinued in 1972 but was resurrected during glasnost and is still broadcast in Russia.
KVN's gendered hierarchy was also mirrored in the two-tier production structure: members of the creative team, whose imaginative capacity was highly valued, all shared
(p. 622) the roles of writer, director, and editor. They spent much of their time together in a group, drinking and discussing their work, in self-isolation from the “below the line” crews.45 At the same time, when it came to viewer mobilization, the show was more inclusive and democratic than the earlier VVV. From about 1968, Central Television's game shows systematically reached out to nonelite participants, mostly working-class men and women, who engaged in competitions that showcased idealized roles in Soviet life such as factory worker, housewife, consumer, or defender of the Fatherland. The competition was no longer live after 1968, which made it more controllable; but it involved more active viewer participation and used viewer votes in addition to professional juries.46 Nevertheless, as more and more cities and institutions got involved, the competition got increasingly intense and professionalized. Its legacy of amateur theater gave way to the structure of a sporting event. Teams were trained to win,47 past captains were rehired for money, comedy writers were paid, and improvisation was replaced by a scripted format.48 The program also began to hand out prizes to winners. KVN's identity as an amateur game show everyone can enter for fun was eroded as it began to resemble capitalist game shows. This is likely to have made authorities cancel KVN in 1972. Another probable reason was its satirical aim at political issues such as bureaucracy and the quality of Soviet products.49 It was also well known that Sergei Lapin, chairman of the State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting (until his retirement in 1985) and member of the Central Committee, hated the show because it had a large number of Jewish players.
KVN ultimately fell victim to the contradictory imperatives that underscored socialist competition. Christine Evans writes that Soviet Central Television's staff in the 1960s was tasked with engineering a renewed Soviet personhood, to be developed through more playful, interactive, and entertaining forms of mass culture. While play and competition became key vehicles of this mass culture, they were also in conflict with the overarching top-down, didactic remit of Soviet TV.50 Even the most trivial televised competitions had
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to have demonstrably higher stakes than “fun” or play. Rather than a profit motive for television companies, which fuels contemporary reality competition programs, socialist TV contests were to prove the strength of the entire system by showing off socialist societies' only competitive resources: people, their bodies, and their talents.
The metaphor and structure of sports helped reconcile two contradictory principles of socialism within these competitive programs: hard work and creative talent. While sports exalted natural talent, they also required discipline and dedication. Hard work was the backbone of early communism, where factory brigades and agricultural collectives engaged in Stakhanovist competition for higher production levels, to prove the viability of the collectivist system. This kind of competition was based on the principle of equal opportunity, to offset the class distinctions that plagued the capitalist system. However, this heroic enthusiasm had lost its momentum by the time television became a mass medium. Nationalism prevailed over socialist internationalism; and consumerism and lifestyle became the new platforms for international contest.
(p. 623) As an ideal, however, Stakhanovist heroism remained present in competitive structures that recalled sports' reliance on achievement that can be numerically measured and compared. A 1965 Hungarian program called Csak egy kicsit jobban (Just a Little Bit Better) covered a competition among factories for the number and quality of their innovations. Another program from the same year, Versengő városok (Competing Towns), set towns in competition. The 1966 show Forog az idegen (Spinning the Tourist) staged a contest about tourism among nine regions. The 1970s Fekete fehér, igen, nem (Black and White, Yes and No) was a fifteen-month, twenty-two-part competition in primetime among Budapest's districts. The winner, District XI, was awarded a fully equipped preschool. As a commentator enthused after the final, “Along the way, the noble goal ceased to be the 5-million-forint preschool; that became only a symbolic prize compared to the mass collaboration of historic significance.”51
With the genre, socialist TV found a balance between educational content and entertaining format. While socialist television programs participated in the circulation of European and American game show formats, for the most part they adapted these formats to the stricter moral codes of socialist citizen training. Of course, the balance between entertainment and education was precarious to begin with. After all, the genre has been one of the “ghosts” of public service broadcasting even in Western Europe, where it was nevertheless no less popular. It was often considered a “bad genre,” “a damning synecdoche for the whole of the medium.”52 It was repeatedly accused of turning knowledge into trivia; its history is blemished by cases of corruption; it pitted participants against one another for financial or other material gain; it created television celebrities; and it thrived on humiliating candidates for viewers' voyeuristic pleasure. In these regards, it built a slippery historical slope toward the flood of reality programming.53
The 1970s-1980s brought about what popular “quiz master” István Vágó, creator and host of numerous quiz and game shows for Hungarian TV, called the golden age of the genre.54 The golden age issued a threat to the equilibrium between the official ideologies of state socialism and the “capitalist” properties of most game show formats. These programs, after all, whipped up competition, fostered a desire for consumer goods, and revolved around individual talents rather than democratic participation. Indeed, when commercial television broke up Western European public broadcasters' monopoly in the 1970s, the ensuing dual-system broadcasting also pushed socialist game shows to become less educational, more commercialized, and even more popular than before.
Nevertheless, while some late socialist quiz and game show formats incorporated entertaining elements and mobilized bottom-up, inclusive, off-the-air competitions, they were aspirational, relentlessly wedded to the idea that TV should feature people who are better, smarter, and more competitive than viewers are. Vágó claims he experienced the shift from the ethos of socialist quiz and game shows to that of global formats most directly in his own persona as host. Under socialism, his inclination was to help contestants, to be their benevolent, if condescending, coach and teacher. By contrast, postsocialist, global formats required that he learn to be the contestants' enemy, rooting against their suc-cess.55
Perhaps it is not entirely coincidental that the arrival of cable and satellite technologies, and the rapid globalization of international media markets under a US-led neoliberal agenda of economic domination, happened exactly at the same time as the disintegration of the Soviet empire. Socialist TV's broadcast monopoly allowed it to position itself as an extension of the family, a national institution within the home. As such, it did manage to foster a shared ethos and gave viewers a sense of belonging even if this sense was at least partially built on the mockery of aggressively educational programs and the increasing awareness of the system's failure to deliver on its lofty goals.
Given this context, postsocialist nostalgia is far more complicated than a near-visceral yearning for the false sense of safety derived from the memory of socialism, fetishistically attached to public personas or consumer products of the past. Instead, nostalgia indicates the disruption of a sense of intimate sociality caused by the collapse of a centralized system of governance and the widespread impact of globalization. This disruption of com-munality has been by definition national at its core. Rather than an ideological framework that is aligned with and lends an institutional and affective structure to the everyday management of socialism's utopian trajectory, nationalism in postsocialist countries has increasingly functioned as a self-protective security blanket against the threat of perpetual expansion that propels neoliberal market logics. Unlike socialist ideology, which constantly revealed its own shortcomings and had to be periodically adjusted to sustain some semblance of credibility, the logic of neoliberal markets, along with the mantra of freedom and democracy, has been experienced as an irresistible, almost biologically driven struggle for individual self-improvement through competition with others, with no positive vision of a collective future.56 Rather than fostering a sense of community and security, market competition generates anxiety and hopelessness. Crisis and depression, which
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have been identified as constitutive economic elements of neoliberalism, rather than exceptional states, align with neoliberalism's signature structures of feeling on an individual level.57
It is not surprising that a large part of postsocialist populations, unmoored from the manageable context of livable socialism and unequipped for individual competition on the global marketplace, have been recruited in the service of nationalistic party politics as well as commercial profits.58 This anxious attachment to nationalism as the last, recognizable resort of collectivity, however, has been evacuated of exactly those values of socialism that television, at its best, conveyed and confirmed: the values of communality, the dignity of work, education, and art.
While the patronizing intention to guide a “gullible population” toward a utopian future undoubtedly prevailed throughout socialist TV's history, this is not a narrative of failure. It is one of experimentation with creating collective value, with socializing individuals to (self-) educate in ways that were community oriented. The genres (p- 625) and programs borne out of this experimentation were often playful and creative, deploying ideological and aesthetic devices that were problematic and disruptive for socialism. The number of boring, propagandistic reality-based programs should not overshadow the bright achievements that punctuate this history and resonate even today.
There is renewed momentum to revisit these experiments now that neoliberalism seems to have run its course. Socialist educational reality programs supplemented, rather than replaced, existing social work and public welfare. They did so in a nonexploitative fashion, not beholden to commercial interests. In their best, most subversive moments, when they minimized dogma in favor of audience involvement and emotional engagement, they remain testimonies not only to the enduring need for the ethos of public broadcasting but also to the enduring potential of alternatives.
Bourdon, Jérôme. “Old and New Ghosts.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 7, no. 3 (2004): 287.
Boyer, Dominic, and Alexei Yurchak. “Postsocialist Studies, Cultures of Parody and American Stiob.” Anthropology News (November 2008): 9-10.
Dankovics, Noémi Dóra.“Játékmesterek és vetélkedó'műsorok a magyar televíziózás történetében.” PhD diss., Budapest College of Communication and Business, 2012.
Dunavölgyi, Péter. “A magyar televíziózás története.” http://dunavolgyipeter.hu.
Evans, Christine. Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.
Evans, Christine. “The ‘Soviet Way of Life' as Way of Feeling: Emotion and Influence on Soviet Central Television in the Brezhnev Era.” Cahiers du Monde Russe 56, nos. 2-3 (Spring 2015): 543-569.
Gumbert, Heather. Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014.
Imre, Aniko. TV Socialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
Jovánovics, Miklós. “Pro and Contra Television.” Népszabadság (September 27), 1970.
Mihelj, Sabina. “The Politics of Privatization: Television Entertainment and the Yugoslav Sixties.” In The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World, edited by Anne Gorsuch and Diane Koenker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 251-267.
Mihelj, Sabina, and Simon Huxtable. From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Pécsi, Ferenc. “Television's Broadcasting Policy.” Report for the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP)'s Agitation and Propaganda Department, from 08.10.1969, MSZMP APO http://288f.22/1969/19.öe.Ag.350, Hungarian National Manuscript Archive.
Polyak, Gábor, and Urbán Agnes. “Az elhalkitas eszkozei: Politikai beavatkozasok a medi-apiac es a nyilvanossag mukodesebe” (“The Tools of Silencing: Political Interference in the Operation of the Media Market and Civil Society”). Mediakutato 16 (2016): 109-123.
Roth-Ey, Kristin. Moscow Prime Time, How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011.
Splichal, Slavko. “Imitative Revolutions: Changes in the Media and Journalism in EastCentral Europe.” Javnost-The Public 8, no. 4 (2001): 31-58.
Stetka, Václav. “From Multinationals to Business Tycoons: Media Ownership and Journalistic Autonomy in Central and Eastern Europe.” The International Journal of Press/Politics 17, no. 4 (2012): 433-456.
Szecskő, Tamás. “Szórakoztatás - Műsorpolitika” (“Entertainment - Programming Policy”). Rádió és TV Szemle 71, no. 3 (1971): 9.
Vajk, Vera. “Fekete fehér, igen, nem.” Népszava, February 17, 1970.
(1.) See, for instance, Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, eds., Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, eds., Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010); Heather Gumbert, Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014); Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics and Everyday Life after Socialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Shana Penn and Jill Massino, eds., Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist East and Central Europe (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).
(2.) See, for instance, J. Assman and J. Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 125-133; D. Boyer, “Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany,” Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006): 361-381; S. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001); A. Imre, “Why Should We Study Socialist Commercials,” VIEW—Journal of European Television History and Culture 2, no. 3 (2013): 65-76; K. Khinkulova, “Hello, Lenin? Nostalgia on Post-soviet Television in Russia and Ukraine,” VIEW—Journal of European Television History and Culture 1, no. 2 (2012): 94-104; S. Mihelj, “The Persistence of the Past: Memory, Generational Cohorts and the ‘Iron Curtain,' ” Contemporary European History 23, no. 3 (2014): 447-468; M. Nadkarni and O. Shevchenko, “The Politics of Nostalgia: A Case for Comparative Analysis of PostSocialist Practices,” Ab Imperio 2 (2004): 487-519; I. Reifova, “Rerunning and ‘Re-watching' Socialist TV Drama Serials: Post-Socialist Czech Television Audiences between Commodification and Reclaiming the Past,” Critical Studies in Television 4, no. 2 (2009): 5357; I. Reifova, K. Gillárová, and R. Hladík, “The Way We Applauded: How Popular Culture Stimulates Collective Memory of the Socialist Past in Czechoslovakia: The Case Study of the Television Serial Vyprávej and Its Viewers,” in Popular Television in Eastern Europe during and since Socialism, eds. A. Imre, T. Havens, and K. Lustyik (London: Routledge, 2012), 199-221; M. Todorova and Z. Gille (eds.), Post-communist Nostalgia (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010).
(3.) See, for instance, Gábor Polyak and Urbán Agnes, “Az elhalkitas eszkozei: Politikai beavatkozasok a mediapiac es a nyilvanossag mukodesebe” (“The Tools of Silencing: Political Interference in the Operation of the Media Market and Civil Society”), Mediakutato 16 (2016): 109-123.
(4.) Slavko Splichal, “Imitative Revolutions: Changes in the Media and Journalism in EastCentral Europe,” Javnost-The Public 8, no. 4 (2001): 31-58.
(5.) Stetka, Václav, “From Multinationals to Business Tycoons: Media Ownership and Journalistic Autonomy in Central and Eastern Europe,” The International Journal of Press/Poli-tics 17.4 (2012): 433-456.
(6.) Stetka, “From Multinationals to Business Tycoons,” 441-442.
(7.) See, for instance, Aniko Imre, TV Socialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 12-19.
(8.) For more on socialist educational programs, see Imre, TV Socialism.
(9.) Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 179.
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(10.) Sabina Mihelj, “The Politics of Privatization: Television Entertainment and the Yugoslav Sixties.” In The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World, eds. Anne Gorsuch and Diane Koenker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 251-267.
(11.) Sabina Mihelj and Simon Huxtable, From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 245-246.
(12.) Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time.
(13.) Heather Gumbert, Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 2.
(14.) See the report “Television's Broadcasting Policy” by Pécsi Ferenc, the vice president of Hungarian Television, report for the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP)'s Agitation and Propaganda Department, from 08.10.1969, MSZMP APO 288f.
22/1969/19.öe. Ag.350, Hungarian National Manuscript Archive.
(15.) Miklós Jovánovics, “Pro and Contra Television,” Népszabadság, September 27, 1970.
(16.) Tamás Szecskő, “Szórakoztatás - Műsorpolitika” (“Entertainment - Programming Policy”), Rádió és TV Szemle 71, no. 3 (1971): 9.
(17.) See Dominic Boyer and Alexei Yurchak, “Postsocialist Studies, Cultures of Parody and American Stiob,” Anthropology News, November (2008): 9-10.
(18.) Elemér Hankiss, “Jegyzetek az amerikai és a magyar TV hatásmechanizmusáról. A cselekvő és merengő tévé,” Filmvilág 8 (1982): 54-57.
(19.) Christine Evans, “The ‘Soviet Way of Life' as Way of Feeling: Emotion and Influence on Soviet Central Television in the Brezhnev Era,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 56, nos. 2-3 (Spring 2015): 543-569.
(20.) Ibid.
(21.) Ibid.
(22.) Heather Gumbert, Envisioning Socialism, 149.
(23.) Ibid., 150.
(24.) Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 207.
(25.) The most common examples of the program types that traveled in Europe, freely transcending the Iron Curtain, were quiz and game shows. See Imre, TV Socialism.
(26.) Mihelj and Huxtable, From Media Systems to Media Cultures.
(27.) Dunavölgyi, “1972.”
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(28.) Gumbert, Envisioning Socialism, 146.
(29.) Ibid., 145.
(30.) Ibid., 145-146.
(31.) Anonymous article about Lunch Break in Film Színház Muzsika 6 (1971). See Dunavölgyi, “1971.”
(32.) The Radio and TV Guide introduced the new program this way: “TV receives countless letters in which viewers ask for advice to solve various problems. Of course Television's employees aren't able to respond to every request; but they try to help with those that have broader public implications and concern the common good. This new program deals with these common issues raised by viewer letters. It also emphasizes responsibility to one another.” See Dunavölgyi, “1971.” My translation.
(33.) Noémi Dóra Dankovics, “Játékmesterek és vetélkedó'műsorok a magyar televíziózás történetében” (“Quiz Show Hosts and Game Shows in the History of Hungarian Television”) (PhD diss., Budapest College of Communication and Business, 2012).
(34.) On the transformation of quiz and game shows during socialism, see Imre, TV Socialism.
(35.) Noémi Dóra Dankovics, “Játékmesterek és vetélkedó'műsorok a magyar televíziózás történetében.”
(36.) Christine Evans, Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).
(37.) Ibid.
(38.) Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 246.
(39.) Evans, Between Truth and Time.
(40.) Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 248.
(41.) Ibid., 253.
(42.) Evans, Between Truth and Time.
(43.) Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 257.
(44.) Ibid., 259.
(45.) Evans, Between Truth and Time.
(46.) Ibid.
(47.) Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time, 260.
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(48.) Evans, Between Truth and Time.
(49.) Ibid.
(50.) Evans, “Song of the Year and Soviet Mass Culture.”
(51.) Vera Vajk, “Fekete fehér, igen, nem,” Népszava, February 17, 1970.
(52.) Jérôme Bourdon, “Old and New Ghosts,” European Journal of Cultural Studies (2004): 287.
(53.) Ibid.
(54.) István Vágó, interview by Anikó Imre, December 18, 2013.
(55.) Ibid.
(56.) John Clarke, “After Neoliberalism? Markets, States and the Reinvention of Public Welfare” Cultural Studies 24, no. 3 (2010): 375-394.
(57.) See, for instance, Clarke, “After Neoliberalism?”; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Random House, 2007); Julie Wilson, Neoliberalism (New York: Routledge, 2018).
(58.) Dominic Boyer likens postsocialist nostalgia to Bakhtin's heteroglossia to illustrate its complexity. See Dominic Boyer, “From Algos to Autonomos: Nostalgic Eastern Europe as Postimperial Mania,” in Post-Communist Nostalgia, eds. Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 19. See also Zala Volcic and Mark Andrejevic, “Commercial Nationalism on Balkan Reality TV,” in The Politics of Reality Television: Global Perspectives, eds. Kraidy Marwan and Katherine Senders (London: Routledge, 2010), 113-126.
Anikó Imre
Anikó Imre, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
Futures Remembered: Kosmonauts, the GDR, and the Retrospective Impulse a
Nick Hodgin
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Jul 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.28
This article seeks to understand and speculate on the significance of certain visual features of the communist past after communism. Focusing in particular on East Germany, it considers the interplay of futures remembered and pasts experienced and the relevance of that interaction to our understanding of the GDR. It looks at the enduring appeal of cosmic culture and especially the figure of the cosmonaut as referenced across a range of media. Surveying its representation in both historical and contemporary culture, it traces the evolution of the cosmonaut as symbol, which was originally representative of socialist achievement and progressive humanism, and examines the ways in which it has come to be represented in visual and popular culture at a time when “the pendulums of the public mindset and mentality,” as Zygmunt Bauman has argued, have performed “a U-turn: from investing public hopes of improvement in the uncertain and ever too obviously un-trustworthy future, to re-investing them in the vaguely remembered past, valued for its assumed stability and so trustworthiness.”
Keywords: East Germany, GDR, cosmonaut, cosmic culture, utopia, visual culture, speculative history, propaganda
Vladimir Putin is reported to have voiced his concern about the absence of references to cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and Sputnik in related books.1 Putin's desire to see restored the triumphs realized under his political forebears is, of course, part of a political agenda rather than a sincere desire for truths to be told or for a more even view of history. His presidency has, after all, provided cover for those writing others out of history.2 The reasons are different, but Putin's concerns echo those heard elsewhere in the former Eastern Bloc. The temptation to erase the past is borne out by surveys in Germany: these reveal that few West Germans feel there was much in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) about which the East Germans are entitled to feel proud. Their eastern compatriots, however, are seldom of the same opinion. Tears may not have been shed for all of the GDR statues, buildings, and murals that have been demolished or destroyed or relocated since 1989, but their disappearance has frequently been seen as a means of erasing all
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aspects of the GDR, while some see remaining traces as evidence of glorification of the communist dictatorship.3 This disappearing action is central to the memory debates that have ebbed and flowed since 1989 when the preeminent signifier of the state, the Berlin Wall, was removed. The clearing away of that particular structure, which, depending on the side from which it was viewed, counted as either a monotone monolith of oppression or a vibrant tableau, a vital sign of the West's freedom of expression, had few detractors.
The drive to rub out many other vestiges of the East German state have met with similar indignation, a recent example of which is concentrated around the gradual disappearance of East German artworks from prestigious galleries, such as the Albertinum in Dresden. According to Paul Kaiser, the Dresden-based art historian who has criticized their removal, these works and their cultural significance are incompatible with the management's desire to establish the museum as a brand. Were tourists to stroll through (p. 630) rooms which previously housed East German art, they might be forgiven, Kaiser has suggested, for wondering whether the GDR had existed at all.4 The same question might also have been asked at the 2009 exhibition “60 Jahre, 60 Werke” (60 Years, 60 Works) at Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau, a retrospective of German art in which not one East German artist was represented. At other times it has not been the GDR's existence that has been called into doubt, but the manner of its existence. In Weimar the decision in 1999 to exhibit National Socialist art alongside East German art—a pairing of the GDR and the Third Reich that was by no means uncommon—caused a furor and was widely criticized by artists and commentators across the country.5 Here they were together, the Nazis and the communists, each the other's evil twin.
The response to Kaiser's article in the regional newspaper provoked responses that echoed those heard in other disputes. The East/West positioning is, of course, as facile as it is irresistible and, perceiving the indifference of Western colonialism, readers of Kaiser's article duly decried Western elitism; but it was not just elite Westerners who dismissed East German artists. A decade before, an artist who had grown up in and subsequently escaped the GDR had also criticized erstwhile colleagues.
“Arschlöcher” (arseholes) was Georg Baselitz's curt description of those he considered “state artists.” That the paintings by GDR artists previously displayed in Dresden had made way for lesser known GDR artists was barely acknowledged in the debate. That detail hardly mattered, for the point with this debate as with so many others is that, three decades since the Berlin Wall was removed, many East Germans feel that they have little agency in representing their history and can only rescue the heritage markers with immense effort. The fastidious removal of Socialism's markers is driven by an impulse that seeks to rid the landscape—the psychological as well as the physical—of the GDR, and it is arguably determined not by the need to eliminate the vainglorious reminders of a dictatorship but by a desire to confirm capitalism's unassailable dominance. Frederic Jameson, discerning a more insidious scheme, sees it thus:
it is not only the invincible universality of capitalism which is at issue: tirelessly undoing all the social gains made since the inception of the socialist and communist movements, repealing all welfare measures, the safety net, the right to union
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ization, industrial and ecological regulatory laws, offering to privatize pensions and indeed to dismantle whatever stands in the way of the free market all over the world. What is crippling is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only that this tendency is irreversible, but that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socioeconomic system is conceivable, let alone practically available.6
Jameson's observations can be easily countered: the standard response is to underline the innumerable horrors and injustices that those movements ushered in, a reaction Alain Ba-diou acknowledges when he says that “An entire century of experiences both epic in scope and appalling was required to understand that certain phrases produced by this short-circuiting between the real and the Idea were misconceived, phrases such as ‘communist party' or ‘communist state.'”7
(p. 631) This chapter is not concerned with reconnecting the real and the Idea, which has so preoccupied Badiou, but it does seek to understand and speculate on the significance of certain visual features of the communist past after communism. I consider the interplay of futures remembered and pasts experienced and the relevance of that interaction to our understanding of the GDR. In doing so, I look in particular at the enduring appeal of cosmic culture, one that was originally rooted in visions of utopian potential and progressive humanism, and examine the ways in which it was and has come to be represented in visual and popular culture at a time when “the pendulums of the public mindset and mentality,” as Zygmunt Bauman has argued, have performed “a U-turn: from investing public hopes of improvement in the uncertain and ever too obviously un-trustworthy future, to re-investing them in the vaguely remembered past, valued for its assumed stability and so trustworthiness.”8
What are the still-existing signifiers of the really existing socialist state? For the most part they are the solid, hard-to-shift features. Massive prefabricated housing estates (called Plattenbauten in German).9 Abandoned premises. Screwed onto walls here and there the antifascist placards that still commemorate sites of heroic communist resistance. And statues, some easy to overlook, some not: the vast Karl Marx head in Chemnitz designed by Lew Kerbel. Kerbel's other monumental bronze sculpture of a communist martyr in Berlin: Ernst Thälmann, jaw jutting, fist clenched, its potency undone by local kids who tag the face and flip skateboards from its steps. Across the city, Yakov Belopolsky's war memorial watched over by an immense Red Army soldier, babe in arm, sword in hand. Though established as statements of intent (architecture: the state provides; placards: history teaches; statues: figures to inspire and remind), these features and totems became part of the landscape, ubiquitous markers of a banal socialism. Aside from some ironic entertainment (build your own cardboard Plattenbauten, Trabant top trump card games, GDR propaganda posters lazily reworked by satirists in order to discredit contemporary political figures through visual association with discredited political systems), few
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of these signs and constructions have been imitated in the years since the state's disappearance. There is, however, one aspect of the socialist past that seems to have endured. Enter the cosmonaut.
In 1976, the sculptor Fritz Cremer instigated a series of paintings to be exhibited in East Berlin's newly built Palace of the Republic (torn down amid much acrimony in 2008) under the slogan, “Are Communists Allowed to Dream?” The sixteen paintings that were eventually grouped together, and which were on display until 1990, were varied; while some offered confirmation of the state's clear-eyed vision (Walter Womacka's “When Communists Dream” is an example), others offered more ambiguous images, notably Bernhard Heisig with “Icarus,” whose head hangs low in anticipation of pitching downward.10 The pessimism would be more pronounced, the cynicism more charged in (p- 632) his “The Dying Icarus” two years later. But 1978 would prove to be a memorable year for many East Germans for quite different reasons. This was not a year that marked another celebration of flaccid state achievement or another anniversary offering a spurious connection to past events but one in which the state was finally able to point to a dream realized, to proclaim a triumph that really meant something to its citizens: Sigmund Jähn's departure beyond the Earth's orbit and entry into the history books (some at least). Here was a figure not falling from the skies but moving out beyond them. Jähn's mission was naturally used to reaffirm communism's value. Gemeinsam im Kosmos (Together in the Cosmos), a book accompanying the photo exhibition of the mission, employed characteristically tedious rhetoric alongside some photos of mission ephemera to remind citizens that cosmonaut Jähn was a “class-conscious, socialist officer, who grew up in our republic and was shaped by it.”11 A mission undertaken with Soviet colleagues as part of the Interkosmos program, it was symbolic, too, of the GDR's relationship with the USSR. This partnership was even playfully acted out in the “wedding” of the cosmonauts' mascots, Masha and the Sandmännchen, puppets familiar to children in the Soviet Union and East Germany, respectively. This space shuttle ceremony, presided over by Jähn and broadcast to viewers back on Earth, was revealing of a light-heartedness not commonly associated with such major propaganda opportunities. Jähn's popularity was of a kind that the ruling Socialist Unity Party struggled to manage. His value to the state was enormous, but harnessing his appeal exclusively to any political program was beyond functionaries' power. The cosmonaut was naturally vital to restoring some confidence in the GDR's potential; that the East German was the first German in space signaled a rare triumph over the Federal Republic, and little time was lost in promoting this achievement in image and text. As with Gagarin, whose historical exploit had been feted by amateur and professional artists (notably Walter Womacka's stained-glass windows on the Humboldt), his face and the Interkosmos logo soon adorned placards, magazines, medals, postage stamps, and badges.12 One Jähn, went the joke, was a new measure of distance: it measured the distance between one poster of the cosmonaut and the next.13 The jokes were less at the expense of the former pilot than they were at the state's exploitation of his feat; the enthusiasm was unbridled and led to a renewed interest in science fiction and space travel that had subsided in the wake of Gagarin's death a decade before.
Cosmic enthusiasm in the Soviet Union and across other communist states had been pronounced in the late 1950s and in the 1960s. Two reasons explain this interest in particular. The first concerns its firsts. As Asif Siddiqi points out, the Soviet space program was the first to launch a satellite successfully, to send a probe to the Moon, to send an animal, and then a man into space; later, the first woman, the first spacewalk, the first multimanned mission.14 The second is its contextual significance: the successes of the program were all the more dramatic and inspiring given the often-pitiful performance of other industries and a lackluster material culture. At a terrestrial level, the level where it mattered, promises had been too often broken, expectations too often exhausted, and the currency of hope badly devalued. It had been true of Gagarin's time and it was true later when Jähn exceeded the hopes and quotidian challenges of his compatriots. The stasis of the East German economy and the flat lining of belief in real material (p- 633) improvement ran counter to the apparent successes and implied possibilities at an extraterrestrial level.
Many citizens across Eastern European states remained skeptical toward those who were presented as exemplars, those quota-busting heroes of industry, the muscular men and redoubtable women celebrated on canvas and in stone and bronze. Such skepticism was understandable given that the message these Socialist Realist avatars often communicated was, quite simply, that citizens should work harder and believe more. The Socialist Realist doctrine was, as Boris Groys notes, “oriented toward what had not yet come into being but what it saw should be created and was destined to become a part of the Communist future.”15 The aesthetic-political project to which these forms of artistic representation adhered often presented strength in ideology and physique as a guaranteed formula for success. Cosmonauts were likewise represented heroically and as figures of inspiration, but there was a difference. They were intended to inspire confidence in the systems that produced them, but citizens were not expected to understand their record-breaking feats as a challenge to work harder and longer in foundries, mines, and on building projects, even if their ordinariness was later underlined. Their supraterrestrial actions transcended the hewing, clawing, and cleaving on Earth and gestured toward the possibilities of imagination as something more than flights of fantasy. Inscribed in the image of the cosmonaut was the possibility of actual utopia, one that was more alluring perhaps than were the positive depictions of a nearly achieved utopia in a really existing socialism. Cosmonauts knew to read their scripts—all that extolling of Marxism-Leninism and of superior societies. And people knew to ignore them. Gagarin's cheerful demeanor, his “apolitically sunny smile,” had endeared him to people not just in the Soviet Union but around the world—his ride around London in an open-topped Rolls Royce was in a sense as unlikely as had been his space flight.16 Eighteen years later Sigmund Jähn's seven days in space would make the East German a similarly venerated folk hero. Like Gagarin, Jähn's popularity can be attributed both to his achievements and his personality. In contrast to the somber demeanor that seemed to typify the Party, of which Erich Honecker, smiling tightly on official portraits, was the stern patriarch, the avuncular Jähn proved a figure popular with all ages.
Jähn's mission was a much-needed public relations boost for the East German state but the rhetoric “the first German in space—a citizen of the German Democratic Republic” did not sustain his accomplishment in the West, where it was allowed to dim and was finally eclipsed by that of the West German astronaut Ulf Merbold, erroneously remembered, even documented, by many as the first German in space (in 1983). It was only after the success of Wolfgang Becker's film, Good Bye, Lenin! (2001), in which a Jähn-alike is recruited as part of the protagonist's fantasy ending for the GDR, that the cosmonaut's reputation was revisited. In the film, the protagonist's restorative impulse is guided by a sleight of hand: to protect his ailing mother from the shock of unification, he hastily reassembles the mise-en-scène of a recently vanished state in order to introduce an authentic historical agent (Jähn) whose clear conscience and unimpeachable judgment can supervise the GDR to a dignified end. Only the cosmonaut, it seems, possesses the vision to see things as they are, or, rather, how they could have been.
(p. 634) Becker's film coincided and contributed to the fascination with East German material culture and Ostalgie, nostalgia for aspects of the East German state, which was by no means limited to those who had grown up in the state. The nostalgic turn is less a question of experiential memory, than of a preferred memory, targeting as it does other pasts and the pasts of others. Bauman acknowledges this, noting the “multiplicity of interpretations to which every selection of past events is amenable” and that these are “the advantages of the past when attracting people seeking defensible trench lines for their faith.”17 Nostalgia naturally has its critics who regard the firm valorization of the past inexcusable precisely because of the shaky foundation on which it is so often based (to say nothing of the resistance to progress that typically accompanies nostalgic rhetoric—on the left as well as on the right). Such suspicion is, after all, often well founded: disagreeable features are elided, uncomfortable historical truths are relegated to footnotes if they are acknowledged at all; malefactors whose activities may not fit the script's rewrite disappear, details are reworked. These have been issues in German post-1989 discourse, where nostalgia for the East German past has been criticized as sentimental retrospection, a myopic perspective considered indefensible in those who grew up in the GDR, and highly problematic in those born after the state had ceased to exist. Ostalgie was the subject of much media and scholarly attention in the late nineties and into the new millennium, and the interest in the East German yesteryear, which was often directed at authentic artifacts, whether consumer goods found or relaunched, was partly understandable given that the GDR state was becoming ever more distant. The GDR thus faded in and out of vision. Items were recycled, reconstituted, unbound from their ideological moorings, and repurposed, serving as personal aide-memoires or as tokens of curiosity. Ostalgie meant different things to different people: consumer goods functioned for some as a means of reasserting an East German heritage, of which people might feel proud, or they became exotic mementoes of a culture that had disappeared—furniture and clothing previously condemned as unstylish now became chic and desirable. Much of its material and visual culture disappeared and reappeared—often in unexpected places. Today, visitors to California might spend a few hours in the Wende Museum, Culver City, amid the thousands of artifacts and visual records of East German life, where “the residue of a lost world” apparently “become[s] a source of new insight that moves us all to a higher level of consciousness.”18 Further up the coast, in Seattle, visitors might also take in Emil Venkov's five-meter-tall Statue of Lenin striding past Taco del Mar, a long way from its original location in Poprad, Czechoslovakia.
The celebration of (certain) aspects of the socialist past was also partly motivated by the East Germans' disappointments and frustrations following unification and by a desire to challenge the triumphalist histories, which framed the GDR according to its repressive features. Though frequently characterized as a counterprogressive impulse, a scurrying retreat from present ills and chronotopic anxieties, the nostalgic turn might also, however, constitute a search for inspiration in the past, rather than a desire to rebuild lost orders and revive past customs, practices, and ideas, even if the past clearly appeals to some people for precisely those reasons. Alastair Bonnett argues that in evoking “the possibility of meaningful events, relationships, or things,” nostalgia may constitute (p- 635) a “disruptive power” that “calls us back to meaning.”19 That potential is echoed by Lina Ko-honen, who says of her research into photographic representations of cosmonauts and the Russian cosmodrome that she seeks to “trace the extinct meanings invested in these photographs and make them visible again.”20 This investment in past meaning characterizes, too, the time travels of others, who are guided not just by a curiosity for periods and places lost (or losing) to time but “for a future that went missing in the past.”21
The alternative ending for the state that is imagined in Becker's film, just one of the many speculative histories of the GDR and its ending or continuation, taps into a widespread subjunctive fascination with what might have been. If only! What if? These are not simply counterfactual musings of a kind popular with journalists and writers but revealing of a tendency to reflect on past potential and speculate on achievements forestalled, a retrospection that is either driven by a desire to recoup some meaning from the past, as Bonnett suggests, or by an unconscious awareness of the past's potential, a residual sense that the past had something to offer that the present has failed to deliver. Interest in the past is not necessarily regressive, as Simon Reynolds notes: “When the past sounds more like the future than the present does, revival becomes progressive.”22 In this sense, then, Ostalgie is more than a symptom of a pervasive retro fetishism that happens to have ze-roed-in on the cultures of a state that no longer exists, but motivated by disillusionment with capitalism and either—to accelerate Beradi's prediction—the rapid “cancellation of the future” or an actual fear of the future.23 Bauman repositions the focus explored in David Lowenthal's seminal text and argues that it is the future as well as the past of Lowenthal's title that is a “foreign country” and one to which ever fewer people are drawn: “The number of people hurrying to travel there in the hope of finding the future full of more pleasurable experiences than successive lived-through presents have been, seems to be falling.” The reason? “These days we tend to fear the future, having lost trust in our collective ability to mitigate its excesses, to render it less frightful and repellent.”24
What are the still-existing signifiers of the ideally existing socialist state? The East Germans' space missions and those of their Soviet counterparts found expression across a range of media. Murals depicting the state's many professions often featured a cosmonaut in between scientist, farmer, and construction worker (Figure 27.1). This laborer and spaceman juxtaposition is worth noting, for it represents the state's determination to find itself in the past and project itself into the future. Like so much GDR art, the murals were emblems of hope in a prosaic landscape; and many are to be found in cities and in towns in eastern Germany still. In Potsdam a series of panels encompassing the unlovely Datenverarbeitungszentrum building (data processing center) celebrates Soviet technology in mosaic form: the tesserae, designed by Fritz Eisel, combine to offer (p- 636) images of scientists, satellite dishes, rockets blasting, and, most eye-catching, a cosmonaut floating outside his capsule.25 Elsewhere in Berlin, Walter Womacka's Man Overcoming Time and Space, a copper bas-relief of a cosmonaut guiding a man and woman, between a star and a planet, stretches across the Haus des Reisens, originally the flagship address of the GDR's travel agency. The irony of images that suggested extraplanetary travel on a building whose travel agencies could offer only limited destinations will not have escaped some citizens. Architectural design across East Berlin bears witness still to the GDR futuristic modernism that owed much to space-age imagination: between the vast residential blocks on the city's showcase street, Karl Marx Allee, the tilted cube of Kino Kosmos, by architects Josef Kaiser and Herbert Aust; likewise their rectangular Kino International with its raised glass front suspended above the street. Piercing the sky above them all, and seen across the city, is Berlin's most iconic landmark, the TV tower, whose spherical restaurant was intended as an homage to the Sputnik's iconic shape. So much future— and all of it past.
And yet there seems to be a persistent fascination with that lost future. In addition to the paintings, murals, and friezes that still adorn walls dotted around towns of the former GDR, and which have their own Pinterest-ed communities (and, wider afield, urban explorers' fascination of Soviet-era ruins, especially those of decommissioned or abandoned high-tech complexes, military bases, and space shuttle centers), curios of the (p- 637) period's fashion for space travel regularly pop up on ebay. The Interkosmos logo with its sweeping star is a motif that adorns original badges, porcelain plates, and cloth patches, and it can be ordered to decorate fridge magnets, T-shirts, and baseball caps. But it is the cosmonaut that appears to have inspired most. The use of kosmonaut (less frequently the Anglicized cosmonaut) is neither geographically concentrated nor culturally determined, and not all of the groups or individuals who have chosen to redeploy the figure have a connection to the USSR or the GDR.26 In Germany the word lends itself to bands, bars, nightclubs, an advertising and marketing agency, a film production company, and even a festival. An urban explorer who reconnoiters and photographs abandoned premises and buildings in and around Berlin goes by the name digitalcosmonaut. One of the most popular street art attractions in Berlin is to be found in Kreuzberg, a western district that once bordered the east. Spread across the side of a building on Mariannenstrasse is Victor Ash's huge stencil-like graffito, Astronaut/Cosmonaut, the image of a suited spaceman seemingly floating above the street, its dual name a reminder that space flight was undertaken by both East and West (Figure 27.2). Often the word, whether singular or plural, is presented in fonts that mimic the graphic design culture and especially the constructivist typeface of the Soviet Union—bold lettering, primary colors, white on red. Typically, it involves an approximated Cyrillic typesetting, slanting some letters and inverting others. The chronological confusion suggested by the visual presentation of the name (the era of the cosmonaut is not the era of constructivist design) is by now quite commonplace and
revealing of a highly impressionistic view of communism that tends to know little of the details and instead jumbles aspects of Soviet-era visual culture, blurring signs, emblems, and motifs from across different national cultures regardless of historical order, political accuracy, or national specificity. For some, though, the word does have meaning. Asked why they had chosen the name for their art production company, one of the founding members conceded that “The name Kosmonaut has for us a nostalgic connotation we found appealing,” adding that, like cosmonauts, their artists were “pioneers who develop new ideas about society, looking at things from a different angle. Searching for answers to fundamental questions of life.” The utopian dimension is clear: “We like the idea that artists can be seen as figures of identification, paving the way to new ideas and a better society, like Kosmonauts were in East Germany and Russia.”27 According to one of the musicians in Die Kosmonauten (one of two Leipzig-based bands bearing the name), whose group produces a hybrid sound that channels different genres and traditions, the choice of name was a nod to little-known early sixties US band The Astronauts via banned GDR beat bands, and an acknowledgment of their own fondness and attachment to Soviet-era space exploration, themes celebrated in songs such as “Laika” and “Das Kosmodrom.”28 Their acknowledgment of disparate and incongruent sources resulting in a sound that combines surf music, science fiction sounds, country music, and punk, is evident in the cover of their album. “Go West” features a Russian cosmonaut riding a horse across a wild western landscape of cacti and boulders. “Die Kosmonauten” is emblazoned here not in faux constructivist lettering but in the font familiar to the 80s disco aficionados and is, for all the juxtaposed absurdity of the sleeve's image, more appropriate to the period marking the East Germans' space age fascination and Jahn's popularity. | (p- 638)
Despite Jähn's enduring meaning to East Germans of a certain age, in surveying the ubiquity of the cosmonaut as reference, as sign, one thing becomes apparent: it is a word seldom attached to any historical figure but nonetheless serves as an echo of the past, invoking past triumphs and past futures. It would be reasonable to speculate that the frequent evocation of the cosmonaut can be attributed to its powerful branding potential—a memorable word, the automatic allusion to Soviet innovation and technological advances, and so on.29 Using the figure of the cosmonaut, and redeploying phrases, images, and ideas associated with the Interkosmos program, seems particularly conspicuous across the eastern region of Germany. Various aspects of the GDR culture have over the last three decades been re-evaluated and even celebrated, by individuals and communities, but rarely within an official public sphere. While past objects of present desire are overwhelmingly tangible artifacts, ever rarer items that connect people to places and times, the fascination with the cosmonaut is largely a fascination with the intangible. Where Soviet-era images of the cosmonaut showed the person in the suit, heads clearly visible in the helmets, pictorial references to the figure after communism invariably anonymize the person. The helmet is either dark or reflecting lunar or solar glare. In contrast to those ostensibly apolitical mementoes (banal quotidian features: raincoats, light bulbs, shopping bags, table lamps), or the actually political of a kind sought by specialists (p- 639) and scholars (military memorabilia, archived films, government files), the cosmonaut is an idea, a concept, a dream; as such, it lends itself to a wide array of uses.
The mock marriage of the Russian doll to the mini cosmonaut, the Sandmännchen, was suggestive. The Sandmännchen was a staple television character in the GDR, one whose arrival signaled children's bedtime and whose implied role was to cast the dust of which dreams are made—then and now: the program is one of the very few to have survived the state. The space romance was not unprecedented: East German films such a Der Schweigende Stern (The Silent Star, Kurt Maetzig, dir., 1960), made almost twenty years before the GDR and the USSR manned a mission together, had imagined—dreamed—a future when people would transcend cultural, ideological, and gender differences with an international cohort of cosmonauts working together, following a cryptic communication from Venus. Maetzig's film featured an international team of cosmonauts from around the world—Europe, Africa, Asia, America, and India. The most expensive East German production ever made, The Silent Star, was even distributed in the West, though the dubbed edit offered a much shorter film because of major revisions. The features that distinguished its socialist origins were cut: gone were the references to Hiroshima and the protagonists' cautionary account that warned of nuclear catastrophe, gone was the film's vision of gender and racial equality.30 Such tampering was not unusual in the Cold War—on both sides. But the doctored narrative was not undone once the Cold War ended. Drawing on Sontag's work on camp, Heiduschke offers an analysis of its inclusion in “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” a television series on the Comedy Channel dedicated to exploring and making fun of bad B-movies, highlighting how the show's comical critique targets not the original film but its revised version, resulting in an evaluation that emphasizes camp and appears oblivious to the film's cultural and historical contexts: the director's reputation, its real technical accomplishments, its international provenance, and its antinuclear message.
The hiving off of certain contexts is not uncommon when it comes to the evaluation of the GDR and especially its material culture.31 Unintended though it may be, that eschewal of the progressive humanism and utopian thrust of Maetzig's film is symptomatic of a broader trend in the “dystopia triumphant” to discount or exultantly declare failed communist utopianism.32 In her analysis of the reception of East German art after 1989, April A. Eis-man notes the “presentist insistence on the GDR's failure and, with it, the loss of the utopia East Germany had promised.”33 We might add to Svetlana Boym's observation that “we are nostalgic for a time when we were not nostalgic” to say that the abiding interest in past futures discussed here is driven not by the desire to restore what was, but what never came to be—to reinvigorate memories of a time when the future did not seem so lost, and when utopian dreams, though near fatally compromised by the widespread and profound failures of communist states, were not yet abandoned.34 Chiming with Boym's focus on a reflective nostalgia, Bonnett notes that “[i]n acknowledging nostalgia we are also acknowledging hope.”35
Looking to the galleries, Eisman argues that “East German art reveals the neoliberal underpinnings of postwar Western art with the latter's emphasis on the individual, the postmodern play of the signifier, and diversity at the cost of challenging inequality.”36 (p- 640) Perhaps that is needed, now more than ever. In contrast to the imagined utopias of before, “questions of wealth and poverty, technological and ecological imbalances, exclusion and otherness, are not denied,” says McGuigan. He explains that “they are merely consigned to their subsidiary places in the conservative imaginary of achieved Utopia.”37 In the final section of this chapter, I should like to turn to the persistence of the GDR art and culture that has emerged in some curious quarters and which offer intriguing overlap with the topics discussed earlier, namely utopian thinking and nostalgia and, which engage, too, with the cosmonaut.
Photography, Barthes once observed, was like a ghost, “the ectoplasm of ‘what-had-been.'”38 The discovery in 2013 of tapes purporting to be lost recordings of compositions, “secret cosmic music of the East German Olympic Program, 1972-1983,” seemed similarly to present an ectoplasmic trace of what had been but, as so often with investigations into encounters between the corporeal and the spectral, research into the music's origins subsequently revealed it to be a sophisticated hoax. Titled Kosmischer Läufer (Cosmic Runner), the project was a knowledgeable conceit: the recordings, the tapes, the artwork all seemed genuine—or plausible at the very least. German history has, after all, offered itself up to accidental archaeology over the years. Attics, archives, and false walls have yielded treasures squirrelled away in times of crisis or concern. Discoveries periodically prompt brief media excitement. Gold concealed during the Nazi era, subversive art stashed behind false walls, cached Stasi documents, even a rediscovered section of the
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Berlin Wall apparently hidden for decades in plain sight. Film scholars are not much different from the crate diggers searching for forgotten vinyl or the urban explorers tiptoeing into abandoned premises to photograph decay. They have unearthed East German films shelved by the regime and searched through the archives to find films never made (because never allowed) or long forgotten or seldom seen. Beyond some kitsch curios, East German music attracted fewer treasure hunters and pop culture archaeologists. Unlike East German film or art, its interest to scholars has been slight, and it has tended to be an acquired taste, savoured primarily by those who had grown up listening to the GDR's home-grown sounds. East Germans' continued affection for certain East German bands after the GDR had ceased to exist was driven partly by the desire to retain something that was unique to the experience of having grown up in the GDR and by a contrari-ness—a rejection of the Western sounds that was analogous to the other acts of rejection and which saw Western status symbols, previously so desirable, declined in favor of the local, the homemade, regardless of the quality or original context. Placing a needle onto old grooves to celebrate the soundtrack of a disappeared world has gone some way to restoring the status of certain songs and, as with so much of the everyday culture of socialist life, has in turn been co-opted by the arbiters of style and those offering to guide tourists into the real GDR and to help chart a way across its past.
(p. 641) Kosmischer Läufer offered something else: this hitherto unknown East German cosmic music, typically catalogued as "Krautrock," was proof that there were certain synergies that connected the future sounds of yesterday in both East and West German states (the real futuristic electronic music made in the GDR has in fact been dismissed by critics as sounding dated even at the time of release).39 Initially presented as a series of cassette tapes, it offered a glimpse (or its aural equivalent) into the underexplored electronic musical composition of which West Germans had been pioneers: Can, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Neu! And so on. The cassette tape format, which Simon Reynolds describes as a "ghost medium [ ... ], an embarrassing relic," seemed to verify the music's period authenticity but perhaps also betrayed the hoax's provenance. The cassette has long been a medium for cheaply recorded sounds, as it lends itself to quick copying and, in recent years, has developed a new cult appeal because of (or despite) its obsolescence. Something Reynolds sees as related to the cult interest in "dead media and outmoded appli-ances."40
The artwork, likewise, seemed authentic: the original tape sleeves resembled a functional catalogue index in keeping with the claim that these were simply compositions for training athletes. It seemed possible: a state that had invested so much in chemical enhancement of its athletes might have also explored the boost potential of music. Music journalists soon caught on. Some investigative work revealed the music by one Martin Zeichnete, to be the (likely) project of an Edinburgh-based musician. While some reviewers noted that the music was too perfect a reproduction of the West German electronica sounds which it apparently paralleled, the revelation of its likely origins did not diminish the project's claims to authenticity.41 A website provided persuasive biographical information, an overview of the East German musician's encounters with the authorities and authentic-looking merchandise. Subsequently, the albums were released by Scottish inde-
Page 13 of 23 pendent, Unknown Capabilities, with new artwork for their sleeves that bore the design influence of East German graphic art seen on posters and postage stamps. The first release featured the GDR flag's hammer and compass set against concentric circles; retro-futuristic motifs—a swirling pattern inside an ovoid—appeared on the second; and on the third, receding lines diminishing to a vanishing point that intersects with a silhouette of the Berlin TV tower against a rising sun. The fourth, a live recording featuring, rather tellingly, Yann Tiersen, well known for his affective nostalgic scores for Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001), opts for a new style that seeks to reinforce the project's multilayered histories. It features a period Barbie-like doll dressed in the kind of future modern but era-specific outfit worn at the GDR's large-scale choreographed rallies. The doll's T-shirt uses the swirling motif patch, which had also been available with a limited number of the first cassettes. Connections to an authentic past (or past future) are reinforced through the visual cultural references, a lifting of footage from various East German sources for the videos made to accompany several tracks. Where “Traum von der goldenen Zukunft” (Dream of a Golden Future) uses images of East German athletes, others pair the tracks with film of those perfectly orchestrated mass jamborees that were intended as proof of socialism's synchronized unity—“Jenseits des Horizons” (p- 642) (Beyond the horizon), “Flucht aus dem Tal der Ahnungslosen” (Escape from the valley of the witless).
“Weltraumspaziergang” (Spacewalk), meanwhile, splices together scenes from one of the few DEFA science fiction films, Eolomea (Herrmann Zschoche, dir., 1972).
One reviewer describes the now long-standing hoax as “so much bigger than the ‘idea' that conceived it” and, unlike most hoaxes, the project has not been affected by the revelation of its deception. That its appeal has not diminished is undoubtedly due to the skill and sensitivity of the musical pastiche but also by the strong visual look of its packaging and presentation and by its well-researched narrative, a near-mythical story that is, as Umberto Eco once said, “too fascinating to be derailed by fact.”42 Asked about the project, the elusive Scottish musician merely remarked, “you can never be too convincing.”43
A few years before Kosmischer Laufer’s motorik pulse beat the path into an imagined GDR past, the American filmmaker Jim Finn had likewise explored a never-event set in the GDR and had likewise been drawn to potentialities of the actual past. In Interkosmos (2006), the first of his “utopian comedies,” the filmmaker presented a documentary-like account of an imagined mission to Jupiter and Saturn. Finn's film is a strange concoction, a medley of images apparently taken from different sources, 16mm film footage, archive film, photographs, animation. Jittering, with the grain and the color grading familiar to film stock of the era, and featuring scratches, “ghosting” (colorful dots and orbs caused by light on the lens), and flares we associate with part-perished or amateur filmmaking (Super 8 film was a widespread pursuit in the GDR and across the Eastern Bloc), the film offers itself as a convincing document of a secret space mission planned by Interkosmos to establish colonies in space. Here, too, a space romance is imagined, between cosmonauts from different countries engaged in separate missions to establish colonies that will never happen. De-dramatized and eschewing any passion or hyperbole, the film opts for a
Page 14 of 23 tone that approximates the factual and impassive quality of some GDR-era documentaries. Perhaps only those familiar with East German documentaries and communist rhetoric will know some of the dialogue is overpitched, a little too recherché, just as Kosmischer Läufer's images are too GDR to be real GDR—few LP covers would have really featured the flag. Like Kosmischer Läufer, it is cleverly and carefully assembled. Supplementary histories evidentiate the documentary deception—cultural details that bear close resemblance to real GDR features, facts and fiction together. A necessarily small-scale choreographed dance sequence is reminiscent of the epic stadia displays; found footage of mental and physical training make for credibly dull viewing, just as long narrated extracts from The Communist Manifesto make for soporific listening. So artful is the film that it even includes simulated footage of stop-motion animation sequence from a children's television program, not Sandmännchen, but the Kosmoschweinchen (little cosmic guinea pig). With its gentle loving nature and strength in numbers, the guinea pig, we are told by the deadpan narrator, held a symbolic importance to the GDR and was chosen as the mascot of International Communist Youth. The authenticity of the presentation might suffice to suspend disbelief in this detail about flying pigs.
(p. 643) While an explanation behind the Kosmischer Läufer project has yet to emerge, Finn has been frank about his intentions, explaining that he had been interested in the collapse of communist systems and their subsequent surrender to experiments in Friedman economics. Critical of both neoliberalism and the autocratic state socialism, he “thought about this utopian system within a system” and decided that it “was actually so corrupt and autocratic that it never could have been reformed in that way, but if they had launched into space, maybe there could have been this space utopia thing.”44 Again, that subjunctive voice—the future that could have been attained, the utopia that might have been possible. At the same time, Finn “wanted the energy and idealism of the Marxist left to be a part of the film and to create a communist love story in the process as well as a kind of funeral dirge for a 75-year-old experiment in social and economic engineering.”45 A romance and a funeral. Passion and loss as the coordinating sentiments of the melancholia that had begun to be sounded even before that experiment had ended.46 But there is something more here than a thanatological or forensic interest in the death of the socialist states (rather than in the communist project). Revisiting a version of the past that imagined a different future is not just idle retrospection or what-if speculation but revealing of a number of overlapping impulses—a resistance to certain reductive historical narratives, political disaffection, a sense that the future is not what it used to be but also, perhaps, that there are other futures still to be imagined.
For Jacques Rancière, “The current ‘crisis' is in fact the failure of the capitalist utopia that has reigned [ ... ] following the collapse of the Soviet Empire: the utopia of the perfect self-regulation of the free market and of the possibility of organizing all forms of human life according to the logic of that market. A rethinking of communism today must take into account the unheard-of situation of the failure of the capitalist utopia.”47 Others,
Page 15 of 23
David Harvey among them, see in the current crisis possibility rather than futility: “While nothing is certain, it could be that where we are now is only the beginning of a long shake out in which the question of grand and far-reaching alternatives will gradually bubble up to the surface.”48 China Mieville, meanwhile, is less passive: “if we take utopia seriously, as a total reshaping, its scale means we can't think it from this side. It's the process of making it that will allow us to do so.[ ... ] We should utopia as hard as we can.”49 For the author and activist, then, utopia re-emerges as verb, as action word, and not merely a noun dusted down for consideration. To utopia? Is the verb transitive or intransitive? And what is its object? To imagine otherwise, to envisage a brighter, better future. You can imagine a skeptical response to such dreaming: a disdainful “dream on.” Dreaming on, though, is precisely the point. In a time when forward projection routinely imagines nothing but dread futures and future dread, the thought of dreaming of possible improvements, and of lives enhanced or rescued by alternative ideas in different systems ought to have more appeal than do the entreaties to look at preferred pasts as (p- 644) is echoed across political parties and those restoration nostalgists whose time tunnel vision narrows in on moments lost to history and which can never be recovered. While the future motifs of the GDR are locked into a past that few would wish to retrieve, these references, whether original, rehabilitated, or simulated, suggest not just a fascination but perhaps even a desire with sustaining those historical dreams for possible futures.
Allan, Sean, and Sebastian Heiduschke, eds. RE-Imagining DEFA East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016.
Barthes, Roland. Camera lucida. Reflections on photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Bauer Volke, Kristina. “Ostdeutschlands Problem mit der kulturellen Substanz. Gesellschaftliche Dimensionen des kulturellen Wandels.” KULTURATION, Online Journal für Kultur, Wissenschaft und Politik 2 (2003). http://www.kulturation.de/ ki_1_thema.php?id=22
Bauman, Zymunt. Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity, 2017.
Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” After the Future. Translated by Arianna Bove et al. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011.
Bonnett, Alisatair. The Geography of Nostalgia: Global and Local Perspectives on Modernity and Loss. London: Routledge, 2015.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Canavan, Gerry. “Review of Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology, by Darko Suvin,” Historical Materialism 21, no. 1 (2013): 209-216.
Dallach, Christoph. “Elektropop aus der DDR. Synthie-Kosmonauten.” Der Spiegel,
September 4, 2010. http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/musik/elektropop-aus-der-ddr-synthie-kosmonauten-a-687917.html
Dokumentationszentrum Kunst der DDR, ed. Volks Eigene Bilder: Kunstbesitz der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR. Berlin: Metropol, 1999.
Douzinas, Costas, and Slavoj Zizek, eds. The Idea of Communism. New York: Verso, 2010.
Eisman, April E. “Whose East German Art Is This? The Politics of Reception after 1989.”
Imaginations. Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies 8, no. 1 (2017): 78-99.
Groys, Boris. Art Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism. London: Profile, 2010.
Holler, Wolfgang, Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, and Paul Kaiser, eds. Abschied von Ikarus. Bildwelten in der DDR—neu gesehen. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung König, 2012.
Isurin, Ludmila. Collective Remembering: Memory in the World and in the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Jameson, Frederic. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2017.
Jampol, Justinian. The East German Handbook. Koln: Taschen, 2017.
Kaiser, Paul. “Wende an den Wänden.” Sächsische Zeitung, September 18, 2017. http://
www.sz-online.de/nachrichten/kultur/-an-den-waenden%203775440.html? ShowAllComments=true
Kelly, Elaine, and Amy Wlodarski, eds. Art Outside the Lines: New Perspectives on GDR Art Culture. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011.
Knabe, Hubertus. “DDR-Straßennamen, Wie die DDR in der Provinz weiterlebt.” Der
Spiegel, October 3, 2006. http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/ddr-strassenna-men-wie-die-ddr-in-der-provinz-weiterlebt-a-440393.html.
(p. 648) Kohonen, Lina. Picturing the Cosmos: A Visual History of Early Soviet Space Endeavor. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2017.
Lane, Penny. “Interview with Jim Finn.” Incite, April 4, 2010. http://www.incite-online.net/finn.html
Lowenthal, David. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Maurer, Eva, Richers Julia, Ruthers, Monica., eds. Soviet Space Culture. Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies. London: Palgrave, 2011.
McGuigan, Jim. Cultural Populism. London: Routledge, 1992.
Mieville, China. “The Limits of Utopia.” (n.d.). http://salvage.zone/mieville_all.html
Radkau, Joachim. Technik in Deutschland. Vom 18. Jahrhundert bis heute. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2008.
Rauterberg, Hanno. “Kesseltreiben in Weimar.” Die Zeit, May 27, 1999. http:// www.zeit.de/1999/22/199922..b7._fortsetzung.xml/komplettansicht
Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber & Faber, 2011.
Rothjan, Alisa. “In Chic New Berlin, Ugly Is Way Cool.” New York Times, January 24, 2002. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/24/garden/in-chic-new-berlin-ugly-is-way-cool.html
Schmoll, Thomas. “Die DDR lebt noch—auf der Straße.” Die Welt, November 11, 2017. https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article170438038/Die-DDR-lebt-noch-auf-der-
Sommer, Tim. “This Krautrock Olympics Soundtrack Will Blow Your Mind.” The Observer, August 8, 2016. http://observer.com/2016/08/this-krautrock-olympics-soundtrack-will-blow-your-mind/
Spice, Anton. ““You Can Never Be Too Convincing”: Kosmischer Läufer's Top 10 Krautrock Records to Run to.” Vinyl Factory, September 9, 2013. https:// thevinylfactory.com/features/you-can-never-be-too-convincing-kosmische-laufers-top-10-krautrock-records-to-run-to/
Stephan, Günter, ed. Gemeinsam im Kosmos. Museale Zeugnisse zum ersten gemeinsamen Weltraumflug UdSSR-DDR. Dresden, Germany: Armeemuseum der DDR, 1983.
van der Hoorn, Melanie. Indispensable Eyesores: An Anthropology of Undesired Buildings. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009.
Weiner, Robert, and Shelley Barbra, eds. In the Peanut Gallery with Mystery Science Theater 3000: Essays on Film, Fandom, Technology and the Culture of Riffing. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011.
Zajda, Joseph. Globalisation and National Identity in History Textbooks: The Russian Federation. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 2017.
(1.) Eva Maurer, Julia Richers, Monica Rüthers, and Carmen Scheide, “Introduction: What Does ‘Space Culture' Mean in Soviet Society?,” in Soviet Space Culture. Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies, eds. Eva Maurer et al. (London: Palgrave, 2011), 1-10, 1.
(2.) See Joseph Zajda, Globalisation and National Identity in History Textbooks. The Russian Federation (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 2017).
(3.) Hubertus Knabe, “DDR-Straßennamen, Wie die DDR in der Provinz weiterlebt,” Der Spiegel, October 3, 2006, http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/ddr-strassennamen-wie-die-ddr-in-der-provinz-weiterlebt-a-440393.html. Streets bearing names associated with the GDR continue to be a regular topic of debate three decades after unification. See Thomas Schmoll, “Die DDR lebt noch - auf der Straße,” Die Welt, November 9, 2017, https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article170438038/Die-DDR-lebt-noch-auf-der-Strasse.html
(4.) Paul Kaiser, “Wende an den Wänden,” Sächsische Zeitung, September 18, 2017, http://www.sz-online.de/nachrichten/kultur/-an-den-waenden%203775440.html? ShowAllComments=true
(5.) Hanno Rauterberg, “Kesseltreiben in Weimar,” Die Zeit, May 25, 1999,
http://www.zeit.de/1999/22/199922..b7._fortsetzung.xml/komplettansicht
See Jonathan Osmond, “German Art Collections and Exhibits since 1989: The Legacy of the GDR,” in Art Outside the Lines: New Perspectives on GDR Art Culture, eds. Elaine Kelly and Amy Wlodarski (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), 215-237. For an overview of the debates concerning East German art and its exhibition, see also Kristina Bauer Volke, “Ostdeutschlands Problem mit der kulturellen Substanz. Gesellschaftliche Dimensionen des kulturellen Wandels,” KULTURATION, Online Journal für Kultur, Wissenschaft und Politik 2 (2003), http://www.kulturation.de/ki_1_thema.php?id=22
(6.) Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2017), xii.
(7.) Alain Badiou, “The Idea of Communism,” in The Idea of Communism, ed. Costas Douz-inas and Slavoj Zizek (New York: Verso, 2010), 1-14, 5.
(8.) Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 6.
(9.) Alisa Rothjan,“In Chic New Berlin, Ugly Is Way Cool,” New York Times, January 24, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/24/garden/in-chic-new-berlin-ugly-is-way-cool.html. See also Melanie van der Hoorn, Indispensable Eyesores: An Anthropology of Undesired Buildings (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009).
(10.) Radkau notes that in contrast to Heisig's painting, the Icarus figure (much referenced by artists in the GDR) in Womacka's painting represents capitalism's fall. See Joachim Radkau, Technik in Deutschland, Vom 18. Jahrhundert bis heute (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2008): 436.
(11.) Günter Stephan et al. (eds.), Gemeinsam im Kosmos. Museale Zeugnisse zum ersten gemeinsamen Weltraumflug UdSSR-DDR (Dresden: Armeemuseum der DDR, 1983), 16.
(12.) For more on the influence of space flight on both avant-garde and conformist East German (and other) artists, see Sigrid Hofer, “Kosmonaut Ikarus. Weltall, Erde, Mensch— die planbare Zukunft als bildnerische Projektion,” in Abschied von Ikarus. Bildwelten in der DDR—neu gesehen, eds. Wolfgang Holler, Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, and Paul Kaiser (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung König, 2012), 199-209.
(13.) Jokes often had a subversive function in the GDR. Those involving Jähn, however, tended to use the cosmonaut as a means of critiquing aspects of the East German state rather than the man: Have you heard? Sigmund Jähn is to become the new director of the GDR's biggest department store. He's used to empty space.
(14.) Asif Siddiqi, “From Cosmic Enthusiasm to Nostalgia,” in Space Culture. Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies, eds. Eva Maurer et al. (London: Palgrave, 2011), 283-307, 285.
(15.) Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 143.
(16.) Cited in Ludmila Isurin, Collective Remembering: Memory in the World and in the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 134.
(17.) Bauman, Retrotopia, 65.
(18.) David Thomson, “Foreword,” in The East German Handbook, edited by Justinian Jampol (Koln: Taschen, 2017), 8. Consider also the furor that accompanied the sale of “Revolution: Frieden unserem Erdenrund,” the large stained-glass mural commissioned for the Stasi headquarters, which was assumed lost only to reappear in Miami—with a $20 million price tag. A citizens' committee in Berlin subsequently called for the mural to be returned to Berlin. See Pia Szecki, “Bürgerkomitee: Stasi-Großbild sichern,” April 4, 2018, http://www.lichtenbergmarzahnplus.de/buergerkomitee-stasi-grossbild-sichern/
(19.) Alisatair Bonnett, The Geography of Nostalgia: Global and Local Perspectives on Modernity and Loss (London: Routledge, 2015), 6.
(20.) Lina Kohonen, Picturing the Cosmos: A Visual History of Early Soviet Space Endeavor (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2017), 107.
(21.) Peter Thompson, “‘Worin noch niemand war': The GDR as Retrospectively Imagined Community,” in The GDR Remembered: Representations of the East German State since 1989, eds. Nick Hodgin and Caroline Pearce (Rochester, UK: Camden House, 2011), 250265, 252.
(22.) Cited in Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), 361.
(23.) Franco "Bifo" Berardi, After the Future, trans. Arianna Bove et al. (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011), 13.
(24.) Bauman, Retrotopia, 58. See David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
(25.) The mosaics were cleaned in 2015 by members of the Kulturlobby Potsdam in an operation called "Action Kosmos," which was led by a man dressed as an ape dressed as a cosmonaut.
(26.) Interestingly, in the reappraisal of Soviet culture, its inferiority can also become a virtue. Consider the blurb on one Californian design company's website: "When NASA first sent astronauts into space, they knew ordinary ballpoint pens wouldn't work in zero gravity. Consequently they spent millions of dollars developing a pen that would not only do that, but also write upside down and in extreme temperatures. Faced with the same problem, the Soviet cosmonauts were given pencils. Welcome to Cosmonaut Design." See https://www.cosmonautdesign.com/.
(27.) Email correspondence, February 6, 2018.
(28.) Email correspondence, January 31, 2018.
(29.) Much the same might be said of the word astronaut, yet this lacks the cultural usage of the Soviet counterpart.
(30.) See Sebastian Heiduschke, "Communists and Cosmonauts in Mystery Science Theater 3000: De-Camping First Spaceship on Venus/Silent Star," in In the Peanut Gallery with Mystery Science Theater 3000: Essays on Film, Fandom, Technology and the Culture of Riffing, eds. Robert Weiner and Shelley Barbra (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 4045, 43.
(31.) See, for example, the wide range of views gathered in the visitors' book and reproduced in Dokumentationszentrum Kunst der DDR (ed.), Volks Eigene Bilder: Kunstbesitz der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR (Berlin: Metropol, 1999), published to mark the exhibition "Rahmen Wechsel," many of which maintain the images' significance in understanding the GDR (for good and for bad).
(32.) Gerry Canavan, review of Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology by Darko Suvin, Historical Materialism 21, no. 1 (2013): 209216, 213.
(33.) April E. Eisman, “Whose East German Art Is This? The Politics of Reception after 1989.” In Imaginations. Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies 8, no. 1 (2017): 78-99, 90-91, http://imaginations.glendon.yorku.ca/?p=9487.
(34.) Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). For Jim McGuigan, “This Western triumphalism is ideology neat and simple: questions of wealth and poverty, technological and ecological imbalances, exclusion and otherness, are not denied: they are merely consigned to their subsidiary places in the conservative imaginary of achieved Utopia.” Jim McGuigan, Cultural Populism (London: Routledge, 1992), 248.
(35.) Bonnett, Left in the Past, 173.
(36.) Eisman, “Whose East German Art,” 93.
(37.) McGuigan, Cultural Populism, 248.
(38.) Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 87.
(39.) Christoph Dallach, “Elektropop aus der DDR. Synthie-Kosmonauten,” Der Spiegel, April 9, 2010, http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/musik/elektropop-aus-der-ddr-synthie-kosmo-nauten-a-687917.html
(40.) Reynolds, Retromania, 351.
(41.) See, for example, Tim Sommer, “This Krautrock Olympics Soundtrack Will Blow Your Mind,” The Observer, August 8, 2016, http://observer.com/2016/08/this-krautrock-olympics-soundtrack-will-blow-your-mind/
(42.) Cited in Bauman, Retrotopia, 40.
(43.) Anton Spice, “‘You Can Never Be Too Convincing': Kosmischer Laufer's Top 10 Krautrock Records to Run to,” Vinyl Factory, September 9, 2013, https:// thevinylfactory.com/features/you-can-never-be-too-convincing-kosmische-laufers-top-10-krautrock-records-to-run-to/
(44.) Penny Lane, “Interview with Jim Finn,” Incite, April 3, 2010, http://www.incite-online.net/finn.html
(45.) See http://www.interkosmosmovie.com/synopsis.html interview: http:// pennylaneismyrealname.com/jim-finn-with-penny-lane
(46.) See Nick Hodgin, “DEFA's Last Gasp. Ruins, Melancholy and the End of East German Filmmaking,” in RE-Imagining DEFA East German Cinema in Its National and Transnational Contexts, eds. Sean Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke (Oxford: Berghahn Books), 271-292.
(47.) Jacques Ranciere, “Communists without Communism,” in The Idea of Communism, 167-178, 174.
(48.) David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile, 2010), 225.
(49.) China Mieville, “The Limits of Utopia” (n.d.), http://salvage.zone/mieville_all.html
Nick Hodgin
Nick Hodgin, Lecturer in German Studies, Cardiff University
Contesting the Cuban-Soviet Visual Rhetoric for the Present
Jacqueline Loss
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Aug 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.29
This article suggests that the “recuperation” of Soviet remains and Cubans' recollections of the Soviets are less significant than an exploration of everydayness in the present—real or reconstructed, in the shadow of the depleted utopic dimensions that were supposed to have molded it. With a focus on photographic series by Alejandro González Méndez; Abel Arcos Soto's novel 9550: Una posible interpretación del azúl (9550: A Possible Interpretation of the Blue, 2014); and Carlos Machado Quintela's film La obra del siglo (The Project of the Century, 2015), this project examines how the works of these artists dissect the utopic mechanism, woven into the international fabric of the Cuban-Soviet imaginary, by questioning the past's framing of the future and the seemingly arbitrary implementation of concrete data and visual rhetoric to create historical narratives.
Keywords: Cuban-Soviet imaginary, Carlos Machado Quintela, Alejandro González Méndez, Abel Arcos Soto, utopian cities, memorialization, Ostalgie, socialist realism
While only fifteen years ago Cubans would reject the notion that they did, in fact, remember the Soviets in one way or another, and that some value could be drawn from reflecting upon the significance of that memory, today that sentiment has been largely replaced by a consolidated Cuban-Soviet imaginary complete with its hammers and sickles, Tarkovsky films, Bolek and Lolek cartoons from Poland, cans of Russian meat, and women from the former Soviet Bloc (the latter “live symbols” of the former “Cuban-Soviet marriage”). It is difficult, and likely not productive, to decipher how much of that array is made for the market, and how much is part of a “natural” process of memorialization that can also involve anaesthetization of the more pernicious archival elements, some of which remain unknown. Cuba's official distancing from the Soviet Bloc in the wake of the USSR's disintegration in 1991 hardly pulverized the material culture and the artistic production that those approximately three decades of cultural, economic, and ideological contact generated. Critical studies, of which my own form part, and documentaries such as Enrique Colina's The Russians in Cuba (2008),1 along with Cuba's continued economic
Page 1 of 24 and even strategic political interest in Russia, have made it impossible to deny the fact that Cubans' so-called fraternity with the Soviets gave birth to a plethora of memories recollected by artists, politicians, and businessmen alike, so much so that they even work themselves into the “new Cuban” economy of the twenty-first century in the form of restaurants, bars, and tours that form part of Cuba's own little Ostalgie industry.
Within the cultural artifacts examined in this essay, the “recuperation” of Soviet remains and Cubans' recollections of the Soviets are less significant than an exploration of everydayness in the present—real or reconstructed, in the shadow of the depleted utopic dimensions that were supposed to have molded it. The artifacts share a similarly (p- 650) “askance” glance toward the Cuban-Soviet memorialization by refusing only to be nostalgic, sentimental, bitter, ironic, or mocking. They also corporealize history or “inscrib[e] the traces of [it] on individual bodies” in emotionally restrained ways.2 I focus on photographic series by Alejandro González Méndez; the novel 9550: Una posible interpretación del azúl (9550: A Possible Interpretation of the Blue, 2014) by Abel Arcos Soto; and the film La obra del siglo (The Project of the Century, 2015), directed by Carlos Machado Quintela, for which Arcos Soto wrote the screenplay. Despite the fact that González Méndez (1974) is senior to both Arcos Soto (1985) and Machado Quintela (1984), both González Méndez and Arcos Soto have described themselves as part of Generation 2000 (also called Generation Zero), in reference to their coming of age around 2000 and/or beginning to exhibit and publish in the twenty-first century. None of the creators examined here would have been old enough to experience first-hand the years of Sovietization in the 1970s, but rather they stage distinct fictional scenarios sparked by how they imagine the Cuban-Soviet union and its aftermath. In their struggles to conceptualize the significance of a “truth” that they did not access first-hand, they largely dissect the utopic mechanism that was woven into the international fabric of the Cuban-Soviet imaginary, by asking us to question the past's framing of the future and the seemingly arbitrary implementation of concrete data and visual rhetoric to create historical narratives. While a novel may not be the most obvious choice within this selective, thematic reading of Cuban post-Soviet visual culture, 9550's evocation of the visual realm through its format, style, and content is such that it merits its inclusion. Taken together, we can see how these three texts refuse to partake in the process through which “sites of memory” (Pierre Nora)3 become homogenized and turn into “invented traditions” (Eric Hobsbawm).4 They accomplish this task through focusing on the frame through which the identification between the Cuban and the Soviet was supposed to be put into being.
I am arguing that González Méndez's photography (especially his series Havana: Future [2005] and Re-construction [2012-2013]), Arcos Soto's novel, and Machado Quintela's film are analogous to one another on account of the self-conscious frame that they employ to illustrate the Soviet-Cuban friendship as a construction. All three capture and critique the process through which a specific ideology materialized and was summoned into existence. They signal how that construction was elaborated through meticulous and repetitive attention to detail that—as it attempted to turn history into nature and the state into a utopia—often lost sight of the reality of individual lives in the present. González Méndez is known for snapshots through which he “reveals, reconstructs, manipulates and reinter
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prets realities that, at times, have not been lived personally, but are part of the truths silenced by the media.”5 Arcos Soto and Machado Quíntela submit a similar Soviet-Cuban visual rhetoric to the test, in order to show how the mechanisms of utopian desire and repression continue to weigh on the present. It is impossible to overlook how the visual is also inflected by an “echoic rhetoric,” in a manner that may remind us of the “fantasy echo,” implemented by Joan W. Scott to critique the invisibilization of difference within feminism. For Scott, “Retrospective identifications ... are imagined repetitions and repetitions of imagined resemblances. The echo is (p- 651) a fantasy, the fantasy an echo; the two are inextricably intertwined.”6 These retrospective identifications of Cuba to the Soviet Bloc can be heard through television screens, microphones, and blank paper; reiterations of national slogans and popular television shows; or even returning whispers referencing a sexualized Soviet man in the ear of a Cuban lover. The echoes, explored here, often make it difficult to decipher the real from the subjective, the resonance from the origins. This chapter points to the dynamic and multidirectional aspects of communist visual culture, its formation in the process of complex negotiations and renegotiations between the centers of power and the human subjects, whose lives have been directly affected by the socialist utopia.
In his preface to Future (2005), Alejandro González Méndez tells us: “We were called ‘generation 2000'; a date seemingly distant but one truly promising.”7 His photographs in this series feel like a future in technicolor—dates, specificity, and refrains emphasize the way in which precision was strategically utilized in order to create a sense of achievable magnitude. His Future series includes, among others, photographs of a picnic, two cows, and a shot of the Russian embassy that showcase a heightened reality, which is also somewhat banal. For instance, González Méndez neither renders the Soviet/Russian embassy, erected in 1987, in the Havana neighborhood of Miramar, imposingly nor as an eyesore (see Figure 28.1). Not only does Miramar hardly live up to its elegant reputation in the photograph, the constructivist building, designed by Alexander G. Rochegov, looks at us sideways, making us reflect upon why it took nearly a decade to be completed. González Méndez captures this story nonchalantly; the building is simply there, as a truncated feat, timeworn like the apartment building beside it, and hardly towering. That the embassy is “askance” obliges spectators to fill in the distance between this real form and the idealized form projected onto the future.
© Alejandro González Méndez
The series that González Méndez refers to as “reflective picnic" opens with an image of a picnic (see Figure 28.2). It inserts itself into a trajectory of picnics and resembles They Are Writing about Us in Pravda by Aleksei Vasilev. In the famous 1951 painting, Soviet peasants see themselves in the newspaper as central to the nation's “truth." But González Méndez also echoes Monet's famous painting from 1865-1866 Le déjeuner sur l'herbe of fashionable people lunching on the grass of a French forest (a response to Monet's 1962 original of the same title). González Méndez stages the Soviet-Cuban picnic with a Lada and a military vehicle in plain view in a seemingly geographically remote landscape, but, in fact, the scene takes place beside the dam in Parque Lenin (Lenin Park)—Havana's largest recreation area, constructed between 1969 and 1972. This photograph winks at the inextricability of idealism and realism within the socialist realist purview. The effect of González Méndez's 2005 return to the places where the “future of [his] generation was forged"8 reveals the “staging" that was entailed in promoting Cuba's insertion into the socialist world, imposing the ideal image onto reality, in a manner that parallels (p- 652) Abram Tertz's description of the socialist realist summons to “view truth in the light of the ideal."9 González Méndez's picnic dislodges the evidence from its “logical" place within reality only to reveal the underpinnings of adapting an ideal image to reality, a conceit that operates in the works by Arcos Soto and Machado Quintela as well.
© Alejandro González Méndez
The politicization of milk and cattle in Castro's revolution is alluded to in González Méndez's 2005 portrait of two cows beneath a sky that monumentalizes everydayness, in its seemingly effortless surpassing of the limits of reality through impressionistic beauty, employing nature “aesthetically” for ideological purposes (see Figure 28.3). The meaning of the portrait expands for spectators who are able to relate the cows' location to the transforming historical significance of the place cited in the photograph's title, Old Amusement Park in the School City "Tarará." Once an old and flourishing middle-class residential neighborhood, Tarará was then intentionally repurposed by the revolution.
(p. 653) From its inauguration in 1959 as a “city school" for scholarship students, many of whom were from the countryside, it was turned into a camp, and later, a “city" for young revolutionary pioneers. By 1978, an amusement park was also inaugurated there.10 In the mid-1980s, at the height of the Cuban-Soviet economic brotherhood when commercial exchanges between the two countries reached nearly 10 billion pesos, Tarará experienced its age of splendor as a center for recreation and teaching. By the end of the decade, it underwent new transformations, shaped by the crisis in the Soviet Union, which had a direct and negative impact on Cuba's economy. In 1989, victims of Chernobyl began arriving in Cuba to be treated in Havana,11 but by 1990, they were transported to Tarará. The portrait of González Méndez's cows is incomplete without this interlude.
© Alejandro González Méndez
Furthermore, this portrait is even better explained with some familiarity of the significance of bovine animals for the post-1959 Cuban nation. Attributing the shrinking cattle population on the island, post revolution, to internal enemies, Fidel Castro began experimenting with reversing the trend, even buying Holstein bulls and cows from Canada. Unfortunately, they did not fare well in tropical conditions; the government's attempt to rectify this mismatch by breeding them with Zebu cows from Southwest Asia was not particularly successful either. By 1979, the illegal slaughter of cattle was criminalized. Nevertheless, the revolution boasted one related feat of enormous magnitude: the White Udder, a Holstein hybrid, born around 1972, that was said to have yielded 109.5 liters of milk one day in January 1982, and was a famed object of the leader's affection. That is why the cows belong alongside the picnic, the Russian embassy, and a statue of (p- 654) the symbol of the José Marti Organization of Pioneers in González Méndez's series. In contrast to the notion that socialist realism was simply propaganda, devoid of aesthetics, Evgeny Do-brenko insists that it was “a highly aestheticized culture, a radically transformed world” and that “all reality outside of Socialist Realism was but the wilderness of everyday life.”12 González Méndez's photographs lay this bare.
After the famous White Udder was slaughtered in 1985, that cow was memorialized in a glass case (not unlike Lenin's preserved body in his famous mausoleum), and, many years later, in 2013, it became the object of Enrique Colina's fascinating documentary about the cow and the structures of myth-making in Cuba. In 2014, González Méndez photographed it behind the vitrine as part of The Mega Projects series (see Figure 28.4). In the 2005 photograph, the apparent anonymity of the cows and the landscape is offset by (p- 655) the crispness of the sky that creates the sensation that something, in fact, “could have”
Page 6 of 24 happened there. This situation, what in grammatical terms would be called a “modal of lost opportunity,” is then brought to its potential in the 2014 photograph of the monumentalized cow.
In Re-construction (2012-2013), González Méndez provides both concrete dates and looser ranges of dates to accompany each image so that spectators get an even better idea of the process of reflection through which the photographer subjects history. In understanding González Méndez's treatment of history, Rafael Rojas draws our attention to another temporality also at work; that is, the present perfect, stating: “The Soviet mark in Cuba is exposed as in the present perfect, either as an intervened ruin or as a space that can be re-functionalized by the same political power.” That strategy contrasts with the “official monumentalization of the Soviet past on the island [that] is becoming more and more like a secret cult” wherein the state and the masses participate in different ways, but similarly “seek to vivify the dead.”13 More specifically, Re-construction boldly links the past, present, and future in its depiction of human subjects interacting with objects, newscasts, landscapes, and sets that have since become history or will become history as per their reconstruction. The featured dates range from 1965-2012,1970-2012, One day in 1984, July 7, 1989, November 9, 1989, December 25, 1993, August 6, 1994 to June 10, 2002, November 22, 2012, January 13, 2013, and May 2, 2017. This scope permits (p- 656) González Méndez to comment on Cubans' limited access to Wi-Fi in the same chronology as he treats the “pits of the printing press where reels of paper await the fresh news to be printed” in Granma—the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party (Any day of 1965-2012),14 or a portrait of a worn-out bureaucratic office, which features a TV screen playing the Ochoa trials, while the Soviet Union undergoes Perestroika (July 7, 1989). In his dossier, González Méndez succinctly describes the coincidence expressed within July 7, 1989 in the following manner:
While political and social changes pushed by Perestroika in the USSR were changing Eastern Europe, in Cuba a trial known as “Cause 1” against high ranking officers and officials of the Army and the State was taking place. The trial was televised almost entirely. The photograph shows General Arnaldo Ochoa during one of the sessions. Ochoa, together with three other defendants, was executed.15
In González Méndez's scene, the proportions are strategic: the televised tragic event appears minute in comparison to the everyday ruin of the socialist office. Furthermore, the empty chair and the off-the-hook telephone contribute to the effect of corporealizing history. Even in the absence of actual bodies, the photographer provides such clues that allow spectators to fill in the gaps and imagine how such socialist staging might affect the nation's bodies. The open file cabinet, seemingly random black binders, and scattered figurines, including a black dog on the top shelf that could stand in for a watchdog, make spectators reflect upon the archives, still largely inaccessible in Cuba. Unlike other nations within the former Soviet Bloc, Cuba has not yet undergone its “declassification” period. While some spectators may not recall or have hardly any knowledge of these events, faced with July 7, 1989, we become witnesses to how the bureaucratic mise-en-scène, characteristic of any place in the Soviet Bloc, not just Cuba, guides our interpretation of historic occurrences.
The metatextual moments—the white paper, the computer screens, and different television sets—also encourage spectators to think about the impact of representation on the interpretation of the so-called concrete reality. In his statement, González Méndez suggests:
Many of the re-created moments were not recorded or broadcast by the official media (at least not in the way that I show them in my photos). That is why more than reconstructing, I compose history.
... The objective is to re-generate, re-present, re-construct, stage.
Not limiting myself to the past, I suggest a failure, attempting to generate a photographic truth.16
Such a photographic truth is especially fascinating if we take into account Marcia Eaton's commentary on the propositional content in pictures and the conversational implicatures between image and readers. In her quest to define pictorial speech acts, Eaton declares, “We are more likely to ‘trust' a photograph of Toledo than a painting of (p- 657) it.” From there, Eaton goes on to diminish “the apparent distinction between objective photographs which can't lie and subjective drawings which can,” showing how this is especially true when it comes to tricks in photography and doctored-up images. González Méndez generates a photographic truth by dissecting the so-called precision of history, the “objective reality,” through restaging of dates and images.17
The curator of González Méndez's duo exhibition in 2013 in Havana, Chrislie Pérez, further explains how González Méndez's photographs contribute to the creation of truths
—“Every data, told or represented, is converted into history because it is the result of an analytical process in which intervene the individuality, perception, knowledge, intentions and circumstances of the individual that tells or represents.”18
That dimension of truth making could pertain as much to Re-construction as it does to the narrator's following admission in Arcos Soto's novel 9550:
Secretly I am fascinated by the years that have names, or perhaps I only enjoy writing the headers on the page: place, complete date, and on the next line, a long slogan in quotation marks that for geometric reasons gives shape to the top of the blank sheet.19
In this way, Arcos Soto visualizes the dimensions of the nationalistic baptismal ritual in the act of individual creation. Like the French Revolution, the Cuban Revolution narrated a new calendar to remind the Cuban people of the important revolutionary dates and concepts. Beyond simply enumerating the number of years since Fidel Castro came to power, many years are named according to the recitation of phrases, such as the year of “liberation,” “agrarian reform,” “productivity,” “the centennial of the fall of José Martí,” and “the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas,” among many others. As a strategy for ensuring the Cuban people's cohesion in a shared national experience of time, most Cuban revolutionary publications simultaneously dictate time through both the Gregorian and the revolutionary calendar. To such heroic displays of history, many Cuban artists respond with their own, more private, resuscitations of the past that, they show, also bear upon the present. Like González Méndez who toys with chronology in the titles of photos, Arcos Soto accomplishes this private resuscitation through a style that inverts “natural” orders, relying on the distance established through aesthetic framing.
The earlier quoted fragment begins the vignette “With Legs Spread Open to the Blackout” and introduces an aspect of the narrator's childhood that involved the infamous frequent power outages, the actual future that Fidel Castro bracketed in 1990, as “The Special Period in Times of Peace,” to frame this devastating period in favor of the nation's utopic plans. Despite the failure of socialist societies elsewhere, socialism would be saved in Cuba, Castro asserted. Arcos Soto's narrator, however, could not care less about rescuing or even putting socialism to rest; rather, he recalls it through minor details such as a scene with his mother and him on the floor with their “open legs,” literally emphasizing the ironic aspects of history through them—in this way, corporealizing history. Arcos Soto's vignette concludes with “For me, a fan of the slogans as I said, they don't come to me anymore with the name of their year in particular, there's no (p- 65«) longer any rancor, I left that night with desire to think, to have a smoke.”20 The grandeur and sense of collectivism that the slogans were supposed to evoke become but a curious artifact that allows the narrator to associate the blackout with what he feels is a fascinating slogan, somewhat removed from their origins and role in congealing history.
González Méndez similarly emphasizes the impossibility of ever envisioning both history and reality as anything but “doctored up.” While in Re-construction (2012-2013), individuals interact in historical scenes, as a mode for the photographer to also come to know
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moments that he was too young to form part of, in The Mega Projects (2014), witnesses disappear, no longer even interacting with the boredom that forms part of history. Here “the mega-projects of the revolutionary era: grandiloquent, massive and nearly supernatural works that supposedly would save Cuba from underdevelopment” are the photographer's subjects.21 Whether the portrait of the nuclear power plant of Juraguá (1979-1992), or the nuclear city around it (1982-1992), the “White Udder” (1972-1985), or the Moscow Restaurant (1974-1990) (also the subject of Zoe García Miranda's 2008 documentary), they hardly seem like a documentation of the “Soviet” leftovers before they disappear—although this is one of the achieved effects. Rather, they beg spectators to reflect upon the significance of reconstruction in the face of those mega projects having been stripped of their grandiosity. González Méndez's series The Gray Five-Year Period is somewhat unlike the other of his series that focus on reconstruction that show the continuity of chronologies. The Gray Five-Year Period sticks to 1971-1975, and using “five scale models of cardboard and lead,” it reconstructs the most dolorous moments of Sovietization. Each photo provides a piece of concrete date for each event, of which the artist could not have taken testimony, given that he was not yet born.
Like these photographic series, the novel 9550 is composed of vignettes that are often disconnected from one another. Sometimes characters appear, never to reappear, but the persistent figures are the unnamed narrator and “the absent one,” the narrator's imprisoned sixty-two-year-old great-uncle, Severo. 9550 does more than provide a visual inventory of the Cuban-Soviet imaginary. It does this quite successfully, hearkening back to Yoss's “What the Russians Left Behind” or even Ernesto René Rodríguez and Jorge Luis Betancourt's 2006 documentary by the same title. However, it would be more precise to think of 9550 as the slides for the act of forging the Cuban-Soviet family. Rather than a critique of the Soviet influence in Cuba, the novel is an investigation into the order of things:
9550 is first, the distance in kilometers between Havana and Moscow. Then, 9550 is the name of a game show on Cuban TV. Although perhaps it was the other way around. Perhaps it's not too exaggerated to assume that no one in Havana knew that (p- 659) fact until 9550 went on air. Then 9550 is first a program and then the distance from here to the snow. Grandfather, who perhaps isn't lying when he swears he knew by heart the aforementioned figure (in miles and kilometers) long before seeing it on television, immediately signed up to be a contestant. So, grandfather is first a contestant on 9550 and only then my grandfather.22
The speculation whether the representation of the distance between Moscow and Havana in the form of the game show was what provided the imaginary for Cubans of the Soviet sphere or whether Cubans harbored that data through education is at the heart of this novel's illustration that everything is already a reconstruction. Even the family is created by way of the famous game show whose winners got to take a trip to the Soviet Union.
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The protagonist recognizes the individual that is his grandfather first as a game show participant and only then as his grandfather, as if the game show's resonances constituted the Soviet-Cuban identification, confounding the sense of origins.
This vignette also underlines the centrality of television in forming Cubans' visual literacy. There is a clear “before” and “after” to Soviet Bloc cartoons, which—broadcast at 6 p.m. each day on Channel 6 of Cuban TV throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—not only tried to instill a moral code but also familiarized Cubans with the faraway Soviet landscape. So immersed are Arcos Soto's characters in it that “birch trees” are mentioned some fourteen times in a short novel in order to conjure up this staged universe. Not only in this work, but in many others by Cubans that evoke the Soviet/Russian-Cuban world, such a repetition of just one or two aspects of the landscape may reveal a degree of performance and/or lack of sincerity in relation to that world. Furthermore, when the narrator cautions against readers' premature conclusion that Micha—the character who is “cruzao” or crossed, mixed Cuban and Russian—has actually seen a birch tree, he does so in a manner that evokes the kitsch: he tells us that Micha “carries [the birch trees] within and immediately recognizes them and shouts ‘a birch tree!' when they appear on television.”23 In another vignette, the narrator formulates the effect of not just the Soviet sphere on Cuban visual culture but television more generally on islanders: “To exaggerate, one can find in my grandfather a clear example of how television, on an island, grips a man's mind and leaves it in a perpetual back and forth from the sun to the snow, from the snow to the sun.”24 To understand Arcos Soto's perspective, it is helpful to consider the explanation of television in Cuba provided by Cuba's own online encyclopedia, which claims that television was “designed under a permanent educational rubric. The programs focus on the multifaceted improvement of man. For that reason, they have a marked tendency toward culture and entertainment.”25 In my translation, I opt for the word “man” here, rather than “humans,” to emphasize the allusion of the word choice “el hombre” to the concept of the new man (el hombre nuevo)—a key concept for the Cuban Revolution. In the first decade of the revolution, Ché Guevara promised that this “new man” would emerge with a new set of values: “selfless and cooperative, obedient and hard working, gender-blind, incorruptible, non-materialistic, and anti-imperialist.”26
To that end, Arcos Soto does not evoke Soviet Bloc cartoons through a lens of nostalgia. Like artists of the Generation of Soviet Bloc Cartoons (“generación de muñequitos
(p. 660) rusos”), who are a bit older than the novelist and came of age in the 1980s, Arcos Soto evokes the cartoons in bittersweet ways, making fun of the way in which they functioned as a model of conduct for the new man. In 9550, the figure of Uncle Stiopa is crucial. Sergey Mikhalkov, the famous Soviet author of children's books, was also the creator of the poems featuring the tall Uncle Stiopa. His poems were later adapted into films. The lieutenant in charge of Severo's case, for instance, is nicknamed “Stiopa,” and the novel concludes with an obituary for Mikhalkov. That “obituary” ends with a reference to an homage to Mikhalkov, in which the author was asked what he did to stay in favor with so many different rulers, having also written the words to both the Soviet and Russian anthems. In response, he said “They all had children.”27 The statement, the last of Arcos Soto's novel, is open-ended, to say the least. For one, it is evocative of the paternalism of
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the socialist state, something that José Manuel Prieto blames on “the state socialist policies and permanent intervention in the private sphere,” extending childhood “well into adulthood.”28 Mikhalkov's interlude in the novel also renders the “doctored-up” nature of socialist realist portraits that González Méndez's photography plays with, making us recall the summons “to view truth in the light of the ideal.”
A character that Severo always used to call “Niño” delineates their relationship to one another, right before Niño loses his voice from ischemia. That occurrence is translated onto the page through a long passage in italics. Niño is portrayed as happy, just because he was making bicycles for his country—for which Severo categorized him as just “an ordinary creature.”29 Niño, we are told, with an irony that characterizes the entire novel, is the “new man.” He would be the good subject for Uncle Stiopa, while Severo would correspond more closely to the novel's narrator whose obsession with his great-uncle was even more justified when he learned (of course, after the fact, once he died) that they were both born on the same day in May.
Arcos Soto has a gift for sparking the uncanny, in part, achieved by his titling of vignettes in a manner that only most literally relates to their content. Thus, the novel reads like defamiliarized “cuadros de costumbres”—“sketches of customs”—a genre that was popular in nineteenth-century Cuba. Within these sketches, the novel remarks upon other aspects of the visual realm as well: from family photographs, whose usefulness to gauge reality is challenged by the narrator, to experimentation with the novel's actual visuality, as evidenced in the italicized passage that evokes Niño's impending loss of voice. The recording of Niño's voice prior to his losing it suggests that even the “good subject's” relationship to presence is fragile. Through defamiliarization, Arcos Soto emphasizes the uncanny in the past and the present. For instance, the vignette entitled “Figures to Contemplate Lying Down in the Summertime” turns out to be not a carefree Monet-inspired picnic, but rather a description of what the prison's ceiling looked like to Severo in the summertime, and such poetic estrangement resonates throughout the novel.
Another aspect of that estrangement entails an examination of how politics informs geography. In the vignette “Anas Dicors or Radioactive Isotope,” the premise of which is a character's return trip on a plane back from the Soviet Union, the narrator states, “Many years ago, when the world was still divided in two and Cuba was a spittle of earth on the (p. 661) wrong latitude, its inhabitants furrowed the skies daily and there in the East became victims of winter.”30 At first, it may seem that the distanced tone of this vignette has little do with the fictionalized travelogues that can be encountered in the work of writers such as Antonio Álvarez Gil, Jesús Díaz, Alejandro Aguilar, or even Emilio García Montiel. Arcos Soto's choice not to name many of his characters makes it more difficult to identify with their experiences. After the reader is informed about Cubans' fate in the East, the narrator hardly gives more specificity. “A Cuban agent (let's call him The Biologist) returns to the little island coming from Moscow feeling the whole time his head weighs on him in a strange way.” Having left the island “insultingly young,” he is returning to it “having forgotten the meaning and purpose of a conscience.”31 “Let's call him the Biologist” offsets readers from what could be a facile sentimentality, not allowing them to be
Page 12 of 24 seduced by History or even its potentially nostalgic or disillusioned aftermath. Hardly a character, this “biologist,” also a Cuban agent, is rather the sketch of an idea, portrayed in all its absurdity. The vignette loosely and humorously ponders a quandary: individual freedom in the face of ideology. We meet the “biologist” whose skills were put to the use of experimenting with how best to cause harm to the nation's enemies: whether through blue-winged ducks carrying lethal viruses to Florida or radioactive isotopes that his teachers instructed him to call by a different name, “the Bulgarian treatment.” The disconnect between name and reality was troublesome to the biologist, not because of how evasive it was from the actual biological damage, but rather because it gave tribute to the political police of Todo Zhivkov. More than inducing cancer, the treatment was meant to convert “uncomfortable beings” into “brief events dissolved in official discourse.”32 After that revelation, a canned voice kindly orders passengers to adjust their airplane seats, fasten their seatbelts, and prepare for landing. In such moments that call attention to the links between naming, knowledge, authority, and its abuse, readers are made gently aware of ideology's rendering of reality and of the effects of an oppressive apparatus on the individual. Despite refusing to offer any personal accounts that are characteristic of Cubans' fictionalized travelogues to the Soviet Bloc, 9550: A Possible Interpretation of the Blue shares with them a challenge to the kind of protagonism expected of Sovietized Cuban subjects.
The award-winning novel tells the story of the narrator's great-uncle. It is by way of black-and-white photographs that the narrator assesses his appearance, but the truth is not easily accessible, and those who view them can hardly decipher the color of his eyes. Photographs permeate 9550, corresponding, in part, to the fact that the narrator's father works as a photographer, placing his son frequently in the role of amateur critic. “No one could ever agree on the exact tone of his gaze, although everyone accepted that it was a variation of blue.”33 That “blue,” however, is diminished in prison, and eventually, in a body suffering from cancer, it is absent. Yet the narrator explains, “all life is a pretext, what I really seek is to go about tracing a map.”34 The map that the narrator traces in this novel is in constant tension with the map that has already been traced for him within the nation's history. This metatextual moment permits us to understand how “blue” takes on numerous meanings throughout the novel. With a wink at that “blue” of nineteenth-century Spanish American modernismo, 9550 embraces artifice and the arbitrariness (p- 662) of signs, rather than heroism.35 The blue travels, like a floating signifier. It is also encountered momentarily, for instance, in the vignette about Micha, whose name is not really Micha, but since the character is “cruzao,” he is given the generic Russian name. We are told that Micha's mother, Irina, is even better than the narrator's simply because she isn't the narrator's mother. Irina always smokes, and when the smoke emerges from her, the narrator laughs, it is more “blue,” emanating a new odor. Blue makes its appearance in more repressive ways as well—it is the color of the first kerchiefs of young communists. However, here in this passage, it not only relates to the Soviet-Cuban union, but it does so in unexpectedly sweet ways: this blue is intimate as “smooth herbs.”36 This minor moment of seduction, albeit somewhat humorous, does contrast with the maps that have already been traced by Cuban authors who memorialize the Soviet sphere in critical ways, attributing their distance from the Soviets to many factors, both profound and superficial, including the Soviet's scent that they find to be disagreeable.37
The novel is also filled with decisive omissions that force readers to dissect the “wilderness” of the everyday from the aestheticized realities that Cubans have internalized. The narrator, whose name is never revealed, expresses his desire to think of the notorious Villa Marista prison, where political prisoners are frequently detained, as a school for adults —wishful thinking that transforms the sentiment of past oppressive referents, a technique that similarly functions in the film The Project of the Century, discussed later. About the incarcerated and long-gone principal character, the narrator says, “I never dealt with him personally. In my family, the same blood was never enough to know each other.”38 This refusal to yield to the conventions of family or to experience familial bonds as a barometer of truth finds its outlet in the rejection of the realist narrative.
The narrator's characterization of his relationship to his uncle can easily transfer to other aspects of the novel that refuse sentimentality, a fact praised by Carlos Espinosa Domínguez: “Abel Arcos eludes the commonplaces, the ideological simplifications, the extreme reductionisms. In that way, he narrates from a conscious place rather than from nostalgia.”39 Much like the heightened yet banal reality of González Méndez's photos, the matter-of-factness with which Arcos Soto narrates 9550 never permits readers to feel as if they have accessed an unmediated reality. The novel begins by enlisting the geographical limits of the neighborhood of La Víbora in Havana in order to convey that, according to those limits, the Villa Marista prison, known as a place where political dissidents are sent, forms part of it. After introducing us to Severo, “the absent one,”40 the narrator accounts for the distance from one to another point, not by revealing the actual time it takes a character to drive in a Soviet automobile, but rather by formulating a succession of probabilities.
It's a given that it's a Lada, simple probabilities: in that time, one of every four cars in Havana is a Lada and if talking about State Security, you could say that one in every two cars is some model of Lada. Let's say it's white, or alternatively, green, and that it's driven by a very serious young guy, a kind of precocious adolescent, of the kind that tends to be chauffeurs of white and green Ladas.41
(p. 663) The brushstrokes used to sketch the Soviet-Cuban past are surprisingly often narrated in the present tense. They make readers continually aware of the novel as fiction and the distance between the “truth” of individual events and of their function not only in history but also in the present. That is to say, the novel's staged performances, as they parody the “staged” Soviet-Cuban visual universe, ask readers to consider the persistence of these rhetorical devices in the present.
The Project of the Century is as much a film about a failed utopian city as it is a film about how Cuba's mass media endeavors to bury the failure of a utopian discourse; still, in its intricate process of framing the mechanisms through which the past came to believe in the magnitude of the future, the film reveals its debt to national and international aesthetic currents that emerged during the first three decades of the revolution, as well as a commitment to preserving the memories of those who believed. The Project of the Century weds the colorful archive from that city's local television to the mostly black-and-white present of the nuclear city of Juraguá (also photographed by González Méndez in 2014), contrasting the past's colorful idealism with its bleak aftermath. The sense that “the nuclear power plant didn't need to explode, like it did in Chernobyl to destroy the city” pervades the film.42 However, interestingly, when the film's director, Machado Quintela, set out to make this film, he didn't start with a story about the abandoned nuclear reactor but rather with an old script written by Arcos Soto about three generations of men living in an apartment together; its location was initially unknown.
Like Havana: Future and 9550, the film obliges spectators to consider the prisms through which we engage the present. First and foremost, it does so by interweaving the archive into the feature film, in a way that explicitly pays homage to the film director Sara Gómez who died at a young age while making De cierta manera (One Way or Another) in 1974. Moreover, imperfect cinema, for which One Way or Another is often considered exemplary, is revisited in The Project of the Century. Emerging from Julio García Espinosa's 1969 treatise, imperfect cinema favored ideologically committed filmmaking that could be produced by nonprofessionals with limited means, and it “show[s] the process of [the] problem.”43 More specifically, the way that The Project of the Century utilizes the historical archive sets spectators up for understanding the present of the lives of its three main characters (Otto; Rafael, his son; and Leo, Otto's grandson) that is devoid of memorable activity. Spectators must draw their own conclusions. For instance, Otto, the oldest of the protagonists, played by the internationally renowned Mario Balmaseda, appears to be losing his memory but recalls his own role as protagonist in Gómez's One Way or Another in an unforgettable scene that, framed before us, rehearses the dynamic between the Cuban macho and the modern Cuban woman. But that appreciation for aesthetic imperfection, what we might call a positive outgrowth of the 1970s (distinct from the failed international magnitude appearing in González Méndez's (p- 664) photography and 9550) goes beyond the homage to Gómez's film. Machado Quintela states: “That the movie is called La obra del siglo, far from ironizing the project's magnitude, ironizes the very movie as well, converting it into a project parallel to the original, and unfinished, like it. A project that is built over errors. All that occurred in Juraguá is born and dies in the shadow of the reactor and the movie is not extant from that either.”44 In this statement by Machado Quin-tela, we hear resonances of the ideologies of collaboration and the distancing from auteur film and Hollywood film that informed much of Cuban revolutionary cinematographic production throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
At the beginning of the film, the historical scenario is set before us: “In 1976 Cuba and the Soviet Union signed an agreement to build two nuclear reactors in the region of Juraguá, Cienfuegos. ... This story takes place in the Electro-Nuclear City (CEN), a residence built for the future workers of the Nuclear Plant.” It then cuts to a raw, aerial view, in color, of the city filmed from what sounds like a helicopter, framed to ensure that spectators become conscious of the distinct temporal dimensions of the film. From there, we go right into the black-and-white present defined with dates and places: “Ciudad Electro-Nuclear (CEN) 2012.” That is to say that the past idealized notions of the future do not lead to utopias but rather to concretized realness, complete with insect exterminators and apartment numbers, “52,” to be precise. The Cold War and freedom from dependency that led to the conceptualization for the plant (a “mega project”) give way to a war on mosquitos, although the rhetoric of communism is sustained in the words of the exterminator that are later echoed on the TV news broadcast. “Look, compañero, you have to do these things even though people don't like them ... It's a war.” What stands out in this interaction between the pest control worker and Otto is the former's twenty-first century strategic, and by now, ironic use of “traditional” revolutionary discourse, “compañero/ comrade” over “señor/gentleman,” to secure the elder's confidence, as Otto is asked to permit the incursion of the state into his domestic sphere in order to eliminate a specific species of mosquito.
The younger of the two exterminators takes a break from his labor with Otto on the patio. Between the raw mise-en-scène alternating between piping and scaffolding, and the diegetic sounds emanating from extermination, this scene is one of the most memorable: it conjures up the distance between the rustic experience of the present and the future that was dreamed of back in the day. Hanging out on the patio, the “unworking worker,” what we could even refer to as a trope in socialist life, utters: “That was a glorious epoch ... .It was a race to see if the Russians or the Americans had a bigger one.” Analogous with the corporealization of history we saw in 9550, this phenomenon, the film's director has acknowledged, extends to the relationship among the family members as a whole.45 This statement is also undeniably intertextual, resonating with the oft-cited question asked by Sergio, the protagonist of the famous Memories of Underdevelopment (1968, Tomás Guitérrez Alea): “What do you like better, the smell of Russians or the smell of Americans?” Such brilliant expressions transform the sobriety of the Cold War, which at the time was at its height, into a debased carnival, which, as Machado Quintela's film suggests, characters are still processing.
(p. 665) Through the voice of “the unworking worker” and images of Yuri Gagarin, the spectator witnesses a tribute to the “beauty” of Yuri Gagarin, who is said to have won over more people than the Kremlin's forty-seven years of propaganda. In fact, that homage is extratextual as well, given that the film is dedicated to both Sara Gómez and to Yuri Gagarin. While the “unworking worker” quantifies Gagarin's feats—“he circled the earth in 108 minutes”—with the intention of capturing Gagarin's “beauty,” the camera cuts to a shot of Cubans watching on TV their very own young Afro-Cuban cosmonaut Arnaldo Tamayo. This is followed by an image of an older Tamayo, from the present day, expressing gratitude to the revolution for its mission to explore the Cosmos. Once again, the
Page 16 of 24 film shows us that the communist “real” is always mediated and “augmented” through its framing, making spectators also question the nature of the present everyday. The implementation of concrete data doesn't stop in the past since contemporary mass media continues to assert those utopic dimensions as a mode of strategic distraction in the present. The incongruity of diegetic sounds is one of the most fascinating techniques to encourage such reflection. As the footage with Tamayo concludes and the camera focuses on the city Juraguâ, viewers hear the countdown to blastoff in Russian that hardly passes as ex-tradiegetic sounds, because by now spectators are themselves convinced that such grandiose sounds echo within the heads of the characters, as part of the collective past. The film suggests that characters have internalized that soundscape to such an extent that when the camera cuts to the exterminators running through all levels of the building to fight the war on mosquitos, the countdown in Russian continues to resonate.
Machado Quintela's film does share with 9550 a vignette-like structure whose connectedness is actually seductive. In contrast to the omnipresent and somewhat unreliable “birch trees” of Arcos Soto's novel, many other iconic aspects of the legacy of the Soviet-Cuban union are lived in the present in The Project of the Century. For instance, one scene begins in the apartment's kitchen with the familiar bantering; then the camera cuts to the Pasacaballos-CEN ferry, slowly zooming in on one after another person who worked at or around the CEN of Juraguâ. The grandfather's voice is heard, though he is no longer seen, identifying the passengers for his grandson (and by extension, the film's spectators). Among those who endure this historical limbo are a shriveled-up woman who “drove a crane for more than twenty years,” a Russian teacher who taught the language to many denizens of this unusual and dystopian place, including to Otto's son Rafael (prior to his studying in the USSR), and “one of the creators of the Nuclear Television, the station from the CEN.” The limbo-like mood of the ferry ride in The Project of the Century could easily remind viewers of the orphanhood from the Soviet period that pervades Antonio José Ponte's short story “Heart of Skitalietz” (1998) or his novel Contrabando de sombras (Trafficking in Shadows, 2002). Yet there is a metatextual element that hovers over the discourse evidenced in the following question that interrupts the spectators' fullblown yielding to the sense of decay. About that TV man on the ferry, the voice-over wonders, “What might they have done with all that was filmed?”—a playfully metatextual question given that The Project of the Century weaves the local footage brilliantly into the film. In another scene from the archive, a caption appears on (p- 666) screen, “CEN Nuclear Television Presents la Obra del Siglo,” referencing the nuclear plant and simultaneously the film we are watching, a reconstruction of life in the aftermath of “la obra del siglo” (the project of the century). In fact, the film's cuts between the past and the present rhetoric make it difficult to ever look at the present with the same eye. Attention to how the ideology of the future leaves its mark on the present extends into the film's soundtrack. Sounds from the era in which a given character was formed, like that of the grandiose rocket, become representative of the chaos of the character's mind in the present. In this way, the film manifests the interconnectedness of the echoic and visual registers in the post-Soviet Cuban memory.
From the melancholic ferry scene, we arrive onto the television screen with a voice-over that is purportedly excited and patriotic, conveying recent events concerning the supremacy of Cuban champions and Cuban sports. And yet we learn, Cuba “won just two gold medals four years ago” and has a lot to prove. Here, we can see the extent to which the revolutionary visual rhetoric continues to operate in the present, in a manner that is comparable to the past. The archive similarly pays attention to quantities; for example, the city being constructed for the plant workers will be 4.5 km from the plant, cover 20 hectares, and house units of 4, 5, 12, and 18 floors. It is as if images from the archive could have appeared within Alejandro González Méndez's Re-construction, where, for a second, the holiday center for the workers of Juraguá evokes a reward from 9550—a trip to a dacha in the Soviet world, rather than a resort in the Caribbean; that is to say, something akin to the future that González Méndez so aptly captures in the reflexive picnic and Arcos Soto evokes in his sometimes disturbing maps of the Soviet-Cuban world.
The awareness that a national legacy is being forged permeates all of the archival footage that is included in The Project of the Century (see Figure 28.5). One of the most captivating of archival sequences is that of the International Women's Day in 1986, wherein the camera, having zoomed in seductively on the backside of a black Cuban woman, zooms out onto a construction site of Juragua, suggesting that the female backside is no longer simply part of that “wilderness of the everyday,” but the product of the nation's ideas for the future. Multiple interviewees who were building the plant came from all over Cuba and described their feeling toward the project. Working on it was like being part of “a single family” and “an active part of the scientific future.” The film's ability to capture the affective fervor of the mid-1980s accomplishes three things simultaneously: it puts forth the possibility of another moment prior to the breakdown of the socialist collective and/or individual family unit, as evidenced in the works under analysis, at the same time that it makes viewers reflect upon that idealistic moment in their own lives and also question more critically the prism through which they view the present—a present that, as seen on the television and in the vocabularies of some of the characters, reproduces the rhetoric of the past, despite having witnessed the decay of multiple mega projects.
At times, spectators feel that, more than realism or “social realism,” they are peeking into science fiction or even surrealism.46 In fact, Machado Quintela suggested just that:
Page 18 of 24
The movie is realist when it has to be, and when it doesn't, it simply changes tone and becomes something else. With surrealism, we reinterpreted the true story (what (p- 667) happened there) and it helps us analyze what happened from another perspective, it obliges us to leave fiction and when you return, your eyes are not the same and you don't have in mind just the narrated story ... .If the unfinished buildings were only buildings and not rockets, if going into the cosmos wasn't spoken about and you only saw the misery of the environment and the failure, it would be deceiving the very reality of the nuclear city.47
For instance, when Rafael finally brings home a woman to the apartment that he, his father, and son inhabit, his father suggests she have a look from the patio at the “planetarium” outside. That “planetarium” is actually the nuclear reactor, a play on “referents” that we saw operating in 9550 as well. The world of idealistic speculation continues to resonate within the imaginary of these characters, casting its net over the intimate encounter between Rafael, who studied engineering in the Soviet Union, and Marta, his new lover. She asks him to speak to her in Russian, as she recalls her former Russian-speaking lover—an exceptional moment, as it is difficult to recall any other such moment in recent Cuban memorialization, where we see Cuban men supplanted by Soviet Russians in the bedroom. That is to say, in a film without women protagonists, it is remarkable that a Cuban woman ruptures the myth of the insuperable Cuban lover, by way of a Soviet phantasm. As Rafael is speaking, the screen divides in two and briefly there appears, as a phantasm, his former Russian teacher, whom we already met on the ferry, helping out his pronunciation.
In conclusion, the aesthetic tools employed by González Méndez, Arcos Soto, and Machado Quintela defamilarize spectators and readers alike to the everyday, out of which ideas about the future were forged. They oblige us to look at the framework through which the Soviets and Cubans created their alliance for the masses, to see the past in relationship to the present, and to dissect the extent to which present-day comportment (p- 668) and ideology relate to the past. In this way, none of the three artists could be charged with participating in the “secret cult” of Soviet memorialization described by Rafael Rojas.48 Rather, they dissect and display the workings of memory, to which we have become inured. Their creative worlds are summoned in order to reveal ideology—its visual register traveling via “echoic rhetoric”—as embedded in our most intimate of moments.
Arcos Soto, Abel. 9550: Una interpretación del azul. Prague: Ediciones Fra, 2014.
Castro, Alina. “Tarará, la gran transformación de un pequeño pueblo.” Arquitectura y Urbanismo 22, no. 3 (2001): 32-37.
Crespo, Cecilia. “Carlos Machado Quintela: ‘Intenté filmar las secuelas de una utopia.” OnCuba, September 11, 2015. http://oncubamagazine.com/cultura/carlos-machado-quintela-intente-filmar-las-secuelas-de-una-utopia/.
Dobrenko, Evgeny. “Socialism as Will and Representation, or What Legacy Are We Rejecting?” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 4 (2004): 675-708.
Eaton, Marcia. “Truth in Pictures.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39, no. 1 (1980): 15-26.
EcuRed. s.v. “Televisión en Cuba,” EcuRed, https://www.ecured.cu/ Televisi%C3%B3n_en_Cuba.
Espinosa Domínguez, Carlos. “Un estreno francamente prometedor.” Cubaencuentro, November 14, 2014. https://www.cubaencuentro.com/cultura/articulos/un-estreno-francamente-prometedor-320912.
Filme “La obra del siglo” presenta en Brasil una cara poco conocida de Cuba.” Cubanet, June 22, 2015. https://www.cubanet.org/mas-noticias/filme-la-obra-del-siglo-pre-senta-en-brasil-una-cara-poco-conocida-de-cuba/.
Gónzalez Méndez, Alejandro. Dossier (2005-2018). https:// incubadorista.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/alejandro-gonzalez-dossier-2018-03.pdf/.
Gónzalez Méndez “Intento generar una verdad fotográfica.” Vistar, July 19, 2015. http:// vistarmagazine.com/alejandro-gonzalez-intento-generar-una-verdad-fotografica/.
Hansing, Katrin. Rasta, Race and Revolution: The Emergence and Development of the Rastafari Movement in Socialist Cuba. Berlin: LIT Verlag Münster, 2006.
“‘Historias Diferidas,' by Alejandro González & José A. Figueroa.” Uprising Art, February
4, 2013. http://blog.uprising-art.com/en/historias-diferidas-alejandro-gonzalez-jose-figueroa-2/.
Hobsbawm, Eric. “Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 1-15. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
La obra del siglo. Directed by Carlos Machado Quintela. Cuba: Uranio Films, 2015.
Loss, Jacqueline. Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.
Nora, Pierre. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Rodríguez, Juan Carlos. “Cinematic Ruinologies: Alamar and the Cuban Soviet Urban Imaginary in Contemporary Cuban Documentaries.” La Habana Elegante (November 2015). http://www.habanaelegante.com/November_2015/
Rojas, Rafael. “Alejandro González Méndez y la Re-construcción de la Cuba soviética.” Libros del crepúsculo, December 23, 2015. http://www.librosdelcrepusculo.net/ 2015/12/alejandro-gonzalez-mendez-y-la-re.html.
Scott, Joan W “Fantasy Echo and the Construction of Identity.” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 284-304.
(p. 671) Tertz, Abram (Andrei Sinyavksy). The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism. Translated by George Dennis. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1960.
Vincze, Teréz. “Remembering Bodies: Picturing the Body in Hungarian Cinema after the Fall of Communism.” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 7, no. 2 (2016): 153-167.
Yoss. “What the Russians Left Behind.” Translated by Daniel W Koon. In Caviar with Rum: Cuba-USSR and the Post-Soviet Experience, edited by J. Loss and J. M. Prieto, 211-225. New York: Palgrave, 2012.
(1.) For an intricate and thoughtful analysis of Cuban-Soviet urban imaginary in films by Damián Bandín Carnero, Karin Losert, and Enrique Colina, see Juan Carlos Rodríguez, “Cinematic Ruinologies: Alamar and the Cuban Soviet Urban Imaginary in Contemporary Cuban Documentaries,” La Habana Elegante 57 (2015), http://www.habanaelegante.com/ November_2015/Invitation_Rodriguez.html.
(2.) I have borrowed this definition of the corporealization of history from Teréz Vincze, “Remembering Bodies: Picturing the Body in Hungarian Cinema after the Fall of Communism,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 7, no. 2 (2016): 165.
(3.) See Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
(4.) See Eric Hobsbawm, “Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1-15.
(5.) Alejandro González, “Intento generar una verdad fotográfica,” Vistar, July 19, 2015, http://vistarmagazine.com/alejandro-gonzalez-intento-generar-una-verdad-fotografica/.
(6.) Joan W Scott, “Fantasy Echo and the Construction of Identity,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 287.
(7.) Alejandro González Méndez, Dossier (2005-2018), 91, https:// incubadorista.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/alejandro-gonzalez-dossier-2018-03.pdf.
(8.) Alejandro González Méndez, Dossier, 91, https://incubadorista.files.wordpress.com/ 2018/04/alejandro-gonzalez-dossier-2018-03.pdf.
(9.) Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavksy), On Socialist Realism, trans. George Dennis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 200.
(10.) See Alina Castro, “Tarará, la gran transformación de un pequeño pueblo,” Arquitectura y Urbanismo 22, no. 3 (2001): 32-37.
(11.) One part of the story of Cuba's role in the treatment of victims from Chernobyl is narrated in the 2018 film entitled A Translator, directed by Cuban/Canadian brothers, Rodrigo and Sebastian Barriuso.
(12.) Evgeny Dobrenko, “Socialism as Will and Representation, or What Legacy Are We Rejecting?” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 4 (2004): 699.
(13.) Rafael Rojas, “Alejandro González Méndez y la Re-construcción de la Cuba soviética,” Libros del crepúsculo, December 23, 2015, http://www.librosdelcrepusculo.net/ 2015/12/alejandro-gonzalez-mendez-y-la-re.html.
(14.) González Méndez, Dossier, 24.
(15.) González Méndez, Dossier, 27.
(16.) González Méndez, Dossier, 23.
(17.) Marcia Eaton, “Truth in Pictures,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39, no. 1 (1980): 16.
(18.) “‘Historias Diferidas,' by Alejandro González & José A. Figueroa,” Uprising Art, February 4, 2013, http://blog.uprising-art.com/en/historias-diferidas-alejandro-gonzalez-jose-figueroa-2/.
(19.) All translations of 9550 are mine. Ábel Arcos Soto, 9550: Una posible interpretación del azul (Prague: éditions fra, 2013), 24.
(20.) Arcos Soto, 9550, 25.
(21.) González Méndez, Dossier, 18.
(22.) Arcos Soto, 9550, 46.
(23.) Arcos Soto, 9550, 28.
(24.) Arcos Soto, 9550, 46.
(25.) EcuRed, s.v. “Televisión en Cuba,” EcuRed, https://www.ecured.cu/ Televisi%C3%B3n_en_Cuba.
(26.) Katrin Hansing, Rasta, Race and Revolution: The Emergence and Development of the Rastafari Movement in Socialist Cuba (Berlin: LIT Verlag Münster, 2006), 41-142.
(27.) Arcos Soto, 9550, 141.
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(28.) Jacqueline Loss, with Anya von Bremzen, Ana M. Dopico, Elzbieta Matynia, Virag Molnar, José M. Prieto, and Abel Sierra Madero, “Grown-Up Children from State Socialist Regimes,” Cuba Material, September 25, 2015, http://cubamaterial.com/pioneros/events/ panel-grown-up-children
(29.) Arcos Soto, 9550, 93.
(30.) Arcos Soto, 9550, 137.
(31.) Arcos Soto, 9550, 137.
(32.) Arcos Soto, 9550, 138.
(33.) Arcos Soto, 9550, 73.
(34.) Arcos Soto, 9550, 76.
(35.) Azul (Blue) is a book of stories and poems by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, one of the initiators of modernismo, published in 1888.
(36.) Arcos Soto, 9550, 29.
(37.) See Jacqueline Loss, Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012).
(38.) Arcos Soto, 9550, 16.
(39.) Carlos Espinosa Domínguez, “Un estreno francamente prometedor,” Cubaencuentro, November 14, 2014, http://www.cubaencuentro.com/cultura/articulos/un-estreno-franca-mente-prometedor-320912.
(40.) Arcos Soto, 9550, 11.
(41.) Arcos Soto, 9550, 12.
(42.) “Filme ‘La obra del siglo' presenta en Brasil una cara poco conocida de Cuba,” Cubanet, June 22, 2015, https://www.cubanet.org/mas-noticias/filme-la-obra-del-siglo-pre-senta-en-brasil-una-cara-poco-conocida-de-cuba/.
(43.) Julio García Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema,” trans. Julianne Burton, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 20 (1979), https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlines-says/JC20folder/ImperfectCinema.html.
(44.) Cecilia Crespo, “Carlos Machado Quintela: ‘Intenté filmar las secuelas de una utopia,” OnCuba, September 11, 2015, http://oncubamagazine.com/cultura/carlos-macha-do-quintela-intente-filmar-las-secuelas-de-una-utopia/.
(45.) Dean Luis Reyes, “Entrevista al cineasta Carlos Machado Quintela,” Cuban Art News, December 3, 2015, http://www.cubanartnews.org/es/news/in-conversation-carlos-machado/4954
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(46.) Crespo, “Carlos Machado Quíntela."
(47.) Crespo, “Carlos Machado Quíntela."
(48.) Rojas, “Alejandro González Méndez y la Re-construccíón de la Cuba soviética."
Jacqueline Loss
Jacqueline Loss, Professor of Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Connecticut
Komunistki: Visual Memory of Female Communist Agency a
Aga Skrodzka
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Jan 2020 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.30
This article argues for the importance of preserving the visual memory of female communist agency in today's Poland, at the time when the nation's relationship to its communist past is being forcefully rearticulated with the help of the controversial Decommunization Act, which affects the public space of the commons. The wholesale criminalization of communism by the ruling conservative forces spurred a wave of historical and symbolic revisions that undermine the legacy of the communist women's movement, contributing to the continued erosion of women's rights in Poland. By looking at recent cinema and its treatment of female communists as well as the newly published accounts of the communist women's movement provided by feminist historians and sociologists, the project sheds light on current cultural debates that address the status of women in postcommunist Poland and the role of leftist legacy in such debates.
Keywords: communist agency, female communists, Wanda Jakubowska, visual commons, feminism, Polish public memory, memory wars
I'm a fierce and unrelenting Communist.
—Wanda Jakubowska1
For it was precisely success—success even in her own world of revolutionaries— which was withheld from Rosa Luxemburg in life, death, and after death. Can it be that the failure of all her efforts as far as official recognition is concerned is somehow connected with the dismal failure of revolution in our century? Will history look different if seen through the prism of her life and work?
—Hanna Arendt2
On March 13, 2018, the city of Zamosc, Poland, saw the removal of the plaque commemorating the birthplace of its most famous citizen—Rosa Luxemburg (born Rozalia Luksen-
Page 1 of 22 burg), the leader of the Polish and international socialist workers' movement and renowned Marxist economist. The plaque was removed by the city authorities upon a directive issued by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance in compliance with the recently adopted Decommunization Act, which bans “promoting” the communist regime, along with public commemoration of persons, organizations, events, and dates that “symbolize” the regime, defined by the law as the “repressive, authoritarian and unsovereign system of governance in Poland during 1944-1989.”3 The invocation of the new law, which led to the removal of Rosa Luxemburg's marker from the city's register of public memory, was initiated by a concerned citizen of Zamosc, who remains anonymous.
A lifelong pacifist, Rosa Luxemburg, whose unrelenting critique of the Bolshevik dictatorship made her a controversial figure in the early socialist movement, and whose radical communist views landed her in jail cells of Germany and Poland, was murdered on January 15, 1919, during the Spartacist Uprising in Berlin, decades before the installation (p. 673) of communism in Poland. Expunging her name from Polish public memory today, on account of its metonymic connection to the regime whose crimes she would most likely vehemently condemn, is not just careless rewriting of history, but an act of the new wave of what Shari Cohen has called “organized forgetting.”4 Cohen used this term in reference to the process of intense history reconstruction arranged along the convenient ideological lines after World War II by the socialist states across East Central Europe. Today similar reconstruction is taking place in the region, but this time the history is being rewritten by a different power—the populist, right-wing governments that push against both liberal democracy and the legacy of local leftist movements. Public historical consciousness, which is shaped by cultural articulations, has become the battleground, where political agency, and the empowerment derived from it, is being redefined as a domain of the national subject, whose imagined hypernormative contours are all too familiar. Needless to say, Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish woman of Jewish origins, disabled, feminist, leftist, childless, emigrant, and highly educated, does not easily fit into such contours.
In the narrative that follows, I focus on visual articulations that comment on female communist agency in the Polish context as a historical memory—a construct that may impact how women in Poland imagine their political potential today and in the future. I argue that the images of komunistki (Polish word for “female communists”) that have recently,5 if reluctantly, entered the visual media landscape disclose not only a collective unease about communist legacy, but more damagingly an unease about women's radical political agency. If ever actualized, this agency threatens not only to deconstruct the consecrated national myths but also to circumvent the claims of Western style feminism (with its emphasis on individual autonomy and personal freedom), identity politics, and liberal democratic ideas of gender equality, in its struggle against the patriarchal and authoritarian strictures that underpin the capitalist economy and all of the civic institutions (whether liberal or conservative) that such an economy supports.
The highly contentious public debates that continue in Poland on the topic of communist legacy now include the role of politically active women who participated in building the new socialist state after World War II. In many ways, the project of narrating the lives of those female political activists is a project of recovery that unfolds against the double dismissal of the communist women's movement by the imported Western-style Polish feminist movement as well as by the anticommunist nationalist movement within the current conservative government. The unbiased portrait of a komunistka would have to rise above the clichés of Soviet-era propaganda images of female tractorists, now highly commodified and ridiculed by liberal feminists and right-wing populists alike, and the graphic tales of terror circulated on the right-wing media platforms about the perverted exploits of female agents of the Stalinist secret police, whose appetite for sex and (p- 674) violence had no equal.6 But more than anything, such a portrait would have to overcome the uncomfortable representational impasse that tends to accompany radical female agency in Polish cultural discourses.
Dominated by grotesque and overdetermined tropes, the female communist agency is, therefore, only problematically present in Polish visual memory, a fact confirmed by recent cinematic expressions on the subject, which will be analyzed later in this chapter. Its portrait is not easily summoned in the context of collective remembrance and as such speaks of the glaring omission in the history of Polish feminist activism, a fact recently pointed out and carefully analyzed by sociologist Magdalena Grabowska.7 This is at the time when the ruling national conservatives actively and openly work to harness and maximize the reproductive potential of Polish women. A wide array of social benefits that encourage women to procreate, provide childcare, and perform housework have resulted in effectively taking them off the job market and potentially removing them from the public sphere, increasing the gender gap in economic ability, and depoliticizing their lives.8 Other conservative legislative proposals are conspicuously directed against women's rights,9 and are seen as part of the gradual, yet steadfast, dismantling of the democratic rule in today's Poland.10 Arguably, the situation calls for a radical social change, generated through organized group action, planned and performed by women. Such action has been modeled, theorized, and documented for much of the twentieth century by socialist and communist activists such as Rosa Luxemburg, the members of the Polish Women's League, and the female party cadre of the Women's Department of the Polish Workers' Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, PPR), and after 1948, the Polish United Workers' Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, PZPR). To remember komunistki is to remember political dissent, coalition politics, and collective bargaining that moved female emancipation project beyond models of marriage, family, couplehood, couple romance, and bourgeois notions of love and sexual desire, all of which have been naturalized and capitalized on by the neoliberal economic and social compromise since the collapse of communism in Poland. The democratic intervention that foregrounds women's interests in today's Poland cannot afford to forget the legacy of komunistki if it is to involve women of all generations, ethnicities, social classes, sexual orientations, and degrees of bodily ability.
Arguably, the work of imagination that is involved in planning any social change, depicting it as a potential to be realized, requires access to visual register, here visual memory of the past revolutions. Polish women who are in the streets today trying to protect their rights are not solitary, aberrant individuals, as characterized by the official conservative propaganda channels that deploy a sophisticated media spectacle using public, tax-funded platforms. Rather, they are members of a community of like-minded women, working together on a social project, whose beginnings can be traced back to the socialist activism of the late nineteenth century, as well as the communist women's movement, which developed under state socialism. If recovered, the visual memory of female communist agency may enhance, by articulating a certain historical continuity and embodied form, the contemporary Polish women's “right to look”—a term coined by Nicholas Mirzoeff to describe the radical oppositional look that works to undermine (p- 675) the authority of a dogmatic visual regime, which otherwise works to classify, segregate, and aestheticize political subjects in order to prevent their organization and unionization.11
In the ensuing sections, I will analyze two recent Polish films that take as their subject the historical figure of a female communist in order to consider how such cinematic representations contribute to the cultural debate over the relevance of communist legacy today and how they attempt to visualize the female political agency. Before proceeding, I stop to look at Erich Lessing's 1956 photograph of a girl visiting the Lenin Museum in Poronin, Poland (see Figure 29.1).12 At the time of the photograph, Lessing was already working as a photojournalist for an international photographic cooperative, Magnum Photos. In 1956-1957, he traveled to Poland to document life under communism in the young People's Republic of Poland. The cache of photographs from this period includes images of Polish women working in the traditionally male trades. There are shots of female miners and rail workers. But Lessing also documents the first beauty contest in the communist Poland—women in swimsuits competing for the “Miss Sopot” title, while huge crowds gather to watch the pageant at the seaside resort. Framed by a Western photographer, a visitor from behind the Iron Curtain, these candid photos are valuable documents that enter into a nuanced dialogue with the visual archive of women's portraits constructed by the communist propagandists. The image that portrays a young girl looking up at the bust of Lenin is particularly captivating. In what feels like an intimate moment of contemplation, the girl exercises her “right to look” at (p- 676) Lenin in solitude, at the time when Polish communists are reevaluating their connection to Marxism-Leninism as the country enters the Thaw period. While the viewer of the photograph will not know what the girl is thinking in this very moment, Lessing captures her critical gaze. The girl's age, her petite stature, and the low angle of her gaze do not diminish her position; on the contrary, one has the impression that Lenin (and all that his bust may symbolize) has never undergone such independent scrutiny. I see Lessing's photograph as a visual metaphor of the complex, highly problematic, and largely forgotten relationship of Polish women to the radical leftist agency. Subtly, the image also speaks of the future potential of such agency.
Photograph © Erich Lessing/Magnum Photos
In 2015, Pawel Pawlikowski's film Ida won the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film. The first such distinction ever awarded to a Polish film (actually a Polish-Danish coproduction), it spurred a national debate over the film's merit and its direct commentary on the Polish-Jewish relations during World War II and the era of Stalinism. Arguably, the film moves to address the two most controversial aspects of the history of the twentieth-century Polish-Jewish relations: the participation of Poles in the anti-Jewish violence during and after World War II and the role of the Jewish-Polish communists in the Stalinist crimes of the 1950s. This bifocal vision led to charges of both anti-Semitism and anti-Polish sentiment directed against the film and the filmmaker. The media debates surrounding Pawlikowski's film as well as the film's language itself inform the ongoing process of Polish post-Wall identity construction and its gender/ethnic politics. My analysis here focuses specifically on the role of women as leaders and activists in the communist project and the film's attempt to engage this aspect of the Polish communist legacy.
In Women, Communism and Industrialization in Postwar Poland, the historian Malgorzata Fidelis argues that much of the existing popular and scholarly literature on the status of women during communism disseminates a misleading image of female passivity and victimization, when in fact the communist regime—mainly during the Stalin era—encouraged Polish women of different ethnic backgrounds to assume political, social, and economic power as part of the communist egalitarian project, resulting in mass female employment and women developing multiple identities in addition to the narrow role of wife and mother.13 In a related publication, Fidelis reviews the communist vision of modernity, paying close attention to how female agency was configured within this vision.14 Contesting the assumption that feminism began in Poland in 1989, Fidelis emphasizes the fact that communism gave Polish women the legislative power in areas of equal pay, inheritance, and access to traditionally male occupations long before such legal emancipation was extended to women in Western Europe and the United States. As her main
Page 5 of 22 archive, Fidelis cites extended interviews with Polish working women, whose productive years spanned the decades between 1940s and 1960s. These (p- 677) conversations, conducted by the author, consistently testify to women's pride, sense of accomplishment, material satisfaction, and professional identification derived from work as industrial workers. In many ways, these narratives offer first-person accounts of female agency enabled by the communist system, and therefore stand in direct opposition to the tired stereotype of woman as victim of communism.
Against the regime of forgetting, which has taken hold of the Polish public memory since 1989 in an effort to distance the Polish national identity from the vilified communist past, Fidelis insists that we must make an effort to unearth women's contributions as agents of social and political change, as subjects who shaped and built communism, even if the international communist project ultimately failed. Along with Agnieszka Mrozik, Magdalena Grabowska, Natalia Jarska, Malgorzata Dajnowicz, and Barbara A. Nowak, Fidelis belongs to the new generation of Polish female scholars, who have taken on the meticulous task of recovering the contentious history of komunistki in order to document the legacy of women's social and political activism in the Polish People's Republic (1947-1989) and, by doing so, repair what Grabowska calls the “torn genealogy” of the Polish women's movement.15
In her seminal research on the biographies of the female communist leaders of the Stalin era,16 Agnieszka Mrozik argues that the contemporary Polish identity formation, including its feminist iteration, depends on the compulsive exile of the female communist agency from its official inheritance, but also the simultaneous recycling of it as “useful waste” that offers a convenient discursive material, against which one defines one's status quo and secures a privileged position within the current political system.17 Further, she argues that the anticommunist sentiments in post-Wall Poland fuel the vehement rejection (mostly among, but not limited to, the right-wing political and cultural formations) of both women's rights as well as the Jewish rights. Somehow, in the course of the post-1989 identity reconstruction, communism became feminized and “semitized.” Not to mention, the said reconstructive discourse oftentimes feminizes the Jewish identity and frequently “semitizes” the feminist voices. Mrozik is not afraid to point out how even the liberal and left-leaning groups within the Polish feminist movement today feel the need to renounce the communist legacy wholesale in order to consolidate their hard-earned post-1989 positions of power within the patriotic and nationalistic mainstream.18 Their widespread rhetorical move to reach beyond the history of the Polish People's Republic and into the pre-WWII era in order to find the acceptable models of Polish feminist identity (with its safe positivist connotations of social welfare and women's suffrage) strikes Mrozik as an example of self-purging, where the communist legacy becomes the abject material that must be deleted and silenced.
According to both Fidelis and Mrozik, this silencing began in October of 1956 with Gomulka's Thaw, when Poland began its de-Stalinization period, during which the Stalin era's professional inclusion of women into politics and industry was suddenly criminalized and pathologized as a perverse time of gender disharmony and ethnic imbalance. In
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Fidelis's words, “After Stalin's death in 1953, Polish communists found that one of the most effective ways to garner support for reforms of the system and establish legitimacy of the poststalinist regime was to deploy the images of sexual disorder and (p- 678) violation of natural gender roles symbolized by working women.”19 Post-Stalinists blamed the failure of the previous regime on the active presence of Jews and women in the leadership positions of the Polish Communist Party (PZPR) as well as the working world in general. In a provocative gesture, Mrozik compares today's compulsive attempts to whitewash the Polish identity (specifically Polish feminist identity) as organically anticommunist to Gomulka's rhetorical manipulation regarding the communist identity of the Polish People's Republic. By denouncing the foreign Stalinist politics, which empowered somehow “less-than-Polish” subjects—females and Jews—Gomulka silenced the agency and accomplishments of female workers and party activists.20 Another communist self-purge with a nationalistic inflection took place in Poland in March of 1968, this time focused solely on the Jewish members of the communist state apparatus. In practice, this government-sanctioned anti-Semitic campaign extended to a mass expulsion from public life, and eventual physical exile, of more than 13,000 Jewish-Polish citizens (including many Jewish-Polish political leaders and activists) from different strata of society, regardless of their actual involvement in the communist regime.21
Set in 1962, Pawlikowski's Ida comments on the exit of the communist legacy from Polish history in a number of complicated ways. It is not surprising that Pawlikowski, a transnational filmmaker who directed films that challenge the nationalist paradigm—films such as Dostoyevsky's Travels (1991), Serbian Epics (1992), and Last Resort (2000)—would make a film about the Jewish-Polish relations set during the period when they were still somewhat shaped by the vision of communist internationalism. (Here, very carefully, I would like to gesture toward a certain parallel between the contemporary transnational identity and the early twentieth-century ideals of international communism). In itself, I argue, Ida visualizes, and replays, the symbolic exit of the international (perhaps a-national) female communist leadership from the annals of Polish (and world) history via its central scene: the scene of self-killing performed by the female Jewish-Polish communist. Through this scene and through a number of carefully orchestrated aesthetic strategies, the film speaks of the continued impossibility of returning the Jewish-Polish communist women, whose ideology of universal emancipation moved beyond the class, ethnic, religious, and national boundaries, to their proper place in history and in contemporary political landscape.
Ida's script was coauthored by Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz, a British playwright, whose most successful play Her Naked Skin (2008) features the militant wing of the British suffrage movement and opens with a scene of a suffragette's suicide. Ida tells the story of a novitiate nun, Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), who as a war-time orphan grew up in a convent, and whom the viewer meets in the weeks leading up to her vows ceremony. At the start of the film she is called into the office of the Mother Superior (Halina Skoczynska) and informed that she must travel to the city to meet with her only living relative, her aunt Wanda Gruz (Agata Kulesza). Upon meeting Wanda, Anna quickly finds out that her birth name is Ida Lebenstein and that she is the only survivor of her Jewish
Page 7 of 22 family, who perished during World War II. In the course of their brief acquaintance, Wanda also discloses, in a fragmented exposé, that she had a young son, (p- 679) whom she left with Ida's parents, when she decided to join the communist war effort. Her child and Ida's family were killed in uncertain circumstances after first hiding with a Polish family, whom Wanda contracted to protect her relatives. In a number of separate conversations, Ida, along with the viewer, finds out that Wanda, who is now a minor judge in a provincial town, used to be a state prosecutor in the show trials during Poland's volatile postwar transition period, when communists consolidated their power. She informs Ida that she “sent men to their deaths,” referring to death sentences passed by the communist authorities on partisan fighters who continued to carry out military resistance after the communist government had been installed in Poland after the war's end.22
After learning about her family's fate, Ida asks her aunt to take her to the family's grave. Wanda quickly replies that most likely there is no grave, but she agrees to take Ida to where the family lived and where they died. What follows engages the conventions of the road movie, and the viewer sets out on a trip alongside the two female characters. On the way to Ida's birthplace, they meet a hitchhiker (Dawid Ogrodnik) who is a saxophone player, going to a gig in the town where Wanda and Ida will stay while they visit the countryside in search of their family's resting place. Once they reach their destination, the women locate their family house, now occupied by the family of Feliks Skiba (Adam Szyszkowski), the son of the Polish man who hid the Jewish family during the war. Wanda, who seems to know that the peasant is accountable for the deaths of her family, confronts Feliks. He agrees to show the women where their family is buried, but not before Ida, the rightful heir to her parents' property, is forced to renounce all claims to the house and the land now occupied by Feliks. He then leads the women to an unmarked grave in the woods. While he digs up the remnants of the bodies from the shallow grave, Feliks confesses to murdering Ida's parents and Wanda's young son. When Ida demands to know why Feliks spared her own life, he explains that as a baby “she was too young to be identified as Jewish” and therefore he decided to give her away to a local priest. The women collect the bones and decide to bury them in a family burial plot in a Jewish cemetery in Lublin. Soon after, Wanda kills herself, and Ida, after a brief affair with the young saxophonist, decides to return to the convent.
While the film's title as well as the manner in which the narrative is bookended by Ida's departure from and return to the convent would suggest the film's investment in the younger character, the film's dramatic impetus resides with Wanda, who is the main agent of action throughout the duration of the story. Interviewed by Malgorzata Sadows-ka, Pawlikowski discloses that Wanda was inspired by the lives of female Jewish-Polish communist activists such as Helena Wolinska-Brus (1919-2008) and Julia Brystiger (1902-1975).23 The director recalls meeting the former in Oxford, where she lived with her husband, Wlodzimierz Brus, who used to be Pawlikowski's university professor. The Bruses moved to the United Kingdom as a result of the 1968 expulsion from Poland. Pawlikowski mentions going to their house for tea and befriending the “charming old lady.” Much later in his life, he found out that Wolinska-Brus was a state prosecutor during the Stalin era in Poland and was involved in the state-sanctioned violence directed against
Page 8 of 22 the “enemies of socialism.” Pawlikowski talks about his (p- 680) fascination with the complexity of Wolinska-Brus's life and his desire to make a documentary about her, a project in which she ultimately did not agree to participate. In the same interview, he states, “I like women like Wanda—full of passion, fueled by an idea, sensual, but simultaneously intellectual, stuck in a quandary, wise, but at the same time naive, ending up in a cul-de-sac.”24 When interviewed by Leonard Quart for Cineaste, Pawlikowski talks about the character of Wanda at length in terms of her ideological investment and her pure faith in communism:
She (Wanda) experienced the country's loss of ideals and sense of purpose. However horrible Stalinism was for a certain generation, for ten years after the war there was an idealistic upsurge. A lot of intellectuals went with it, including Milan Kundera in Czechoslovakia and Ryszard Kapuscinski in Poland, who were all Marxists. Since they were idealistic, and did not quite want to see the collateral damage that was occurring, they got off on this narrative. For after the loss of the national idea, and the reduction of nationalism to absurdity in the shape of Hitler, the universalist idea of Marxism became appealing to young people.25
The critical interpretations of Wanda's character are highly polarized. Some see her as tragic and ultimately martyred by the filmic text, a woman betrayed by the system, whose personal sacrifices in the name of communism had been wasted by those whom she be-lieved.26 Others see her as a damaging anti-Semitic stereotype of a communist criminal— a perpetually drunk, perversely sexualized, heartless, and driven-by-revenge Jew.27 Piotr Forecki offers an in-depth analysis of Pawlikowski's character in relation to the highly problematic discursive formation of “zydokomuna" (Judeo-communism)28—a narrative that blames the Jewish-Polish political activists of the post-World War II period for the forceful implementation of communism in Poland, which, the narrative insists, has always been a country “organically incapable” of adopting communism.29 Arguing that “Judeo-communism” functions as a condensed and convenient anti-Semitic trope that continues to be used in the process of the Polish postcommunist national identity consolidation, Forecki rightly observes that some of the emblematic figures of the Stalin-era communist leadership, who happened to be Poles of Jewish ethnicity, have been assigned a phantasmatic quality of bogeymen—the frightening foreign agents of communist terror. Forecki notes that this negative symbolic value is especially used in reference to komunistki.30
I argue that Wanda Gruz played by Agata Kulesza is neither the victim nor the perpetrator that the reviewers interpret her to be. Kulesza's performance exceeds the confines of her stereotypical role, and the carefully orchestrated exit of Wanda from her window does not allow the viewer to become immersed in tragic pathos. Pawlikowski uses the film form to create Wanda outside and apart from history,31 alienated from its course. Through such treatment he calls the viewer's attention to a certain discursive gesture taking place in the contemporary Polish culture—the wholesale disavowal of the communist project along with the memory of the many female lives that were once genuinely committed to it, dismissing those lives' real accomplishments and their investment in the still unrealized project.
(p. 681) The film constructs the female radical subject as pacified presence. Much like her niece who lives in a convent, Wanda drowns in silence, stripped of the symbolic and political power that she once wielded. Throughout the film she appears on screen in minimalist images, often captured at the edge of the frame, weighed down by her physical surroundings. Along with the material trappings that serve as reminders of her former privileged life (the expensive Camel cigarettes and the record player), the film meticulously documents the vestiges of Wanda's former agency, including her revolutionary activity before and during the war. In her measured performance, Agata Kulesza shows how Wanda's daily activities—her walking, eating, smoking, fucking, sleeping, and bathing—are shaped by her, now-compromised, radical agency. Kulesza's body language speaks of purposeful action, minimized affect, unsentimental and unapologetic directness. Kulesza's Wanda has rid herself of the quaint rules that govern the bourgeois decorum with regard to feminine conduct. This portrayal is further emphasized by the film's investment in silent action and movement at the expense of dialogue. The viewer gets to fully appreciate Wanda's emancipation from the strictures of the traditional norms dictated for her gender only after she had exited the diegetic world of the film, when her niece once again arrives in Wanda's apartment and for a while impersonates her aunt. We see the young nun strip out of her religious garments and literally try to walk in her aunt's shoes. The viewer watches Ida as she awkwardly smokes her first cigarette, wobbles about on high heels, and drinks vodka straight from a bottle. The contrast is stunning. Ida's imitation of Wanda underscores the loss that the older woman's death embodies—the loss of the fully articulated, self-aware, female authority. But it is the scene of Wanda's suicide that best represents the symbolic divestment of the female communist subject.
Before she kills herself, Wanda eats and bathes. She puts on a record with Mozart's exuberant Jupiter Symphony. What follows shocks the viewer as an all-too-sudden diegetic and extradiegetic caesura. In an extended shot, the fixed camera looks onto a window in Wanda's empty living room as if preparing the stage. She then comes into the room, and the viewer's field of vision, and moves to open the window. She disappears off screen once more to put on her coat. When she returns, she is already engaged in her walk out of life. Without stopping or even pausing, Wanda ascends the windowsill and continues walking (see Figure 29.2). She never stops at the edge of the precipice. There is no hesitation, only calculated action. The scene of death takes place off screen. While one can interpret this as a well-rendered depiction of methodical suicide, the scene's internal structure invites another reading. Wanda leaves the diegetic space, walking away from the camera and disappearing through the window frame, whose shape, dimensions, and light distribution suggest a screen. The scene is minimalist, devoid of drama, and highly metacinematic in its structure. Because the camera does not follow Wanda and does not document her fall (and therefore the moment of her physical death), the exit gains an allegorical meaning: the character leaves the representational medium, the narrative, and the plane of vision. For a while longer, the shot continues to showcase the empty window opening, illuminated with the outside light and surrounded by the dark interior of the
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room—a screen in a darkened movie theater. The image speaks of absence: the cinematic (p. 682) apparatus is there, but it frames nothing. As such, it communicates the impossibility of representation for women like Wanda.
Frame capture
As Pawlikowski's camera (under the masterful control of Tukasz Zal) continues to linger on the window frame, the contrast of light and dark—the elemental ingredients of cinema —makes me think of the history of the medium and another communist Wanda, whose life and work have been symbolically eradicated much like the life of Wanda Gruz from Pawlikowski's story. I am thinking of the filmmaker Wanda Jakubowska (1907-1998; see Figure 29.3). Best known for her film about Auschwitz, The Last Stage (1947), Jakubows-ka—an Auschwitz survivor herself—was a committed communist, whose prolific filmmaking career and political engagement began well before World War II, in the socialist circles of the Warsaw intellectuals and artists, who lived in the same progressive housing development in the district of Zoliborz—the Warsaw Apartment Cooperative, founded in 1921 by the Polish Socialist Party activists. Involved in the creation of the collectivized system of film production units and the promotion of film education in the Polish People's Republic, Jakubowska was a political filmmaker as well as an activist with a clear vision of a cultural revolution based in ideals of communist internationalism.32 Her life's political and creative accomplishments were minimized and disparaged in the 1990s, during the era of anticommunist “lustration.”33 Only ever mentioned briefly and dismissively in Polish film scholarship, Jakubowska had to (p- 683) wait till 2015 for a fair Polish-language biography, informed by archival evidence.34 In the introduction to this book, the film historian and Women's Studies scholar Monika Talarczyk-Gubala, known for her film column published by the left-wing publication Political Critique (Krytyka Polityczna), explains that Jakubowska is a figure “effectively repressed” from the “living tradition” of Polish cinema. Talarczyk-Gubala adds that Jakubowska “was one of the prominent women born at the start of the twentieth century, who declared commitment to the leftist world-view,
precisely because it enabled the transgression of the ‘second sex,' guaranteed political subjectivity, and narrated the necessity for politicizing women's experience.”35
Photograph © Roman Sumik/Filmoteka Narodowa— Instytut Audiowizualny
Painstakingly researched, Jakubowska's biography paints a picture of a complicated life committed to leftist politics and politically engaged filmmaking. In meta-commentary interspersed throughout her narrative about the filmmaker, however, Talarczyk-Gubala frequently observes the difficulty of portraying Jakubowska anew. She speaks of the vanishing figure available to contemporary readers and cinephiles only as an afterimage, unfocused and blurred. When briefly mentioned in the memoirs of others, Jakubowska appears as a caricature summarily sketched out with visual tropes that refer to her as a physical, political, and professional aberration. Frequently described (p- 684) as strong, driven, and direct, she is also, according to her biographer, too often characterized as masculine, gender bending, unattractive, or queer. According to the historian, many referred to her as an ugly babochlop (Polish pejorative colloquialism referring to an androgynous figure)—a rhetorical gesture that configured female communist agency as a form of transgression. When trying to recover and represent Jakubowska's agency as the pioneer female filmmaker, Talarczyk-Gubala comments on how the process is all the more challenging because of the record of willful scholarly neglect with regard to the basic facts about Jakubowska's life, such as her birthdate, for example, erroneously reported in many sources as October 10, 1907, instead of November 10.
The careful reconstruction that the film historian undertakes works to undo Jakubowska's elimination from the history of Polish cinema as well as the history of Polish feminist activism. By framing her research findings as a biography, a portrait of sorts, richly illus-
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trated and full of vivid descriptions, Talarczyk-Gubala summons a simultaneously complex and emblematic representation of Jakubowska, returning the filmmaker (and her cinematic output) into the visual commons. Through her scrupulous work as a historian, Talarczyk-Gubala engages in “persistent looking,” which is how Mirzoeff describes the act of visual resistance that counters the hegemonic ways of organizing, systematizing, and aes-theticizing the subjects in history in order to bar them from political agency.36 This persistent portrait, then, serves as evidence that disturbs the established memory of Jakubows-ka and women like her. It complicates the memory of communism, and in the process it troubles the codes of Polish national mnemonic security. I summon this portrait here because, in her effort to rediscover the communist filmmaker, the author documents the systematic erasure of Jakubowska from Polish film history, whose most venerated arc plays up the tradition of anticommunist dissident filmmaking. The documented erasure of Jakubowska points to another dimension of organized forgetting, where the communist visual agency is queered in the act of its dismissal.
In 2016, the former anticommunist dissident filmmaker Ryszard Bugajski, known for his cult film Interrogation (Przesluchanie, 1982), released his response to Pawlikowski's controversial portrait of the Jewish-Polish Stalinist prosecutor. Blindness (Zacma) is a film that focuses on an episode from the life of Julia Brystiger, a high-ranking communist activist, who, as the unconfirmed, yet much circulated rumor suggests, sought the conversion to Catholicism in her retirement in order to atone for her crimes as a Stalinist security agent.37 The film focuses on Julia's alleged visit to a convent, located in a small town near Warsaw, where she is to meet with Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski (1901-1981; the
(p. 685) Primate of Poland with a much celebrated status of an anticommunist national hero, whose case for canonization is currently being reviewed by the Vatican). As Bugajski's film overstates, Julia seeks out Wyszynski to find guidance in her act of penance. The film presents the atheist, Jewish-Polish Julia, who in her position in the State Security Services was tasked with infiltrating the community of the Catholic Church leaders, as a person seized by a crisis of faith. The plot of the film spans only a few days and features the slow dismantling of her staunch communist conviction. In a spectacle of expiation, full of graphic scenes of sexualized violence that depict Brystiger, in flashback, in the midst of her alleged sadistic interrogations, the viewer first becomes privy to the interrogator's heavy conscience, only to witness her spiritual and ideological breakdown, illustrated by images of self-harm. Unlike Wanda Gruz, Brystiger is not granted an exit. Instead, the narrative pushes her to go on in the protracted process of personal expiation. As a public event that enters public memory, the film insinuates an act of confessional lustration.
Once again, I turn to a climactic scene centered on the imagined suicide of a komunistka. As in the case of Pawlikowski's film, the scene of the female communist's suicide is a liberty taken by the scriptwriter (Bugajski himself), who creatively interprets the biography of Julia Brystiger, who otherwise lived a long life and died of natural causes. Why does the film, then, insist on showing the woman engage in self-destruction? What kind of affective work does the film facilitate through making the scene structurally meaningful and later echoed in other scenes of self-harm?
While Ida affords us a meta-cinematic and largely allegorical reading of the imagined suicide, Blindness does not. After Julia arrives in the convent, her meeting with Cardinal Wyszynski is endlessly postponed. His assistants—a priest and a nun—take turns to inform Julia that the Cardinal cannot see her just yet. She must wait. The viewer quickly realizes that Julia is trapped and will have to go through many obstacles before she is granted an audience with the Cardinal. Spectatorial satisfaction is organized around the protracted testing of the female character and the sadistic look activated through such testing. This dynamic resembles the narrative set-up of a classic horror film, as theorized by Carol J. Clover.38 The film's publicity poster confirms this generic affinity (see Figure 29.4). The threatening world of the convent closes in on Julia, as she becomes the investigative agent who will move the narrative forward to satisfy her quest, as vaguely defined as it is. The villain in the story is Julia's own communist identity, more specifically her past agency as a communist activist. This complicates the film structurally as both the source of the horror and the agent who will ultimately bring it down is the same character. In the course of the film, she becomes the aberrant phallic female of the horror genre, wielding, in different hallucinatory scenes, a gun, a knife, and a whip as she becomes colonized by the force she is fighting. As in the horror formula defined by Clover, in Bugajski's film the female character is staged through scenes of abjection, slowly leading up to the ritual of cleansing at the end of the narrative.
Poster art by Andrzej Pqgowski. Courtesy of the artist
The first scene of abject terror features Julia's attempted suicide. After a long day of waiting in vain for her meeting with the Cardinal, she decides to give up on her quest and return home. Predictably, she finds herself unable to leave the small town. Someone (p- 686) (p. 687) slashes the tires in her car and she is forced to go back to the convent to continue her wait. Wet from the rain and exhausted, Julia retreats to a small room, where she is to spend the night. The camera shows her slumped down on her cot. She fumbles around in her handbag and pulls out a gun, which she promptly puts against her temple and shoots. The gun misfires. She makes only a halfhearted attempt to fix the jammed gun before she puts it away. She is unable to carry out her suicide. Or, more accurately, the genre requires Julia to undergo many more extreme tests, many of them somatic and visceral in their visual discharge. Her guilt must be ascertained and atoned for before forgiveness is granted. Julia's attempt at killing herself is echoed later in the film, in a dream scene, where she slashes her face with a knife, and again at the very end, where she is shown putting a metal cilice—a Catholic tool of corporal mortification—on her body.
Eventually, Julia gets to meet the Cardinal and confess her regret over her former life. They engage in a lengthy discussion about faith. This confession of a reformed communist along with the affective work of the film provide the viewer (especially one with a specific political expectation) the cathartic retelling of history, a desired corrective that assures one of the impossibility of an unapologetic komunistka. In the process, the abject figure of female communist agency is pacified. The woman who leaves the convent at the end of Blindness is no longer phallic. She has slain the villain (her former self) and can now be restored to the normative register of Polish femininity. In fact, at some point, Julia explicitly distances herself from her Jewish communist identity by arguing that her commit-
Page 15 of 22 ment to communism was a dybbuk possession. This rhetorical gesture is a not-so-subtle rehashing of the toxic Judeo-communism trope, which in the recent memory wars places Bugajski's film on the side of the Law and Justice party's vision of Polish history—a position already signaled by the filmmaker's earlier films: General Nil (General Nil, 2009) and Closed Circuit (Uklad zamkniety, 2013). While the fictitious spiritual transformation informs the viewer that “Bloody Luna”—Brystiger's nickname in the right-wing, anticommunist discourse—was in fact a guilt-ridden, fragile human, the visual and affective impetus of the film, structured along the organizing principles of the horror genre, and reproducing the possession narrative, very much performs and brings to the visual commons the grotesque construct of a bloodthirsty communist murderer.
In today's Poland ruled by the Law and Justice party, mnemonic security has been presented as the key national interest. Who, how, and for what purposes commemorates Polish history is now being articulated through the nation's memory laws, including the recent controversial amendment from February 2018, which aims to strictly control how Nazi and Soviet crimes are interpreted and how Polish responsibility is narrated in relation to such crimes. Poland like many other postcommunist Eastern European countries has a designated body with prosecutorial powers, the Institute of National (p- 688) Remembrance, to control its public sphere of commemoration. Although the memory laws make exceptions for artistic and scientific purposes, their language and the announced potential punitive measures (including fines and prison sentences up to three years) are designed to intimidate and silence those who wish to take up the more controversial events from the Polish past. Observers argue that the newly rearticulated law impedes reconciliation processes, rather than facilitating them.39 Aside from threatening prosecution for those who attribute to Poland the co-responsibility for the Nazi crimes, the amendment from February 2018 extends its prosecutorial mandate to the period of history between the dates of November 8, 1917, and July 31, 1990. Prior to the 2018 amendment, the Institute's purview focused on years between 1944 and 1990. The extension was obviously meant to include the Bolshevik Revolution, allowing the Institute a much broader control over how communist legacy will be framed in Poland's collective memory from now on. While the international stakeholders issued an immediate condemnation of the 2018 amendment on account of how it seeks to control the truth about the accountability for the Holocaust, there were no public voices to react to the new law's effective control over the memory of the radical left.
The increasingly oppressive climate surrounding the memory of communism in Poland bodes poorly for the possibility of remembering komunistki as agents of progress, protofeminists, and subjects of history. The cinematic evidence from the last few years discussed in this chapter shows the difficulty of imagining the communist female activists as models to emulate. Women who wish to engage in leftist intervention have yet to secure their “right to look.” As a public platform of scopic ritual, cinema is one of the most powerful spaces, where women's rights must be articulated for the political commons to reg
Page 16 of 22 ister their absence or violations. While we wait for someone like Agnieszka Holland to film a biography of Wanda Jakubowska, the female historians press on in their quiet work of recovering the communist women's lives and documenting their political inheritance. Their work now carries a risk of legal retribution that depends on how the Polish Institute of National Remembrance decides to interpret its clause about scholarly exception.
Arendt, Hannah. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1968.
Cohen, Shari J. Politics without a Past: The Absence of History in Postcommunist Nationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
Fidelis, Malgorzata. Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Forecki, Piotr. “Fantazmat Julii Brystiger.” Srodkowoeuropejskie Studia Polityczne 17, no. 1 (2017): 47-69.
(p. 692) Grabowska, Magdalena. Zerwana genealogia. Dzialalnosc spoleczna i polityczna kobiet po 1945 roku a wspolczesny polski ruch kobiecy. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2018.
Harper, Jo. Poland's Memory Wars: Essays on Illiberalism. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2018.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Mrozik, Agnieszka. “Przgdki (po)rewolucyjnej rzeczywistosci. Konstruowanie historii lewicy we wspomnieniach polskich komunistek w latach 60. XX wieku.” In Rok 1966. PRL na zakrgcie, edited by Katarzyna Chmielewska, Grzegorz Wolowiec, and Tomasz Zukowski, 255-296. Warszawa: Instytut Badan Literackich PAN, 2014.
Mrozik, Agnieszka. “Poza nawiasem historii (kobiet), czyli po co nam dzis komunistki.” Wakat-Online 3 (2014), http://wakat.sdk.pl/poza-nawiasem-historii-kobiet-czyli-po-co-nam-dzis-komunistki/
Paczkowski, Andrzej. “Zydzi w UB: proba weryfikacji stereotypu.” In Komunizm. Ideolo-gia, system, ludzie, edited by Tomasz Szarota, 192-204. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Neriton, Instytut Historii PAN, 2001.
Spiewak, Pawel. Zydokomuna. Interpretacje historyczne. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Czer-wone i Czarne, 2012.
Talarczyk-Gubala, Monika. Wanda Jakubowska. Od nowa. Warszawa: Krytyka Polityczna, 2015.
(1.) Stuart Liebman, “‘I Was Always at the Epicenter of Whatever Was Going on': An Interview with Wanda Jakubowska," Slavic and East European Performance 17, no. 3 (1997): 29.
(2.) Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1968),
34.
(3.) The Decommunization Law, one of the main lustration initiatives authored by the national-conservative Law and Justice party, went into effect on April 1, 2016, and has been amended twice to date, in June and December of 2017, in an effort to better enforce the initial law. The second amendment has been criticized as an act of law that is in conflict with the current Polish Constitution by limiting the power of local governments and potentially violating certain civil rights. The debate has since entered a legislative path. See Leszek Jaworski and Magdalena Nizolek, “Jakie zmiany wprowadza ustawa dekomuniza-cyjna?" Gazeta Prawna, January 24, 2018, https://serwisy.gazetaprawna.pl/samorzad/ artykuly/1099437,jakie-zmiany-wprowadza-ustawa-dekomunizacyjna.html
(4.) Shari J. Cohen, Politics without a Past: The Absence of History in Postcommunist Nationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
(5.) The word komunistki has been returned to the Polish public discourse in the last five to seven years thanks to the scholarship of Agnieszka Mrozik, whose publications attest to a consistent effort at recovery of the legacy of communist women. My current project is much indebted to Mrozik's work.
(6.) A subgenre of pseudohistorical books on the subject of Stalin-era female prosecutors and party leaders disseminates the narratives about the alleged violent and sexual exploits of female communists. For examples, see Slawomir Koper, Kobiety wladzy PRL (Warszawa: Czerwone i Czarne, 2012); or Przemyslaw Slowinski, Boginie zla, czyli kobiety okrutne, zgdne wladzy i wystgpne (Katowice: Videograf II, 2010).
(7.) Magdalena Grabowska, Zerwana genealogia. Dzialalnosc spoleczna i polityczna kobi-et po 1945 roku a wspolczesny polski ruch kobiecy (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2018).
(8.) The number of economically active women in Poland has been dropping steadily since the national conservatives took power in 2015. Among European Union member states, Poland has one of the highest rates of women staying off the job market due to domestic labor and childcare. See the statistical data reported by the Central Statistical Office of Poland, “Labour force survey in Poland III quarter 2018," http://stat.gov.pl/en/topics/ labour-market/working-unemployed-economically-inactive-by-lfs/labour-force-survey-in-poland-iii-quarter-2018,2,31.html
(9.) Since 2015, when the national-conservative Law and Justice party, with its strong ties to the Roman Catholic Church, gained majority in Polish government, a number of legislative initiatives have been proposed to limit Polish women's access to legal abortion, in vitro fertilization, contraception, and protection against domestic violence. These threats to women's rights have met with mass street demonstrations, the so-called Black Marches.
(10.) For the thorough appraisal of the illiberal and antidemocratic policies supported by the ruling Law and Justice government, see Tomasz Basiuk, “LGBTQ and Polish Patriarchy,” in Poland's Memory Wars: Essays on Illiberalism, edited by Jo Harper (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2018), 196-202.
(11.) Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 3-4.
(12.) The Lenin Museum in Poronin, Poland, opened its doors in 1947 in the former pub, where Lenin used to spend time with his family, friends, and political associates while residing, between 1913 and 1914, in Krakow and Bialy Dunajec (Tatra Mountains), then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Poronin, Lenin planned to establish a training school for the party activists, a plan which was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. In 1970, the Polish anticommunist resistance movement “Ruch” conspired to burn down the Lenin Museum. The attempt ultimately failed. The museum closed down in 1990.
(13.) Malgorzata Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 61-62.
(14.) Malgorzata Fidelis, “Kobiety i komunizm,” Znak 689 (2012), http:// www.miesiecznik.znak.com.pl/kobiety-i-komunizm/
(15.) Grabowska, Zerwana genealogia, 18.
(16.) Mrozik studies the memoires and autobiographical writing of Polish and Jewish-Pol-ish female communist activists who engaged in radical leftist activity before 1939 and who participated in engineering the new socialist state after the war. Mrozik's research includes the biographies of Wanda Wasilewska (1905-1964), Julia Brystygier (1902-1975), Melania Kierczynska (1888-1962), Edwarda Orlowska (1906-1977), Helena Kozlowska (1906-1967), Romana Granas (1906-1987), Janina Broniewska (1904-1981), Jadwiga Siekierska (1903-1984), Maria Kaminska (1897-1983), Julia Minc (1901-1987), Jadwiga Sabina Ludwinska (1907-1998 or 1999), and Helena Bobinska (1887-1968), among others. See Agnieszka Mrozik, “Przgdki (po)rewolucyjnej rzeczywistosci. Konstruowanie his-torii lewicy we wspomnieniach polskich komunistek w latach 60. XX wieku,” in Rok 1966. PRL na zakrqcie, edited by Katarzyna Chmielewska, Grzegorz Wolowiec, and Tomasz Zukowski (Warszawa: Instytut Badan Literackich PAN, 2014), 255-296.
(17.) Agnieszka Mrozik, “Poza nawiasem historii (kobiet), czyli po co nam dzis komunistki,” Wakat-Online 3 (2014), http://wakat.sdk.pl/poza-nawiasem-historii-kobiet-czyli-po-co-nam-dzis-komunistki/
(18.) Ibid.
(19.) Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization, 3.
(20.) Mrozik, “Poza nawiasem historii.”
(21.) See Dariusz Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna w Polsce 1967-1968 (Warszawa: In-stytut Studiow Politycznych PAN, 2000).
(22.) Referred to as the “Cursed Soldiers,” these partisan fighters of the underground anticommunist resistance movement have recently been named the anticommunist heroes. In a gesture that ignores the controversial aspects of the partisans' guerrilla warfare that included ethnic massacres, the Law and Justice government designated March 1 as the National Remembrance Day of the Cursed Soldiers.
(23.) Malgorzata Sadowska, “Pawel Pawlikowski, rezyser Idy o Polsce, polskosci i Kos-ciele,” Newsweek Polska Online, October 26, 2013, https://www.newsweek.pl/kultura/ida-film-pawla-pawlikowskiego-sylwetak-rezysera-newsweekpl/vlbnl3w
(24.) Ibid.
(25.) Leonard Quart, “Film as Meditation: An Interview with Pawel Pawlikowski,” Cineaste 39, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 40-44, 43.
(26.) For examples, see Jakub Majmurek, “Pierwsze odkrycie w Gdyni” Krytyka Polityczna, “Dziennik opinii” column, September 13, 2013, http://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/film/ majmurek-pierwsze-odkrycie-w-gdyni/2013/; or Krzysztof Varga, “Pigkno pod prggierzem” Wyborcza, November 7, 2013, http://wyborcza.pl/piatekekstra/ 1,129155,14913929,Piekno_pod_pregierzem.html
(27.) For examples, see Agnieszka Graff, “Ida—subtelnosc i polityka” Krytyka Polityczna, “Dziennik opinii” column, November 1, 2013, http://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/film/ graff-ida-subtelnosc-i-polityka/2013/; or Piotr Forecki, “Legenda o Wandzie co zastgpila Niemca,” lewica.pl, November 5, 2013, http://www.lewica.pl/?id=28839&tytul=Piotr-Forecki:-Legenda-o-Wandzie,-cozast%B1pi%B3a-Niemca
(28.) For a detailed analysis of “Judeo-communism,” see Pawel Spiewak, Zydokomuna. In-terpretacje historyczne (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Czerwone i Czarne, 2012). In his study on the communist leadership of the Ministry of Public Security in post-World War II Poland, historian Andrzej Paczkowski investigates the ethnic breakdown of the upper leadership cadre. According to this study, Poles constituted 60 percent of the leading communist apparatus, Jews another 30 percent, and Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians combined for the remaining 10 percent. See Andrzej Paczkowski, “Zydzi w UB: proba weryfikacji stereotypu,” in Komunizm. Ideologia, system, ludzie, edited by Tomasz Szarota (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Neriton, Instytut Historii PAN, 2001), 192-204.
(29.) Piotr Forecki, “Fantazmat Julii Brystiger” Srodkowoeuropejskie Studia Polityczne 17, no. 1 (2017): 47-69.
Page 20 of 22
(30.) Ibid., 49-50.
(31.) In an interview, Pawlikowski tells Quart that he “wanted to avoid entering historical, rhetorical territory” in Ida. See Quart, “Film as Meditation,” 43.
(32.) In her interpretation of The Last Stage in the context of the Polish topos of national motherhood, Elzbieta Ostrowska points out how Jakubowska modified this ideal through her vision of communist internationalism. See Elzbieta Ostrowska, “Filmic Representations of the ‘Polish Mother' in Post-Second World War Polish Cinema,” European Journal of Women's Studies 5, no. 3-4 (1998): 419-435.
(33.) Derived from Latin lustratio, lustration refers to the controversial mechanism of political “cleansing” performed by the postcommunist governments in the former Eastern Bloc in order to prevent those associated with the abuses of the communist regime from participating in successor governments and civil service. The Polish lustration law from 1997 to 2007 resembled the South African truth and reconciliation process and relied on public confession. Since 2007, the lustration process is regulated by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance.
(34.) Monika Talarczyk-Gubala, Wanda Jakubowska. Od nowa (Warszawa: Krytyka Polity-czna, 2015).
(35.) Ibid., 11, 18.
(36.) Nicholas Mirzoeff and Magda Szczesniak, “Persistent Looking in Times of Crisis: Nicholas Mirzoeff in Conversation with Magda Szczesniak” View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 11 (2015), http://pismowidok.org/index.php/one/article/view/342/648. In this interview, Mirzoeff provides a corrective—the need to overcome the logic of binarism —to his earlier account of countervisuality, presented in the earlier referenced The Right to Look.
(37.) Historical accounts based in archival research disprove Julia Brystiger's famed sadism and participation in interrogations as a high-ranking secret security agent. The historical studies also refute the myth about her conversion to Catholicism late in life. See Patrycja Bukalska, Krwawa Luna (Warszawa: Wielka Litera, 2016) and Agata Stopyra, “Figurantka ‘Roxana.' Inwigilacja Julii Brystiger przez Sluzbg Bezpieczenstwa (19621974),” Przeglqd Archiwalny Instytutu Pamiqci Narodowej 2 (2009): 389-404.
(38.) Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
(39.) Uladzislau Belavusau and Anna Wojcik, “Polish Memory Law: When History Becomes a Source of Mistrust,” New Eastern Europe, February 19, 2018, http:// neweasterneurope.eu/2018/02/19/polish-memory-law-history-becomes-source-mistrust/
Aga Skrodzka
Aga Skrodzka, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Clemson University
Specters of Europe and AnticommunistVisual Rhetoric in Romanian Film of the Early 1990s a
Constantin Parvulescu and Claudiu Turcus
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Aug 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.31
This article identifies visions of European identity articulated by the anticommunist propaganda broadcasts of Radio Free Europe Romania (RFER) in the 1980s and traces the way these visions influenced the audiovisual rhetoric of the Romanian cinema of the early 1990s. It examines how RFER listeners envisioned this identity in a context of inner exile and in opposition to the communist system and its legacy. The study presents the political profile of film directors of the 1990s who gave cinematic form to RFER anticommunism. Using the concept of “hauntology,” a psycho-ideological analysis of this cinematic output is provided, with a specific focus on one of the most appreciated films of the immediate post-1989 decade, the 1994 Pepe and Fifi (Dir. Dan Pita).
Keywords: 1990s Romanian cinema, Radio Free Europe Romania, RFER, anticommunist propaganda, European identity, transition to capitalism, hauntology
This “richness of the inner life” is fundamentally fake. It is a screen, a false distance, whose function is, as it were, to save my appearance, to render palpable (accessible to my imaginary narcissism) my true social-symbolic identity.
—Slavoj Zizek
This chapter identifies visions of European identity articulated by the anticommunist propaganda broadcasts of Radio Free Europe Romania (RFER) in the 1980s and traces the way these visions influenced the audiovisual rhetoric of the Romanian cinema of the early 1990s. Our chapter consists of three parts. The first shows how RFER listeners envisioned European identity in a context of inner exile and how they imagined their political self in the way our epigraph conceives of interiority. This first part allows us to draw an intellectual and political profile of prominent film directors of the 1990s, who gave cinematic form to this vision. The second part provides a psycho-ideological analysis of their cinematic product. We focus on one of the most appreciated films of the immediate post-1989 decade, the 1994 Pepe and Fifi (Dir. Dan Pita). The third part consists of a
Page 1 of 22 broader overview of the way this imagined European political identity shaped by RFER listening informs the Romanian cinematic landscape of the 1990s. In particular, (p- 694) we trace the way RFER-style anticommunism affected the aesthetic, moral, and intellectual discourse of 1990s cinema, and, as the quote from Zizek suggests, the way cinema served as a device of rendering acceptable the actual political performance of the socialist subject during the times of state socialism.
Research for the first part of the chapter considers (1) published texts by former RFER listeners recounting their listening experience, (2) letters from these listeners to RFER, (3) Radio Free Europe's (RFE) audience research, (4) publications by former RFE and RFER personnel, (5) academic research on RFE broadcasting, and (6) most important, twelve in-depth oral history interviews conducted by us with former RFER listeners in 2015.1 We scrutinize these sources in order to show how RFER listening generated images of Europe and an ideologically saturated perception of European belonging, predicated in particular upon anticommunism and middle-class civility.
Our analysis of RFER's persuasion practices and listening experiences is based on the premise that, by the 1980s, RFE propaganda took inspiration from the BBC colonial broadcasting model. The BBC had given up political vehemency. Its primary goal was to generate information that seemed politically neutral and objective and to use this objectivity to create loyal imperial subjects. In adapting the BBC model, RFE broadcasting proposed a version of European identity highlighting the self-centered and nonmanipulable subject of the liberal-democratic order, opposed to socialist communitarianism and its belief in the clairvoyance of the Communist Party.
This RFER-produced political subject model was also more consumerist in terms of lifestyle, thus creating distance toward the austerity promoted by state-socialist regimes. Moreover, it held a transnational perspective on political issues, opposed to the national one provided by the radio broadcasting service of the Romanian state, with which RFER directly competed. One should add that it was not only through political programs that the new model of a political subject was disseminated. RFER's various cultural, lifestyle, and entertainment segments contributed to fleshing out RFER's vision of Homo eu-ropaeus, endowing it with cosmopolitan literary and musical taste, a certain form of European public demeanor and appearance, and, very importantly, consumption options, including visions of quality of life in terms of material possessions and international travel.
Our study traces then the side effects of this living-room Europeanization process: how these visions of European belonging conflicted with the reality of life under state socialism; how they created inner exile and double consciousness. The analysis performed in the second part of the chapter starts from the premise that films like Pita's Pepe and Fifi are neither realistic depictions nor intellectual parables of the 1990s transition era, as most studies of the cinema of this period try to show.2 We approach the film (and others of the time—analyzed in the third part) with research questions that are reminiscent of the way in which expressionist cinema of interwar Germany has been investigated by film historians such as Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner—that is, as “haunted screens” and as reflections of “mentalities,”3 collective “psychological dispositions,” as well as expressions of “fears and hopes” of a certain historical context.4
(p. 695) Returning to the quote by Zizek that opens our chapter, we explore the way the imagined European self, produced by REFER listening, took shape on screen in a specific historical moment. It is a time when the formerly exiled European consciousness could express itself once again, after the abolishment of censorship in December 1989, as well as in a time when its fundamental fakeness could come to light and could be experienced as such by both filmmakers and audiences. Moreover, we consider this period as a moment of renegotiation of visions of Europe, as former RFER listeners came in a significantly more direct contact with a real-existing Europe.
Kracauer argues that the collective fears, dispositions, and haunting spirits “gain momentum in cases of extreme political change [and] dissolution of political systems,” as well as that they “survive their primary causes and undergo a metamorphosis of their own”5—in other words, that they gain certain spectral agency. Taking this into account, we use a “hauntological” method to investigate the media embodiments of these returning specters. This method originates in a text that is contemporary to the films we study: Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx (1993) and whose insights have been developed in inspiring ways in cultural studies by various theorists, among them Mark Fisher. Fisher uses hauntology as the study of a perception of ideology in terms of absence rather than in terms of presence, tracing modes of “spectral causality” and an investigation of what acts as agency without (physically) existing.”6
In the third part of the chapter, we reflect on the way the Romanian feature films of the 1990s are marked by and act out RFER anticommunist propaganda. We trace the way the films gesture toward the disempowering aspects of the listeners' inner exile and the way listening contributed to the production of a politically disabled citizen, who entertained a spectatorial relationship with political realities, preserving, in the post-1989 era, the living-room listener perspective. We link RFER propaganda to developing victimization discourses, lack of confidence in community, manipulation paranoia, and most important, a spectral relationship to Europe, which, as films like Pepe and Fifi show, continues to be, even after 1989, a deferred cultural and political reality.
RFER played an important role in shaping the perception of post-1989 realities. We are interested here in the way in which radio listening constructed a certain European subjectivity predicated upon resistance to communism. This alleged Europeanization goal of RFE broadcasting is, of course, already indicated in the name of the broadcaster—Radio Free Europe—the Romanian division being just one among others fighting for the Europeanization of the Eastern Bloc. That this fight for reuniting Europe under the value of freedom was linked to anticommunist Cold War interests is also not a secret. Since its in
Page 3 of 22
cipience, the broadcaster was sponsored with American money under the (p- 696) impetus of America's 1949 “Crusade for Freedom,” and it was designed to “pierce holes in the Iron Curtain” and supply with fresh ideological air “the hermetically sealed people of Eastern Europe.” What was supposed to be sent through these holes to “the captive people” of the Soviet Bloc was Western values.7 Presented as quintessential to European identity, they were highlighted in order to undermine the legitimacy of socialist regimes at a subjective level by stimulating “peoples' nonviolent resistance.”8 Thus, it is evident that the image of Europe that these broadcasts and their listeners generated became a counterdiscourse to the representations of real-existing socialist Eastern Europe of that time. Paraphrasing Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto, this radio-constructed Europe developed into a specter, haunting socialist Europe and announcing an imminent return of the repressed.
These lines of action guided the functioning of RFE until 1989. What changed throughout the station's more than forty years of broadcasting was its rhetoric and the way in which it constructed Europeanness. In its early days, propaganda was more vehement. In later ones, RFE toned down its antagonizing rhetoric, and following the BBC model, positioned itself as an information station, considering that it could best follow its goals by winning the trust of its listeners. The strategy was successful.9 Optimistic audience research conducted in those times suggests that between 80 percent and 90 percent of the Romanian population had experienced some exposure to RFER. As we shall see, this change in tactics also affected the way in which listeners conceived of European belonging.
This successful strategy to create European and cosmopolitan consciousness also exemplifies the often-cited dictum that the medium is the message. From its early days, RFE broadcasting on short waves was, due to its long-distance cross-border propagation (in contrast to AM and FM), almost synonymous with international broadcasting and with bridging gaps between distant cultures. Thus, in the case of Eastern Europe, shortwave consumption was not synonymous with anticommunist living-room dissent. It was also a listening practice specific of a second or third world culture. It absorbed worldviews from centers and performed belonging to a cosmopolitan community and public sphere. Consumers of shortwave broadcasts envisioned themselves not only as a national public grunting against the governance of their nation-state but also as individuals whose listening practices reaffirmed their membership in a borderless community from which they felt physically, but not spiritually and intellectually separated.
That this imagined membership played a more important role in undermining loyalties to state socialism than exposure to more confrontational antisocialist content was the main reason why RFE changed its tactics and adopted the BBC home service model. Audience research performed by RFE and the oral history of listening (including the interviews we conducted, whose profile is described in note 11) testify to this effective change in persuasion strategies, catering to the listeners' cosmopolitan expectations. This is also proven by the fact that the listeners' first RFE and shortwave experiences responded not
to their quest for alternative sources of news, but for consumption of international entertainment, in particular pop music.10
(p. 697) Even if it was far from active political resistance, participation in the transnational community of shortwave listeners was perceived as politically subversive. Andreescu and Berindei's valuable edited collection of letters to RFER presents the practice of tuning in to RFE as oppositional and describes it as “passive resistance.”11 This memory of subversive listening is also voiced in the interviews we conducted. One of the interviewed subjects described his experience as marked by the need to comment and share his participation. Most listeners, however, never made it further than becoming aware of this need. Another subject commented, “We listened and we cursed,” admitting that he did not publicly perform his frustration. The oppositional experience of listening and of being European was acted out in silence in the privacy of one's living room.
Consequently, Romanians practiced European identity in inner exile, awaiting more favorable times to share their comments and perhaps revolt. This inner exile experience was enhanced by the vehement counterpropaganda launched by the Romanian government against RFER, which included assassination attempts against editors and a bomb attack against the station's headquarters.12 To this we need to add the rumors that circulated within Romanian society that people who listened to RFER could face police harassment or arrest (though none of the subjects we talked to was able to recall an episode of a person being reprimanded just for listening to RFE). In retrospect, interviewees admitted that these rumors were probably untrue, and that their circulation was entertained not only by the Romanian police apparatus but also by listeners themselves in order to increase the prestige of their listening experience.
The practice of resistance in inner exile was reinforced by the vigilance with which one listened, careful not to be heard by neighbors. Deficient signal quality also had its contribution. Interviewees inaccurately believed (or wanted to believe) that, in those days, the Romanian government jammed RFER signal.13 What interviewees regarded as jamming was the typical hassle of shortwave reception: static noise, fading, and signal distortion, and as well as the “environmental jamming” caused by air turbulence, domestic electrical interference, and electromagnetic pollution from industrial consumers.14 Imagined jamming was thus the testimony of investing with political meaning the private living-room experience of listening, turning the living room into an ideological battlefield, as Istvan Rev argues.15
Another important identity-generating aspect of RFER listening was its educational role. Interviewees regarded RFE news services as an important contribution to their formation as national and European citizens. This formative role was played not only by the consumed content but also by the way in which it was delivered and the effect this delivery had on listeners. It demanded self-understanding as educated and morally responsible middle-class subjects. Becoming European, another interviewee argued, was similar to developing a consciousness beyond the barbarism and the corruption of real-existing socialism. It was a living-room version of what Vaclav Havel famously called life in truth— with, of course, the important difference that RFER audiences' life in truth was not taking place in a real-existing public sphere (as Havel insistently demanded).
After 1989, interest in RFE dwindled in Eastern Europe. RFE was an anticommunist propaganda station that could no longer find its voice in the absence of its antagonist.16
(p. 698) Post-1989 media liberalization in Eastern Europe allowed television to become its main source of information and entertainment.17 In terms of content, almost everything RFE had earlier to offer could be consumed in the post-1989 era through national media outlets, including regime thrashing. The only aspect that still made RFER stand out was the quality of its content. Our interviewees argue that national media was not able to achieve its level of accuracy, documentation, civility, and independence, as well as its transnational contextualization, all linked to the values of the educated European citizen.
One type of information our investigation of RFE reception did not encounter is references to the negative effects of RFER exposure. Interviewees understood the battle over signification fought during the Cold War, but they did not think that it had long-term negative effects on listeners. Issues of deception, frustration, addiction, or waste of one's time—complaints one can hear about television or other electronic media nowadays—did not come up in their responses, nor more generally in the oral history of Romanian RFE listening. The study of Pepe and Fifi in the second part of this chapter aims to highlight some of the pernicious aspects of RFER exposure, approaching them as “unknown knowns,” as “silent [spectral] presuppositions we are not aware of.”18
We regard these negative effects as indicative of the ideological context of the early 1990s and trace how they are acted out in the cinema of the time. Anticommunist propaganda, we assume, left behind confused subjects, chronically disappointed with politicians and political structures. Further, we believe that the RFER propaganda contributed to civic stress, especially because the promised Europe did not arrive after the fall of communism. From this point of view, RFER content may have provided escape and education, but it may have also made audiences unhappier. Since 1989, Romania has constantly scored low in various surveys measuring the happiness index of its people, close to the level of war- and famine-stricken countries, anticommunist propaganda, with its constant disparagement of the Romanian (communist) way of life, has in no small measure contributed to this collective sentiment. Romania also scores low among the countries that trust their representatives. All these symptoms are present in the film under close scrutiny in the second part of this chapter.
RFER propaganda used anticommunism as a scapegoat master narrative in order to create an unrealistic image of liberal-capitalist Europe. Romania's 1989 inner exiles translated and adapted this narrative to the post-1989 context and used it to explain some of the shortcomings of Romania's frustrating transition times of the 1990s. Repressed for many
Page 6 of 22 years, the desire to turn imagined Europe into reality (to give its spirit a body, as Derrida would put it) found the historical opening it longed for in 1989, when, at least in the first months after the fall of the communist regime, it seemed that utopia was (p- 699) achievable. Sadly, this window of opportunity soon closed, and all our interviewees remember Romania of the early 1990s as a period of unfulfilled hopes. RFER's anticommunism offered easy and catchy explanations to these disappointments in the form of “the legacy of communism,” which, as specter of Europe (predicated upon anticommunism), emerged as the most important haunting political agent of the early 1990s.
The specter of unfulfilled European belonging also inspired a perverted form of class struggle. The RFER-educated middle-class, schooled in the values of European civility by the station's cultural and political segments, perceived itself as the victim of the working class, whose poster image became the vulgar, violent, and manipulable street mob shouting, “We're working, we're not thinking!” This and the frustrations mentioned earlier are traceable in Pita's film Pepe and Fifi, together with a general discomfort with the public sphere of the former closeted listener and living-room political exile, who came out after 1989 into an uncharted and unfamiliar public space. This is why approaching Pepe and Fifi in a way similar to the German cinema of the post-1918 era (also a post-regime change cinema) is insightful and fitted for a hauntological method. This approach can reveal the spectral ideological forces, Zizek's unknown knowns, that generate, as Kracauer puts it, certain “dispositions” (frustrations, anxieties, rationalizations) derived from the experience of inner exile and double consciousness theorized in the previous section.
Hauntology traces spectral casualties. In French, “hauntology” is pronounced similarly to the word “ontology.” More than a word game, however, it helps us to approach the cinematic image as spectral, as an index of both a presence (the post-1989 historical realities) and absence (the frustrated desires, fears, and dispositions linked to the specter of the absent propaganda-constructed Europe). The specter indicates thus the condition of the no longer (rejected communism) and the not yet (the shortwave Europe expected to materialize). Cinematic hauntology traces then the way in which this imagined presence-absence gains corporeality on screen (the becoming body of the specter or the becoming known of the unknown known), and it shows how the cinematic image is ideologically “inhabited from inside”19 both as mise-en-scene and elements of cinematography and sound.20
Hauntology also helps to understand the “out of joint” temporality21 of “extreme political change,”22 which in common Eastern European studies jargon is called “transition.”23 Hauntology, Fisher argues, has another virtue: it articulates a commentary on the contraction of space and time in the world of the “tele-”24: the tele-made and tele-marketed. This is important because the film we analyze stages the return to space and corporeality of a shortwave tele-made and tele-marketed construct. The film screen gives body to the ethereal living-room experiences in the particular time context we mentioned earlier. This time is turbulent not only because it is one of transformation but also because transformation implies the conflict between the imagined and the real-existing, a conflict that takes place at all levels: moral, social, economic, and political.
The imagined Europe gaining body fights for space on screen with the emerging exploitative capitalist realities that were only discretely referred to in RFE propaganda. (p- 700) The emotionally charged cinema of this period creates specters by exploiting this emergence and conflict. As such, Pepe and Fifi is informed by spectatorial relationships of camera and characters to reality (perpetuating the living-room tele-perspective) and the consequent fear of corporeality and physical engagement. It is driven by the quest for disidentification from the passions dominating the public sphere and its manipulable mob, the desire to act as radio and educator of the masses, as well as the social and political frustration and disorientation produced by the absent Europe.
Before we start our analysis, let us underline the way Pepe and Fifi transports and renders visual the pre-1989 experiences into the post-1989 era. Pepe and Fifi is the first post-1989 feature of the director Dan Pita, who belonged to the generation of the listeners whom we interviewed. This makes it easier for us to assume that he shared not only their RFER listening experiences but also their image of Europe as well as their desire to Europeanize the post-1989 economic, social, and political Romanian environment. Romanian film history regards Pita as belonging to the innovative 1970s generation of Romanian cinema.25 His work matured, however, in the 1980s, when he made a series of youth films that reflected on the increasing social alienation and withdrawal into inner exile of this generation under state socialism. His cinematic statements went against state-promoted optimism, defended a certain form of socialist dropping out, and told stories of quiet rebels defending their private space.26
Such representations can also be seen as metaphorizing the inner exile experience of RFER listeners. Anecdotally, this reading is directly indicated in the plot of the film that reflects in the most visible fashion the fight for safeguarding one's private universe from political intervention during state socialism, Sand Cliffs (aka Sand Dunes, 1983). Its investigative plot develops around a chain of incidents triggered by the alleged robbery of a Western-made boom box radio, which would have provided higher shortwave quality reception, as well as a film and a photo camera—two devices that could document real-existing socialist realities.
A certain haunted and surreal atmosphere marks Pita's films of the pre-1989 era, which is cinematically encoded with long and “slow tracking shots through dimly lit hallways, desert-like landscapes, misty forest roads,” bizarre dream sequences, and ominous synthesizer music.27 These stylistic elements resurge in Pita's post-1989 Pepe and Fifi. This return suggests not only the touch of an auteur but also confirms Kracauer's thesis that certain dispositions take a life of their own, follow their own logic and development in time and in a relation to historical events, a process that is more complicated than just a simple “influence” or straightforward causation.28 In fact, as Kracauer has it, political turmoil can stimulate the “forlornness” and “emotional fixations” of these dispositions; and as ghosts of the past, these fixations can continue to shape the perception of the present, maintaining attitudes that increasingly lose links to reality.29
Pepe and Fifi's three protagonists belong to the generation of the children of the interviewed listeners (the names of two make the title), who mature in the post-1989 times and who can become the first full beneficiaries of the political transformation brought about by 1989. They struggle to make a living in the new world. Pepe is an underachieving boxer. Fifi, Pepe's sister, is a disoriented spirit with a good heart. Carol is their neighbor (p- 701) and his name does not appear in the title because he is an alias of the director —and thus listed next to the title and linked by the authorial preposition by (neighboring them in this way as well). Because he is an invalid in a wheelchair, tends to preach, and owns the house he and his friends live in, he plays a father figure role. The plot is not coherent. It shows how the two siblings get increasingly entrapped in the devious scheming of an emerging transition-era mafia, which leads to their downfall—Pepe's death and Fifi's descent into high-end prostitution.
As father figure and powerless observer of this downfall, Carol is the most representative transposition of the former living-room dissenter. Many scenes in the film show him talking into a bullhorn, lecturing, preaching, and provoking people, as well as providing a radio-like commentary on the political and economic realities of the transition era from the position of a person who has lost hope in the present and the promises of 1989. But neither he nor his friends have a clear psychological and emotional profile. Like expressionist film characters, their motivations remain mysterious, giving the impression that there is always an extra and unknown drive, not perceivable on screen, that animates them. Also none of them seems to be equipped to survive in the new, carnivorously competitive, world. Carol is an invalid, Pepe and Fifi socially handicapped, and none of them has a clear life project.
The absence of Europe or of a satisfying political reality is indicated by the use of contemplative shots of the ghostly urban post-1989 environment. The technique is similar to the one employed in Pita's 1980s films. Eerie music accompanies slow tracking shots, tracing the edges of deserted construction sites, devastated buildings, and abandoned factories. They index not only a presence but also an absence, as well as a state of angst induced by this absence. The camera relates to the profilmic in a spectatorial way, contemplating it with both curiosity and bewilderment, using uncanny camera angles to emphasize the general impression of a state of alert and a sense of unbelonging.
Characters are truly themselves only in private spaces. A scene shows Carol and Pepe preparing to go out for a walk and then taking the walk. Pepe comes to pick up Carol. Indoors, the disabled Carol, who cannot move his legs, is extremely mobile. Yet his wheelchair-mediated encounter with the outside world indicates that he belongs indoors—his disability gesturing toward the legacy of passive inner exile listenership. This relationship with the exterior is also reinforced by sequences presenting him sitting by the window, looking outside, or shouting at people through his bullhorn.
The bullhorn is one of the most conspicuous props of the early post-1989 era. Its function is multiple. In the history of 1989, it stands, on the one hand, for the bottom-up mobilization of masses. It opposes the organized and ritualized practices of the communist power elite which presented itself and addressed its subjects by means of more centralized technology such as stages and balconies endowed with powerful sound systems, as well as radio and television. On the other hand, the bullhorn becomes indicative of new forms of social manipulation by means of rumor and mob irrationality, as well as ideological garbage.
Carol not only uses the bullhorn to address people from his window but also takes it with him on the street to lecture at the passersby. His favorite topics are current political
(p. 702) affairs and remembering the state-socialist past. In his hands, the bullhorn gains another meaning. It becomes indicative of the condition of the coming out of inner exile. From his wheelchair pushed by Pepe on the street, Carol acts out his former unfulfilled desire to curse at the communist regime accumulated in the act of listening. Even if times have changed, the Romanian government and its police apparatus remain his primary targets, as well as the post-1989 downfall of social order.
The bullhorn also becomes the indicator of the inner exile's unpreparedness to interact publicly. Carol does not understand the public sphere as a site of dialogue. Instead, he lectures, insults, swears, and calls people names. He acts out as radio and tells them— just as RFER has done for decades—that they live in a corrupt world, marked by a long list of flaws that are all explainable through the “legacy of communism” and its long-term effects on the moral and political values of people. He tells them that Europe, happiness, and decent life are to be found somewhere else. Not here, not now, in the Romania of the 1990s, but rather behind an Iron Curtain that has not truly lifted after 1989. Here, now, he tells them, “Your lives are meaningless [ ... ] The state doesn't care for you [ ... ] You are victims [ ... ].” His recommendation—“Leave the country”—turn an inner exile into outer exile.
In another scene that captures quite accurately the situation in Romania of the 1990s, Carol comes across documents of the former Romanian secret police that are to be burned. He theatrically recounts biographies belonging to this huge archive of political denunciations, murders, and thefts that are soon to be erased. Like RFER, he acts out yet another indictment against blighted Romanian society, with its memory dislocated, and as such in the situation of not being able to regenerate itself morally, as well as politically and economically. His jeremiad continues: delinquency is rampant, hunger violent, and poverty extreme. The phantasmatic Europe propagated by RFER remains the only mode of denouncing the absence of a social project in post-1989 Romania and of emphasizing the impossibility of achieving national solidarity. The solution remains a radical one: an exit from this reality. An escape, rather than a departure, because only the latter would be an option for a real, knowable, perceivable geography.
The haunting causality of the specter of Europe is more evident in the final scene of the film, in which, dressed in a funerary black suit, Carol accompanies Fifi to a hospital to identify the body of Pepe. Fear of corporeality, disidentification from the public sphere, disorientation created by the absent Europe, and the strong emotions and subjective perception of the film are even more noticeable here. Romania is perceived as an underground labyrinthine morgue, with the murdered Pepe, the victimized innocent fellow who wants to make a living, at its center. The sight of Pepe's body in a chiaroscuro-lit room makes Carol feel guilty and gestures toward the negative effects of propaganda specters. Has Pepe ended up being killed because of the ideas of good life Carol had exposed him to?
After the corpse identification, Carol's state of panic intensifies. His angst is complemented by a piercing metallic extradiegetic sound. Carol repeatedly calls on Fifi: “Get me the hell out of here!”—while the metallic noise gradually becomes the diegetic sound of his wheelchair pushed by Fifi in hurried despair. A long race out of the labyrinthine (p- 703) morgue devoid of perspective ensues. The film ends by showing them reach a space that seems to be an exit, or just its simulacrum—perhaps real, perhaps phantasmagoric, and perhaps only a vision produced by exhaustion and despair. It is a place of dazzling light created by increased photographic overexposure. It seems unbearable, blinding, and at the same time liberating in terms of its intensity. If this sequence is the metaphor of Eastern European 1990s transition, the Europe remains a spectral destination at the end of a tortuous and apparently neverending quest.
Postcommunist narrative of anticommunism became the hegemonic intellectual paradigm of the post-1989 era, and any reflexive or possibly critical debate on it was programmatically avoided. In December 2006, anticommunism even received official confirmation. The Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania generated a special report that licensed the president of Romania of the time to publicly condemn communism as “illegitimate and criminal.” While an analysis of obvious similarities in perspective, even word choices, between the report, the presidential condemnation and RFER broadcasts content is long overdue, what is important here to remember is that this political moment marked, in fact, the extension of a long-term hermeneutical framework, whose starting point is located in the pre-1989 era, in the double consciousness of the inner exile experience of the RFER listener.
This historical development explains the perception of anticommunism as a natural moral attitude. Anticommunism is the unknown known that marks the cultural production of the 1990s (and 2000s). It informs its quest for truth about its past and present, though without being credited for it. Consequently, even if Romanian anticommunist discourse was among the most radical ones in Eastern Europe, Romanian cultural studies rarely approached its specter as an object of investigation.30 Anticommunism was addressed critically only in political science studies31 or as a symptomatic phenomenon pertaining to the intellectual history of the Romanian transition.32 In cultural studies, anticommunism continued to work in the same register as it was marketed by RFER broadcasting. It func-
Page 11 of 22 tioned as a self-understood presupposition of European, educated, civil, postbarbarian way of signifying, and it represented one of the few intellectual paradigms of interpretation that crossed almost unchanged the intellectual borderline of 1989. As such, it serviced intellectual self-branding and remained a best-selling news and artistic media ingredient on the internal market, in conjunction with or complementing three other legitimation frameworks: ethnic nationalism, orthodox Christianity, and, less overtly stated, neoliberal social Darwinism.
The Romanian film industry absorbed and reflected through the filter of anticommunism the cultural-political power formations set up immediately after 1989. The analysis
(p. 704) of Pepe and Fifi reveals some aspects of Romanian anticommunist discourse. When looking at the entire production of the era, one can discover RFER's anticommunism replicated in almost the entire socially engaged film output of the 1990s. Of the sixty Romanian films produced in the 1990s, about one-third can be considered as such. Among its major trends are a direct, radical critique of communism, articulated in antagonistic terms, with an emphasis on the abuses of the communist regime, and an indirect critique of communism through the recovery of themes that were taboo until 1989 (sex and sexuality, mysticism, gender discrimination, religious beliefs, Western pop culture consumption, etc.), which RFER addressed in its lifestyle, entertainment, and religious broadcasting segments, and which, as our interviewees argued, completed their European education. In spite of the different timelines, these two categories of critique share the quest to curse and the convoluted and conflicted acting out through cinema of this repressed need. Additionally, their articulation seems to reveal a double perspective. Stories are told from both inside and outside of these realities, by a narrator who is both identified and disidentified with them, both communism-contaminated barbarian (and object of self-hatred) and soldier of Europe (and subject of moral and intellectual entitlement).
The first trend is retrospective and includes films whose denunciation draws on stories intensely covered by RFER broadcasts: abused peasant families, intellectuals broken by the system, subversive marginals, rebel musicians, surveilled teachers, humanized security officers, and the dullness of everyday life. The second trend includes films that one could call reactive. They use the RFER perspective to frame the present, accompanied by the frustration and self-hatred it generated, depicting a post-1989 Romania that is poor, confused, angry, violent, promiscuous, resentful, greedy, and rich in rapidly devaluating currency. Like Pepe and Fifi, many films in this group depict Romania as a place from which one must escape, as it is lethally corrupted by the past.
Retrospective anticommunist films articulate the fear and disgust with barbaric non-Euro-pean communism. For instance, Somewhere in the East (Undeva in Est, Dir. Nicolae Margineanu, 1991) revisits the 1950s collectivization and voices a broad range of anticommunist stereotypes of the 1980s and 1990s: the opposition between the brutish activists, who occupy all positions of power and impose abusive social rules, and the men and women who defend the bourgeois equilibrium of the world (by listening to the Voice of America radio station). The film concludes with a dramatic scene of victimization: a
Page 12 of 22 woman kills her newborn child before being shot herself, preventing her offspring from living in a world that has gone astray. A barbed wire fence is featured before the final credits, gesturing toward the disciplining practices of the communist regime.
Road of the Dogs (Drumul cainilor, Dir. Laurentiu Damian, 1991) is another such 1950s story, which relies on biblical tropes to articulate its discourse of victimization and to indicate what kept its author away from barbarism. It shows a conflicting family triangle: a grieving war widow with one communist and one anticommunist son—referencing Cain and Abel. The film's plot resembles the biblical one, includes murder, and ends in a similar way as the film discussed earlier. A woman (a sort of Abel's wife) prays to remain childless or to give birth to only deaf and blind descendants so they will not have to experience the world of absolute evil.
(p. 705) The same emotionally charged and intellectually rigid imagery and plot structure can be found in The Most Beloved of Earthlings (Cel mai iubit dintre pamanteni, Dir. Ser-ban Marinescu, 1993), as well as in Red Rats (Sobolanii rosii, Dir. Florin Codre, 1991), whose plot takes place in a later period of state socialism and presents the new order as a breeding ground of corruption and callousness. Red Rats's voiceover declares from the 1991 perspective: “Before we were led by a madman; now we are led by bribes and lies. All dealers talk politics; all politicians make deals.” The film ends in a somewhat circular manner, returning to the initial retrospective soliloquy: “Communism was a crime, one of which we became aware only later; that is, right now, in these moments after the revolution. It destroyed the morality of the individual.”
The Oak (Balanta, Dir. Lucian Pintilie, 1993) seeks dark humor, grotesque situations, and violent imagery to express its anticommunist anger in a register reminiscent of RFER's weekly political cabaret show and the antiregime daily satirical editorials of The Romanian Update primetime segment (Actualitatea romaneasca). The Oak is determined to show the arbitrariness and irrationalism at the center of communist governance in order to indicate that it has lost touch with the scientific socialist materialism it was supposed to put in practice, which could have set it apart from other dictatorships of the twentieth century. In contrast, Fox Hunter (Vulpe vanator, Dir. Stere Gulea, 1993), which records the passage from before to after 1989, assigns the RFER gaze to its vigilante protagonist, an intelligent and opinionated female teacher.33 It is her character that becomes the medium of voicing commentaries (or screaming them aloud) on the absurdity of state socialist universe, on life in fear and dire material conditions, and on the increasing barbarity of its subjects.
The protagonist is sophisticated but socially isolated (in inner exile). She carries into the post-1989 present the psychological dispositions and mentalities of the pre-1989 times. She hopes to illegally flee the country and start a life in the West, arguing, “Don't you understand that for us there is no longer any better place?” Her view of post-1989 is not optimistic either. Expressionist bleakness pervades, announcing, like Pepe and Fifi, an ill-fated future, devoid of the chance of a new beginning. “Oh, Lord, what do you have against us?!” the protagonist reflects in resignation, while another film by Gulea, State of Affairs (Stare de fapt, 1995), presents the post-1989 era similarly to Red Rats. The listener-victim narrator depicts a world in the same “I vs. them” antagonism. “They” does not indicate a structure, but a cast of actors who have only changed roles after 1989. The same individuals occupy positions of power in the pre- and post-1989 eras, suggesting that every protagonist of the post-1989 political scene has its pre-1989 doppelganger.
The drive to tell the “truth” about communism in the cinema of the 1990s also takes the shape of allegorical representation. There are three Romanian films produced in the 1990s whose abstract and vaguely suggested spatial-temporal coordinates place them in the register of allegories of dictatorship. Their retrospection aims to be more conceptual as their focus is oppressive power mechanisms. All the evil, violence, and suffering displayed in these films gesture toward the (negative) haunting causation of Europe as lack in a time of not yet (transition) and no longer (lost opportunity).
The Eleventh Commandment (A unsprezecea porunca, Dir. Mircea Daneliuc, 1991) envisions its dystopian space as a mined forest, bleeding civilization by the very cause of (p. 706) its isolation from the “outside.” Its characters are captives and are portrayed as split between loyalties to the collective good and the dictatorial evil they nest inside. In The Sleep of the Island (Somnul insulei, Dir. Mircea Veroiu, 1994), those who want to connect with the values of the outside are interned in an institute located on a remote island and are mistreated. Finally, Luxury Hotel (Hotel de lux, Dir. Dan Pita, 1992) locates its dystopian space among Hamletian ruins. Distance from Europe is articulated as a regression to a premodern vertical social stratification, referenced by the hotel's various floors.
Reactive anticommunist film continues the presentation of the failure to establish contact with the outside and to absorb the values of European civilization performed by these allegories. Nevertheless, in the films that take place after 1989, captivity is internal. The windows of the hotel might have opened and the minefields deactivated, but not the mental and moral arrest generated by pernicious communism. Thus, the anticommunist films of the 1990s voice a Munchian scream of despair at a world that cannot liberate itself from its past. If retrospective anticommunism draws on justice-driven acts of memorial-ization with the purpose of rehabilitating a European national consciousness, reactive anticommunism is set to explain the failure of the postcommunist connection to Europe. Instead of questioning Europe as a propaganda artifact and acknowledging that real-existing Europe is multifaceted and needs to be duly discovered step by step, without spectral guidance, these films denounce the reality of postcommunist transition as a site of perpetual failed encounter with the specter.
The Culprit (Vinovatul, Dir. Alexa Visarion, 1991) testifies to this failed encounter and calls for the dropping of the search, while The Conjugal Bed (Patul conjugal, Dir. Mircea Daneliuc, 1993) employs a range of exotic characters and situations to make the same statement that decent life is not here and now, but somewhere else. The central theme of the film is prostitution. It serves as an uncomfortably sexist metaphor of the inner corruption of the individual marked by the legacy of communism, articulated again from a perspective that managed to subtract itself, at least in part, from this corruption process.
The failed encounter is even referenced in the title of one of the productions of the time: Too Late (Prea tarziu, Dir. Lucian Pintilie, 1996). The nonaccomplishment indicated in the title refers, on the one hand, to a late reconstruction of hidden historical truth about state-socialist times, while on the other, it gestures toward a justice-seeking discourse without an object, uttered “too late.” The film tells the story of a prosecutor who arrives in the Jiu Valley, a coal mining area gone bankrupt in the early 1990s, to investigate a murder in the underground mine. He is the one articulating the too late fatalistic verdict, acting out RFER's judgmentalism on the perpetuation of communist barbarism and the eternally delayed achievement of European integration.
The film's bad ideological faith is most clearly revealed by the fact that the bankruptcy of the Romanian coal industry of the early 1990s was not primarily the result of communism, but of newly instated capitalist economic relations and of a crisis of coal mining affecting all Europe. Yet the blame is put on the legacy of the past and on the lazy working class, which the RFER listener has intensely practiced to despise. In the prosecutor's view, communism is to blame for the murder he is investigating. Communism has (p- 707) bestialized men and women, explaining why they commit such murders he is assigned to solve. The murderer turns out to be a miner living in a gallery, who killed for food. His crime invests the coal mine undergrounds with a metaphorical status. It becomes the ultimate matrix storing the pernicious legacy of communism. The prosecutor asks for the closing of the mine, regarded as nothing but “a natural reserve of orangutans.”
There are, however, two exceptions in the Romanian cinema of the 1990s, which cast a more nuanced look at communism. Both Who Is Right? (Cine are dreptate?, Dir. Alexandru Tatos, 1990) and Trahir (Dir. Radu Mihaileanu, 1993) address Romanian society during socialism without resentment, trying to capture its complexity and anticipating the perspective of the New Romanian Cinema of the 2000s, which toned down judgmentalism. Tatos's film is, however, made before 1989, but released immediately after. Therefore, its different mode of articulation originates mainly in the specific context of its production. We include it here because it premiered in 1990 and could have served then as a more comprehensive representational model of envisioning the socialist era.
The film shows an authorities' incursion into a socialist proletarian milieu. As in Too Late, a prosecutor arrives at a state-owned company with the aim of investigating a work accident. The film is composed of multiple interviews with workers. Unlike, however, in Too Late, its investigations are ineffective. One character even warns the prosecutor: “You won't achieve much with your [quest for] objectivity.” For Tatos, life is more important than indictments and its framing. Even if a character insists that “one cannot live in suspicion,” Who Is Right? is a film about the inability to draw a clear contrast between black and white, and a rejection of judgmentalism.
Examining the complicity of the Romanian writers with the secret police, Radu Mihaileanu's film is also not tormented by the “mental dispositions” of the past. His different vision can be explained because Trahir is a film made by a director who already left Romania in 1980 for the West (France) and was not confined to mature politically by listening to RFER. He also did not have to experience the double consciousness of inner exile. He encountered Europe not as a propaganda specter, but as an everyday reality, itself in transition from embedded liberalism to neoliberalism. To this one could add the fact that the film was made for foreign audiences, as its dialogue is in French. As such, one can agree with the Romanian critic Alex Leo §erban, who, in 1994, found Trahir “perhaps the most mature cinematic investigation in our recent past.” 34
In this chapter we outlined the inner exile, double consciousness, and political frustration of the socialist subject generated by the practice of listening to Radio Free Europe (RFE). We aimed to show how this particular practice was reflected in socially concerned cinematic artifacts of the 1990s. As such, we approached the cinematic medium as a transporter of mental and emotional dispositions of the past, as a visualization (p- ?ob) of a listening experience, and as an arena of acting these dispositions out. Since all subjects we interviewed remembered the combination of frustration and relief that listening to RFER generated, we assumed that the directors of the analyzed films were such subjects as well, and that they used their art as a belated realization, in times of postcensorship, of accumulated RFER listener frustrations. We see their films as vehicles for voicing, in times of postcensorship, their need to curse at the communist regime, point the finger at its legacy, and voice their story of victimization.
As our interviewed listeners recounted, RFER exposure produced relief by generating a feeling of belonging to a broader transnational (European) network of educated and politically vigilant subjects. RFER made use, however, of this drive to belong to a transnational community in order to spread its anticommunist message, inspiring listeners to blame communism for their political and economic frustrations. The side effect of this power operation was that they imagined themselves as second-class Europeans. This subaltern relationship to Europe is manifest in the films of the 1990s and is still perceptible in the cultural production of the 2000s. Moreover, resentment created by this subalternship has been exploited politically by neoconservative discourse and anti-European right-wing parties, which flourished all over the former Eastern Europe and continue to gain popularity by disseminating narratives of anticommunism and new nationalism.
In 2007, director Alexandru Solomon made a documentary about RFER. Insightfully titled Cold Waves, with the original Romanian title referencing the ideological war fought by means of radio broadcasting (Razboi pe calea undelor), the film reminds its viewers that the truth about communism (as well as about Western “embedded” liberal democracy) was a symbolic product of the Cold War, offered for free in exchange for political loyalty. The same can be said about the democratic education RFER freely offered. This thesis is important to understand, transnationally, the symbolic processes of evaluating state-socialist experience and of the years that followed it.
Solomon's approach and his thesis that RFE was an enterprise paradoxically working toward rendering itself irrelevant show that anticommunism was in fact part and parcel of the legacy of communism, as was the elitist thinking and working-class hatred associated with it. This paradox marks the post-1989 era. The use of RFE-style anticommunist denunciation of the “legacy of communism” served, in fact, the perpetuation of its legacy as defined by RFE. While insightful in many ways about present and past historical realities, the films we analyzed here are also plagued by this contradiction. As such, they testify, as expressionist artifacts, to a certain emotional and ideological landscape of the 1990s—to its fears, self-hatred, contradictions, and neuroses, but also to a series of uncomfortable social and political prejudices—against workers, against community values, against women, and people of other cultures, religions, and races.
From this point of view, this chapter only scratches the surface of an important act of rethinking, all over former Eastern Europe, of the legacy of anticommunism. As such, we have sketched here only how fabricated images of Europe haunted the consciousness of the 1990s and prevented it from understanding the revamped geostrategic and economic realities of the post-1989 world and from finding less bumpy roads of European (p- 709) integration. Anticommunist propaganda created the predicament of Europeans without Europe (inner exile), which paved the way of the acceptance of the one-way—stridently subaltern—type of Europeanization of Eastern Europe in the immediate post-1989 era, finding perhaps its ultimate expression in the pitiful anti-Eastern European sentiment of Brexit voters.
This Europeanization, which also bore the problematic name of “transition,” led to new forms of moral, ideological, economic, and cultural expropriations that again need to be fully understood (and not in new nationalist terms).35 But the legacy of anticommunist propaganda has also negatively affected other aspects of the Romanian cultural habitat. The 1990s witnessed long debates on values and cultural canons. Anticommunism played an important role here, too, but not only, as one might imagine, by prioritizing the symbolic production of former dissidents. In this sense, one of the most pernicious effects of 1990s anticommunism was that it facilitated the uncritical revisitation, under the heading of victims of communist terror, of interwar fascist cultural production, which became the new standard of the 1990s and which has left its traces in the cinema as well, though more discreetly than in other arts.36
Andreescu, Florentina C. “Seeing the Romanian, Transition in Cinematic Space.” Space and Culture 1 (2016): 73-87.
Beichman, Arnold. “The Story of Radio Free Europe.” National Review, 36, no. 21, November 2 (1984): 29-35.
Berg, Jerome S. Listening on the Short Waves—1945 to Today. New York: McFarland & Company, 2008.
Berindei, Mihnea, and Gabriel Andreescu. The Last Communist Decade. Letters to Radio Free Europe (Ultimul deceniu comunist. Scrisori catre Radio Europa Libera), Vol. I: 19791985. Iasi: Polirom. 2010.
Bresseler, Eva Susanne. Von der Experimentierbühne zum Propagandainstrument: Die Geschichte der Funkausstellung von 1924 bis 1939. Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2009.
Cernat, Manuela. “Is the Contemporary Romanian Film a Mirror in Which the Portrait of Youth Appears in a Proper Light?” (“Este filmul romanesc contemporan o oglindä in care portretul tineretului apare in adevärata sa luminä?”). Scinteia, November 16 (1980): 6.
(p. 712) Cummings, Richard H. Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950-1989. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2009.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated from the French by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Ernu, Vasile, Costi Rogozanu, Ciprian Siulea, and Ovidiu Tichindeleanu. The Illusion of Anti-communism: Critical Readings of Tismaneanu Report (Iluzia anticomunismului. Lec-turi critice ale Raportului Tismaneanu). Chisinäu: Cartier, 2008.
Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2014.
Gorzo, Andrei, and Gabriela Filippi, eds. The Film of Transition. Contributions to the Interpretation of the Romanian Cinema of the 1990s (Filmul tranzitiei. Contributii la interpretarea cinemaului romanesc „nouazecist"). Cluj-Napoca: Tact, 2017.
Holt, Robert T. Radio Free Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958.
Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler. Revised ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Mägura Bernard, Ioana. The Director of Our Radio Station. Bucharest: Curtea Veche, 2007.
Mitrovich, Gregory. Cold War Broadcasting Impact. Report on a conference organized by the Hoover Institution and the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Integration Wilson International Center for Scholars, Stanford University, October 13-16, 2004. http://media.hoover.org/sites/default/files/documents/ broadcast_conf_rpt.pdf
Parta, Eugene R. Discovering the Hidden Listener: An Empirical Assessment of Radio Liberty and Western Broadcasting to the USSR during the Cold War: A Study Based on Audience Research Findings, 1970-1991. Stanford, CA: Hoover Press, 2007.
Parvulescu, Constantin. Orphans of the East: Eastern European Cinema and the Revolutionary Subject. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.
Petrescu, Cristina, and Dragos Petrescu. “The Canon of Remembering Romanian Communism: From Autobiographical Recollections to Collective Representations.” In Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollection of Lived Experience in Southern Europe, edited by M. Todorova, A. Dimou, and S. Troebst, 43-70. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014.
Puddington, Arch. Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000.
Zizek, Slavoj. “Philosophy, the ‘Unknown Knowns,' and the Public Use of Reason.” Topoi 25, no. 1-2 (2006): 137-142.
(1.) We thank graduate student Andra Dodita for helping us conduct these interviews.
(2.) See Dominique Nasta, Contemporary Romanian Cinema, The History of an Unexpected Miracle (London: Wallflower Press, 2013), 47-56; and Florentina C. Andreescu, “Seeing the Romanian, Transition in Cinematic Space,” Space and Culture 1 (2016): 73-87; Andrei Gorzo and Gabriela Filippi (eds.), Filmul tranzitiei. Contribute la interpretarea cin-emaului romanesc "nouazecist" (Cluj-Napoca: Tact, 2017).
(3.) Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
(4.) Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 8.
(5.) Ibid., 9.
(6.) Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2014), 18.
(7.) Robert T. Holt, Radio Free Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), 23.
(8.) Holt, Radio Free Europe, 21-22. RFE internal documents emphasize that it sought to trigger an active listenership, which would manifest itself politically: “Only alert, coolheaded successive moves by the peoples themselves, armed with understanding of their situation and a clear sense of what they want, can promise any real fruits.”
(9.) Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), ix; loana Magura Bernard, The Director of Our Radio Station (Bucharest: Curtea Veche, 2007), 16. This home service model was used by the BBC first. RFER employed it more substantially in the 1970s.
(10.) See Gregory Mitrovich, Cold War Broadcasting Impact, report on a conference organized by the Hoover Institution and the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Integration Wilson International Center for Scholars, Stanford University, October 13-16, 2004, 19. In Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, that is, before the advent of FM, the top broadcaster of this kind was Radio Luxembourg, while the program with the highest popularity on RFER was the music program. This initiation role of pop music is confirmed by Radio Liberty (a RFE version for Soviet Union citizens) audience research done by the Soviet Academy of Sciences: “69% of the Soviet audience tuned to Western media because of their interest in music programs, followed by international news (45%) and domestic news programming (38%).”
(11.) Mihnea Berindei and Gabriel Andreescu, Ultimul deceniu comunist. Scrisori catre Radio Europa Libera/The Last Communist Decade. Letters to Radio Free Europe (Iasi: Polirom, 2010), 22. A collection of such letters is available at OSA archive and online on the OSA hosted Parallel Archive at http://www.parallelarchive.org/.
(12.) The bomb attack seemed to have been carried out with the help of the notorious international terrorist Carlos the Jackal. See Richard H. Cummings's article published in Historia under the title “The Last Tango in Munich: Carlos the Jackal and the Radio Free Europe Attack,” https://www.historia.ro/sectiune/general/articol/ultimul-tango-la-munchen-carlos-sacalul-si-atentatul-de-la-radio-europa-libera.
(13.) Romania hardly jammed RFE broadcasts throughout its entire socialist experience. It did not interfere with listening even in the 1980s when the antagonism between RFER and the regime was at its highest. Historian Mircea Raceanu claims that jamming was totally stopped already in 1963, spurred by Romania's decision to follow an independent course in foreign policy from Moscow (Mitrovich, Cold War, 30). For the later period, one of the reasons was indicated in an interview conducted for this study with Michael Shafir, who worked for RFE's audience research department. Romania tried to comply with the Helsinki Accords of 1975, which demanded free access to information.
(14.) Jerome S. Berg, Listening on the Short Waves—1945 to Today (New York: McFarland & Company, 2008), 11. In addition, good reception was sabotaged by a well-kept secret of the radio manufacturing industry: the technological quality of mass-produced radio sets was never high enough to meet the standards of decent shortwave reception-something that radio sets makers, even Western ones, knew very well when they added short waves to their receivers (Berg, Listening on the Short Waves, 21).
(15.) Mitrovich, Cold War Broadcasting Impact, 26.
(16.) Holt, Radio Free Europe, 24.
(17.) In Romania, this phenomenon was apparent from the first day of the fall of the communist regime. A 2011 media consumption Eurobarometer shows that Romania, the country with the most popular RFE division, later became the EU country with the least interest in radio and with of the highest in television.
(18.) Slavoj Zizek, “Philosophy, the ‘Unknown Knowns,' and the Public Use of Reason,” Topoi 25 (2006): 137.
(19.) Jacque Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, translated from the French by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). Page numbers for earlier quotations.
(20.) As Derrida notes, the specter informs as interpellation, it has an eye, a voice it uses to talk to realities, calling them names, conferring them identity and value. As such, it has power of transformation.
(21.) Derrida, Specters of Marx, 3.
(22.) Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 9.
(23.) For Kracauer, it was the Weimar Era.
(24.) Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 20.
(25.) Manuela Cernat, “Is the Contemporary Romanian Film a Mirror in Which the Portrait of Youth Appears in a Proper Light?” (Este filmul romanesc contemporan o oglinda in care portretul tineretului apare in adevarata sa lumina?), Scinteia, November 16, 6.
(26.) Constantin Parvulescu, Orphans of the East: Eastern European Cinema and the Revolutionary Subject (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 142.
(27.) Ibid., 143.
(28.) Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 9.
(29.) Ibid., 11.
(30.) Cristina Petrescu and Dragos Petrescu, “The Canon of Remembering Romanian Communism: From Autobiographical Recollections to Collective Representations,” in Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollection of Lived Experience in Southern Europe, edited by M. Todorova, A. Dimou, and S. Troebst (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014), 43-70.
(31.) Daniel Barbu, Republica absenta. Politico §i societate in Romania postcomunista (Bucharest: Nemira, 2004).
(32.) Vasile Ernu, Costi Rogozanu, Ciprian Siulea, and Ovidu Tichindeleanu, The Illusion of Anti-Communism: Critical Readings of Tismaneanu Report/Iluzia anticomunismului. Lecturi critice ale Raportului Tismaneanu (Chisinau: Cartier, 2008).
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(33.) Other soft revoltees echoing RFER living-room dissidence appear in Divorce from Love (Divert din dragoste, Andrei Blaier, 1991) and E pericoloso sporgersi (Nae Caranfil, 1993).
(34.) Alex Leo Serban, "Trahir," Dilema, April 22-28, 1994.
(35.) A rethinking of the concept of Eastern European transition cinema as cinema of Europeanization can be found in C. Parvulescu and C. Turcus, eds., Europeanization in EastCentral European Fiction Film (1980-2000). Special Issue of Studies in Eastern European Cinema 9, no. 1 (2018).
(36.) This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministery of Research and Innovation, UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0541, Contract 140/2018.
Constantin Parvulescu
Constantin Parvulescu, Senior Researcher in Film and Media Studies, Babes-Bolyai University
Claudiu Turcus
Claudiu Turcus, Associate Professor in Film and Literary Studies, Babe§-Bolyai University
Lenin inLos Angeles: Counter-Memories, Recycling Socialism
Katarzyna Marciniak
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Jan 2020 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.32
Opening with a discussion of the Gao Brothers' sculpture Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin's Head, which appeared in a public space in Los Angeles in 2011, this article provides a meditation on the various post-Cold War disappearances and reappearances of statues of Lenin in Eastern Europe, a space still haunted by its communist past. The analysis is focused on the representation of several of these monumental sculptures evoking their installation, removal, and reconfiguration—in a cluster of films and public statue “performances” across the former Eastern Bloc. It also explores the different hermeneutic registers encircling the statues, registers that often mix experiences of trauma with ludic contestation. The vignettes that serve to organize the article demonstrate how these sculptures have the potential to prompt counter-memories, often becoming triggers that enable the excavation of private or communal remembrance. To clarify this process, each vignette offers an instance of revisionist storytelling, disclosing the unstable relationship between monumental sculpture and memory, and tapping into counter-histories, or histories that demand to be remembered and vindicated.
Keywords: Lenin statues, public art, communist counter-memories, counter-histories, monumental sculpture, Gao Brothers, Grütas Park, politics of commemoration, revisionist storytelling
Counter Memory: My mother, an active Solidarity member, keeps bringing home various publications produced underground. We see pamphlets, manifestoes, and whole books occasionally—“bibula” in the underground lingo. All documents have sketchy fonts and low-quality paper. My grandmother and father worry out loud that this is dangerous. We will all go to jail, says my grandmother. I am young, but I understand that we have access to illicit stuff. I read a lot of those materials. This is my introduction to defying the communist regime.
December 2011, an uncanny emergence: the gigantic head of Lenin appears on La Brea Avenue, a major artery running through Los Angeles. This glistening creation of stainless steel is a sculpture placed in a public space—on the street, in front of the new, but yet to be opened at that point, Ace Museum of Contemporary Art (see Figure 31.1).1 Titled “Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin's Head,” the sculpture is the work of Beijing-based brothers Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang, referred to as “two of the most incendiary figures in China's contemporary art world.”2 Gao Qiang remarked on the fact that their art is often thought of as shocking: “It is fine if people get shocked by the work or think it's sensationalist, but that's not the intention. I personally never get shocked by art because life itself in China is shocking enough.”3 The brothers are known for their controversial, politically challenging art, specifically for their various provocative renditions of Mao, still a sacrosanct figure for some Chinese. Headless Mao, naked Mao, feminized Mao with huge breasts, a firing squad of Mao figures shooting at Christ, repentant Mao in a kneeling position with a hand on his chest—these are some of the Gao Brothers' best-known pieces. Their Mao performance in Moscow at the Kandinsky Prize ceremony
(p. 714) in 2008 was similarly unsettling: wearing red Mao masks, the artists smashed Mao's head to reveal Lenin's head inside Mao's. In interviews, the artists speak about the importance of the Mao figure as a recurring and troubling preoccupation for them: “1968 was a crucial moment in the Cultural Revolution where many political cleanings took place. Our father, a simple laborer, was thrown into jail. We still don't know if he actually committed suicide as the authorities told us, or if he was killed during his incarceration.”4 The leaflet I pick up at the Ace Museum when it finally opens tells me that due to the controversial nature of the sculpture, “Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin's Head” has been banned in China.
(p. 715) While many East Europeans who grew up under state socialism are familiar with statues of Lenin in urban spaces (usually a full figure with the right hand raised), the presence of Lenin's highly polished, stainless-steel head in southern California invites us to think about the disappearance and reappearance of Lenin statues as a trope, and it suggests a mode of political playfulness that was not possible under “real” socialism. We can apparently now have fun with Lenin. After the statue appeared at the corner of La Brea and 4th Street, I found myself engaged in street research, observing organized photo shoots (in one case, a group of several young men with naked torsos and wearing combat gear were posing in front of Lenin's head; in another, a man wearing a gorilla costume was being videotaped while dancing in front of the statue); watching random people who pose in front of the sculpture as their companion takes a snapshot with a phone; and overhearing all kinds of conversations during which, inevitably, someone asks me, “Do you know who the dude is?”
As the site has become a popular public performance space, I return to a memory of growing up in socialist Poland and recall the sarcasm of the oft-repeated phrase “Lenin wiecznie zywy" (Lenin always alive), a shorthand assertion that evoked the seemingly endless absurdity of communism. The statement referred initially to Lenin's embalmed corpse placed on display in Lenin's Tomb in Moscow. Back then, it also highlighted the inescapability of Lenin's communist ideals that subjugated the lives of several generations of people in Eastern Europe and beyond. That statement was—and still is—the mark of a powerful residue from the past; Lenin is perpetually among us: variously remembered as an instigator of revolution, a philosopher and educator; also as a brutal instigator of communist oppression. At the time when the sculpture appeared in Los Angeles, there were, yet again, discussions in Russia about whether Lenin's embalmed body should be finally
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buried and his remains put to rest. Then, in 2015, two Russian performance artists, part of the Blue Rider art collective, performed an exorcism on Lenin's mausoleum in Red Square. They splashed “holy water” onto its front door while shouting “rise up and leave.”5 This act earned them ten days in jail.
The Gao Brothers' sculpture resurrects this sentiment—Lenin always alive—in a complex way: a small statue of a feminized Mao figure is performing the balancing act of a skilled gymnast on Lenin's head. Mao holds a balance pole as if walking a tightrope. The image of precariousness raises conflicting questions: do the communist hauntings of Western landscapes represent nostalgia for an unrealized utopia, or memories of anger and resistance, or simply aesthetic appreciation for oppositional art? Or perhaps, since the sculpture appropriates the glossy aesthetic of Jeff Koons's work, might one not think that Lenin's severed head with a shrunken Mao dancing on top of it offers a triumphant image of capitalism and thus becomes a commentary on the vacuity of extravagantly priced contemporary art? Or, considering the contentious history of communist ideas globally, could we read this sculpture as a historical jump cut across time and space, speaking to the risks inherent in emulating Lenin's ideals? Arthur Hwang, the UK-based curator who organized the Gao Brothers' first US museum show at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City in 2010, similarly remarked that the pole Miss Mao holds is “a subtle reference to the Communist Party's own balancing (p- 716) act as it bases its continuing legitimacy on a Marxist-Leninist fiction.”6 But Lenin's appearance in Los Angeles is not, in fact, an isolated occurrence as the proliferation of Lenin-Mao-socialist-related kitsch appears to be a global phenomenon. The Gao Brothers' sculpture is just one compelling example of what I call “socialist recycling” and a symptom of the global flirtation with the bankrupt legacy of communism and a persistent fascination with the failed project of state socialism.
I want to think about the emergence of Lenin in Los Angeles in connection to several conceptual threads. First, Michel Foucault's idea of counter-memory and counter-history feels important here, as it references the return of lost voices and forgotten experiences. Drawing on Foucault, philosopher José Medina argues that counter-histories feed off counter-memories and he submits that “the critical goal of genealogy is to energize a vibrant and feisty epistemic pluralism so that insurrectionary struggles among competing power/knowledge frameworks are always underway and contestation always alive.”7 Analyzing Foucault's idea of subjugated knowledges, Medina claims: “the critical task of the scholar and the activist is to resurrect subjugated knowledges—that is, to revive hidden or forgotten bodies of experiences and memories—and to help produce insurrections of subjugated knowledges.”8 Second, considering specifically the rise and fall of the monuments of communism, art historian Charles Merewether's point is also pertinent: “monuments are part of the turbulent legacy of the past; they cannot stand outside history.”9 Monuments seek permanence, commemoration; they are an iconography of mainly male triumphs and expressions of how the state seeks legitimation through representation. Finally, I also recall the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko, a Polish-born, US-based installation artist with a long-standing interest in the rhetorical power of monuments, who for years has been projecting counter-images onto existing memorials in various parts of the world.
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Among his public art works, Wodiczko's rendition of Lenin in East Berlin in 1990 is especially relevant here (see Figure 31.2). Since he has produced several projects on homelessness, most notably, “Homeless Vehicle,”10 we can understand his rendition of Lenin as deeply ironic: a communist leader is transformed into a homeless person, dragging his possessions in a cart. Wodiczko remarks: “watching the monuments of Lenin being destroyed made me think that there should be a public discussion before any of this is irreversible. The sculptures are witnesses to the past, memorabilia of the monstrous past.”11 His argument is that “the past must be infused with the present to create a critical history.”12 Commenting on his architectural projections and the way they alter our perception and call for what Foucault referred to as “fearless speech” 13—Wodiczko's reanimated monuments indeed convey different meanings than originally intended—he recognizes “the phenomenological power of the architectural body,” perceiving the animation of monuments as an instigator of public dialogue.14 Although the Gao Brothers' Lenin-Mao sculpture is not a communist-era monument, but rather an artifact that uses familiar historical figures to create a pastiche of a monument, it offers the kind of critical history that Wodiczko calls for and the feisty epistemic pluralism proposed by Medina; it is a postsocialist counter-memory, a counter-visualization of the remnants of communist regimes. | (p- 717)
Courtesy of Krzysztof Wodiczko and Galerie Lelong, New York
(p. 718) Reflecting on the difficult translatability of memories, I am also prompted to recall the insights of Monica Popescu, who, with specific reference to a statue of Lenin in Seattle (see Figure 31.3),15 theorized the communist artifact's movement through new symbolic markets and globalized economies and argued for the importance of the figure of translation. She writes: “the symbolic residue and surplus rendered in the process of translation and the optical aberrations that accompany the mirroring speak of the differ-
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ent modes of emplotment of the same artifact [ ... ] in different cultures and critical discourses.”16 It is the effect of the optical distortions we see in the Gao sculpture and also in Wodiczko's reconfigured Lenin statue that interests me here. Commenting on the rather bizarre appearance of Lenin's statue in the community of Freemont, Seattle in 2000, Popescu acknowledges that “As could have been expected, Russian and Eastern European émigrés refused to see the humorous undertones of having to face again the father of a regime responsible for numberless deaths, crimes, deportations, and ruined lives.”17
So “fun” with Lenin is relational, contextual, generational, and, for some, fiercely connected to counter-memories and counter-histories. This kind of overt fun was certainly not possible when I was growing up in a Warsaw-Pact country governed by a regime enforced by the Soviet military, requiring that Lenin be popularized only as a serious
(p. 719) historical hero. I think of Lenin in Los Angeles as a visual metaphor for communist shivers, an image that provokes me to ask: how do we approach communist ghosts without either romanticized nostalgia or disavowing amnesia? How might we acknowledge these ghosts without either a leftist lament for the defunct communist experiment, or the demonization of an era of totalitarian repression? How do we approach incommensurable clashes between a Western nostalgia for a “real” socialism-communism as an ideal of social justice and East European experiences of living the ramifications of Leninism in the former Soviet bloc? How might art, as a site of creative oppositional possibilities, perform such ghostly speaking without simply offering, to use Charity Scribner's words, a “requiem for communism”?18 Might communist-related visual culture help us make sense of the period and its complexities?
Contemplating such questions, in what follows I analyze the divergent representations of various Lenin's statues—their installation, removal, and reconfiguration—in several films and public statue “performances” across Eastern Europe. I dwell on the different hermeneutic registers encircling the statues of Lenin in various parts of Eastern Europe
Page 6 of 22 still processing the communist past, registers that often mix experiences of trauma with ludic contestation. Each vignette I offer demonstrates how these various sculptures have the potential to prompt counter-memories; indeed, they often become “triggers” that serve to excavate private or communal memories of the past. As such, each vignette focuses on revisionist storytelling and stresses the unstable relationship between monumental sculpture and memory, tapping into counter-histories, that is, histories that demand to be remembered and vindicated, and which decommunization laws in Eastern Europe are threatening to obliterate.
Counter-Memory: I remember an old movie theatre, the Kino Popularne, in my hometown, Lodz, Poland—a dilapidated building on Ogrodowa Street. During the first brief period of Solidarity, in the early 1980s, this place was known for showing politically risky films, circulating outside the reach of the state socialist censors. Among them were Andrzej Chodakowski and Andrzej Zajgczkowski's 1981 Workers '80 (Robotnicy '80) and Andrzej Wajda's 1981 Man of Iron (Czlowiek z ze-laza) about the Gdansk shipyard strike of the summer of 1980 and the beginnings of the Solidarity movement. This short-lived era of uncensored screenings ended with the brutal imposition of martial law on the night of December 12, 1981. The next morning citizens woke up to dead phones and to radio and TV broadcasts featuring General Wojciech Jaruzelski's somber voice and images of his mannequinlike body in a military uniform (I remember my grandmother's snarky comment: “What a grotesque puppet of the Soviet imperium”). Using a fuzzy rhetoric of national catastrophe, (p- 720) unspecified chaos, and demoralization, Jaruzelski claimed that this was a “dramatic moment in Polish history” when “our motherland has been brought to the precipice.” He then announced the formation of a Military Council of National Salvation (Wojskowa Rada Ocalenia Narodowego), in order to “rescue” the nation from the subversive and harmful activities of rogue dissidents. Per Jaruzelski's assurance, this military coup was being organized in accordance with the Polish Constitution.19
Commenting on this period, Agnieszka Holland writes in The Guardian in February 2019: “Life under communism was threatening, but we were able to circumvent the system. We learned to trick the censors [ ... ]. We wanted to tell stories about the contemporary world and voice our collective anger. In the summer of 1980 this joined with the anger of workers from the Gdansk shipyard, whose strike led to the creation of the Solidarity movement. It was then that we Polish film-makers felt an incredible sense of agency.”20 Indirectly reflecting on the collective anger Holland mentions, Lenin from Krakow (Lenin z Krakowa),21 a 1997 Polish documentary directed by Jerzy Ridwan and Jerzy Kowynia, provides a short but fascinating account of Lenin's statue in Nowa Huta—its (un)welcomed presence in the city, its eventual removal, and its bizarre afterlife. While there were other statues of Lenin throughout Poland, the one in Nowa Huta had a particular resonance because of the specific history of this location. Built from scratch in 1949 as a working-class suburb of Krakow, Lenin Nowa Huta (“Lenin's New Steelworks”) is a legendary creation. Conceived as a model communist city contributing to the mission of building the new postwar Poland, Nowa Huta was showcased as Stalin's gift to the allied nation. Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, was among the Polish artists who helped to promote the communist propaganda by celebrating the creation of Nowa Huta: “Socialist city/the city of good fate/without suburbs or shady corners/ friendly to everyone.”22 Despite the official line that advertised the city as a spectacular design in the Renaissance tradition of perfect symmetry, this new urban model was commonly perceived as a punishment for the Krakow community's resistance to the Soviet-imposed regime (historically, Krakow, Poland's original capital, has been the center of vibrant intellectual and cultural activities).
Focusing on Nowa Huta, Lenin from Krakow weaves archival footage with present-day interviews. Many people are interviewed who recount memories linked to the statue of Lenin—historians, apartment dwellers where Lenin stayed in Krakow in 1912, former workers from Nowa Huta, local artists—but the two main figures are Marian Konieczny, a sculptor who designed the statue, and Andrzej Szewczuwaniec, a man who tried to blow it up. Represented as an individual who, because of his oppositional politics, suffered various injustices and incarceration during that era, Szewczuwaniec recalls his internal urge for retribution. He remembers sharing with friends his idea of how to destroy the monument: “If we could pull off an explosion at Lenin's feet, then that is how we would best get back at the communists” (in Polish he uses the derogatory word “komuna,” a shorthand for both the communist authorities and the entire system).23 His attempt partially failed as only one of Lenin's feet was blown off. The disfigurement of (p- 721) Lenin's standing emerges as an irony in the film, as Konieczny, commenting on his design of the monument, says: “This is a figure in motion, hands at his back, bulky frame, leaning forward. Lenin is marching like his eternally marching ideas.” We also learn that Szewczuwaniec's plan to damage the statue was not the only one. As painter Adam Mace-donski explains, “the statue bothered us so much that we decided to do something about it.” He recalls how he and his colleagues planned to splash Lenin with valerian so that all the neighborhood cats would be attracted to it: “cats' poop is extremely smelly and the stench would symbolize our attitude toward the statue. Before that happened, someone blew up that foot.” In 1989, when the removal of socialist relics began, the film shows how the statue was set on fire during the happening “Let's apply make-up to Lenin.” Nevertheless, the statue survived even the fire.
The film opens with images of a kitschy Swedish private amusement park where Lenin's statue leads its curiously sheltered afterlife. Throughout the narrative, we repeatedly see the owner of the park, Bengt Erlandsson, wearing cowboy attire complete with bolo tie, who is a proud collector of various artifacts. Whenever he appears, we hear the uplifting orchestral rendition (played by the Nowa Huta Orchestra) of tunes associated with communist times. The ironic tonality established by the music underscores the incommensurable clashes revealed by the narrative: Konieczny, the sculptor, is convinced that Lenin
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represented social justice; Szewczuwaniec, the dissident, offers a story how he was sent to work at Nowa Huta as a punishment for his oppositional politics; a former Nowa Huta worker recalls how, back then, the workers were forced to forgo their end-of-year bonus to fund the monument. In the end, in showcasing Lenin's statue in Sweden, the film subtly conveys the idea that Lenin lives best in the West.
Courtesy of Malgorzata Szydlowska, Bartosz Szy-dlowski, and Theater Laznia Nowa
“Fun” with Lenin in Nowa Huta was on display again in 2014 when Malgorzata Szydlowska and Bartosz Szydlowski presented their work, ironically titled “Fountain of the Future” (“Fontanna Przyszlosci”), as part of the Festival Artboom in Krakow focusing on Nowa Huta (see Figure 31.4). Commonly referred to as “Pissing Lenin,” the statue, placed in the same spot where the previous Lenin's statue “lived,” is another optical aberration and provocation; it is small and fluorescent, making it oddly cheerful. Maciej Mizian, an art historian at the local museum comments: “Why so tiny? The goal was to cut the ideology down to size.”24 And the authors of the statue ask: “Are we capable of ascribing a funnier, surrealist meaning to this past, of bursting the bubble, of showing that we're able to let go of the trauma through laughter and distance?”25 The answer depends on generational experiences. While a younger public might see “Pissing Lenin” as a playful performance, a local resident of an older generation, interviewed to comment on “Fountain of the Future” mentions painful memories associated with the statue: “‘It was by the Lenin statue that the ZOMO (communist riot police) beat us up during demonstrations held by Solidarity,' he said, recalling the freedom-fighting trade union that helped bring down communism.”26
Interestingly, the media also reported that members of Law and Justice (the ultra-conservative party currently dominant in Poland) placed a condom on the statue, claiming that they wanted to prevent Lenin from disseminating communist ideology.27 This additional layer of performance treats communism as an infectious disease. (p- 722) Paradoxically perhaps, Lenin and his ideology have become an uneasy common ground for an entire spectrum of otherwise radically opposing political groups.
Counter-Memory: When my friends in the United States ask about my growing up in Poland during the socialist era, they are curious to hear that I lived with my parents and grandmother in two rooms in socialist "bloki," the claustrophobically stifling spaces built and promoted with zest as exciting sites of "modern living." Inevitably, they ask, "that's two bedrooms, right?" I explain that the idea of an apartment here is hardly compatible with socialist architectural design, which treated the concept of a bedroom as a bourgeois luxury. Two rooms meant two allpurpose quarters with a tiny bathroom and a kitchen (often without a window, a design known as a "blind kitchen"). Such quarters were referred to as "transitive apartments," as typically they had no separate entrance, and thus to enter the second room, one had to walk through the first one, precluding any privacy and instigating surveillance on a very private, domestic level. My grandmother lived in a second room and, while (p- 723) walking through my parents' room (where I occupied a corner), it was her routine to quickly scrutinize the state of their affairs. The same kind of inspection took place in the stairwell where, because of the tightness of space, neighbors were used to scrutinizing each other's daily movements. This system of domestic surveillance where one was always watched by relatives or neighbors served as a miniature example of the governmental control of citizens during socialism. The uniformity of the "bloki" design was meant to reinforce the concept of the supposed uniformity of socialist society, proudly projected as a nation of "equal stomachs" and thus of equal needs and desires.
The socialist domestic infrastructure plays a critical role in Wolfgang Becker's 2004 feature Goodbye Lenin! At the time when the Gao Brothers' sculpture appeared, I was teaching this film, a well-known narrative that represents, as Roger Hillman claims, "history in the subjunctive mood," one that might have been but wasn't.28 One of the pivotal and spectacular images in the narrative is Lenin's bust being carried away by helicopter, an image of removal and disposal (see Figure 31.5). His bust, hand outstretched, is carried into the sunset, signaling a moment of extinction or disappearance, an end. The flying away of Lenin's bust constitutes a symbolic clash that finds an interesting counterpart in Lenin's statue in Los Angeles. This cinematic moment of dismissal mimics the historical dismantling of the towering sculptures of the communist leaders all over Eastern Europe after 1989, which marked the end of colonization by the Soviet empire and signaled the rapid emergence of a capitalist economy and commodity culture.
Frame capture.
Goodbye Lenin! is a narrative of surreal socialism, one of deterritorialization and defamiliarization, featuring an East Berlin mother, a devoted socialist, who falls into a (p- 724) coma for eight months and wakes up after the fall of the Wall. Her son Alex then stage-manages reality for her, re-creating in the present the socialist time of the past. His mission is to protect his mother; her doctor has told him that “the knowledge of the changes would be life-threatening for her.” The socialist time is now playing itself out in the mother's room while outside there is already a hybrid mixture of past and present, signaling a new reality. Alex is staging a reversed history, a transfigured version of the past, a resurrection of the GDR life in his mother's room that works to “save” her memories against this new reality. Interestingly, he does this with the help of his friend, Denis, who sees himself as a future filmmaker. Together they concoct home-made media broadcasts, cutting and pasting archival footage with various staged performances, and each created vignette is put on a VHS tape and played in the mother's room, simulating for her a live TV broadcast. Julian Kramer, commenting on the film, calls these creations “fantasy news,” which “create the humane German Democratic Republic of their personal dreams, a vision that is in stark contrast to the reality of a state which spied on its citizens' every move, kept political prisoners behind bars for decades under unspeakable conditions, and was responsible for shooting dead dozens of refugees attempting to leave GDR.”29
The iconic moment of Lenin's bust being carried by a helicopter occurs when the mother ventures into the street for the first time and, visually, we are cued to understand it as a perplexing, dizzying, and disorienting experience. Right before she exits her room, we see a blimp marked with a “test the west” message. Outside, the first thing she sees is an IKEA poster, then Lenin's shadow, then a huge poster advertising bras, and, finally, the flying bust of Lenin. The statue then gives way to images of Coca-Cola and Burger King. The socialist era is disappearing fast. An episode with pickles is quite revealing in this respect: when the mother craves a specific brand of pickles, “Spreewald gherkins,” Alex finds out that they are no longer available in stores and he decides to dumpster-dive for old jars in which he places newly available pickles, now from the Netherlands. It is an elaborate scheme—a con job—involving boiling and sterilizing the jars and placing the rescued labels on them; these moments are both touching and playful, offering a vision of
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Lenin in Los Angeles: Counter-Memories, Recycling Socialism scavenger-hunt socialism—one based on misrecognition and masquerade. The now nonexistent GDR pickles become rejects of history, just like Lenin's statue from Nowa Huta was picked up by the Swedish scavenger-hunter.
In the contemporary climate permeated by anti-immigrant campaigning, discussions of the wall along the US-Mexico border, European xenophobia intensifying after the refugee crisis, and what Wendy Brown has referred to as “walling”30 on a more global scale, Goodbye Lenin! is a compelling narrative to reconsider. While many transnational films representing the persistent ideology of walling underscore the obsessive guarding of borders, Goodbye Lenin! shows their destruction. As Alex says: “At the beginning of June 1990, the borders of our GDR were worthless; we felt like being in the center of the world. Where finally something moved, and we moved with it.” When the mother discovers a new reality, she asks: “What is actually happening here?” Instead of telling her about the fall of the Wall, Alex and Denis produce yet another vignette: this one reverses (p. 725) history in an absurd fashion; we learn that the (by now deposed) East German dictator, Comrade Honecker, consented to accept exiles from the West seeking protection in the East. These are people “who [the nation] previously saw as enemies and who today want to live with us.” The mother is thus coaxed into believing that their socialist nation is graciously welcoming refugees from the West. It is worth returning to this cinematic moment because, right before she dies, Alex's mother, says, “You can take one in,” referring to a potential refugee from the West that her apartment might now accommodate. But the audience understands that such a gesture of hospitality could never have taken place in GDR. Furthermore, as Stephen Legg writes, despite his genuine intentions to protect his mother, “to maintain the illusion, Alex had to adopt the coercive tactics of the communist state, using media distortion, emotional blackmail and constant manipula-tion.”31
Counter-Memory: On the eve of Martial Law, in the midst of the harshest winter in decades, Wojciech Marczewski's 1981 movie Shivers (Dreszcze) premiers. Shivers has acquired the status of a cult film in Poland because it offers a compelling critique of institutionalized indoctrination, featuring the coming-of-age story of a boy enticed to inform on his parents. Also, having been screened right before the imposition of martial law, the film—metaphorically—was a powerful foretelling of what was to come. Martial law was indeed a time of cultural and social shivering— tanks and armored vehicles in the snowy streets, armed troops everywhere, the austere era of military curfew, tapped phones (when one picked up a phone, a live male voice, as if lifted from George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, announced “rozmowa kontrolowana” [“monitored conversation”]), and the rationing of such basics as butter, laundry detergents, and shoes. The shivers generated by martial law only slowly eased into the next stage, the “period of normalization” (1983-
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1986), an official term ironically acknowledging that the nation was finally emerging from the abyss of abnormality. During this period, I am a university student. One day, returning from our classes, my male friend and I tumbled in the snow near Poniatowski Park—laughing, rolling, and laughing some more. All of a sudden, we see stern police officers in our faces, demanding our identification cards. They instructed us that laughing like that and displaying pleasure in public was inappropriate and could lead to an arrest.
(p. 726) Pleasure in public was on a peculiar display in October 2015, when Ukrainian artist Alexander Milov (whose sculpture, “Love,” for the 2015 Burning Man Festival is well-known), converted Lenin's statue in Odessa into a monument to the Star Wars villain (see Figure 31.6). The figure of Darth Vader, mimicking Lenin's posture, now occupies the Soviet leader's once celebrated and now repudiated place. This replacement vividly underscores Milov's claim that the reach of American popular culture has more longevity and influence than the Soviet ideal.32 This event was playfully recorded in the media: “The Force Awakens in Ukraine,”33 “Vladimir Lenin Statue Gets Darth Vader Makeover,”34 “Lenin, I Am Your Father: Darth Vader Engulfs Ukrainian Communist Statue (and Brings Free Wi-Fi).”35 Milov transformed the Soviet-era statue after new legislation, the decommunization laws, came into force in Ukraine in 2015, which demanded that all remnants and symbols of the country's communist past be taken down. Fittingly, the statue radiates a force (the head contains a Wi-Fi hotspot) and Milov hopes that the monument will attract Star Wars fans from around the world.
This curious refashioning of Lenin's original statue became a layered ludic artifact, another gesture of recycling socialism; as Milov claims, “The Bronze Lenin was left inside, so that the grateful or not so grateful descendants could exhume him, if needed.”36 The redressing of Lenin as Darth Vader, and thus associating him with Star Wars' “dark side,” is an obvious connotation.
A more ambivalent afterlife for a Lenin statue is offered by Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius whose 2004 video, Once in the XX Century, envisions reinstalling Lenin's statue in Vilnius in 1991. Talking about his film, Narkevicius claims that the monument had two symbolic values: it was a mark of communist ideology and also a mark of occupation.37 Narkevicius explains that he acquired the material for his short from the Lithuanian National TV archive, footage that documented the removal of Lenin's statue. He also purchased video footage of the same event from a freelance reporter.38 His intent was to have a two-camera perspective on the same event. He skillfully edited the material as if staging a reversed history: surprisingly, we see the crowd cheering and celebrating the erection of the statue. However, the pivotal image from the film is eerily similar to the one in Goodbye Lenin!: we again see Lenin's statue in the air, gliding in space, hand outstretched (see Figure 31.7). The flying, legless statue, towering over people's heads, supposedly returning to its original spot, is a spectral, unsettling performance. Like Goodbye Lenin!, Once in the XX Century flirts with history and brings the past into the present; Lenin returning as a ghostly apparition might thus be read as a need to unleash a confrontation with the traces of the communist past. As Narkevicius claims: “No historic period passes without leaving a trace, and its aftermath does not disappear naturally, especially such a dramatic, extensive, radical and overwhelming tide as Soviet rule.”39 Is Once in the XX Century thus issuing a warning against the return of the specter of communism and the repetitiveness of history? | (p- 727)
(p. 728)
Frame capture.
Counter-Memory: Prague, summer 2013: I stumble upon a monument, the Memorial to the Victims of Communism. It features seven bronze figures descending a flight of stairs. I need a moment to realize that, with each step down the stairs, the figures become progressively disfigured, up to the point when they are almost erased. Their sculpted bodies lose their limbs, they become hollow; the last image I register is of a solo foot broken off from the rest of the body—the only remnant left of a complete human figure.
Near Druskininkai, southwest of Vilnius, Lithuania, Grutas Park, nicknamed “Stalin's World,” houses Soviet-era statues; among them various apparitions of Lenin—busts, heads, and full-body figures. The park's info-site explains: “The aim of this exposition is to provide an opportunity for Lithuanian people, visitors coming to our country as well as future generations to see the naked Soviet ideology which suppressed and hurt the spirit of our nation for many decades.”40 The Park exhibits eighty-six works by forty-six artists: “Such a large concentration of monuments and sculptures of ideological content in a single out-door exposition is a rare and maybe even unique phenomenon in the world.”41 Using the metaphor of “banishment” as best encapsulating the function of Grutas Park, Paul Williams writes: “The will to understand the communist years as the result of unwelcome external control is supported by the cold giganticism that characterizes socialist internationalist iconography.”42 Housing such gigantic statues, this park is one of the many heritage museum parks across Eastern Europe that entice the visitors (p- 729) to “experience” communism, a particular form of special interest tourism that has boomed in the postsocialist region. Perusing the Eastern European heritage sites,43 one finds a multiplicity of ways in which the socialist-communist experiment becomes a complex site of remembering, one that also inevitably invites a kind of morbid curiosity and markets historical trauma through museums, theme parks, and "relive-it" tours and even engages in self-exoticizing for the sake of "Western" fun.44
In contrast to such handling of the past, Emilija Skarnulyte's 2012 short, Aldona,45 offers a vision of Grutas Park in a nuanced, seemingly noncommittal way. Skarnulyte, a Lithuanian who describes herself as a nomadic visual artist and filmmaker,46 films her grandmother as she walks into the park and wanders around. The description of the video informs us that Aldona is blind, but even without this metadiegetic knowledge, the spectators can deduce this fact as she clearly "feels" the surroundings with her bare hands: "In the spring of 1986, Aldona lost her vision and became permanently blind. The nerves in her eyes were poisoned. Doctors claimed that it was probably due to Chernobyl's Nuclear Power Plant explosion."47 The description alone prepares us to witness an elegiac narrative whose background evokes the ominous specter of the horrific environmental disaster in Chernobyl in 1986, which would shorten countless lives,48 a space now designated as the Exclusion Zone, an area where human habitation is forbidden due to high radioactivity.
The first shot of Aldona emphasizes her hands, which she washes intently outdoors under splashing water. When she moves to wash her face, we still cannot see her eyes. We may interpret this narrative moment as Aldona's cleansing ritual before her foray into the park. As she enters the park, the camera shadows her, showing her back as she moves slowly and shakily. The first artifact in the park is a guard tower beside a metal fence, connoting the imagery of a prison yard, or perhaps a gulag, a Soviet concentration camp.
The main part of the short unfolds in the park as Aldona "encounters" various statues of communist leaders. We learn that we are in Grutas Park when Lenin's face appears on a plaque and we hear robust voices sing a popular Soviet song about three tankmen. The audibility of this song creates a feeling that Aldona is entering the past. We watch her touching various surfaces of a towering monument to Soviet soldiers until she eventually meets Lenin's statue. At this point close-ups proliferate as Aldona is feeling Lenin's face (see Figure 31.8). She searchingly feels his eyes, nose, his mouth, his chin. These are moments of an eerie intimacy as Aldona's fingers move around the face, showcasing her performance of "touching" the past, her past. As she slowly exits the frame to the right, Lenin's bust is sitting on the grass on the left. We have just witnessed the postcommunist encounter of a frail, elderly Lithuanian citizen with the statue of the Soviet leader as she tries to make sense of her "injured" history. This is her tactile confrontation with the communist past, provoking a sense that the park is a cemetery. If cemeteries are places of contemplation that honor the dead, Grutas Park emerges as the ironic liminal space of otherness, a heterotopic space, to use Michel Foucault's term, which houses the exiled rejects of history (heterotopias etymologically mean "other places"; Foucault theorizes heterotopias as spaces "outside of all spaces"49).
(p. 730) Unlike the ludic contestation expressed by the statue of “Pissing Lenin” in Nowa Huta, or the Vilnius monument of Darth Vader hiding Lenin's original statue inside, Skarnulyte short film offers a poignant contrast to such whimsical renditions of Lenin's statues, suggesting that those injured by the communist era process the hurt in a very personal way. The slowly unfolding narrative, seemingly showing only Aldona's walk, gestures toward a cinema of contemplation. It is a poetic rumination on communist wounds, on the power of memory, on the past embedded in a frail body, a narrative whose tonality takes us back to the haunting beauty of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1983 Nostalghia, one of the most visually stunning films about exile and memory in film history. Just like Tarkovsky's famous film, Aldona, too, honors contemplative suture as it opens with images of stillness, darkness, heavy fog, and flickering shadows. While the opening image of a foggy landscape in Nostalghia might be interpreted as exemplifying the condition of the protagonist's exile as marked by disorientation, instability, and confusion, the opening shots of traveling through a foggy forest in Skarnulyte's short tap into Aldona's legibility and visibility as a member of the vanishing generation whose memories of trauma will soon fade.
As the narrative clearly highlights the trope of touching, I want to dwell for a moment, in closing, on the performance of tactility in the narrative since it cues us to consider the power of sensory memory as Aldona “sees” with her hands. The affective power of cinema has a theoretical history50 and, in this context, Laura McMahon provides some useful discussion. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy of touch, she argues for an apprehension of cinema as “a privileged space for understanding touch as a figure of withdrawal, discontinuity, and separation rather than under its more traditional guise as a marker of immediacy, continuity, and presence.”51 Indeed, withdrawal, a sense of discontinuity and separation draws us into Aldona's reality, suggesting that her private (p- 731) countermemories and counter-histories under communism are not accessible to the audience, thus making archiving communism an intensely personal project. While I opened this chapter with the notion of optical aberrations that facilitated a certain “fun” with Lenin, I want to leave the reader with an antithetical trope—that of blindness. One of the last shots is of Aldona's upper face as her eyes seem to stare intently into the lens: we know that she cannot see but her eyes demand to be looked at, offering us the paradox of blind Page 17 of 22
vision (see Figure 31.9). Is this the metaphor we are left with while contemplating what it might mean to encounter communism? The shot of her injured eyes might be read as a caution for future generations—the eyes that cannot see—thus leaving us, in the end, with a sense of the lethal radioactive danger embedded in the communist ethos.
Brown, Wendy. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books, 2010.
Burstrom, Mats. “Archeology and Existential Reflection.” In The Interplay of Past and Present: Papers from a Session Held at the 9th Annual EAA Meeting in St. Petersburg 2003, edited by Hans Bolin, 20-28 (Huddinge: Sodertorns hogskola, 2004).
Etkind, Alexander. “Post-Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memory of the Soviet Terror.” Constellations 16, no. 1 (2000): 182-200.
Forest, Benjamin, and Juliet Johnson. “Unraveling the Threads of History: Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92, no. 3 (2002): 524-547.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 22-27.
Kuczynska-Zonik, Aleksandra. “Dissonant Heritage: Soviet Monuments in Central and Eastern Europe.” In Historical Memory of Central and East European Communism, edited by Agnieszka Mrozik and Stanislav Holubec. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Marciniak, Katarzyna. Streets of Crocodiles: Photography, Media, and Postsocialist Landscapes in Poland. Bristol, UK: Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2010.
McMahon, Laura. Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras, and Denis. London: Legenda, 2012.
Medina, José. “Toward a Foucauldian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epis-temic Friction, and Guerilla Pluralism.” Foucault Studies 12 (2011): 9-35.
Merewether, Charles. “The Rise and Fall of Monuments.” Grand Street 68, no. 4 (Spring 1999): 182-191.
Nadkarni, Maya. “The Death of Socialism and the Afterlife of Its Monuments: Making and Marketing the Past in Budapest's Statue Park Museum.” In Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, edited by Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, 193-207. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Popescu, Monica. “Translations: Lenin's Statues, Post-communism, and Post-apartheid.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 16, no. 2 (2003): 406-423.
Ugresic, Dubravka. “The Confiscation of Memory.” New Left Review 218 (1996): 26-39.
Williams, Paul. “The Afterlife of Communist Statuary: Hungary's Szobor Park and Lithuania's Grutas Park.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 44, no. 2 (2008): doi: 10.1093/fmls/cqn003.
Wodiczko, Krzysztof. Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
(1.) The sculpture was removed from this spot in 2017.
(2.) Michael Gold, “Brothers Test China's Limits with their Art,” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/11/world/la-fg-china-gao-broth-ers-20100811
(3.) Ibid.
(4.) Gao Brothers, ArtStack, https://theartstack.com/artist/gao-brothers/lying-child
(5.) Henri Neuendorf, “Russian Performance Artists Arrested for Exorcizing Lenin,” artnet, January 21, 2015, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/russian-performance-artists-arrested-for-exorcizing-lenin-227135
(6.) Alice Thorson, “In Kemper Show, Gao Brothers Take a Visual Hammer to China's Past,” The Kansas City Star, October 3, 2010, E1.
(7.) José Medina, “Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism,” Foucault Studies 12 (2011): 12.
(8.) Ibid., 11.
(9.) Charles Merewether, “The Rise and Fall of Monuments,” Grand Street 68, no. 4 (Spring 1999): 183.
(10.) Agnieszka Sural, “Homeless Vehicle—Krzysztof Wodiczko,” culture.pl, https:// culture.pl/en/work/homeless-vehicle-krzysztof-wodiczko
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(11.) Krzysztof Wodiczko, Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 189.
(12.) Ibid., 189, my emphasis.
(13.) Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
(14.) Elise S. Youn and Maria J. Prieto, “Interview with Krzysztof Wodiczko: Making Critical Public Space,” agglutinations.com, April 11, 2004, http:// architecturalinterviews.blogspot.com/2009/12/interview-with-krzysztof-wodiczko.html
(15.) Popescu explains the puzzling presence of Lenin's statue in Seattle: “Found discarded in the Slovak Republic in the aftermath of the 1989 collapse of communist regimes of Eastern Europe, this bronze colossus was brought by Lewis Carpenter to Seattle and, after his death, planted at a crossroads it still (dis)graces today.” Monica Popescu, “Translations: Lenin's Statues, Post-communism, and Post-apartheid,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 16, no. 2 (2003): 407.
(16.) Ibid., 408, my emphasis.
(17.) Ibid., 407.
(18.) Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
(19.) Jaruzelski Speech, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czitOxjdfwM
(20.) Agnieszka Holland, “Film Was a Catalyst for Change in Postwar Europe. It Can Be Again,” The Guardian, February 20, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2019/feb/20/film-postwar-europe-populism-fear
(21.) Lenin from Krakow is available at https://www.cda.pl/video/24087260d
(22.) The opening fragment of Wislawa Szymborska's poem, “Na powitanie budowy soc-jalistycznego miasta,” https://wiersze.annet.pl/w,,13823, translation mine.
(23.) Translations from the Polish are mine.
(24.) Maja Czarnecka, “Polish City's New Statue by Artist Bartosz Szydlowski Cuts a Urinating Lenin Down to Size,” artdaily.org, http://artdaily.com/news/71184/Polish-city-s-new-statue-by-artist-Bartosz-Szydlowski-cuts-a-urinating-Lenin-down-to-size#.XILUoM2IY58
(25.) Ibid.
(26.) Ibid.
(27.) Ibid.
(28.) Roger Hillman, “Goodbye Lenin (2003): History in the Subjunctive,” Rethinking History 10, no. 2 (June 2006): 221.
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(29.) Julian Kramer, “Goodbye Lenin: The Uses of Nostalgia,” opendemocracy, August 12, 2003, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/article_1433jsp/
(30.) Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010).
(31.) Stephen Legg, “Memory and Nostalgia,” Cultural Geographies 11 (2004): 99.
(32.) Fiona Macdonald, “The Man Who Turned Lenin into Darth Vader,” bbc.com, October 23, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151023-the-man-who-turned-lenin-into-darth-vader
(33.) Lanre Bakare, “The Force Awakens (in Ukraine): Darth Vader Statue Replaces Lenin Monument,” The Guardian, October 23, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/ oct/23/darth-vader-statue-erected-ukraine
(34.) Jayme Deerwester, “Vladimir Lenin Statue Gets Darth Vader Makeover,” USA Today, October 24, 2015, https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2015/10/24/vladimir-lenin-statue-gets-darth-vader-makeover/74547258/
(35.) Claire Voon, “Lenin, I Am Your Father: Darth Vader Engulfs Ukrainian Communist Statue,” HyperAllergic, October 23, 2015, https://hyperallergic.com/247920/lenin-i-am-your-father-darth-vader-engulfs-ukrainian-communist-statue-and-brings-free-wifi/
(36.) Jack Shepherd, “Star Wars: Ukraine Statue of Vladimir Lenin Transformed into Darth Vader,” Independent, October 26, 2015, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter-tainment/films/news/star-wars-statue-of-vladimir-lenin-in-ukraine-has-been-transformed-into-darth-vader-a6709206.html
(37.) Deimantas Narkevicius, “Personal Memory versus Political History in Eastern Europe,” khanacademy.org, https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/tate/conflict-con-tradiction/creating-contradiction/v/deimantas-narkevicius
(38.) Deimantas Narkevicius, Once in the XX Century, LUX, https://lux.org.uk/work/once-in-the-xx-century
(39.) Quinn Latimer, “Deimantas Narkevicius,” Art in America, February 5, 2010, https:// www.artinamericamagazine.com/?s=narkevicius
(40.) http://grutoparkas.lt/en_US/
(41.) http://grutoparkas.lt/en_US/outdoor-exposure/
(42.) Paul Williams, “The Afterlife of Communist Statuary: Hungary's Szobor Park and Lithuania's Grutas Park,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 44, no. 2 (2008), doi: 10.1093/fmls/cqn003
(43.) Apart from Grutas Park, other well-known sites are The Museum of Communism in Prague, Memento Park: Remains of Communist Dictatorship and The House of Terror in Budapest, and The Museum of Socialist Realism in Kozlowka, Poland.
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(44.) I analyzed this phenomenon through a case study of “Crazy Guides,” a Krakow group vigorously engaged in marketing socialist ghosts through selling “communist tours”—a carnivalesque variety of “commie” pleasures. See Katarzyna Marciniak, Streets of Crocodiles: Photography, Media, and Postsocialist Landscapes in Poland (Bristol: Intellect, 2010).
(45.) Emilija Skarnulyte, Aldona, https://vimeo.com/123000664
(46.) https://www.emilijaskarnulyte.co/about-1
(47.) Skarnulyte, Aldona.
(48.) Evan Osnos, writing about the Fukushima disaster, states that the Chernobyl disaster claimed four thousand lives, but other estimates are much higher as Wikipedia, for example, notes that “By the year 2000, the number of Ukrainians claiming to be radiation ‘sufferers' (poterpili) and receiving state benefits had jumped to 3.5 million.” Evan Osnos, “The Fallout: Seven Months Later: Japan's Nuclear Predicament,” The New Yorker, October 10, 2011, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/17/the-fallout https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Human_impact
(49.) Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no.1 (Spring 1986): 24.
(50.) For example, Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Trinh Minh-ha, Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism, and the Boundary Event (London: Routledge, 2011).
(51.) Laura McMahon, Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras, and Denis (London: Legenda, 2012), 2.
Katarzyna Marciniak
Katarzyna Marciniak, Professor of Global and Transnational Media, Occidental College
Coda: Flashes of Arab Communism o
Laura U. Marks
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Print Publication Date: Jun 2020
Subject: Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards
Online Publication Date: Jan 2020 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190885533.013.35
In the twentieth-century Arabic-speaking world, communism animated anticolonial revolutions, workers' organizations, guerrilla movements, and international solidarity. The communist dream was cut short by Arab governments, deals with global superpowers, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and historical bad luck. But recently a remarkable number of Arab filmmakers have turned their attention to the history of the radical Left. Filmmakers from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have been urgently seeking models for grassroots politics in the labor movements, communist parties, and secular armed resistance of earlier generations. This coda explores two strata of communist audiovisual praxis: the radical cinema that supported labor movements and guerrilla actions from the 1950s to the 1980s, and recent films that draw on that earlier movement. The coda argues that the Arab audiovisual archive holds flashes of communism that have been neither fulfilled nor entirely extinguished. The new films release their unspent energy into the present, diagnosing earlier failures of Arab communism and making plans for new forms of solidarity.
Keywords: Arab communism, radical Left, Arab cinema, labor movement, audiovisual archive
In many parts of the Arabic-speaking world, communism was a dream cut short by Arab governments, deals with global superpowers, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and historical bad luck. But communism fights on in Arab independent cinema. In recent years a remarkable number of Arab filmmakers have turned their attention to the history of the radical Left in their countries: labor movements, near-forgotten communist parties, secular armed resistance movements. I came across some of these works in my research on experimentalism in Arab cinema in the early twenty-first century. With historical research and imaginative reconstruction, filmmakers from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have been urgently seeking models from earlier generations for grassroots movements that can unify and mobilize people against the government, corporate, and religious powers that oppress them. They recount their own stories, interrogate their elders, and delve into archives. In these ways Arab filmmakers rediscover the audiovisual cultures of previous generations when communism animated anticolonial revolutions, workers' organizations, guerrilla movements, and international solidarity. This coda explores two strata of communist audiovisual praxis: in the radical cinema that supported labor movements and guerrilla actions from the 1950s to the 1980s, now part of an Arab communist archive; and in recent films that draw on that archive.1 The archive holds sparks, embers, the potentials of communism that have been neither fulfilled nor entirely extinguished. The new films devise ways to release their unspent energy into the present.
No doubt a fragrance of nostalgia wafts through these movies' choice of archival footage and photos: female fedayeen bearing arms; Lebanese strikers articulating their goals in Marxist language; a Shi'i communist fighter recovering from his injuries in Kiev; a filmmaker declaring that Moroccan cinema must express proletarian issues.2 Nostalgia is part of what drives filmmakers to restage events from the communist past: an FLN operative's mission; a student occupation of the university president's (p- 736) office; some good-looking Algerians debating revolution in a bar, gesticulating with cigarettes.3 However, the best movies looking back to Arab communism are not just nostalgic but making plans. They earnestly desire to discover what the Arab Left today can learn from the political strategies of their forebears. Could Arab Marxists have better extricated themselves from their ideology's European sources? What were the warning signs that communists would be crushed by the state socialists they helped bring to power? How did the secular Left lose power to fundamentalist religious movements? The filmmakers, not only in their historical investigations but also in their persistent, imaginative methods, are coming up with diagnoses and prescriptions. These films are a part of the activism that led to the uprisings of 2011 in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and Bahrain, and of the deep reflections after those uprisings were brutally crushed in Egypt and Syria.
A sketch of the history of communism in the many Arabic-speaking countries begins in the early twentieth century.4 The Marxist doctrine that revolution must arise from the industrial proletariat did not initially speak to Arab countries where the mass of workers were peasants. However, industrial workers—cotton and textile workers in Egypt, tobacco workers in Lebanon, artisans and transport workers in Iraq, and so on—began organizing labor unions from the 1910s on. Initially communism appeared to many as a foreign import, introduced by Arab bourgeois intellectuals who had studied abroad, and supported from within by ethnic and religious minorities, chiefly Shi'i Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Kurdish, and Armenian. Yet this diversity was the communist movement's strength. Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs—The Iraqi Connection (Switzerland/Iraq, 2003) by Samir portrays four Iraqi communist writers who were forced to emigrate because they were Jewish. Over images of bustling, sophisticated Baghdad before World War II, they recall that in the 1940s the Iraqi Communist Party had hundreds of thousands of members: “not only Jews but Shiites, Christians, and then Sunnis, Kurds from the north, and farmers
Page 2 of 11 from the south,” as Sami Michael says. “People looked up to us. We were Iraqis, Communists, and patriots.” Forget Baghdad echoes the warnings of many Arab communist writers that nationalism and sectarianism would destroy the movement.
The long history of colonialism and imperialism—first by France and Britain after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, then by the United States and Israel—shaped Arab communists. They drew on Lenin's critique of imperialism and his insistence that Marxist principles adapt to local economic circumstances. Failure to do so results in mimicry and self-Orientalism. In a 1974 book, Hassan Hamdan (aka Mahdi Amil), a Lebanese (p- 737) Communist Party member, diagnoses the cultural imperialism by which the instrumental reason of Euro-American capitalism has been universalized, leaving Arabs and others to critique their own supposed inadequacy.5
Communists took part in anticolonial struggles in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, the People's Democratic Republic of (South) Yemen—which in 1979 became the Arab world's only officially Communist country—and by the Palestinians. The question of which had precedence, class struggle or anti-imperialism, drove Arab Communists at every point in their history, especially in relation to Israel: the Palestine Communist Party, founded in 1919, struggled and ultimately failed to reconcile worker internationalism and anti-Zionism.6 Communist organizer Nadine Acoury articulates the problem in Mary Jir-manus Saba's A Feeling Greater Than Love (Lebanon, 2017): “Workers' struggle and liberating our land are both important. This equation doesn't exist in the West. Marx came out of the West, Lenin from Russia. No one colonized Lenin. Not like us—300 years of the French, then the Americans, then they brought in Israelis on top of it all.”
After independence, the “Arab socialist” states of Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Algeria nationalized agriculture and industry and carried out progressive reforms in health care and education, at the same time that they brutalized and imprisoned communists. Communists' critiques of the military coups in Egypt in 1952, Iraq in 1958, and Syria in 1963, according to the Marxist doctrine that military coups can only lead to fascism, have proven correct. As Nasib Nimr, who with comrades in the Party of Socialist Revolution quit the Lebanese Communist Party, argued in the 1960s, Marxism-Leninism was meant to transform according to local conditions, but in Arab communism “we stripped Leninism of its democracy and kept centralism. Democratic centralism is only a slogan, a curtain we hide autocratic rule and personality cults behind.”7
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union supported Arab communist parties and socialist governments, in exchange for Arab acquiescence to Soviet foreign policies even when these crippled their anti-imperialist interests.8 In 1967, while Arab communist parties supported UN Resolution 242 calling for Israel to withdraw to the 1948 borders, dissident communists refused to recognize the 1948 establishment of Israel and called for armed struggle. They asked, in words that resonated with international liberation movements, “The enemy bombarded us with napalm and other terrible weapons; should we bombard him with politics and peaceful expressions—surrender?”9
Communism effectively died in the new socialist republics that imprisoned communists alongside Muslim activists. Amil was shot dead on the street in 1987, the same year that fellow Shi'i communist Hussayn Muruwwah was assassinated, among many communists murdered either by governments or Islamists. In the course of the Lebanese civil wars, communist militias dissolved along sectarian lines—a tale told with sad deliberation in Maher Abi Samra's We Were Communists (Lebanon, 2009), eccentrically in Mohamed Soueid's My Heart Beats Only for Her (Lebanon, 2009). Communist parties continue to be banned, and strikers often imprisoned, in most Arab countries.
Arab communism from decades past produced audiovisual cultures that, to the extent that they are preserved, continue to smolder and flash in our time. The Algerian revolution had its realist militant cinema from 1957, which hardened into a state-subsidized official revolutionary cinema in 1967.10 The vast majority of engaged films from the 1960s and 1970s were made by filmmakers in solidarity with the Palestinian fedayeen: the Palestine Film Unit (Aflaam Falastin), formed in Jordan in 1968 by Hani Jawhariyyah, Mustafa Abu Ali, Khadija Abu Ali, and Sulafa Jadallah (the first Arab camerawoman, according to Emily Jacir).11 After the Israeli Army forced the PLO out of Beirut in 1982, the PFU's archive was lost. Activists have labored for decades to find, preserve, and release some of these precious militant films.12 For example, Mohanad Yaqubi's detective work for Off Frame, aka Revolution Until Victory (Palestine, 2016), uncovered PFU filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali's long-lost rushes for Tal al Zaatar, which preserves bits of fire like female feday-een training and a Palestinian farmer plowing his field with a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder. A Hundred Faces for a Single Day (Lebanon, 1969), the recently rediscovered documentary by Lebanese filmmaker Christian Ghazi, uses an avant-garde montage aesthetic, especially striking in its use of abrasive sound, to contrast the righteous struggles of the fedayeen with the decadence of the Arab bourgeoisie. Iraqi filmmaker Kais al-Zubeidi, who now lives in Berlin, also brought experimental strategies to his pro-Palestin-ian films.13 Lebanese filmmaker Maroun Baghdadi's The Most Beautiful of All Mothers (Lebanon, 1978) portrays the men and women who fought with the Communist Action Organization in the Lebanese civil war.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, Syrian filmmakers (employed, as in Algeria, by the state) studied in Moscow, Prague, and Kiev, and this Soviet-satellite training informs the radical aesthetics of Omar Amiralay, Mohamad Malass, Nidal al-Dibs, and others of this period.14 Sometimes revolutionary aesthetics appear in the films of sympathetic foreigners, like Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (Algeria/Italy, 1966) and the many Palestinian solidarity films, including Wakamatsu Koji and Adachi Masao's Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (Palestine/Japan, 1971), and more famous works.15
This body of earlier films, together with archival documents of all sorts, supplies the material from which contemporary Arab filmmakers looking for flashes of communist fire depart. Viewers now have the thrill of witnessing well-organized masses: strikers, guerrillas
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training in formation. We can see and hear workers, fighters, and intellectuals articulately deploy Marxist analysis and admire the magnetism of courageous individuals who fully embody Marxist praxis. These films give evidence that in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s women enfranchised themselves to organize, strike, and fight alongside their male comrades. The accessories of the international revolution are on display: keffiyas showing Palestinian solidarity, Moroccan hair spun into Afros in stylish sympathy with the Black Power movement (in Ali Essafi's Wanted!, Morocco, 2010), noms de guerre (p- 739) honoring leaders of the movement. We glimpse too the audiovisual styles of montage, inspired by Eisenstein, Vertov, and Brecht, that filmmakers of earlier generations deployed to rouse viewers' critical analysis, and techniques of militant cinema that Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Santiago Alvarez, and Wakamatsu Koji shared with Palestinian filmmakers.16 We hear the surprisingly romantic poetry written to embolden the struggle, revolutionary anthems belted out in unison.
The outpouring, in the last fifteen years, of Arab films looking back to past communist culture cannot just repeat the hortatory address of Third Cinema, nor the once-radical aesthetics of Soviet montage, Brechtian reflexivity, and Marxist realism. This would be to fetishize the revolutionary sparks that glimmer from these films. Historical research faces the Foucauldian dilemma that recorded words, images, and sounds from the past cannot speak to the present directly. The same is true of memories of people who lived through these events. Filmmakers have to devise methods to disrupt rather than repeat communist styles of the past, activating the potentials that glint within these recordings and memories.
When they can, the filmmakers interview living activists to try to grasp a time when Arab communism was healthy. Sometimes their interlocutors paint a vivid picture, as in Forget Baghdad, when Musa Khoury recalls, “Most party members were laborers. One was a shoemaker with a big thumb. After I failed to explain the difference between idealism and materialism, Mr. Big Thumb did it, quoting Marx. I was so disappointed with myself.” His memory, resonating with the radical films of the 1970s, stirs dim awareness of a character now rare in popular culture, the articulate worker-intellectual. But more often, filmmakers must deal with interviewees who forget, out of despair, trauma, or self-censorship. The gentle communist protagonists of Reem Ali's Foam (2006), broken in a Syrian jail, do quiet activism but refuse to speak of the past. In Mohamed Soueid's Nightfall (Lebanon, 2003), veterans of a pro-Palestinian militia drown their communist sorrows in arak. In Namir Abdel Messeeh's Toi, Waguih (Egypt/France, 2005), the filmmaker's father, an Egyptian communist imprisoned for five years and tortured, frustrates his son by speaking of his experience only in the third person plural.
Often they begin by searching for archival documentation of communism. The struggle to access archives that are sequestered by governments, held privately, or lost altogether occupies many films. The empty-archive film, a sturdy and often productive trope of Arab
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cinema, must be handled deftly to produce more than lassitude in its audiences.17 In the best cases, filmmakers treat the archive as volatile but opaque, troubling the images and sounds they do find, releasing latent energies for analysis. The example I love the most is Soueid's My Heart Beats Only for Her about the “Vietnamese,” that is, communist wing within Fatah. Beginning in 1963, pro-Palestinian fighters traveled to Vietnam to learn resistance methods from the Viet Cong, taking noms de guerre like Abu Khaled Hanoi
(p. 740) and Abu Ali Giap. Soueid's audiovisual montage deftly narrates the diffusion and dissipation of the fedayeen's communist ideals. The Fatah chant “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” rises to a roar over a slow-motion film of Ho performing martial arts, followed by Yasir Arafat in a similar pose. The chant carries over black-masked soldiers of the Lebanese fascist militia Kata'eb and motley street fighters of the Lebanese civil war; ending with Hezbollah, the official armed resistance, and the only group that still makes use of the techniques Fatah learned in Vietnam. Over the giant bronze statue of Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi we hear a speech of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. “Either Lebanon is Hong Kong—or it is Hanoi!” he thunders, as the crowd cheers. “We are able to present to the world a country where there is construction, economy, state, corporations, competition, productive sectors, ... and resistance!” Nasrallah's voice reverberates metallically. This, Soueid economically suggests, is what has evolved from the dream of communist internationalism: an organization holding a religious monopoly on armed struggle, happy to collaborate with capitalist imperialism, and ready to form a government.
To fan the embers of communist history, filmmakers also use creative storytelling. Soueid interweaves interviews and archival footage with the fictional tale of the son of a fidai who retraces his father's experience in Vietnam. In Zanj Revolution (Algeria, 2012), Tariq Teguia creates a journalist character who, galvanized by a remark from an Algerian demonstrator, embarks on the search for an adequate origin story for the 2011 Arab uprisings in the twentieth-century history of the Arab Left and—in a stunning Afro-Arab genealogy for communist struggle—in slave uprisings in ninth-century Iraq.
The new “communist” filmmakers approach the past personally and aggressively, often using text to pry open the image. As Saba's A Feeling Greater Than Love pores over the handful of militant Lebanese films made between 1971 and 1982, a title reads, “I thought if I stared long enough at the images, I might understand why their revolution was not sustained.” An all-caps title interrupts an argument among communist strike organizers reunited after forty-five years. “THE FILM REJECTS THE STATEMENT BY AHMED DIRANI THAT MARX WAS WRONG!”
Saba finds an invaluable resource in actor-turned-organizer Nadine Acoury, aka Warde, whose life in the communist movement yields lesson after lesson. She tells Saba, “I discovered the bourgeoisie are weak willed. They have no values. They're always imitating the French. They messed us up. I was searching for the people.” Acoury joined the Organization of Communist Action and began organizing female workers. She leads Saba to another spark from an earlier generation of communism: a well-theorized feminist critique. (Arab Communist Party programs included women's liberation from the beginning.18) She recounts trying to convince a young worker that all people are equal
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under communism. “I gave the example of the USSR, but she said to me, ‘People are not equal, why do you want to make them equal?'” Saba intercuts this with an ironic scene from Ghazi's A Hundred Faces for a Single Day. Fiddling with the radio, a man briefly gets a staticky Soviet national anthem. His wife brings him coffee in bed and asks him pointedly, “Jalal, do you support the Palestinian resistance?” He tells her to iron his blue shirt instead of asking questions like that. Saba follows this with an all-male march
(p. 741) from the 1970s and an anthem whose words include “I kiss the ground beneath your feet”—one of many songs that addresses the revolution with the words of a lover. Like Soueid, Saba distorts the anthem, and as it grotesquely slows and stops, a viewer can ponder the vertiginous gap between Marxist and feminist praxis.
The artists of contemporary Arab communism restage and reenact struggles with earnest vigor. A Feeling Greater Than Love begins with a reenactment that uncannily shakes the past into the present. Najib Ismail drives through the towns and hills of southern Lebanon with a loudspeaker on the roof of his car, calling, “Oh people of Nabatiya and all the villages of the south! Join us to support the strikers occupying the Regie building. Our government called in the tanks, the army, and security forces, and put them under siege. The owners are trying to seize the profits they did not labor over.” Except for the detail of the Regie tobacco factory, that call for solidarity could be made today, but would the people mass on the streets as they did in 1973?
The desire that restaging will lead to informed action animates several recent Arab films in which activists, workers, or prisoners (Zeina Daccache's 12 Angry Lebanese, Lebanon, 2009) reenact crucial events. Damian Ounouri convinces his uncle to restage his actions as an FLN operative in Fidai (Algeria/France, 2012). Marwa Arsanios remakes the bomb scene from The Battle of Algiers in Have You Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila (Lebanon, 2014). To make Out on the Street (Egypt, 2015), Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk invited Egyptian factory workers to reenact their confrontations with bosses and police, performing different roles in turn, in order to demystify the mentality of authority. In The Sheikh Imam Project, or, How to Play Arabic Music on a Large German Instrument (Lebanon, 2014), Gheith Al-Amine seeks to embody the tradition of leftist dissent by lustily reperforming a 1960s protest song by Egyptian singer Sheikh Imam only available in low-fi recordings. The video's subtitle indexes the difficulty of harmonizing Marxism with an Arab context. Reenactments like these suggest that to truly embody a revolutionary attitude would allow the performers to bypass the Foucauldian divide and incarnate the feeling of revolutionary struggle, which would in turn, for the filmmakers or viewers, lead to new action.
In these ways, Arab filmmakers create a new communist audiovisual culture. Pressing reluctant interlocutors, squeezing and remixing archives, dealing creatively with absence, and performing the Left back into being, they stir embers of communist praxis into flame.
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Armes, Roy. Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
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Buali, Sheyma. “A Militant Cinema: A Conversation between Mohanad Yaqubi and Shey-ma Buali.” Ibraaz. May 2 (2012). http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/16.
Budeiri, Musa. The Palestine Communist Party, 1919-1948: Arab and Jew in the Struggle for Internationalism. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010.
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Ginat, Rami. Egypt's Incomplete Revolution: Lutfi al-Khuli and Nasser's Socialism in the 1960s. London: Frank Cass, 1997.
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Ismael, Tareq Y., and Jacqueline S. Ismael. The Communist Movement in Syria and Lebanon. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998.
Jacir, Emily. “Palestinian Revolution Cinema Comes to NYC.” The Electronic Intifada, February 16, 2007. http://electronicintifada.net/content/palestinian-revolution-cine-ma-comes-nyc/6759.
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Marks, Laura U. Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.
Massad, Joseph. “The Weapon of Culture: Cinema in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle.” In Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, edited by Hamid Dabashi, 30-42. London: Verso, 2006.
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(1.) For more on this movement, see the chapter “Communism, Dream Deferred” in my book Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
(2.) In Mohanad Yaqubi's Off Frame, aka Revolution until Victory (Palestine, 2016) and many other films; Mary Jirmanus Saba's A Feeling Greater Than Love (Lebanon, 2017); Akram Zaatari's In This House (Lebanon, 2005); and Ali Essafi's Wanted! (Morocco, 2010).
(3.) Fidai by Damien Ounouri (Algeria/France, 2012); 74: Reconstitution of a Struggle by Rania and Rafed Rafei (Lebanon, 2012); Inland by Tariq Teguia (Algeria, 2008).
(4.) This history draws on Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954 (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1998); Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, “Labor and National Liberation: The Trade Union Movement in Iraq, 1920-1958,” Arab Studies Quarterly 5, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 139-154; Rami Ginat, Egypt's Incomplete Revolution: Lutfi al-Khuli and Nasser's Socialism in the 1960s (London: Frank Cass, 1997); Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (New York: Warner, 1991); Tareq Y. Ismael and Jacqueline S. Ismael, The Communist Movement in Syria and Lebanon (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998); Tareq Y. Ismael, The Communist Movement in the Arab World (London: Routledge/Curzon, 2005).
(5.) Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 144-148. Later Amil, with other Arab and South Asian Marxists, bitterly critiqued Edward Said for lumping Marxism with Orientalism, undermining indigenous communist struggle. Gilbert Achcar, Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism (London: Haymarket Books, 2013), 71-74.
(6.) See Musa Budeiri, The Palestine Communist Party, 1919-1948: Arab and Jew in the Struggle for Internationalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010).
(7.) Nasib Nimr, Falsafat al-Harakah al-Wataniyya al-Taharoriya (Philosophy of National Liberation Movements; Beirut: Dar al-Ra'eid al-Arabi, n.d.), quoted in Ismael, The Communist Movement in Syria and Lebanon, 70.
(8.) Ismael, The Communist Movement in the Arab World, 21. The Algerian Communist Party sided with the French Communist Party's goals of gradual change rather than the radical anti-imperialist stance of the FLN. Arab communist parties fell in step with the Soviet Union's approval of the partition of Palestine in 1948.
(9.) “Marjan Comments on Bakdash Article in Nidal al-Sha'ab," Ila al-Amam, September 10, 1967; translated and cited in Ismael, The Communist Movement in Syria and Lebanon, 69.
(10.) Roy Armes, Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 15-17.
(11.) Emily Jacir, “Palestinian Revolution Cinema Comes to NYC," The Electronic Intifada, February 16, 2007. http://electronicintifada.net/content/palestinian-revolution-cinema-comes-nyc/6759
(12.) See Sheyma Buali, “A Militant Cinema: A Conversation between Mohanad Yaqubi and Sheyma Buali," Ibraaz, May 2, 2012. http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/16; Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard, “Lost Archives of Palestinian Films," Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema (London: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 255-256; the Dreams of a Nation archive, http://www.palestine.mei.columbia.edu/dreams-of-a-nation; Joseph Massad, “The Weapon of Culture: Cinema in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle," in Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, ed. Hamid Dabashi (London: Verso, 2006), 30-42; and Leah Caldwell, “Unearthing Jordan's Soviet Cinema," Al-Akhbar, May 23, 2012. http:// english.al-akhbar.com/node/7615
(13.) Jacir, “Palestinian Revolution Cinema Comes to NYC."
(14.) See Kay Dickinson, Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond (London: Palgrave, 2016), and Rasha Salti, ed., Insights into Syrian Cinema (New York: ArteEast, 2006).
(15.) See Terri Ginsberg, Visualizing the Palestinian Struggle: Towards a Critical Analytic of Palestine Solidarity Film (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016).
(16.) Buali, n.p.
(17.) On the inventive archival practices in Arab cinema, see my chapter “Archival Romances" in Hanan al-Cinema.
(18.) Ismael, The Communist Movement in Syria and Lebanon, 18.
Laura U. Marks
Laura U. Marks, Grant Strate University Professor in Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University
Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Skrodzka, Xiaoning Lu, and Katarzyna Marciniak
n Date: Jun 2020 Subject: Literature Online Publication Date: Jul 2019
View PDF Go to page:
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(p. 744)
(p. 745) Index
Note: Figures are indicated by an italic f, respectively, following the page number.
Aalto, Alvar 47
abjection 685
Abramov, Mark 519
Abrosimov, Pavel 78
Abu Ali, Khadija 738
Abu Ali, Mustafa 738
ACWF. See All-China Women's Federation
Adams, Jaden 330
Adolf Hitler, Superman, Swallows Gold (Heartfield) 573
Adorno, Theodor 7
“The Advent of Sound in Cinema” (Shub) 103
Afanas'eva, A. 120
Aflaam Falastin (Palestine Film Unit) 738
African filmmakers 364-65
African Rhythms (1966) 366, 368-69, 370, 371, 379
African Socialism 373
Against the Will to Silence (Muir) 276
agitka (nonfiction propaganda films) 90
Agnivtsev, Nikolai 174, 188/; 189
Aguilar, Alejandro 661
Ai Qing 476
AIZ. See Worker-Illustrated Newspaper
Aktuelni Razgovori (Current Debates) (television show) 618
Alamar housing district 30, 31 f, 32, 463, 668, 670
alcohol 466
alcoholism 500
Aldona (2012) 729-31, 730/, 731 f
Alexander I 66
Ali, Reem 739
All-China Federation of Trade Unions (Zhonghua quanguo zong gong hui) 229
All-China Women's Federation (ACWF) 476, 478, 490
Allen, Gwen 276
Allende, Salvador 432-33, 435, 436, 443
All’s Well (Tout va bien) (1972) 326, 327, 328
All-Union Communist Party 106n5
All-Union Industrial Association of Electronic Measurement Instruments (SoiuzElektroPribor) 257
All-Union Institute for Secondary Resources (VIVR) 258, 265
All-Union Leninist Young Communist League 106n5
All-Union Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics (VNIITE) 254-58, 265, 266f
Al'pert, Max 92
Altman, Natan 185-86
Alvarez, Santiago 739
Alvarez Gil, Antonio 661
Les Amants (Magritte) 581
Amaterske radio (Amateur Radio) (magazine) 144
amateur art 224
Chen on 229
institutionalized 227
PRC and 228
state support of 225
(p. 746) amateur authorship 242
amateur game production 146
amateur games 137
Amateur Radio (Amatérské radio) (magazine) 144
amateur theater 227
American and Canadian League for Peace and Democracy 342
“American Contrasts” (Efimov) 525-26, 526f
The Americans (television show) 611
Al-Amine, Gheith 741
Amiralay, Omar 738
Amnesiopolis (Rubin) 53
anacoluthon 288
“Anas Dicors or Radioative Isotope” (Arcos Soto) 660
And always ... John Heartfield (Meg mindig ... John Heartfield) (exhibition) 574
Anderson, Gary 263
Andrade, Annouchka de 366, 375
Andreescu, Gabriel 697
Die Angkar (The Organization) (1981) 392, 393, 394f 397
Angola 372
anticolonial 10, 11, 368, 372, 374, 404n51, 549, 571, 590, 592, 594, 735
anticolonial struggle 306, 737
anticommunism
hegemonic intellectual paradigm of 703
legacy of 708
narratives of 708
nationalism and 673
propaganda of 693, 695, 697, 709
reactive anticommunist films 704, 706
retrospective anticommunist films 704, 706
Anti-Dühring (Marx) 348 antifascism 567, 572 anti-fascist war 346
Antiguo Parque de Diversiones de la Ciudad Escolar “Tarará” (Old Amusement Park of the City School “Tarará”) (González Méndez) 652, 654f
anti-Maoist uprising 387
Anti-Rightist campaign 229, 230, 245n21,480
anti-Zionism 737
Apollon (journal) 67
Aquaplane (video game) 146
Arab communism 11
audiovisual cultures of 738
USSR and 737
Arabic-speaking world 735
history of communism in 736
Arab independent cinema 735, 739
Arab Spring 113
Arafat, Yasir 740
Arbeiterfotografie (worker photography) 503, 513n1
Arbus, Diane 506
architectonic forms 72
Architectural Working Group (Pracovní architektonická skupina) 52-53 architecture 46
Engels and 55
Fourth Congress of Russian Architects 68
functional 76
Kobzdej degree in 202
Marxism-Leninism and 71
modernism and 44
Molnár, V., on 45
monumentalism and 78
neoclassical 66
neo-Stalinist 82-83
Neues Bauen architects 47, 49, 50, 56
sociopolitical agency of 48
stylization 9
temporary 203
USSR and 65
Architecture for All (Architektúra vsem) (Miljacki) 50
Archizoom Associati 417-18
Arcos Soto, Abel 650, 652, 658, 661
aesthetic tools employed by 667
future and 666
matter-of-factness of narration by 662
the uncanny 101,606, 660, 701, 713
Arhitectura RPR (journal) 26, 28
(p. 747) Armstrong, Neil 421
Army Arts Reference Book (Liandui shiyong meishu ziliao) 239, 240f, 241 f
Arnheim, Rudolf 506-7
Arquitectura Cuba (magazine) 31
Arsanios, Marwa 741
Art (Meishu) (journal) 229, 232
art criticism 10
Art Deco 239
Art in Everyday Life (Iskusstvo v bytu) (Lamanova and Mukhina) 251,413 artist-citizens 90
artistic dictatorship 70
artistic production 91
artistic technique 576
artistic truth 325
The Art of Commune (Altman) 186
Art of Dressing (Iskusstvo odevat’sia) (journal) 420
Art of Socialist Countries (exhibition) 212
Art Review (Przeglgd artystyczny) (magazine) 202, 214
Arvatov, Boris 254, 256, 261,411,417
ASEAN. See Association of South-East Asian Nations
Asher, Michael 286
Ashton, Dore 211
ASNOVA. See Association of New Architects
Associated Television (ATV) 396
Association of New Architects (ASNOVA) 72, 73
Association of Polish Artists 202, 203
Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) 386, 401
Astronaut/Cosmonaut (Ash) 637, 638f
Atel’e (Atelier) (journal) 414
Atic Atac (video game) 146
The Atlantic (newspaper) 2
Atomic Blonde (2017) 611
At the Academy of Art (W Akademii Sztuk Plastycznych) (1925) 203
At the Die Cutter (James) 506
At the Linotype Machine (James) 506
ATV. See Associated Television
Atwood, Margaret 611
audiovisual media 325
Auerbach, Jonathan 520
aural language of film 364-65
Aust, Herbert 636
austerity globalism 570
Austin, J. L. 121
author function 227 avant-gardes 23, 32, 50, 407, 572 aesthetic paradigms of 286
Devëtsil (multimedia avant-garde collective) 47 historical 284, 287
informational means of recycling and 262
Italian 419
Khrushchev, N., and 33
modernism and 77
October (journal) and 279
in USSR 67
Axis of Evil 604
Ayuso, Fernando 460
Bad Blankenburg 510
Bad Blankenburg 1985 (Schulze Eldowy) 511 f
Badiou (2018) 320, 322, 323f, 326f, 333f
artistic truth and 325
Badiou on 335
Wagner, Idea of communism and 325
Badiou, Alain 13, 320-21, 329-30, 630, 631
on Badiou 335
didactic take on art by 327
dominant temporality of biography of 332 ontological multiplicity and 333
Plato and 334
“plus-one” formula and 327 politics and 323-24 red years and 326
Baghdad 736
Baghdadi, Maroun 738
“Balance of Power” (Efimov) 532, 533f
Balanta (The Oak) (1993) 705
Ballad of a Soldier (1959) 552 Balmaseda, Mario 663
Balogh, Mária 619
Balso, Judith 320
Bang Wooyong 345
(p. 748) Banham, Reyner 262
Barrandov Film Studios 142
Bartlett, Djurdja 458
base 52
Bata Shoe Company 55
The Battle of Algiers (1966) 368, 372, 738, 741
Battleship Potemkin (1925) 372, 373
Bauhaus 47, 52, 58, 65, 72, 406, 416
Bayer-Red, Alfred 528
Bazin, André 332
BBC. See British Broadcasting Corporation
Bébr, Richard 139
Becker, Wolfgang 633, 634, 641, 723
Beckmann, Max 441
Beene, Geoffrey 421
Beer, Stafford 257
Before the May 1st Parade-Berlin 1951 (Kobzdej) 203
Begic, Eldina 424
Belopolsky, Yakov 631
Benefit-the-Masses Vocational Evening School 479
Benois, Aleksandr 68
Bergson, Henri 331
Berindei, Mihnea 697
Berlin 1983 (Schulze Eldowy) 501-2, 502f
Berlin Dada 567
Berlin Wall 400, 504, 534, 545, 629, 630
Berlusconi, Silvio 613
Berman, L. 120
Berman, Mieczyslaw 574
Betancourt, Jorge Luis 658
Bethune, Norman 342, 350f, 360n13
Canadian-American Medical Aid Team and 346
Communist Party of Canada and 347
cultural memorialization of 348
Fang and 354
narrative of 349
spirit of 351
statue of 343f
Bethune International Peace Hospital 342
Beyer-Volger, Lis 416
BFG. See Bureau of Fashion Guidance
Bhabha, Homi K. 296, 304, 311, 312
biblical tropes 704
Biermann, Wolf 296-97
Bildende Kunst (journal) 433
Bild für einen lateinamerikanischen Sänger (Painting for a Latin American Singer) (Rehfeldt) 445 biomechanics 408, 426n4
biorhythm calculations 137, 139, 140-42, 142f, 150
Bissau, Guinea 368
Bitterfeld Way (Bitterfelder Weg) 510
Black and White, Yes and No (Fekete fehér, igen, nem) (television show) 623
Black Power movement 738
Blacksoft 147
Black Square (Malevich) 32-33
The Black Star (1965) 305
Blake, Peter 583
Blind Justice (Heartfield) 581
Blindness (Zacma) (2016) 684-85, 686f, 687
Blue Rider art collective 715
Bogdanov, Alexander 91,412, 425
Bolek and Lolek (cartoons) 649
Bolshevik Revolution 23
Laknerand 575
universal aspiration of 185
Archizoom Associati and 417
constructivism and 407
Luxemburg and 672
NEP and 413
propaganda and 522-23
Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir 124
Bonch-Osmolovskaia, Olga 189
Bondarchuk, Sergei 552
Bonfire sparks (Iskry kostra) 119, 124
Bonsiepe, Gui 256
book burning 436
(p. 749) Borom Sarret (1963) 373
Borovskaia, Anna 177-80, 178f 179f 180f
Bourdieu, Pierre 33
bourgeois humanitarianism 348
bourgeoisie 69
bourgeois individualism 26-27
Boym, Svetlana 639
Bradley, Mark 549
Brandenberger, David 522
Branzi, Andrea 418
Bread-Making Plant No3 (Deineko and Troshin) 163, 164f
Breaking Bad (television show) 2
Brecht, Bertolt 739
Brendel, Micha 505
Breuer, Marcel 416
Brexit 709
Brezhnev, Leonid 249, 265, 461,617
bricklaying 201
bricolage 137, 144-45, 146, 150
Brighenti, Andrea Mubi 486
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 694
Brodaty, Lev 529
Broodthaers, Marcel 286
Brown, Kate 2
Brown, Wendy 724
Brus, Wlodzimierz 679
Brystiger, Julia 679, 684, 685
Brzozowski, Tadeusz 211
Buchloh, Benjamin 285-86, 287, 446
Buchwald, Kurt 505
Buck, Tim 347
Buck-Morss, Susan 33
bufen nannu (not distinguishing men from women) 477
“The Builder's Song” (Milanes) 36
Bukharin, Nikolay 112
Bukowska, Helena 205
Bulgakova, V. 121
Bureau of Art Exhibitions (BWA) 203
Bureau of Fashion Guidance (BFG) 458, 459, 459f 460
Buren, Daniel 286
Bürger, Peter 285
Burkina Faso 368
Burri, Alberto 211
Bush, George, W. 603
BWA. See Bureau of Art Exhibitions byt (everyday life) 24, 116, 251,408 CAA. See China Artists Association
Cabral, Amilcar 368
cadre suit (ganbufu) 482
CAFA. See Central Academy of Fine Arts
Cai Guo-Qiang 242
Caijian riji (Dressmaking Diary) 488
Cai Ruohong 232
calligraphy (shufa) 235
Cambodia Kampuchea (1987) 390
Campbell, Jan 596
Camp de Thiaroye (1988) 373, 374
Canadian-American Medical Aid Team 346
Canadian Red Cross 342
Cao Hanmei 480
“The Cape and the Skin” (Strada) 418-19 capital
accumulation of 2, 282 dominant ideologies of 333
Capital (Marx) 281
Capital (unfinished film) 278, 281
capitalism 3, 8, 49, 83, 329, 348, 461,524, 606 amateur art in 227 criminal record of 5 cultural imperialism 737 disaster 595 economic relations of 706 fashion and 407, 423
Jameson on 630
late 129
media practices of 595
negative sensibilities produced by 612 nineteenth-century 45
Cardin, Pierre 421
(p. 750) Cars for Comrades (Siegelbaum) 54
Carter, Jimmy 282
Cartier-Bresson, Henri 506
Castro, Fidel 22, 30, 455, 652, 657
Castro, Raúl 460
Castronovo, Russ 520
Catherine the Great 66
CBWA. See Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions in Warsaw
CCCP na stroike (USSR in Construction) 92, 93
CCP. See Chinese Communist Party
CDR. See Committees for the Defense of the Revolution
Celant, Germano 417
Cel mai iubit dintre pamanteni (The Most Beloved of Earthlings) (1993) 705
Cement (Gladkov) 36
censorship 116, 121, 138, 601, 708
Centennial Youth Column (CJC) 460
Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) 225, 230
Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions in Warsaw (CBWA) 204
Central Committee of the Komsomol 97
Central Europe 47
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 612
Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio (CNDS) 348
Central Research Institute for the Experimental Planning of Housing 19
Chanel, Coco 420
Changchun 598
Chang-tai Hung 342
Chardin, Jean Siméon 233
Charlot, John 547, 554, 561, 562n10
Chau, Nguyén Minh 553
Chen Duxiu 235
Chen Su 229
Chen Xiaonan 231
cheo (traditional opera) 556, 557
Chernobyl 729
Chernobyl (television show) 2
Chernyshev, Sergei 75
Children’s Internationale (Gralitsa) 171-73, 173f, 186
children’s literature 158, 159, 166, 173
Chile
coverage of 436
Heisig and 437
putsch in 432-35, 434, 439, 445-46, 447
Chile, 11. September 1973 (Hegewald) 443
Chile—12. September 1973 (Heisig) 437, 438f 444
Chilenisches Requiem (Requiem for Chile) (Tübke) 439
China 129, 204, 393, 594. See also People’s Republic of China
amateur art in 225
anti-imperialist war against Japan 358
Marxism-Leninism and revolutionary experience in 348
Republican period of 225
Second Sino-Japanese War and 342
socialism and 476
Vietnam and 395
China Artists Association (CAA) 229
“China’s Script Problem Today” (Qian) 235
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 228, 341, 346
assuming power 475
Korean War 350
political culture of 342
women and 476
Chinese Communist Revolution 224
Chinese National Gallery 242
Chinh, Tru’b’ng 547
Chi Nhung (Miss Nhung) (1970) 548
Christianity 438
Christie, Ian 89
Chuikina, Sofia 251
Chuji jifa congshu (Fundamental Art Techniques Series) (do-it-yourself art manuals) 225, 228,
artists who contributed to 230
books in 231
meishuzi and 234
publisher’s foreword in 229
Chukchi Pioneers 184
(p. 751) The Chukchi Society (exhibit) 165
Chukhrai, Grigori 552
Churchill, Winston 532
Church of Christ the Redeemer 75
Chuzhak, Nikolai 255
CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency
CIAM. See Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne
Cicero 113
Cine are dreptate? (Who Is Right?) (1990) 707
cinema 92, 509. See also Vietnamese cinema
apprehension of 730
Arab independent cinema 735, 739
cinematic hauntology 699
critical transnational cinema studies 367
Deleuze on 331
Egyptian 378
imperfect 663
North Korea, cinematic culture of 605
“plus-one” formula and 327
Radio-Cinema 95
Soviet Bloc, cinematic traditions of 545
Third Cinema 739
truth in 321
Cinema and Life (journal) 95, 105
Cissé, Souleymane 365, 367, 372, 373
citizen consciousness 260
citizen obligation (grazhdanskaia obiazannost) 259-60
City for Three Million Inhabitants 52
City of Robots (Mësto robotu) (video game) 147
Civilized Woman (Rossmann) 415-16
civil rights movement 507
CJC. See Centennial Youth Column
Closed Circuit (Uklad zamkniety) (2013) 687
clothing labels 463-65
“The Clothing of Today” (Stepanova) 408, 409f
Clover, Carol J. 685
Club of the Merry and Quick-Witted (Klub veselykh I nakhodchivykh) (television show) 620, 621,
CNDS. See Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio
coal 99-100
Coal Festival 460
coal miners 53
Co gai tren song (The Girl on the River) (1987) 548
Cohen, Shari 673
Cold War 2, 9, 23, 25, 297, 695
African filmmakers during 364-65
aftermath of 613
GDR and 501
manifestations of 542 propaganda in 530 softening of 561
Cold Waves (2007) 708
Colina, Enrique 649
collective imaginary 8
collectivism 333
collectivity 164
Collins, Christiane Craseman 47
colonialism 370, 524, 589-91, 596-97, 601,630. See also anticolonialism
in Arabic-speaking world 736
victims of 600
“Colonialism’s Collapse” (Gursed) 528
Colorful Kids (Agnivtsev) 188f, 189
Come Back, Africa (1959) 368
COMECON. See Council for Mutual Economic Assistance
Comintern. See Communist International
Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) 459
commodification 407
commodity fetishism 261
commodity form 420
communal housing (dom kommuny) 24
communalization 20
communal kitchens 234
Communications (Mitteilungen) (newsletter) 436
(p. 752) communicative communism 308
communism 5, 6, 12, 129, 311, 393, 437, 572, 573, 578, 590, 612, 631,638, 715, 719, 721, 729. See also anticommunism; Arab communism; Idea of communism
actualized 295
African filmmakers and 364
archiving 731
art and 287
atheist ethos of 557
attempts at 592
aversion to 198
Chinese path to 342
Cold War and 606
collective ethos of 544
communicative 308
critique of 704
early 622
fall of 698
as final stage in socioeconomic development 9 full 124
hammer and sickle of 290
history of 400
impressionistic view of 637
installation of 672-73 international aspirations of 568 legacy of 702, 706, 707, 708, 716 life under 675
march of 370
museumization of 3
nationalism and 554
political possibility of 11
race and 365
radical egalitarian society of 615
as radical social movement 567
realization of 348
resistance to 695
rethinking of 643
rhetoric of 664
sartorial dynamics under 467
satirical images of 614
spectral 178
spirit of 349
stalled progress of socialism toward 616
tolerant forms of 579
transition to 24
utopian notions of 79
value of 632
visual culture of 66, 401, 594
women and 676-77
youth's engagement in 203
Communist Action Organization 738
communist family-state 557
communist film collectives 368
communist film festivals 377, 379
communist ideology 36
Communist International (Comintern) 10, 347, 572
Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 189, 348, 642, 696 communist modernity 216
communist parties 44
Communist Party of Canada 347
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) 106n5
communist party states 4
communist project 45
communist states 572
Communist University of the Toilers of the East 174
communist vision 590
Competing Towns (Versengő városok) (television show) 623 compilation films 93
comprador class 373
compulsion 259
computer culture 151
computer graphics in visual art 138-39
computing 10
Comrade Detective (television show) 611
comradely objects 254
Comradettes 424-25
concentration camps 393
Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) 27, 47-49, 52 (p. 753) Marxism and 50
visual culture of 54
The Conjugal Bed (Patul conjugal) (1993) 706
Consemueller, Erich 416
Constitution of People's Republic of Poland 204
constructivism 23, 73, 274, 278, 585n14
Bolshevism and 407
Brown, W., and 423
formal-aesthetic aspects of 279
historical rooting 285
Lamanova and 413
October (1927) and 281
October (journal) and 276, 277, 282, 290
principles of 72
proletariat 416
questions of 287
Shub and 101
Stepanova on 408
transparency and 417
unfinishedness and 281
Vertov and 284
Constructivism (Rickey) 279
consumerism 138, 252, 267, 417, 466, 468, 582, 622
Contemporary Petrograd (Sovremennyi Petrograd) (Lukomskii) 70
Contrabando de sombras (Trafficking in Shadows) (Ponte) 665 contraception 22, 34
Contreras, Pedro 461
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) 399
Convention People's Party (CPP) 305
Cooper, Hugh 103
Coplans, John 280
copyright 114
Cosmic Runner (Kosmischer Läufer) (music recordings) 640-41,642, 643 cosmonauts 631,633, 638
Cotton (Shatilov and Manuilov) 164-65, 167-70, 168f, 169f, 170f
Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) 137, 143, 545 counterculture 445 counter-memory 716, 731
Counterpart (television show) 611
counterrevolutionary clothes 456
The Country I Saw (film series) 589, 590, 606
Part One 591, 592, 593, 594-95, 596, 597, 599f, 600-601,601 f
Part Three 605
Courrèges, André 421
Coyula, Mario 457
CPP. See Convention People's Party
CPSU. See Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Craft, Stephan 345
The Cranes Are Flying (1957) 552
Cremer, Fritz 631
critical transnational cinema studies 367
cross-cultural partnerships 379
Crowley, David 463
Cryder, Spencer 390
Csak egy kicsit jobban (Just a Little Bit Better) (television show) 623
Csernus, Tibor 566
Cuba 20, 25, 368, 460, 534, 659
Alamar housing district 30, 31 f 32, 463, 668, 670
clothing labels in 463-65
consumers in 467
Khrushchev, N., and 30
mass media and 663
microbrigades in 22
Ostalgie and 649
propaganda and 36
revolutionary government of 29
standardized housing in 30
USSR and 455
Cuban Bureau of Industrial Property (OCPI) 463
Cuban Communist Party (PCC) 455, 462
Cuban Institute of Film Industry (ICAIC) 31
Cuban Institute of Research and Orientation of Internal Demand (ICIODI) 466, 467
Cuban Institute of the Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) 456
Cuban Revolution 455, 657, 659
(p. 754) Cuban-Soviet economic brotherhood 653
Cuban TV 659
Cubism 233
CUJAE. See School of Architecture of the University City José Antonio Echeverria
The Culprit (Vinovatul) (1991) 706
cultivation (vzrashchivanie) 256
cult of labor (cultul muncii) 36
Cultural Association (Kulturbund) 508
cultural indoctrination 4
Cultural Revolution 129, 225, 242, 358, 476, 482
androgyny and 477
charged atmosphere of 492
mass production and 484
pattern books in 487f
propaganda and 488
culture wars 4
Current Debates (Aktuelni Razgovori) (television show) 618
cvartal 27
cybercrime 140
Marxism and 308
potential of 302
Cybernetics and Management (Beer) 257
Czechoslovakia 22, 50, 53, 54, 150, 548, 616, 618
amateur game production in 146
bastlení and 144
biorhythm calculations and 140
computer graphics in visual art from 138-39
digital visual culture of 138
electronics industry 143
prefabrication and 55
USSR and 137
Czech Republic 143
daily routine 33
Dai Yongfu 480
Dajnowicz, Matgorzata 677
“Dakar, I Do Love Dakar” (Mighty Terror) 371
Dam in Parque Lenin (Presa del Parque Lenin) (González Méndez) 653f
Darth Vader (fictional character) 726, 727f
DC-Cam. See Documentation Centre of Cambodia
The Dead President—Dr. S. Allende (Der tote Präsident—Dr. S. Allende) (Wetzel) 443 Dean, Jodi 11, 308
The Death of Tarelkin (play) 408
al-Debs, Nidal 738
De cierta manera (One Way or Another) (1974) 663 decolonial analysis 304-5
decolonization 379
Decommunization Act 672, 688n3 decommunization purges 4 decorated objects 176
defa-futurum 293, 295, 296, 297, 299, 312
creative process chart 309, 309f
disco films and 301 practice of 310 state support for 311 visual cultures of 304
defamiliarization 723
Deineko, Olga 159-64, 161 f, 162f, 163f
Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (Monet) 651
Delacroix, Eugène 233
Delaunay, Sonia 420
Deleuze, Gilles 331-32
Demands of Life (Lilina) 158
Democratic Kampuchea (DK) 385, 386, 400
Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) 589-90, 605 juche and 599
Korean War and 594 legitimation of 597 nuclearization of 604 precariousness of 593
Democratic Republic of Congo 374
democratization 7, 115, 566 demonization 1
Demonsoft 147
(p.755) Deni, Viktor 528
Derrida, Jacques 695
design (dizain) 33
Design for the Real World (Papanek) 249
design programs (dizain-programmy) 257 de-Stalinization 27, 81,677 deterritorialization 723
deterritorializing power 1
Deutschland 83 (television show) 611
Devétsil (multimedia avant-garde collective) 47
dialectical montage 373-74
The Diary of Anne Frank (Ein Tagebuch für Anne Frank) (1959) 311
Diawara, Manthia 305
Díaz, Jesús 661
Dick, Philip K. 611
Dickinson, Rick 144
dictatorship of the proletariat 115
didacticism 330
Diderot, Denis 113
digital computing 137
Digital Equipment Corporation 136
Diller Scofidio + Renfro 80
Ding Fong 398
Ding Ling 476
Dior, Christian 422
disability 501, 502, 512-13, 516n60, 701
disaster capitalism 595
disco films 301
division of labor 157
DIY. See do-it-yourself
dizain (design) 33
dizain-programmy (design programs) 257
Djagalov, Rossen 377, 378, 379
DK. See Democratic Kampuchea
Dneprostroi—Hydroelectric Station 92
Doanh nghiép Quöc gia chiéu bóng va chup anh (Photography and Cinematography State
Enterprise) 544
Dobrenko, Evgeny 592, 606, 654
Doctor Bethune (1963) 353, 356f 358
Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam) 390
dói mói (Renovation) 547, 548-49
do-it-yourself (DIY) 112, 117, 118, 125, 136, 138, 143-45, 251-52, 265
do-it-yourself art manuals 225, 227, 229-30
Dokuchaev, Nikolai 72
domestic design 9
domestic infrastructure 20
domesticity 32
domestic kitchens 34
domestic space 37
dom kommuny (communal housing) 24
Dong Cunrui 344
Donskoi, Mark 375
Don’t Burn (Bung dót) (2009) 548
Dostoyevsky’s Travels (1991) 678
DPRK. See Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Dresden 629
“Dress and Revolution” (von Mekk) 414
dress beautification campaign 483f
Dressmaking Diary (Caijian riji) 488
Dreszcze (Shivers) (1981) 725
Drumul cainilor (Road of the Dogs) (1991) 704
Drzewiecki, Conrad 302
Duan Hong 349
Dubcek, Alexander 548
Dudorov, Fil 177-80, 178f, 179f, 180f
Bung dót (Don’t Burn) (2009) 548
Dushkin, Aleksei 78
Dzerzhinsky, Felix 203
Dzorages hydroelectric station 101
Eastern Bloc 137, 458, 614, 695
Eastern Bloc satellites 44
Eastern Europe 53, 567, 571,611,633, 728-29 decommunization laws in 719
1990s transition 703
statues of Lenin in 715
East Germany (GDR) 293, 294, 295, 388, 392 alcoholism and 500
artists working in traditional media in 439
(p. 756) Chilean putsch and 433 cine-futurism and 296, 312 Cold War and 501 diplomatic relations with 435 documentaries in era of 642 economy of 632 erasing aspects of 629 Ghana and 316n67
Heartfield and 574
history of 304
legacy of 297
material culture of 639
motifs of 644
Ostalgie and 634
Paris Commune and 437
persistence art and culture of 640
photography and 505
proletariat and 509
scientific socialism and 301
socialism and 311
socialist realism and 434, 446-47
state socialism of 298
surveillance and 308
Eaton, Marcia 656-57
Eav, Kaing Guev 390
Ebédszünet (Lunch Break) (television show) 619
ECCC. See Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
Echeistov, Georgii 173, 186-87, 187f, 188f
Eco, Umberto 642
economic austerity 455
economic determinism 10
economic exploitation 373
economic inequality 48
economic reforms 159
education 180
educational initiatives 7
Efimov, Boris 519-21, 523, 524-26, 525f, 526f, 530f, 533f, 535f
on consumers of satire 530
Great Soviet Encyclopedia and 528
Khrushchev, N., and 534
Kon and 529
Nuremberg Trials and 531
polarized world drawn by 536
reception of 527
truth campaign and 532
women and 537
Efremin, Aleksandr 121 egalitarianism 225
Egyptian cinema 378
Eibisch, Eugeniusz 207
Eibish, Eugeniusz 212
Eikhebaum, Boris 174
Eisenhower, Dwight 534
Eisenstein, Sergei 95, 96, 274, 277, 364
Capital (unfinished film) 278
Constructivism and 281
contemporary interest in 372
Greenberg and 280
historical break and 288
Stalin and 279
Vertov and 280
Eisman, April A. 639
Eisner, Lotte 694
Ekster, Aleksandra 414
electricity 99
electrification 9, 89, 90, 97, 99, 110, 157
ElektroMera 257
The Eleventh Commandment (A unsprezecea porunca) (1991) 705
emancipatory politics 11
Emden, E. 187 f
Emmerling, Inga 433
emotional actions 385
empirical journalism 589, 590, 595
energy 89
electrical towers 103f
principles and movements of 90
production of 103
Shub and 98
sound- 99
Engels, Friedrich 44, 47, 55-56, 65, 189, 299, 348, 642, 696
(p. 757) Engler, Wolfgang 509
L’Enigma d’Isidore Ducasse (Ray) 581
environmentally conscious consumption 265
environmental movements 252
Eremin, V. V. 386
Erlandsson, Bengt 721
Erren, Lorenz 121
Erzählungen aus der Neuen Welt (Narrations from the New World) (1968) 294
Escarpado (Kobzdej) 211
Espin, Vilma 459
Espinosa Dominguez, Carlos 662
Ethiopia 368
ethnic differences 171-72
ethnic nationalism 703
ethnographic documentary filmmaking 591
Euromaidan 113
European identity 693
European Old Masters 233
European Union 611
Evans, Harriet 488
Evening of Merry Questions (Vecher veselykh voprosov) (television show) 620-21,622 everyday life (byt) 24, 116, 251, 408
Every Person Has the Right to Life and Freedom (Jeder Mensch hat das Recht auf Leben und
Freiheit) (Sitte) 441, 442f, 444
Excavators and Cranes (Trofimova and Mogilveskii) 185f
existentialism 210
Exner, Hermann 503
Exotron (video game) 146
Experimental Design Workshop (TED) 460
Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) 390
Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001) 641
The Face of Fascism (Heartfield) 581
Face of Our Time (Sander) 503
Faces of Socialist Realism (Sitkowska) 199
factory-made garments 484
Der Fall Heusinger (The Heusinger Case) (1959) 311
The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927) 94
family values 25
Fang Zhaoyuan 354
atrocities of 574
Wagner and 325
Eastern Bloc and 458
NEP and 414
process of fashionalization 423
strategic use of 468
traditional flower motifs in 411
Fate of a Man (1959) 552
Faust Overture (Wagner) 321
February Revolution 94
fedayeen 738
Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) 34, 459
Federici, Silvia 35
Fedorov-Davydov, Aleksei 415
A Feeling Greater Than Love (Saba) 737, 740, 741
Fehér, Dávid 577
Fehérváry, Krizstina 53
Fekete fehér, igen, nem (Black and White, Yes and No) (television show) 623
Felix Dzerzhinsky on His Way to Siberia (Kobzdej) 203
female communists (komunistki) 673-74, 685, 688, 689n5
“The Feminine Fashion” (newsreel) 459
feudalism 475
“A Few Fragments from Norman Bethune's Life” (Zhou) 342
Fidar (2012) 741
Fidler, Miroslav 149
15th National Day Celebration 353
(p. 758) “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression” (Buchloh) 285
“Figures to Contemplate Lying Down in the Summertime” (Arcos Soto) 660 Fiks, Yevgeniy 365
Film Africa 369
Film Fables (Ranciere) 330
Film Studies 8
First All-Poland Exhibition of Art 202, 218n22
First All-Union Congress of Architects 77
First Circle (Solzhenitsyn) 82
The First Festival of Negro Arts (1966) 369
First Five-Year Plan 89, 92, 93, 158, 540n42
coming to an end 95
cultural work during 90
dominant strands of 91
photomontages and 92
First Leningrad Governorate Exhibition of Wall Newspapers (1925) 122
First State Textile Print Factory 410
Fischer, Arno 505
Fisher, Mark 699
Five Guerrilla Brothers (1969) 596
five-year plans 65
“flapper” dresses 420
FLN. See National Liberation Front
Florschuetz, Thomas 505
The Flower Girl (1972) 596
FMC. See Federation of Cuban Women
Foam (2006) 739
Fonda,Jane 327
Fong, Ding 388
For a Stable Peace, Against Those Who Would Ignite a New War (Efimov) 532
Forbidden City 232
Forecki, Piotr 680
Forgács, Éva 572
Forget Baghdad (2003) 736, 739
Forms (Levine) 56
Forog az idegen (Spinning the Tourist) (television show) 623
For the Cultural Building of Nationalities (Mansurov) 173
Forum (Fórum) (television show) 618
Fotografie (journal) 503, 504, 506
Fotokino Magazin (magazine) 509
Fotokonfrontationen (photoconfrontations) 572
Foucault, Michel 33, 35, 227, 278, 507, 716, 729, 741
Fougeron, Andre 206
Fountain of the Future (statue) 721, 722f
Fourth Congress of Russian Architects 68
Fox Hunter (Vulpe vänätor) (1993) 705
Fox News 613
Frage-Antwort-Prozess 306
Frampton, Kenneth 51
Franco, Francisco 531
Frank, Robert 506
Frankfurt 52
French and Company 211
French Communist Party 373
French New Wave 332
French Revolution 657
Frölich, Paul 503
From Caoutchouc to Galoshes (Deineko and Troshin) 159-60, 161 f, 162f, 164
“From Magician to Epistemologist” (Michelson) 278
From the Bottom of My Heart (Ot vsei dushi) (television show) 617-18
Fukuyama, Francis 304
Fuller, Buckminster 253
functionalist modernism 406
Fundamental Art Techniques Series (Chuji jifa congshu) (do-it-yourself art manuals) 225, 228,
artists who contributed to 230
books in 231
meishuzi and 234
publisher’s foreword in 229
fundamentalist religious movements 735, 736
Fu Tianchou 231
Future (González Méndez) 651
futurism 420
Gadai, Gadai, Gadalshchik (Guess, Guess, You Guesser) (television show) 621
Gadassik, Alla 94
Gadjigo, Samba 373
Gagarin, Yuri 421,629, 632, 633, 665
Gallery of Socialist Realist Art 217n8
Galliano, John 422
Galt, Rosalind 555
Game of Thrones (television show) 2
ganbufu (cadre suit) 482
Ganf, lulii 529
Gao Minglu 242
García Espinosa, Julio 663
García Montiel, Emilio 661
garment-making cooperatives 480
Garment Making Methods (Dai) 480
Gaultier, Jean-Paul 422
Gazinskaya, Vika 422
GDR. See East Germany
Gelfreikh, Vladimir 78
General Nil (General Nil) (2009) 687
genocide 387
geometric abstraction 408
geometry 420
Gerasimov, Vadim 136, 137, 233
Gerasimova, Ekaterina 251
Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) 366, 367, 371, 372, 551 artistic stimulus of 552
reputation of 375
German Communist Party (KPD) 567
German Federal Republic (GFR) 393
Gerrand, James 390
GFR. See German Federal Republic
Ghostly Matters (Gordon) 303
Giedion, Siegfried 47
Gierowski, Stefan 211
Gilbert, Cass 78
Gilbert, Sophie 2
Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy 274, 278, 280
Gillar, Jan 55
The Girl on the River (Co gái tren song) (1987) 548
Gladkov, Feodor 35-36
Glaum-Lathbury, Abigail 424f, 425
Gledhill, Christine 596
Glendinning, Miles 53
global revolution 10
Global South 546
“Global Strategy” (Bayer-Red) 528
Globke, Hans 311
Gluckman, Max 21
Gnedin, E. 529
Gober, Robert 283
Godard, Jean-Luc 326, 327, 332, 739
Golubev, Alexei 252
Gomulka, Wladyslaw 677-78
González Méndez, Alejandro 650, 651,652f, 653, 653f 654f
aesthetic tools employed by 667
future and 666
on July 7, 1989 656
Good Bye, Lenin! (2001) 633
Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) 641
Goodbye Lenin! (2004) 723-24, 723f
Gorham, Michael 112
Gorin, Jean-Pierre 326, 327, 332
Gorky, Maxim 76
Gorky Park of Culture and Rest 76
Gorodetskii, Boris 118, 119, 122
Goskino 93
Gosplan. See State Planning Committee
Gossnab. See State Committee of the USSR for Material and Technical Supplies
Gralitsa, Yuri 171-74, 173f 186
graphic design 422
Gray, Tallyn 399
(p. 760) The Gray Five-Year Period (González Méndez) 658
grazhdanskaia obiazannost (citizen obligation) 259-60
Great Depression 52
Great Leap Forward 224, 234, 245n21,482
Great Soviet Encyclopedia 528
Great Terror 112
Great Victory Vocational School for Women 478
The Great Way (1927) 94
Greaves, William 369
Greece 66
Greenberg, Clement 280, 289, 290
green citizenship 260
green consumerism 267
Gres Gallery 211
Grimmling, Hans-Hendrik 441,445
Groensteen, Thierry 520
Gronow, Jukka 463
Gropius, Walter 47
Grosz, George 575
Groys, Boris 633
Grunin, V. 116
Grutas Park 728-29
Gruttner, Rudolf 445
Guang Zhi 229
guapos (tough guys) 458
The Guardian (newspaper) 720
Guernica (Picasso) 442
Guess, Guess, You Guesser (Gadai, Gadai, Gadalshchik) (television show) 621
Guide to Cutting (Lin) 479, 484
gulags 729
Gulea, Stere 705
Gundermann, Gerhard 303
Guo Jianying 480
Gursed, Arnain 528
Gutman, Tara 398
Haacke, Hans 286
Habanera (1984) 466
Hack, K. 546
Hahner-Springmuhl, Klaus 505
Hallstein Doctrine 435
Hamdan, Hassan 736
Hamelin, Candice 505
The Handmaid’s Tale (television show) 611
Hanoi: Vietnam Courier 387
“Happy New (and Their Last) Year!” (Efimov) 531
Hardt, Michael 1
hardware bricolage 137, 144-45, 146
Harlan, Thomas 311
Hartung, Hans 209
Hatem, Shafick George 345
hauntology 699
haute couture 419
Havel, Vaclav 697
Have You Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila (2014) 741
Hazard, John 368
Heartfield, John 92, 566, 567, 572-73, 577, 581
GDR and 574
Grosz and 575
mass media and 568
mimicry and 582
montage and 583-84
organic illusionism of 576
“Heart of Skitalietz” (Ponte) 665
heavy industry 482
Hegel, G. 492
Hegewald, Heidrun 443
Heiduschke, Sebastian 639
Heisig, Bernhard 436, 437, 438, 438f, 439, 444, 445, 447, 631
Hellwig, Joachim 294, 295, 297, 298, 299
defa-futurum and 296
documentary practice of 300
Ghana and 305
International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and 302 petit-bourgeois socialism and 312
political aspirations for cyber-technologies and 308
Helsinki Accord 249
(p. 761) Helvetica typeface 262, 263
Heng Samrin 393
Her Naked Skin (2008) 678
heroic daughters and sons (yingxiong ernü) 341
Herzfeld, Helmut 567
Herzfelde, Wieland 574
heteroglossia 104
Heubler, Douglas 567
The Heusinger Case (Der Fall Heusinger) (1959) 311
Heynowski, Walter 392
Heynowski & Scheumann Studio (Studio H&S) 311,392, 399
Hicks, Jeremy 112
Higher Artistic and Technical Institute (VKhUTEIN) 71
Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops (VKhUTEMAS) 71, 73
High Stalinist period 126, 128
Hillman, Roger 723
L’histoire centrale (Magritte) 581
historical break 288
historical struggle 324
Hitchcock, Alfred 367
Ho Chi Minh City Museum of American War Crimes 389
Holbraad, Martin 22
Holocaust 317n79, 569, 577, 583, 584n11,688
Holt, Douglas B. 422
Homeland (television show) 611
Homo europaeus 694
Honzik, Karel 50
Horkheimer, Max 7
Hornekova, Bozena 415
Hotel de lux (Luxury Hotel) (1992) 706
housing
communal housing (dom kommuny) 24
communist project and 45
Marxism-Leninism and 44
modular 9
postwar 56
revolutionary housing policy 25
shortages 48
standardized 30
USSR campaigns for 53
Housing (La Vivienda) (1959) 29
housing construction 25
The Housing Question (Engels) 44
housing reform 26
Houze, Rebecca 261
Howard, Ebenezer 70
How Brands Become Icons (Holt) 422
How to Create a Communal Kitchen (Zenyang ban hao gonggong shitang) 234
How to Decorate Blackboard Newspapers (Zenyang meihua heiban bao) 234, 237
How to Make Designs (Lei) 233
How to Make Etchings (Zenyang zuo tongbanhua) (Chen) 231
How to Make Graphic Designs (Lei) 231
How to Make Oil Paintings (Zenyang hua youhua) (Ai) 231,233
How to Make Pencil Drawings (Ge) 231,233
How to Make Prints (Zenyang zuo banhua) (Li) 231
How to Paint Still Lifes (Zenyang hua jingwu) (Wu) 225, 226f, 233
How to Sculpt (Zenyang zuo diaosu) (Fu) 231
how-to-sew manuals 475
How to Write Meishuzi (Qiu) 234
Hrda, Stanislav 148
Hu Angang 492
huapu 229
Hu Mang 532
“Human Settlements” (Arquitectura Cuba) 31
Humphrey, Caroline 21
A Hundred Faces for a Single Day (1969) 738, 740
Hungarian Communist Party 578
Hungarian Socialist Worker's Party 616
Hungary 53, 137, 151, 534, 568, 616
political crisis in 577
thaw in social and political life in 578
Hun Sen 398
Hurricane Flora 30
Huxian County peasant painters 224
(p. 762) Hwang, Arthur 715
hyper-Maoism 400
hysteron proteron 288
Iakovlev, Iakov 159
I Am Twenty (1965) 376
ICAIC. See Cuban Institute of Film Industry; Cuban Institute of the Cinematographic Art and Industry
ICIODI. See Cuban Institute of Research and Orientation of Internal Demand
Ida (2015) 676, 678-79, 682f 685
Idea of communism 321, 323, 329, 333-34, 631
expression of 322
Marker and 330
subjectivity and 324
Wagner and 325
identity politics 673
ideological colonization 21
Ignatovich, Boris 93
III Wystawa Sztuki Nowoczesnej (Third Exhibition of Modern Art) 214 il’ichovka 120
Ilya Repin 233
imaginary order 324
Imam, Sheikh 741
I’m Cabbage. Do You Know My Leaves? (Heartfield) 581
Immisch, T. O. 503
imperfect cinema 663
imperialism 437, 441,475, 590, 602
in Arabic-speaking world 736
cultural 737
injustice of 601
neocolonialism and 595
politics of 606
Im Staub der Sterne (In the Dust of the Stars) (1976) 295, 307, 310
In Chile, Quiet Prevails (In Chile herrscht Ruhe) (Womacka) 443
indigeneity 373
Industrial Cooperation (Tsentrosoyus) 258
industrialization 9, 27, 65, 248
of construction 30
Great Leap Forward and 224
Stalin and 415
industrialized production 24
industrial photography 164
industrial processes 249
industrial production 76, 91,412, 617
Industrial Revolution 55
informal army coat (junbianfu) 481
informal networks 150
Informel 210
infrastruction 36
infrastructural violence 21
infrastructure 21
domestic 20
logistic and material 257
socialism and 36
Inga (play) 412-13
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 233
Ingulov, Sergei 121
INKhUK. See Institute of Artistic Culture
In Memory of Norman Bethune (Jinian Baiqiuen) (1962) 344, 348, 352
“In Memory of Norman Bethune” (Mao) 342, 344, 345, 349, 352, 358
Institute for Industrial Design (Institutul de Proiectari Industriale) 26
Institute for the Design of Cities and Public and Housing Constructions (Institutul de Proiectare a
Ora§elor, a Constructor Publice §i de Locuit) 26
Institute for the Design of Constructions (Institutul de Proiectari de Construct) 26
Institute of Art (Instytut Sztuki) 206
Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) 71-72, 73, 425n3
Institute of National Remembrance 687-88
Institutul de Proiectare a Ora§elor, a Constructor Publice §i de Locuit (Institute for the Design of
Cities and Public and Housing Constructions) 26
Institutul de Proiectari de Construct (Institute for the Design of Constructions) 26
(p.763) Institutul de Proiectari Industriale (Institute for Industrial Design) 26
Instytut Sztuki (Institute of Art) 206
intellectual property rights 124
Interkosmos 463, 632, 637, 638
Interkosmos (2006) 642
international communication 103
International Communist Youth 642
International Exhibition of Decorative Arts 414
internationalism 189, 299, 342, 370, 404n51, 567
anti-imperialism and 347
anti-Zionism and 737
Mao on 341
New Leftism and 584
Second International and 360n25
symbols of 358
International Modernism 406, 415
International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 302
International Women's Day 456, 666
Interrogation (Przesluchanie) (1982) 684
interwar modernism 52
In the Dust of the Stars (Im Staub der Sterne) (1976) 295, 307, 310
“Into production!” (Brik) 410
Ioffe, M. 529
Iraqi Communist Party 736
Iraq War 603
Isakoff, Ned 329
Iskry kostra (Bonfire sparks) 119
Iskusstvo odevat’sia (Art of Dressing) (journal) 420
Iskusstvo v bytu (Art in Everyday Life) (Lamanova and Mukhina) 251,413
Ismail, Najib 741
Italian avant-garde 419
Italian neorealism 552
Italian rationalists 49
Italian Renaissance 76
Ivanova, V. 187 f
Ivens, Joris 350
Izvestiia (journal) 523, 524, 529
Jachym, Toss Him into the Machine (Jachyme, hod ho do stroje) (1974) 140-42, 141 f 142f
Jacobi, Günter 444
Jadallah, Sulafa 738
Jähn, Sigmund 632
enduring meaning of 638
Gagarin and 633
popularity of 637
Jakubowska, Wanda 672, 682-84, 683f 688
Jameson, Fredric 294, 297, 630
Jamieson, Neil 551
Jankovic, Jozef 139
Kwangtung Army and 598
public sphere of 601
Jarska, Natalia 677
Jaruzelski, Wojciech 719
Jarvis, Helen 399
Jawhariyyah, Hani 738
Jay, Martin 590
Jeder Mensch hat das Recht auf Leben und Freiheit (Every Person Has the Right to Life and
Freedom) (Sitte) 441,442f, 444
Jefanow, W P. 503
Jemelka, Martin 53
Jerozolimskie, Aleje 214
Jesenská, Milena 415
Jeunet, Jean-Pierre 641
Jiang Feng 230
Jiang Naiyong 478
Jiangsu People's Publishing House 239
Jiang Yunchuan 349
jiefangfu (Liberation coat) 481
Jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily) (newspaper) 342
Jinian Baiqiuen (In Memory of Norman Bethune) (1962) 344, 348
John Heartfield (Herzfelde) 574
Jordan 738
(p. 764) J0rgensen, Finn Arne 252-53, 260
José Martí Organization of Pioneers 654
DPRK and 599
formulation of 593
juche realism 592, 593, 595, 600, 606
classics of 596
melodramatic mode of 598
July 7, 1989 (González Méndez) 656
junbianfu (informal army coat) 481
Junta Multiplication Tables (Junta Einmaleins) (Schieferdecker) 446
Junta Music (Grimmling) 441
Jupiter Symphony (Mozart) 681
Just a Little Bit Better (Csak egy kicsit jobban) (television show) 623
Juszkiewicz, Piotr 200
Kádár, János 568, 575, 578, 579, 580
Kafka, Franz 581
Kaganovich, Lazar 75
Kaganovsky, Lilya 100
Kalatozov, Mikhail 552
Kalinin Prospekt 81
Kalyan, Gorav 322
Kamennoostrovskii Prospekt 65, 68, 69f
Kampuchea (1980) (film) 392, 393
Kampuchea (Eremin and Kobelev) 386
Kampuchea. Dossier III (Hanoi: Vietnam Courier) 387
Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation (KNFUNS) 388
Kandinsky, Wassily 71-72
kanji 237
Kant, Immanuel 615
Kargin, A. S. 224
Kaufman, Mikhail 95
KCNA. See Korean Central News Agency
Keita, Modibo 368
Kekushev, Lev 68
Kelly, Catriona 112
Kenez, Peter 522
Kenzler, Marcus 433
Keo Chanda 393
Keo Chenda 399
Kerbel, Lew 631
Khalturin, Stepan 124
Khalturinets Tribune (Tribuna Khalturintsa) 124
Khan-Magomedov, Selim 257
Kharkov 77
crimes of 393
Nazism and 396
propaganda by 391
secondary witnesses to crimes of 392
strongholds of 395
United Nations General Assembly recognizing 387
Khoury, Musa 739
Khriakov, Aleksandr 78
Khrushchev, Nikita 19, 23, 39n41, 81,421, 527, 534 avant-gardes and 33
Cuba and 30
cultural liberalization and 248
domestic revolution and 20
Stalin and 25
turn toward mass production of 54
Khrushchev, Sergei 527
khrushchevka 19
Kim Il Sung 592, 594, 596, 598
Kim Jong Hwa 594
Kim Jong Il 592, 593, 594, 599
kinopravda 615
Kirya, Ilya 114
Kissinger, Henry 387
Kläber, Thomas 506
Klein, Yves 286
Kleines politisches Wörterbuch (Small Political Dictionary) (Verlag) 293-94
Klokova, Mariia 186-87, 187f 188f
Klub veselykh I nakhodchivykh (Club of the Merry and Quick-Witted) (television show) 620, 621,
Klutsis, Gustav 92, 93, 96, 125, 410
prozodezhda and 411
(p.765) KNFUNS. See Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation
Knight Lore (video game) 146
Knöfel, Jörg 505
Kobelev, E. V. 386
Kobzdej, Aleksander 197, 199, 210. See also Pass a Brick
Ashton on 211
at Association of Polish Artists 203
career of 215
degree in architecture 202
Lwow and 206
oeuvre of 208
Sopot Group and 207
status as artist 204
transformation of 216
Kochugov, Dmitrii 258-59, 260, 262
Ko Hak Rim 594
Kohonen, Lina 635
Kokoschka, Oskar 437
Kolditz, Gottfried 307
Kollwitz, Käthe 445
komunistki (female communists) 673-74, 685, 689n5
possibility of remembering 688
Kon, Feliks 529
Konchalovsky, Andrei 552
“Kondiciogram” (Petra Janu) 140, 142
Koons, Jeff 715
Kopalin, Ilya 95
Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) 604
Korean Film Studios 593
Korean identity 596
Korean Workers' Party 589
kosmonaut (astronaut) 637
Kosmischer Läufer (Cosmic Runner) (music recordings) 640-41,642, 643
Die Kosmonauten (band) 637
Kosygin, Aleksei 257
Kotelnicheskaia Quay 78
Kotkin, Stephen 54
Kotnis, Dwarkanath S. 345
Kozloff, Max 280
KPD. See German Communist Party
KR. See Khmer Rouge
Kracauer, Siegfried 176, 177, 694, 695, 699, 700
Krakow 207
Kramer, Julian 723
Krasnaia niva (Red Field) (journal) 413, 414
Krasnyi tekstil’shchik (The Red Textile Worker) (wall newspaper) 116, 121
Krauss, Rosalind 274, 278, 280, 285, 411
Krautrock 641
Kremlin Palace of Congresses 81
Krestianskaiia gazeta (The Peasant Newspaper) 159
Krinskii, Vladimir 72
Kroha, Jirí 51
Krokodil (journal) 523
Krzhizhanovskii, Gleb 157-58, 159-60, 164, 184
K.Sh.E. (1932) 89, 90, 93, 96, 97, 99, 105-6
Ku, Alexander 283
Kuehn, Karl Gernot 513
Kulisiewicz, Tadeusz 205
Kulturbund (Cultural Association) 508
Kuppers, Sophie 92
Kurs, A. 118
Kushner, Boris 256
Kwangtung Army 598
Kwon, Heonik 557
competitive 621
division of 157
ethnic differences and 171 -72
Marx and 37
Romania and 36
rural 35
simultaneity of differently organized 169
skilled 44
toil of 500
(p. 766) Labor-Progressive Party in Canada 349
labor theory of value 250
labor unions 736
Lacan, Jacques 324
Ladovskii, Nikolai 72
Lakner, László 566, 569, 572, 577, 577f, 581-82, 583f
Bolshevik Revolution and 575
generation of artists of 578
Kádár and 579
mass media and 568
radical voluntarism and 571
socialist realism and 574, 576
utopian globalism and 570
Lamanova, Nadezhda 251,413, 414
Lan, Ngö Phuomg 551
landscape images 555
Langman, Eleazer 93
Lapin, Sergei 622
Lapland 175-76
Laptev, Alexei 180-82, 181 f, 182f
The Last Bolshevik (1992) 330, 331
The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10 33
Last Resort (2000) 678
The Last Stage (1947) 682
late capitalism 129
lateral montage 332
Law and Justice party 687
Lebanese Communist Party 737
civil war in 738
militant Lebanese films 740
Lebenstein, Aleksander 214
Lebenstein, Jan 211
LEF. See Left Front of the Arts
Left Front of the Arts (LEF) 72, 112
Legg, Stephen 725
Leipziger Volkszeitung (newspaper) 437
Lenin, Vladimir 35, 75, 89, 110, 412, 427n28, 675, 675f, 731
critique of imperialism 736
as Darth Vader (fictional character) 726, 727f
Eastern Europe, statues of 715
Fountain of the Future (statue) 721, 722f
Goodbye Lenin! (2004) 723-24, 723f
Los Angeles statue of 713, 714f, 719 omnipresent portraits of 139
statue as homeless person 716, 717f
wall newspaper mourning death of 119
wall newspapers and 115
world revolution and 567
Lenin from Krakow (Lenin z Krakowa) (1997) 720
Leningrad 101, 165, 250, 255, 258
Leningrad Union of Soviet Artists 127
Lenin Museum in Poronin, Poland 675, 675f, 689n12
Lenin's Tomb 715
Lenin z Krakowa (Lenin from Krakow) (1997) 720
Lenkiewicz, Rebecca 678
Lennon, John 570
Lenoe, Matthew 115
Leonidov, Ivan 55
Leont'eva, Valentina 617
Lessig, Lawrence 114
Lessing, Erich 675
Letter from Siberia (Lettre de Sibérie) (1957) 300
Letters to Siberia (1958) 332
Lettre de Sibérie (Letter from Siberia) (1957) 300
Levin, A. 387
Levine, Caroline 56
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 144
Lev Tolstoy and the Russia of Nicholas II (1927) 94, 105
Liandui shiyong meishu ziliao (Army Arts Reference Book) 239, 240f, 241 f liberalism 370
liberalization 214, 248, 547, 613, 698
Liberation coat (jiefangfu) 481
(p. 767) Liberation Daily (Jiefang ribao) (newspaper) 342
Liebe im Jahr 2002 (Love in the Year 2002) (1972) 294, 302, 303, 307
Li Fenglan 225
The Light of Leninism (Luch leninisma) 116
Lilina, Zlata 158
Li Qun 230
Li Song 233
Lissitzky, El 23, 71, 92, 96, 410
literary devices 288
Lithuania 728
Little Black Dress (Chanel) 420
Litvinenko, V. 532
Liu Hulan 344
Livanova, Vera 128f
living environment (zhilaia sreda) 256
living newspapers (zhivgazety) 120
Lobovskii, A. 118
Lodder, Christina 279
Loeser, Franz 294, 306, 310, 317n75, 317n79
logics of interrogation 306, 317n79
Love in the Year 2002 (Liebe im Jahr 2002) (1972) 294, 302, 303, 307
Lowenthal, David 635
Luch leninisma (The Light of Leninism) 116
Lunch Break (Ebédszünet) (television show) 619
LuXun 235
Luxury Hotel (Hotel de lux) (1992) 706
Luzhkov, lurii 82
Lwów 206
lyricism 543-44, 550, 553-55, 557, 560
Ma, Ran 378
Machado Quintela, Carlos 650, 652, 664, 665, 666-67
MacKay, John 97
Maetzig, Kurt 639
The Magnanimous Cuckold (play) 408, 422
Magnetic Mountain (Kotkin) 54
Mahnach, L. 369
Makovskii, Sergei 67
malarstwo materii 210
Malass, Mohamad 738
Maldonado, Tomas 256
Maldoror, Sarah 365, 366, 367, 373, 374, 377f
Malec, Ivan 138
Malevich, Kazimir 23, 32-34, 71-72
Mally, Lynn 227
Man Conquers the Cosmos (Eisel) 636f
La Mandarria (Embajada Rusa) (González Méndez) 652f
Mandel'baum, Bernhard 185
The Man in the High Castle (television show) 611
Man Overcoming Time and Space (Womacka) 636
Mansurov, Gasim 173
Manual for Survival (Brown, K.) 2
Manuel Prieto, José 660
Manuilov, Appolon 164-65, 167-70, 168f, 169f, 170f
Man with a Movie Camera (1929) 99, 105, 278, 283, 284f, 287 beginning of 364
constructivism and 284
making of 280
montage technique and 289
Maoist hand-painted slogans 241
Maoist period 224, 225, 243, 475, 477
meishuzi and 228
women in 478
Mao suit 476
Mao Zedong 129, 323, 341, 344, 345, 352, 358
classical Marxism and 348
Communist Party of Canada and 347
critic of patriarchy 492
death of 240
directives from 486
hyper-Maoism 400
“On New Democracy,” 491
performance art based on 713-14
(p.768) political thought of 348-49
provocative renditions of 713
revolutionary writings of 476
Marcuse, Herbert 8
Marczewski, Wojciech 725
Marczynski, Adam 212
Margolin, Victor 253
Markasova, Elena 120
Marker, Chris 300, 330, 331, 332, 335, 739
Markowska, Anna 200
Marx, Karl 2, 9, 189, 281,299, 310, 348, 631,642, 696 aesthetic theory of 8 commodities and 407 economic determinism and 10
Federici and 35 labor and 37 Marxism 3, 48, 741
Allende and 432 CIAM and 50 classical 348 cybernetics and 308
Neues Bauen architects and 47 political ontology of 21
Soviet Communist Party and 50 tropes of discourse of 45
Marxism-Leninism 5, 10, 45, 65, 294, 299, 368, 547, 737 architecture and 71
Chinese revolutionary experience and 348 housing and 44 philosophical principles of 614
Poland and 676 principles of 475 scientific socialism and 301 Masao, Adachi 738 Masha (cosmonaut mascot) 632, 639 mass media 113, 130, 568
Cuba and 663
in North Korea 604 mass production 54, 411,484 master-slave dialectic 492 material culture 411 materialism 45, 48, 50 material production 164 Ma Tianxiang 491-92 Matta-Clark, Gordon 283 Mattheuer, Wolfgang 440, 444, 445 Maure de Venise (1958) 376 Maxim, Juliana 45 Maxim Gorki Theater 444 May, Ernst 47 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 93, 111 May Fourth Movement 228 Mazin, Craig 2 McCray, Porter 212 McGuigan, Jim 640 McLellan, Josie 508, 512
McLeod, Mary 49
Me, One of Them (Lakner) 575
mechanization 484
media literacy 129
Medina, Jose 716
The Mega Projects (González Méndez) 658
Meg mindig ... John Heartfield (And always ... John Heartfield) (exhibition) 574 Meishu (Art) (journal) 229, 232
development of 237
literary projects using 235
Maoist period and 228
People's Republic of China and 237, 239
propaganda and 240
styles of 241
Meishuzi for Countryside Use (Nongcun yingyong meishuzi) 237, 238f Meishuzi’s Technique 239
Meishuzi zuofa (The Practice of Writing Meishuzi) 239
Mekkail’s Thoughts (Dudorov and Borovskaia) 177-80, 178f, 179f, 180f
Melis, Roger 505
Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) 664
Meng, Bou 394
Mengya yuekan (Sprouts) (journal) 235, 236f
Merewether, Charles 716
(p. 769) Messeeh, Namir Abdel 739
Mésto robotu (City of Robots) (video game) 147
Metamorphosis (Kafka) 581
Metamorphosis (Lakner) 576, 577f, 578, 579
Metwaly, Jasmina 741
Metz, Christian 590
Meyer, Hannes 47
Michael, Sami 736
Michelson, Annette 274, 278, 280, 281, 284, 288, 289-90
microdistrict (microrayon) 28, 29
Mida, Massimo 300 middle sex (zhongxing) 477
Miedinger, Max 262
Miéville, China 643
Mighty Terror 371
migration 35
Mihaileanu, Radu 707
Mikhalkov, Sergey 660
Milanes, Pablo 36
Milian, Jerzy 302
Miljacki, Ana 50
Milov, Alexander 726
MINCIN. See Ministry of Domestic Commerce
determination of 552
influence of 561
interpretations of 551
lyricism and 544, 550, 553-55, 557
peers of 548
poetic discourse and 560
professional life of 549-50
significance of 553
spirituality and 557
symbol of paper kite and 559
MINIL. See Ministry of Light Industry
The Minimum Dwelling (Nejmensi byt) (Teige) 47
Ministry of Domestic Commerce (MINCIN) 458
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade 79f
Ministry of Light Industry (MINIL) 463
Minkus, Mikhail 78
Minsk 77
Mir iskusstva (World of Art) 68
Mirror (Zwierciadio) (magazine) 212
Mirzoeff, Nicholas 513, 674, 684
Missile Crisis 25
“Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin's Head” (Gao, Z., and Gao, Q.) 713-14,
714f
Miss Nhung (Chi Nhung) (1970) 548
Mit dem Herzen dabei (With Open Hearts) (television show) 617-18
MIT Press 283
Mitteilungen (Communications) (newsletter) 436
Mizian, Maciej 721
mnogoukladnost 171
mobile blood transfusion 342
Moda ’75, Edición Especial (fashion brochure) 466 modernism 50, 65, 70, 91,256, 411
aesthetic of 419
architecture and 44
avant-gardes and 77
functionalist 406
International Modernism 406, 415
interwar 52
People's Republic of Poland and 214
political 570
postmodernism 82
postwar 200
prerevolutionary 69
social engagement and 216
socialist realism and 575
modernismo 661
modernity 421
geometry and 420
People's Republic of Poland, communist modernity in 216 socialism and 463
modernization 19
dynamic of 35
of infrastructure 21
mass 25
Modisane, Bloke 368
modular housing 9
(p. 770) Mogilveskii, A. 185f
Mokashi-Punekar, Prachi 375
Moldovan Soviet Socialist republic 263, 266f
Moles, Abraham 256
Molnár, Margit 619
Molnar, Miklós 578
Molnár, Virág 45
Monangambé (1968) 374
monarchy 69
Monochrome und Feuer (Klein, Y.) 286
montage 373, 374, 568, 583-84, 739
“Montage October’ (Krauss) 278
Montand, Yves 327 monumentalism 67
architecture and 78
contemporary 82
neoclassicism and 75
Monument to the Third International (Tatlin) 571-72
Mordvinov, Arkadii 76
Morocco 735
contemporary monumentalism in 82
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade 79f
Mossovet apartment house 77 f
Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture 71
Moscow Sound Factory 98
Mossovet apartment house 77f
The Most Beautiful of All Mothers (1978) 738
The Most Beloved of Earthlings (Cel mai iubit dintre pämänteni) (1993) 705 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 681
Mrozik, Agnieszka 3, 13n10, 677, 689n5
Mua öi (The Season of Guavas) (1999) 548
Mühsam, Erich 503
Muir, Peter 276
Mukarovsky, Jan 80
Mukhina, Vera 251,413, 414 multilingualism 104
Mumford, Eric 49
Muñiz, Mirta 465
Munro, David 396
Munts, Oskar 69
Münzenberg, Willi 573
Muratov, Sergei 620
Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna 199, 200, 214, 217n12
Murawski, Michal 55
Muruwwah, Hussayn 737
Museum of Modern Art 211
Music and Stars (Música y Estrellas) (television show) 460 Mussolini, Benito 49, 581
Muthesius, Stefan 53
My Heart Beats Only for Her (Soueid) 737, 739
My Lai massacre 387
Mystery Science Theater 3000 (television show) 639 mythologies 261
Nagy, Imre 578
Nanchang Clothing Factory 482
Nancy, Jean-Luc 730
Näripea, Eva 551
Narkevicius, Deimantas 726
Narkomfin Communal House 24
Narrations from the New World (Erzählungen aus der Neuen Welt) (1968) 294, 299 nashi otlichniki (schoolchildren) 110
Nasrallah, Hassan 740
Nath, Vann 394
National Conference of Builders, Architects, and Workers in the Construction Materials 19 nationalism 7, 10, 393, 736
anticommunist 673
attachment to 624
ethnic 703
ethos of 614
exploitation of 615
parochial 342
nationalities 171
nationalization of industries 455
National Liberation Front (FLN) 368, 741
national question 184
National Socialist art 630
KR and 396
Poland and 688
Negri, Antonio 1
Nejmensl byt (The Minimum Dwelling) (Teige) 47
neoclassicism 80
architecture and 66
artistic dictatorship and 70
monumentalism and 75
neoconservatism 603
neoliberalism 282, 365, 643, 707
core policies of 434
economic policies of 6
negative sensibilities produced by 612
social Darwinism of 703
status quo of 2
Neolithic Shang dynasty 240
NEP. See New Economic Policy
Neue Kunst in Russland (Umansky) 575
Das Neue Russland (journal) 572, 573
Neues Bauen architects 47, 49, 50, 56
Neues Deutschland (New Germany) (newspaper) 435, 436
Nevsky, Alexander 522
New Economic Policy (NEP) 91,251,412, 427n28
Bolshevism and 413
end of 415
fashion and 414
New Germany (Neues Deutschland) (newspaper) 435, 436
New Left 14n23, 109n41, 360n25, 402n17, 428n48, 450n48, 566, 570-72, 575, 577, 585n20,
intellectuals of 567
internationalism and 584
New Materialism 8
New (Socialist) Person 31
new socialist subject 45
new socialist women 34
New Soviet Person (Novy Sovetsky Chelovek) 23, 33, 102
Ngakane, Lionel 368
Nguyen, Viet Thanh 560
Nhung ngoi sao bien (Starts on the Sea) (1973) 548
Niemandsland (No Man’s Land) (magazine) 512
Nietzsche, Friedrich 335
Nightfall (2003) 739
Nikolaev, Ivan 74
Nimr, Nasib 737
9550 (Arcos Soto) 650, 658, 660, 661,667
Nol, Lon 386
No Man’s Land (Niemandsland) (magazine) 512
noncommunist states 572
nonfiction propaganda films (agitka) 90
Nongmin da fen qi (Peasant da Vincis) (Cai) 242
nonrepresentational European modern art 233
North Korea 467, 589-90, 592, 598
cinematic culture of 605
mass media in 604
national identity of 601
revolution in 594
Norway 260
Nostalghia (1983) 730
Nostalgia for the Countryside (Thuorng nhó dőng que) (1995) 548
No-stop City 417-18
not distinguishing men from women (bufen nannü) 477
Novy, Otakar 45
Novy Sovetsky Chelovek (New Soviet Person) 23, 33, 102
Nowa Huta 720-21
Nowak, Barbara A. 677
Nowosielski, Jerzy 211
Nuclear Proliferation Treaty 604
“The Nuremberg Mirror” (Efimov) 531
(p. 772) Nuremberg Trials 442, 531
Nyitott boríték (Open Envelope) (television show) 619
The Oak (Balanta) (1993) 705
Obediently (Lakner) 577, 579, 580f, 582
Object Studies 8
La obra del siglo (The Project of the Century) (2015) 650, 661,663, 665-66, 667f
OCPI. See Cuban Bureau of Industrial Property
constructivism and 281
making of 280
October (journal) 274, 275f, 280
art historical approach of 284
avant-gardes and 279
constructivism and 276, 277, 282, 290
The Duchamp Effect special issue 285
historiography pursued by 287
Russian Revolution of 1917 and 281
Soviet Revolutionary Culture 278
twentieth anniversary of 283
October Revolution 186, 277, 408, 527
Off Frame, aka Revolution Until Victory (2016) 738
Okhotnyi Riad market area 76
Oktiabr' (October) Association 96, 101
Old Amusement Park of the City School “Tarará” (Antiguo Parque de Diversiones de la Ciudad
Escolar “Tarará”) (González Méndez) 652, 654f
Oldenizel, Ruth 252
olive-green uniforms 456
Oltarzhevskii, Viacheslav 78
Once in the XX Century (2004) 726, 728f
150 km Per Hour (1971) 683f
One Way or Another (De cierta manera) (1974) 663
“On New Democracy” (Mao) 491
On Photography (Sontag) 503
On the Art of the Cinema (Kim Jong Il) 592, 593
“On the Nature of Photography” (Arnheim) 506
On the Occasion of the Crisis Party Conference of the SPD (Heartfield) 577
ontological multiplicity 333
Open Envelope (Nyitott boríték) (television show) 619
Opina (tabloid) 466
Oppositions (journal) 274
optical aberrations 718
The Organization (Die Angkar) (1981) 392, 393, 394f, 397
Organization of Communist Action 740
Orientalism 151, 167, 542, 736
Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths (Krauss) 411
ornamentalism 176
orthodox Christianity 703
Oruzheinyi Lane Business Center 83f
Oruzheinyi Lane complex 82
OSA. See Union of Contemporary Architects
Ostrava-Poruba 51 f
Ostwald, Wilhelm 91
“Otkhody v dokhody” (“Waste into profit”) 263
Ottoman Empire 736
Ot vsei dushi (From the Bottom of My Heart) (television show) 617-18
Ounouri, Damian 741
Our Union (Klokova and Echeistov) 186-87, 187f, 188f
Ousmane Sembene (Gadjigo) 373
Out on the Street (2015) 741
The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies (Auerbach and Castronovo) 520
Padmore, George 367
Painting for a Latin American Singer (Bild für einen lateinamerikanischen Sanger) (Rehfeldt) 445
Palestine 735
anticolonial struggles in 737
fedayeen 738
filmmakers from 739
solidarity with 738
(p. 773) Palestine Communist Party 737
Palestine Film Unit (Aflaam Falastin) 738
Palm Sunday (Virágvasárnap) (Lakner) 582, 583f
The Pan-African Festival of Algiers (1969) 372
Pan-Africanism or Communism? (Padmore) 367
Panorama (magazine) 619
Paramonova, Katia 100
Park, J. P 229
Parsons, Charles 346
“The Parthenon or Hagia Sophia” (Munts) 69
Party of Socialist Revolution 737
Parvulescu, Constantin 6
Pass a Brick (Kobzdej) 198, 198f, 200-202
passive resistance 697
Pass the Brick (Kobzdej) 203
The Past of a Room Flying By (Lakner) 569
Pathirana, Saroj 365
in Cultural Revolution 487f
gender balance in 480
published outside of PRC 479
regime of visibility and 478
women and 488
Patul conjugal (The Conjugal Bed) (1993) 706
Pawlikowski, Pawel 676, 678, 679-80, 685
PCC. See Cuban Communist Party
Peace Prospekt 76
“Peace Symbol” (Abramov) 519
Peanuts (Schulz) 520
Peasant da Vincis (Nongmin da fen qi) (Cai) 242
The Peasant Newspaper (Krestianskaiia gazeta) 159
pedagogy of images 177
peer-to-peer-based media 129
People’s Daily 232
People's Democratic Republic of (South) Yemen 737
People's Fine Art Publishing House 225, 237
People's Liberation Army 225, 230, 348
People's Republic of China (PRC) 225, 341, 348, 378, 387, 475 amateur art and 228
DK and 386
early years of 478
establishment of 352
heavy industry in 482
pattern books published outside of 479
USSR and 400
People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) 387, 393
People's Republic of Poland 199, 200, 211,218n13
communist modernity in 216
Constitution of 204
modernism and 214
People's Republic of Romania (RPR) 25
People's Republic of Vietnam 385
People's Revolutionary Tribunal 387
People's Volunteer Force 350
Pepe and Fifi (1994) 693, 694, 695, 700, 704
Pérez O'Reilly, Fernando 460
petit-bourgeois socialism 312
Petra Janù (musician) 140, 142
Petrograd 70
Pfaff, Françoise 367
Pheng Cheah 595
Phillips, Sarah D. 513
Phillips, Steve 396
Phnom Penh 385, 387-89, 396, 398
photoconfrontations (Fotokonfrontationen) 572
Arbeiterfotografie (worker photography) 503, 513n1
Barthes and 640
evidentiary status of 504
GDR and 505
industrial 164
nonprofessional 509
purported objectivity of 506-7
socialist realism and 571
women and 506
(p. 774) Photography and Cinematography State Enterprise (Doanh nghiep Quöc gia chiöu bong va chup anh) 544
photomontages 90, 92, 124, 125, 567, 572-73
pictorial dehumanization 160
Pinches, Gerry 396
Pinochet, Augusto 432-33, 441, 531
book burning under 436
victims of 437
pinyin 241
Pioneer Truth (Pionerskaia Pravda) 184
Piotrowski, Piotr 200
Piper, Eric 396
planned economies 10, 55, 251,254, 545
Plato 334
“plus-one” formula 327
Plutynska, Eleonora 205
poetry 543
poetic discourse 560
poetic realism 550
Poland 50, 54, 137, 151,209, 534, 616, 649. See also People's Republic of Poland
economically active women in 689n8
feminism and 674
implementation of communism in 680
Law and Justice party and 687
Lenin Museum in Poronin 675f
Marxism-Leninism and 676
Nazism and 688
public memory of 673
socialist realism and 199, 200, 210
temporary architecture in 203
Zamosc 672
Poletaev, Nikolay 124
Poliakov, Leonid 78
Polish Institute of National Remembrance 672
Polish People's Republic 677, 678
Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) 205, 206, 674, 678
Polish Women's League 674
Polish Workers' Party (PPR) 674
political agency 282
“The Politics of Translation at Soviet Film Festivals during the Cold War” (Razlogova) 378
Pollock, Jackson 209
Pol Pot 385, 387, 388, 393, 397
prosecution of 389
trial of 398
Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique 386, 388, 398
Polska, Moda 458
Poly-Play arcade machine 146
Ponchaud, François 396
Ponte, Antonio José 665
Popescu, Monica 718
“flapper” dresses and 420
traditional flower motifs and 411
Popular Front 567
Porçbski, Mieczystaw 211
Portugal 368
postcensorship 708
postcolonial time lag 310-11
postmodernism 82
Postoutenko, Kirill 115
postsocialist countries 57
postsocialist media landscape 613
postsocialist nostalgia 612, 624, 627n58
poststructuralism 274
poverty 71
Powell, Colin 603
PPR. See Polish Workers' Party
Pracovní architektonická skupina (Architectural Working Group) 52-53
The Practice of Writing Meishuzi (Meishuzi zuofa) 239
Pratt, Mary Louise 591
Pravda (newspaper) 115, 129, 159, 529
PRC. See People's Republic of China
Prea tarziu (Too Late) (1996) 706, 707
prefabrication 30, 39n41, 44, 46f, 55
premodern Chinese literati paintings 233
(p. 775) prerevolutionary neoclassicism 67, 69
Presa del Parque Lenin (Dam in Parque Lenin) (González Méndez) 653f Prigogine, Ilya 3
“The Primary Colors for the Second Time” (Buchloh) 285
Pripyat, Ukraine 2
Prism (Prisma) (television show) 618-19
Pristed, Birgitte 258
private corporations 281
PRK. See People's Republic of Kampuchea
productivist (proizvodstevnnaia) literature 159 productivists 254, 261
proizvodstevnnaia (productivist) literature 159
The Project of the Century (La obra del siglo) (2015) 650, 661,663, 665-66, 667f Proletarian Cinema (journal) 95, 97
proletariat 224
aesthetic needs of 414
art of 186
constructivism 416
culture of 174
dictatorship of 115
gaining power 299
GDR and 509
solidarity 347
Proletkult 91
Pronaszko, Zbigniew 212
of anticommunism 693, 695, 697, 709
Bolshevism and 522-23
in Cold War 530
Cuba and 36
Cultural Revolution and 488
films 31
by KR 391
meishuzi and 240
nonfiction propaganda films (agitka) 90
practices of 262
radio-cine documents 95
for recycling 263
specters of 702
standardized 239
systems of 537
women and 524
Prospekt, Nevskii 68 prozodezhda 407, 408f, 409
Delaunay and 420
Gaultier and 422
Klutsis and 411
Rodchenko and 414
von Mekk and 414
for women 412
Przeglad artystyczny (Art Review) (magazine) 202, 214
Przekroj (magazine) 213f
Przesfuchanie (Interrogation) (1982) 684
Pure Colors. Red, Yellow, Blue (Rodchenko) 284-86 pure visuality 290
Pushkin, Alexander 522
PZPR. See Polish United Workers' Party
Qian Xuantong 235
Qi Baishi 233
Qing period 235
Qiu Ling 234
Qiu Ti 480
Quart, Leonard 680
Quevedo, Nuria 445
Rabinbach, Anson 99
rabkory (workers' correspondents) 112
rabsel’kor language 112
Rabsel’korovskoe dvizhenie (Worker and Peasant Correspondents movement) 110, 112 racism 365, 370, 371, 375, 376, 524
radical voluntarism 570-71
Radio and TV Review (Rádió és TV Szemle) (journal) 616
Radio-Cinema 95
Rádió és TV Szemle (Radio and TV Review) (journal) 616
Radio Free Europe (RFE) 694, 695, 697, 707
(p. 776) Radio Free Europe Romania (RFER) 693-95, 697, 707
exposure to 708
lifestyle, entertainment, and religious broadcasting segments of 704
listeners of 700
negative effects of 698
weekly political cabaret show 705
Rákosi, Mátyás 578
Ranciere, Jacques 330, 331,643
Randel, Wolfgang 299
RAPKh. See Russian Association of Proletarian Artists
Rappaport, Aleksandr 257
The Rational Dress Society 425
rationing system 462
Rauschenberg, Robert 583
Ray, Man 581
Razlogov, Kirill 378
Read Only (RO) culture 114-15, 130
Read/Write (RW) culture 114-15, 116, 129
“Realistic Manifesto” (Pevsner and Gabo) 72, 85n21
real order 324
Rebel Army 29
Re-construction (González Méndez) 655, 658
Rectification Campaign 455
feasibility of 261
informational means of 262
junctions of 260
policy 253
propaganda for 263
Red Army 116
Red Army/ PFLP (1971) 738
Red Doric 70
Redfern 420
Red Field (Krasnaia niva) (journal) 413, 414
Red Guards 492
Red Rats (Sobolanii rosii) (1991) 705
Red Sparrow (2018) 611
Red Star (Bogdanov) 412
The Red Textile Worker (Krasnyi tekstil’shchik) (wall newspaper) 116, 121
red years 326
economic 159
housing 26
regime of visibility 478
Rehfeldt, Robert 445
Reindeer and the Lopars (Gladun) 175-77, 175f
Relay (Ruderman and Laptev) 180-82, 181 f 182f
Remix (Lessig) 114
Renovation (ddi moi) 547, 548-49
repair society 253
reproduction 22, 25, 34, 35, 41n100, 302
Requiem for Chile (Chilenisches Requiem) (Tubke) 439
Requiem for Victor Jara (Mattheuer) 440, 440f, 444
Rerberg, Ivan 78
Rev, Istvan 697
revolutionary housing policy 25
revolutionary intelligentsia 461
revolutionary martyrs 344
revolutionary optimism 351
revolutionary romanticism 121
revolutionary struggle 741
Reynolds, Simon 641
RFE. See Radio Free Europe
RFER. See Radio Free Europe Romania
Riabushin, Alexander 256
Richter, Gerhard 571
Rickey, George 279
Rifat, Manolo 460
Ritter, Claus 293, 294, 295, 297, 298, 299
documentary practice of 300
political aspirations for cyber-technologies and 308
Rizk, Philip 741
RKSM. See Russian Young Communist League
(p. 777) RO. See Read Only
Road of the Dogs (Drumul câinilor) (1991 ) 704
Rodchenko, Alexander 23, 71, 73, 284-86 commodities and 417 on commodity form 420 graphic design by 422 Inga and 412-13 Oktiabr' (October) Association and 96 principles of constructivism and 72 productivism and 254 prozodezhda and 414
ROPF and 93
ROSTA windows and 111
Thayahtand 419
USSR in Construction and 92
at World Exposition 416
Rodríguez, Ernesto René 658
Rodríguez, Eva 460
Rogachev, Igor 398
Rogosin, Lionel 368
Roman alphabet 241
Romania 20, 22, 34, 549, 698. See also Radio Free Europe Romania
cultural habitat of 709
labor and 36
in 1990s 702
president of 703
USSR and 25
Romanov Empire 248
Rome 66
Romero, Federico 545
Romm, Mikhail 552
ROPF. See Russian Association of Proletarian Photographers
Rössler, Günter 298
Rossmann, Zdenek 415-16
ROSTA windows 111
RPR. See People's Republic of Romania
Rubin, Eli 53
Ruderman, Mikhail 180-82, 181 f, 182f
Runge, Vladimir 258
rural labor 35
Russian Association of Proletarian Artists (RAPKh) 93
Russian Association of Proletarian Photographers (ROPF) 93
“The Russian Connection” (Woll) 366
Russian Constructivism (Lodder) 279
Russian dolls 639
Russian Revolution of 1917 66, 274, 281
The Russians in Cuba (2008) 649
Russian State Library 112
Russian Telegraph Agency 111
Russian Young Communist League (RKSM) 106n5
RW. See Read/Write
Ryang, Sonia 604
S-21 (Tuol Sleng) 387, 388, 389, 389f, 390, 392, 395
concentration camps and 393
Kanapa and 397
narrativization of 400
reporting on 396
survivors of 394
Saba, Mary Jirmanus 737, 740, 741
Safarov, Georgii 184
Safonov, Dmitrii 112
Said, Edward 591
Salazkina, Masha 377, 378, 379
Sambizanga (1972) 372
samokritika (self-criticism) 121
Samra, Maher Abi 737
Sand Cliffs (1983) 700
Sander, August 503
Sandmännchen (cosmonaut mascot) 632, 639, 642
Sankara, Thomas 368
Santiago de Cuba 30
Sappak, Vladimir 615
sartorial landscape 456
Satire in the Struggle for Peace (Satira v bor’be za mir) (exhibit) 519-21, 522, 533
(p. 778) Satochin (Shatokhin) (video game) 148, 148f, 149f
Savage, Polly 365
Savel’ev, Leonid 166-67, 166f, 182, 183f, 184
Saving Bruce Lee (Salti and Kouoh) 366, 380n9
Savuth, Kar 391
Scarpaci, Joseph L. 456
Schieferdecker, Jürgen 445, 446
Schlemmer, Oskar 416
Schmidt, Hans 47
Schmitt, Carl 604
schoolchildren (nashi otlichniki) 110
School of Architecture of the University City José Antonio Echeverria (CUJAE) 456
Schulz, Charles 520
Schulze Eldowy, Gundula 501-2, 504, 505, 507-8
VBK and 510
Der Schweigende Stern (The Silent Star) (1960) 639
Science and Technology for Youth (Vëda a technika mladezi) (magazine) 145 scientific socialism 301
scientific-technological revolution 23
Scott, Joan W. 650
Scott-Smith, Giles 546
Seamstresses Listen to Hitler’s Speech (Lakner) 569
Sea of Blood (1968) 596
The Season of Guavas (Mùa ôi) (1999) 548
“Secondary material resources” (“Vtorichnye material’nye resursy”) (Vtormar) 250, 253, 254, 260-62, 263, 265
green consumerism and 267
logo of 264f
Second National Art Exhibition 232
Second National Exhibition of the People’s Liberation Army 225
Second Sino-Japanese War 342, 345
secret police 138
sectarianism 736
SED. See Socialist Unity Party
Segal, Joes 546
Seghers, Anna 293
Segre, Roberto 457
Seinfeld (television show) 328-29
Selected Works of Mao Zedong (Mao) 349
self-awareness 508
self-criticism (samokritika) 121
self-determination 347
self-interest 6
self-Orientalism 736
Sembene, Ousmane 365, 366, 367, 372, 373, 377f
Semenov, Vladimir 75
Semiotext(e) (journal) 276
Semrad, Stanislav 50
Sen, Son 387
Senghor, Léopold Sédar 371
sensible dynamism 92
September 11, 1973 432-33
septicemia 342
§erban, Alex Leo 707
Serbian Epics (1992) 678
Serenade for the 12th floor (Serenada pentru etajul XII) (1976) 29
serial architecture 44, 51, 54, 56
“Serve the People” (Mao) 349
Sewing Manual (Sun) 478
sexuality 298, 314n27, 476, 491,495n40, 496n49, 497n64, 704
Shaanxi province 224
Shabad, Elizaveta 177
Shahn, Ben 582
Shaikhet, Arkadii 92
Shatilov, Boris 164-65, 167-70, 168f, 169f, 170f
Shatokhin (Satochin) (video game) 148, 148f, 149f
sheep 102f
The Sheikh Imam Project, or, How to Play Arabic Music on a Large German Instrument (2014) 741
Shekhtel, Fedor 68
(p. 779) Shivers (Dreszcze) (1981) 725
Shohat, Ella 591
Shorin, Alexander 95
Shub, Esfir 89, 90, 92, 93-95, 104, 164
“The Advent of Sound in Cinema,” 103
constructivism and 101
documentary practice of 300
energy and 98
on factory scenes 102
formalism and 100
sound film and 97
Vertov and 96, 99, 106, 107n23
Shubin, Valentin 398
shufa (calligraphy) 235
Shumyatsky, Boris 89
Siddiqi, Asif 632
Siegelbaum, Lewis 54
significant affinities 367
The Silent Star (Der Schweigende Stern) (1960) 639
Silvan, I. 26
Simplicissimus (journal) 525
Sinclair ZX Spectrum 143, 143f 144
“A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire” (Mao) 349
Sino-American normalization 386
Sino-Soviet split 594
Siqueiros, David Alfaro 436
Sissako, Abderrahmane 365, 366, 372, 375
Sitkowska, Maryla 199
The Sixth Part of the World (1926) 300
Skarnulyte, Emilija 729
Slater, Peter 346
slavery 370
Slavic studies 366
Sledziewska, Anna 205
The Sleep of the Island (Somnul insulei) (1994) 706
Slovakia 143
small entries (zametki) 110
Small Political Dictionary (Kleines politisches Wörterbuch) (Verlag) 293-94 Smejkal, Vladimir 140
Smith, David 211
Smithson, Robert 278
Smol’ianinov, V. 115
Smolyak, Olga 252
Snow, Edgar 478
Sobolanii rosii (Red Rats) (1991) 705
Sochor, Lubomir 139
social arrangements 30
social Darwinism 703
social development 5
social engagement 216
social engineering 4
social equity 225
social formation 30
social improvement projects 4
African Socialism 373
artistic production under 550
aspirational ideology of 614
Brezhnev, socialist way of life and 617 building 56, 174
children’s literature, socialist transformations and 159
China and 476
construction of 37
developed 249
enemies of 527
everyday cultures of 612
friends of 524
GDR and 311
high 342
histories of 611
hybrid nature of 180
infrastructure and 36
late 265
legitimization of 467
living environment of 46
macro-politics of 295
markers of 630
mature 532
messages complementary to 549
modernity and 463
national versions of 22
path toward 545
petit-bourgeois 312
professionals educated under 461
promise of 436
(p.780) rational consumption and 253
real existing 510
relaunch of 421
sartorial landscape under 456
scientific 301
Soviet satire and 523
state 57, 250-51,298, 696, 715
sustainability and 250
themes of 612
transition to 35
virtues of 513
wall newspapers and 127-28
socialism in one country 65
socialist consumerism 138
Socialisticky svaz mladeze (Socialist Union of Youth) 138, 147
socialist objects 254
socialist pop(ulism) 312
socialist realism 49, 52, 126, 208, 214, 216-17
apologists of 207
children’s literature and 158
color use of 203
dialectical methodology of 504
directives of 202
dismissals of 434
doctrine of 633
experience of 210
Gallery of Socialist Realist Art 217n8
heyday of 551
juche realism and 592
Kobzdej and 197
materialist premise of 510
modernism and 575
pastiche style of 570
photography and 571
photomontage and 573
renovation (dői mái) and 547
revolutionary martyrs and 344
schematics of 509
Starzynski and 209
topic of war and 553
two acts of period of 206
USSR and 606
Socialist Realism: Polish Art 1950-1954 (Wtodarczyk) 199
socialist television 614-17, 639, 642, 651,659, 665, 666
formats of 623
history of 624
mass tele-education with 619, 625
variety shows on 620
Socialist Union of Youth (Socialisticky svaz mládeze) 138, 147
Socialist Unity Party (SED) 510, 632
social justice 1, 49, 372, 612, 719, 721
surveillance of 114
undeletability of 122
social organization 111
social reproduction 22
sociocritical realism 280
soft power 4
SoiuzElektroPribor. See All-Union Industrial Association of Electronic Measurement Instruments
Sokorski, Wtodzimierz 202, 207
impossibility of 702
Palestine with 738
Solidarity movement 720
Solo Journey (1985) 148
Solomon, Alexandru 708
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 211
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 82
Somewhere in the East (Undeva in Est) (1991) 704
Somnul insulei (The Sleep of the Island) (1994) 706
The Song of Guerrillas 351
Songyankou Model Hospital 351
Sopot Group 207
Soueid, Mohamed 737, 739, 741 sound-energy 99
sound film 97
(p. 781) Sousa, John Philip 114
Soviet-African cinematic relationships 365-66, 379 Soviet Bloc 145, 150, 468, 534
cinematic traditions of 545
computer culture of 151
cultural diplomacy within 204
Soviet Bloc computer software 136
Soviet Central Television 622
Soviet Communist Party 50, 60n40, 115
Soviet-Cuban past 663
Sovietization 455, 471n42, 650, 658
Soviet North 176
humor of 529
moral mirror of 531
weaponization of 11,520, 524, 528
Soviet Union. See Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) Sovkino 106n2
Sovremennyi Petrograd (Contemporary Petrograd) (Lukomskii) 70 Soyuzkino 89, 106n2
space programs 463
Space Saving Mission (video) 147
Spanish civil war 353
Spartacist Uprising 672
spatial representation 29
Special Period 455
special territories (zapovedniki) 248
Specters of Marx (Derrida) 336n14, 695, 710n19
Sperka, Martin 139 spetzodezhda 410
Spinning the Tourist (Forog az idegen) (television show) 623
Spiral Jetty (Smithson) 278
spirituality 553, 555, 557, 561
spiritual transformation 29
Splitting (Matta-Clark) 283
sportodezhda 410
Springfeld, Gert 296
Spring March (Emden and Ivanova) 187f
Sprouts (Mengya yuekan) (journal) 235, 236f
SS Chelyuskin 1933-1934 Arctic expedition 116
Staeck, Klaus 567
Stakhanovist heroism 623
Stalin, Joseph 25, 50, 65, 174, 281,323, 572
architecture, neo-Stalinist 82-83
Constitution of People's Republic of Poland and 204 death of 54, 81,492
Eisenstein and 279
High Stalinist period 126, 128
industrialization and 415
late Stalinist period 79, 87n45
monumentalism and 76
neoclassicism and 66
rise of 406
socialist realism and 49
“Stalinist gothic” buildings 78
Stalinist towers 77-78, 80, 82
wall newspapers and 112
women and 676-77
Stalingrad 77
Stalinization 205
Stallabrass, Julian 447
Standage, Tom 113
standardization 20, 23, 25, 27, 29, 30, 33, 36-37, 51, 166
“Standardization of Clothes” (Delaunay) 420
standardized construction 81
standardized housing 30
Standard Total View (STV) 388
Stare de fapt (State of Affairs) (1995) 705
Starts on the Sea (Nh&ng ngoi sao bien) (1973) 548
Starzynski, Juliusz 205, 207, 208-9, 211,214
State Committee of the USSR for Material and Technical Supplies (Gossnab) 258 “Statement on Sound” (Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Aleksandrov) 95, 96
State of Affairs (Stare de fapt) (1995) 705
State Planning Committee (Gosplan) 157, 252, 258
(p. 782) state press 111
steel workers 53
Stenberg, Georgii 73
Stenberg, Vladimir 73
stengazety (wall newspapers) 110-11, 129
correspondents for 116
critics of 116
frequent destruction of 122f, 123f intellectual property rights and 124
Lenin and 115
mourning death of Lenin 119, 124
mythical status of 116 socialism and 127-28
Stalin and 112
time consuming nature of 119-20
Stepanova, Varvara 73, 254, 409f, 410, 416, 419
on constructivism 408
industrial production and 412
Little Black Dress and 420
traditional flower motifs and 411
Stonecutters (Kobzdej) 203
Strada, Nanni 418-19
strategies of representation 576
Stroganov School 71 structuralism 274
Student Village of Textile Institute 74f
Studio H&S. See Heynowski & Scheumann Studio
Studnicki, Juliusz 212
STV. See Standard Total View
subjectivism 279
subjectivity 324 subjugated knowledges 716
Sudan 737
sugar 461
sumiao 232
Sun Po 478
Suprematism 72
surplus value 407
Sus, Oleg 138
Suslov, Mikhail 532
design history of 253
planned economies, sustainable design and 254
socialism and 250
suxie 232
Svazarm (Union for the Cooperation with Army) 138, 144, 145
Svaz socialistickych architektu (Union of Socialist Architects) 54
Svezhii nomer tsekhovoi gazety (Levitin and Tulin) 126f
Swalwell, Melanie 137
Swenarton, Mark 47
symbolic order 324
Symphony of the Ursus Factory (Wojcik) 6
Syria 735
anticolonial struggles in 737
filmmakers from 738
Syrkus, Szymon 50
Szcz^sny-Kowarski, Feliks 212
Szewczuwaniec, Andrzej 720, 721
SztandarMtodych (Youth Banner) (magazine) 212
Ein Tagebuch fur Anne Frank (The Diary of Anne Frank) (1959) 311
Tagg,John 507
Tal al Zaatar 738
Talarczyk-Gubata, Monika 683, 684
Tamayo, Arnaldo 665
Tambi, Vladimir 166-67, 166f, 182, 183f, 184
Tannebaum, Gerald 353
Tannert, Christoph 505
Tarabukin, Nikolai 255, 256, 261
Taranczewski, Wactaw 212
Tarkovsky, Andrei 552, 649, 730
Tashkent Festival of African and Asian Cinema 377, 378
Taslitzky, Boris 206
Tatlin, Vladimir 23, 71, 567, 571-72, 575
Tatos, Alexandru 707
Taylor-Jones, Kate 366
Tchaboukiani, Vahtang 376
Tchorzewski, Jerzy 211
Technicky magazin (Technology Magazine) 139
(p. 783) techno-fascism 311
technological mediation 23
technological production 163
Technology Magazine (Technicky magazin) 139
TED. See Experimental Design Workshop
Teguia, Tariq 740
Teige, Karel 47-48, 49, 55, 60n36, 60n40
Teisseyre, Stanislaw 208
Television and Us (Sappak) 615
Telingater, Solomon 96
Tereshkova, Valentina 421
territorialization 35
Tetris (video game) 136-37, 151
text adventure games 146-49
Thälmann, Ernst 631
Themba, Can 368
Theory of the Avant-Garde (Bürger) 285
Theremin, Leon 98
theremins 98
Theresienstadt 393
Theses on Vietnamese Culture (Trubng) 547
They Are Writing about Us in Pravda (Vasilev) 651
Third Exhibition of Modern Art (III Wystawa Sztuki Nowoczesnej) 214
Third World 590
Thirith, leng 388
Thuorng nhd döng que (Nostalgia for the Countryside) (1995) 548
Tiersen, Yann 641
time clippings (Zeitausschnitte) 568
Tinbergen, Jan 9
tobacco 466
Today (1930) 105
togetherness 186
Toi, Waguih (2005) 739
Ton, Konstantin 75
Too Late (Prea tärziu) (1996) 706, 707
totalitarianism 5, 8, 115, 297
Der tote Präsident—Dr. S. Allende (The Dead President—Dr. S. Allende) (Wetzel) 443 tough guys (guapos) 458
Tout va bien (All’s Well) (1972) 326, 327, 328
Toynbee, Polly 491
traditional flower motifs 411
traditional opera (cheo) 556
Trafficking in Shadows (Contrabando de sombras) (Ponte) 665
Trahir (1993) 707
Tran Huu Due 398
Transhumanism 8
transnational history 37
traumascapes 401
travel writing 591
Traverso, Enzo 3
Tret'iakov, Sergei 94
Tribuna Khalturintsa (Khalturinets Tribune) 124
Triumph Palace (Triumf Palas) 82
Trofimova, A. 185f
Troshin, Nikolai 159-64, 161 f 162f, 163f
Trotsky, Leon 281
Tsarist regime 115
Tsentrosoyus (Industrial Cooperation) 258
Tsivian, Yuri 101
tuberculosis 342
Tugendkhol'd, Iakov 414
Tuol Sleng (S-21) 387, 388, 389, 389f, 390, 392, 395
concentration camps and 393
Kanapa and 397
narrativization of 400
reporting on 396
survivors of 394
Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum 390
Tuo Wang 491
Turksib (Shklovsky) 184
(p. 784) “The Twelfth Hour of Nazi Criminals” (Efimov) 530f 531
“Two Worlds” (Efimov) 524, 525f
Ucnik, Lubica 548
Ugolini, Laura 482
Uklad zamkniety (Closed Circuit) (2013) 687
Ukraine 93
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic 206
Ulbricht, Walter 510
Umansky, Konstantin 575
Undeva in Est (Somewhere in the East) (1991) 704
Unidad Popular 433, 435, 440, 441
Unification Treaty 295
Union for the Cooperation with Army (Svazarm) 138, 144, 145
Union of Contemporary Architects (OSA) 73
Union of Fine Artists (VBK) 505, 508, 510
Union of Socialist Architects (Svaz socialistickych architektu) 54
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) 2, 365-66
approaching collapse of 267
Arab communism and 737
architecture and 65
artist-citizens in 90
avant-gardes and 67
children’s literature and 158
Cuba and 455
cultural production in 278
Czechoslovakia and 137
disintegration of 649
energy and 89
establishing 522
Helsinki Accord 249
housing campaigns in 53
infrastructure and 21
Maldoror on 367
monumentalism and 67
nationalities in 171
PRC and 400
reforms in 19
Romania and 25
sensibilities of 521
social arrangements in 30
socialist realism and 606
United States and 370
unprecedented destruction to USSR from World War II 77
Vietnam and 385-86
Vietnamese cinema and 551
United Nations General Assembly 387
United States 253, 280-81, 347, 386, 593, 676, 736
Crusade for Freedom 696
exceptionalism 605
Reagan years in 328
USSR and 370
Unknown Capabilities (record label) 641
A unsprezecea porunca (The Eleventh Commandment) (1991) 705 urbanism 26, 55, 56
Urbanowicz, Bronistawa 203
user-generated content 110, 129
use value 407
USSR. See Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
USSR in Construction (CCCP na stroike) 92, 93
utopia 1, 5, 11, 30, 79, 604, 615, 624, 637, 639, 642, 650, 651,664, 698 aspiration toward 423
builders of 512
concept of 407
construction of 10
DPRK and 595, 596, 599, 600, 602
ideas of 4
importance of realism over 301
industrial 49
material 465
modernists and 52
possibility of 633
spectacles of 593
status of 592
thinking 640
unrealized 715
vision of 225
visions of 631
utopian globalism 570
(p. 785) Vágó, István 623
“Vain Efforts” (Efimov) 534, 535f
Vályi, Péter 618
van der Rohe, Ludwig Mies 47
van Dijck, José 113
van Eesteren, Cor 47
Vanek, Jan 415
van Gogh, Vincent 233
Variety (magazine) 379
Varshavksii, L. R. 528
Vasilev, Aleksei 651
VBK. See Union of Fine Artists
Vecher veselykh voprosov (Evening of Merry Questions) (television show) 620-21,622
Vëda a technika mládezi (Science and Technology for Youth) (magazine) 145
Venice Biennale 204-5, 207, 208
Venkov, Emil 634
Venzher, I. 369
Vera Mukhina Higher College of Art and Industry 255
Verhoeff, Nanna 590
Verlag, Dietz 293
Vernichtungskrieg (war of annihilation) 387
Versengő városok (Competing Towns) (television show) 623
Vertov, Dziga 6, 94-97, 105, 164, 364
constructivism and 284
de-Marxification of 288
documentary practice of 300
Eisenstein and 280
influence of 739
kinopravda and 615
montage technique of 289
October (journal) and 278
Vertov Group 95
A Very Secret Service (television show) 611
Vesnin, Aleksandr 73
“Vestirsi è facile/Dressing Is Easy” (Archizoom Associati) 418
VGIK. See Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography
Vickery, Michael 388
Vieira, José Luandino 374
Vietcongs 387
China and 395
cultural production of 548
diaspora from 542
occupation of Cambodia 400
USSR and 385-86
Vietnamese cinema 544-45, 551, 561n3
national character of 547
Vietnamese Democratic Republic 544
Vietnam War 387, 389, 392, 447, 507
Hollywood genre about 542
Viêt vè chiên tranh (Writing about War) (Nguyên) 553
Vinovatul (The Culprit) (1991) 706
violence 293, 373, 374, 376, 388, 391,433, 434, 447, 523, 591,595
colonial violence 589, 598, 599
infrastructural violence 21
revolutionary violence 358
sexualized violence 685
state-sanctioned violence 679
visual culture. See specific topics
visualization 254
visual regimes 589
La Vivienda (Housing) (1959) 29
VIVR. See All-Union Institute for Secondary Resources
VKhUTEIN. See Higher Artistic and Technical Institute
VKhUTEMAS. See Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant 2
VNIITE. See All-Union Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics
Voice of Kampuchea Radio (broadcast) 399
von Mekk, Vladimir 414
von Richthofen, Esther 508, 509
Voprosy literatury (journal) 530
Vossen, Richard Cohn 300
VR-activity 259
VR-messages 262
(p. 786) “Vtorichnye material'nye resursy” (“Secondary material resources”) (Vtormar) 250, 253,
green consumerism and 267
logo of 264f
Vulpe vânâtor (Fox Hunter) (1993) 705
vzrashchivanie (cultivation) 256
W Akademii Sztuk Plastycznych (At the Academy of Art) (1925) 203
Wade, Geoff 546
Wallasch, Chris 302
wall newspapers (stengazety) 110-11, 129
correspondents for 116
critics of 116
frequent destruction of 122f 123f
intellectual property rights and 124
Lenin and 115
mourning death of Lenin 119, 124
mythical status of 116
socialism and 127-28
Stalin and 112
time consuming nature of 119-20
Wang Fulai 225
Wang Qi 230
war of annihilation (Vernichtungskrieg) 387
Warsaw Apartment Cooperative 682
“Waste into profit” (“Otkhody v dokhodÿ’) 263
wasteless consumption 258
wasteless production 258
Wayland Rudd Archive 365
“The Weapons of Laughter” (Efimov) 530
WEB. See Western European Bureau
Weber, Heike 252
Weber, Max 385
We Have No Right to Wait (1972) 36
Weiner, Douglas R. 249
Weiss, Wojciech 212
welcoming culture (Willkommenskultur) 296
Die Welt der Gespenster (The World of Ghosts) (1972) 295
Werkstatt Zukunft I (Workshop Future I) (1975) 294, 301, 306
Werkstatt Zukunft II (Workshop Future II) (1976) 294, 298, 301, 307 Westad, Odd Arne 561
Western civilization 3
Western Europe 253
Western European Bureau (WEB) 573
West Germany 435
Wetzel, Christoph 443
We Were Communists (Samra) 737
“What's Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?” (Foster) 285
What We Are Building (Savel'ev and Tambi) 166-67, 166f, 182, 183f, 184
When the Tenth Month Comes (1984) 543, 548, 553-55, 556f, 558f spirituality of 557
symbol of paper kite and 559f, 560
White Udder 654
Who Is Right? (Cine are dreptate?) (1990) 707
Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia (Morris) 400
Widmung Chile (Dedication to Chile) (Ebersbach) 438, 439f
Wieckhorst, Karin 501, 502, 505, 507, 512
Williams, Linda 596
Williams, Paul 728
Willkommenskultur (welcoming culture) 296
Wisniewski, Alfred 208
With Open Hearts (Mit dem Herzen dabei) (television show) 617-18
Wlodarczyk, Wojciech 199, 200, 205, 206, 220n44
Wochenpost (newspaper) 443-44
Wodiczko, Krzysztof 716
Wojcik, Jasmina 6
Wolf, Christa 303
Wolinska-Brus, Helena 679-80
women 167-68, 420, 493, 676-77, 688
CCP and 476
(p. 787) communism and 676-77
Cultural Revolution and 490, 491
Efimov and 537
film workers 94
liberation of 24
in Maoist period 478
new socialist women 34
patriarchy and 488
pattern books and 488
photography and 506
Poland, economically active women in 689n8
propaganda and 524
prozodezhda for 412
Stalin and 676-77
visibility of 486
workers 414,
Women, Communism and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Fidelis) 676
Women of China (magazine) 490, 491
Women's Department of Polish Workers' Party 674
Women's Institute for Higher Education 93
Worker and Peasant Correspondents movement (Rabsel’korovskoe dvizhenie) 110, 112
Worker-Illustrated Newspaper (AIZ) 567, 573
worker photography (Arbeiterfotografie) 503, 513n1
workers 224
as owners of means of production 475
socioeconomic identities of 228-29
steel 53
women 414
workers' correspondents (rabkory) 112
Worker's Cultural Palace 229
working conditions 116
Workshop Future I (Werkstatt Zukunft I) (1975) 294, 301, 306
Workshop Future II (Werkstatt Zukunft II) (1976) 294, 298, 301, 307
Workshop of Contemporary Dress 413
World Exposition 416
World Festival of Negro Arts 369
World of Art (Mir iskusstva) 68
The World of Ghosts (Die Welt der Gespenster) (1972) 295
world revolution 567
World War I 46
World War II 50, 55, 285, 298, 421,446, 680, 736 atrocities of 210
battles of 52
recovery from 505
unprecedented destruction to USSR from 77
worldwide revolution 65
World Wide Web 113
Writing about War (Vi£t v£ chiPn tranh) (Nguyön) 553
“Writing Characters Is Like Drawing Pictures” (Lu) 235
Wuxi Department Store Purchasing Department 488
Wu Yinxian 350
Wu Zuoren 225, 226f 230, 231,233
Wyszynski, Stefan 684
Xala (1974) 373
xenophobia 724
Xiaobing Tang 475
Xiao Shufang 480
xiesheng 232
Xu Beihong 233
Yan'an Film Group 350
Yanan period 476
Ye Qianyu 480
yingxiong ernü (heroic daughters and sons) 341
Yoko Ono 570
Yoss 658
Young Pioneers 112
Youth Banner (Sztandar Mlodych) (magazine) 212
Yu Bingnan 240
Yu Feng 480
Yurchak, Alexei 137
(p. 788) Zacma (Blindness) (2016) 684-85, 686f 687
Zakharov, Andreian 67
zametki (small entries) 110
Zamosc, Poland 672
Zanj Revolution (2012) 740
Zapata Swamp 460
zapovedniki (special territories) 248
Zeichnete, Martin 641
Zeitausschnitte (time clippings) 568
Zenyang ban hao gonggong shitang (How to Create a Communal Kitchen) 234
Zenyang hua jingwu (How to Paint Still Lifes) (Wu) 225, 226f, 233
Zenyang hua youhua (How to Make Oil Paintings) (Ai) 231,233
Zenyang meihua heiban bao (How to Decorate Blackboard Newspapers) 234, 237
Zenyang zuo banhua (How to Make Prints) (Li) 231
Zenyang zuo diaosu (How to Sculpt) (Fu) 231
Zenyang zuo tongbanhua (How to Make Etchings) (Chen) 231
Zhao Tuo 353
Zhao Yiman 344
zhilaia sreda (living environment) 256
Zhitomirsky, Aleksandr 567, 574
zhivgazety (living newspapers) 120
Zhivkov, Todo 661
Zhonghua quanguo zong gong hui (All-China Federation of Trade Unions) 229
Zhongshan coat 481,481 f, 482, 487
zhongxing (middle sex) 477
Zhou Enlai 386
Zhou Erfu 342
Zhou Yang 228
Zimmer, Michael 113
Zizek, Slavoj 13n8, 693, 694, 695, 699, 710n18
Zonin, Aleksandr 116
al-Zubeidi, Kais 738
Zukrowski, Wojciech 204
Zumbado, Héctor 466
Zwierciadio (Mirror) (magazine) 212
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