Notes
Introduction: Americanism and Fordism – and Chaplinism
1.Viktor Shklovsky, Mayakovsky and his Circle (London: Pluto Press, 1972), pp. 118–19.
2.Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Dover, 1998), p. 19.
3.Ibid., p. 21.
4.Ibid.
5.Bernard Doray, From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness (London: Free Association Books, 1988), p. 126.
6.E.H. Carr and R.W. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926–1929 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 510.
7.Ibid.
8.This was not entirely idle. In ‘Contains Graphic Material – El Lissitzky and the Topography of G’, Maria Gough notes that ‘like the many other Internationals established in the early 1920s, the Constructivist International adopted its nomenclature in emulation of the mother ship of international socialism founded in Moscow in 1919, the Communist International, or Comintern. El Lissitzky had been a key protagonist in the formation of the Constructivist International in 1922 and had once also claimed to ‘have close links with the Comintern’, though ‘their precise nature remains unclear’; but had also claimed of his transnational activities – ‘we are taking not art but Communism to the West’. The 1922–23 period when the ‘Constructivist International’ briefly came into existence is one still full of revolutionary intensity – the era of the German inflation, and plans for an eventually abortive (except in Hamburg) Communist insurrection. The Constructivist moment is not one of mere consolidation. See Detlef Mertins and Michael W. Jennings (eds), G – An Avant Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–1926 (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2010), pp. 23–30.
9.That said, there is a link to New York Futurism via Louis Lozowick; see Barnaby Haran’s PhD thesis, The Amerika Machine: Art and Technology between the USA and the USSR, 1926 to 1933 (University College London, 2008) on some under-investigated examples of Americans applying and adapting the ideas of Meyerhold and El Lissitzky.
10.On the ambiguous, difficult slippage between the positive and negative views of America and Americanism in the Soviet press through the period studied, of particular importance are Alan M. Ball, Imagining America – Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), Jeffrey Brooks’ ‘The Press and its Message – Images of America in the 1920s and 1930s’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch and Richard Stites (eds), Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991) and the interestingly identically-named section ‘Imagining America – Fordism and Technology’, in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (eds), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 393–411. The literature on Soviet and Weimar Americanism is extensive, if not always specific. Works of particular importance for this book are: Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), Susan Buck-Morss’ Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), René Fülöp-Miller’s The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1928), Manfredo Tafuri’s The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987) and Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), along with contemporary theoretical works such as Antonio Gramsci’s ‘Americanism and Fordism’, in Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (eds), Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2005), or Siegfried Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), I found two comparative essays on spatial history in the USA and USSR by Kate Brown exceptionally useful for both their context and contemporary resonance. ‘Out of Solitary Confinement’, in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8: 1 (Winter 2007) and ‘Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana are Nearly the Same Place’, The American Historical Review 10: 1 (February 2001).
11.Susan Buck-Morss renders Benjamin’s ‘dream-images’ perhaps even more pointedly as ‘wish-images’, in The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
12.Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
13.The present work uses ‘avant-garde’ broadly in the terms of Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), to denote a self-conscious group aiming at the transformation of art through the transformation of everyday life, and vice versa; though it should be noted that such a usage is anachronistic, and the term was never used in the 1920s. ‘Left Art’ or ‘Left Artist’, in the definition by Richard Sherwood, is more useful:
an artist influenced by Futurist, Formalist or Constructivist theories on art, ie a general hostility to imitation of life, in favour of ‘creation’ or ‘construction’ of life; hostility to realism in art, or a tendency to utilitarianism; rejection of ‘belles-lettres’ in literature, of ‘pure’ or ‘easel art’ in painting, and of ‘applied art’ (in the sense of art ‘applied’ to a ready-made object).
Richard Sherwood, ‘Introduction to Lef’, Screen (Winter 1971–72), p. 31.
However, the term is much rarer in the German context. Accordingly, the more precise term Constructivist is used whenever possible.
14.For instance. Lily Feiler’s Preface to Viktor Shklovsky’s 1940 Mayakovsky and his Circle, ed. and trans. Lily Feiler (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1972) quotes a contemporary reviewer’s criticism:
that the worldview of the best poet of the Soviet epoch was formed not by the Bolshevik Party with which Mayakovsky had been connected since his youth, not by Lenin’s books, which he had read, not by the entire atmosphere of imminent revolution, but by people like Shklovsky, Brik, Khlebnikov . . . Feiler, Mayakovsky and his Circle, p. xxii.
This was no doubt extremely unfair; but now the problem is precisely the opposite, with the avant-garde subsumed back into art.
15.Bertolt Brecht, ‘No Insight Through Photography’, in Brecht on Film and Radio, trans. and ed. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 2000), p. 144. This precedes the more famous formulation in his Threepenny Lawsuit (translated in the same volume), where the named factories are those of Krupp and AEG.
16.One example of this is the work on LEF by Halina Stephan. This does make clear the absolutism of LEF, and the Futurists’ occasional (and inconsistent) desire for ‘dictatorship’ in Soviet arts; but it does LEF a disservice by considering it largely in terms of a literary movement, see Halina Stephan, ‘Lef’ and the Left Front of the Arts (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1981). This book takes an approach closer to that of Yuri Tsivian, who in an essay on the especially sectarian Kinoks group, warns against considering the avant-garde’s often indeed ‘totalising’ theory separately from their multi-valent practice: the avant-garde’s ‘self-images were austere and isolationist; their practices, flexible and open. As students of the avant-garde we are sometimes too mesmerised by the former to pay enough attention to the latter [. . .] techniques, ideas and objects easily changed hands’. See Yuri Tsivian, ‘Turning Objects, Toppled Pictures: Give and Take between Vertov’s Films and Constructivist Art’, in October 121 (Summer 2007), pp. 92–110.
17.Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (London: Verso, 2011).
18.‘All these “friends” of the USSR approach the problems of the Soviet state from the sidelines, as observers, as sympathisers, and occasionally as flâneurs.’ Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), p. 225.
19.Ernst Toller, Which World: Which Way? Travel Pictures from America and Russia, trans. Hermon Ould (London: Sampson Low, 1931), p. x.
20.Alan M. Ball reveals that the band, touring the USSR, were ‘the Chocolate Kiddies Revue’. Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), p. 100.
21.Dziga Vertov, ‘Film-Makers, A Revolution’, Screen (Winter 1971–72), p. 76.
22.Lev Kuleshov, ‘Selections from Art of the Cinema’, (1929) Screen (Winter 1971–72), pp. 110–11.
23.Ibid.
24.Ibid., p. 113.
25.Ibid., p. 114.
26.Ibid.
27.Ibid.
28.Ibid., pp. 120–1.
29.Ibid.
30.In the Pravda article ‘Man’s Enslavement to the Machine’ in 1914, Lenin describes Taylorism as both a system of sweating and one that could be managed by workers themselves to emancipatory ends. This is not too different from the later, mooted ‘adaptation to our own ends’ of elements in the Taylor system in 1918’s ‘The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government’, where he refers to it as a system of both ‘subtle brutality’ and a great ‘scientific achievement’. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 663. Similar remarks are made in Trotsky’s already quoted 1926 ‘Culture and Socialism’ with reference to Fordism – the key element in Trotsky’s partial defence of Fordism is that it would considerably reduce working hours: Leon Trotsky, ‘Culture and Socialism’ (1926) in Problems of Everyday Life: Creating the Foundations for a New Society in Revolutionary Russia (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), p. 244. It should not be deduced from this that the Soviet Union was either willing or capable of Taylorising its workforce – in fact, it seems incontrovertible that it was neither. See Daniel A. Wren and Arthur G. Bedeian, ‘The Taylorization of Lenin: Rhetoric or Reality?’, International Journal of Social Economics 31: 3 (2004), pp. 287–99. Similarly, Alan M. Ball finds that Gastev’s Central Institute of Labour, although officially sponsored in the 1920s, was marginalised by the 1930s, with Gastev himself purged in 1938: Ball, Imagining America, p. 29.
31.Doray, From Taylorism to Fordism, p. 83.
32.Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 82.
33.Of course, Charles Chaplin was not an American. Nonetheless, within a few years of joining Mack Sennett’s group in 1914, he was one of the most famous actors and arguably directors in Hollywood, if not the most famous, so a clear exemplar of Americanism; although it is possible that his use of English Music Hall routines, in a morphed, cinematic form made them particularly accessible to Europeans. See Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003).
34.A recent exception is Paul Flaig’s work on ‘Weimar Slapstick’, such as ‘Brecht, Chaplin and the Comic Inheritance of Marxism’, in The Brecht Yearbook 35 (2010), pp. 39–58. Thanks to David Shulman for the reference.
35.Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, pp. 158–61.
36.Peter Wollen, ‘Modern Times: Cinema/Americanism/The Robot’, originally published in 1988, in Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth Century Culture (London: Verso, 2008), p. 40.
37.Peter Wollen, ‘Into the Future: Tourism, Language and Art’, originally published in 1990, in Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth Century Culture (London: Verso, 2008), pp. 192–3.
38.Many of the most insightful theorists of popular black music have concentrated on precisely this tension, manifested in the consistent combination of rigid yet ‘loose’, sexualised syncopation and technological futurism. In particular, Peter Shapiro, ‘Automating the Beat: the Robotics of Rhythm’, in Rob Young (ed.), Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music (London: Continuum, 2002), and Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet, 1997) or the very apposite comparisons between Soviet Constructivist architecture and that most determinedly futuristic black American music – Detroit techno – in Barrett Watten’s The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003).
39.J.K. Galbraith, ‘Was Ford a Fraud?’, in The Liberal Hour (Harmondsworth: Penguin Pelican, 1963).
40.Ibid., p. 132.
41.Ibid., p. 140.
42.Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (London: Verso, 1986), p. 51.
43.Ibid.
44.Ibid., pp. 55–6.
45.Ibid.
46.Ibid., p. 186.
47.On this brief ‘utopian’ Taylorist moment in post-revolutionary Germany, and its replacement with a more grim version of rationalisation, see Nolan, Visions of Modernity, p. 90.
48.According to Reyner Banham’s A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture, 1900–1925 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
49.Gramsci, ‘Americanism and Fordism’, pp. 302–3.
50.Ibid.
51.Ibid., p. 303.
52.Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, p. 81.
53.Ibid.
54.‘The Montage of Attractions’, in Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense (London: Faber & Faber, 1986).
55.Erwin Piscator is, other than Brecht, the main German figure of relevance here, with a similar approach to the montage of attractions. Although he claimed not to have been influenced by Meyerhold, he noted that the emergence of these similar but unconnected methods ‘would merely prove that this was no superficial game with technical effects, but a new, emergent form of theatre based on the philosophy of historical materialism which we shared.’ However, the comic and circus elements are rather less pronounced. See Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre, ed. and trans. Hugh Rorisson (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980), p. 93.
1. Constructing the Chaplin-Machine
1.Second version in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938, eds Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 118.
2.Gilbert Seldes, Movies for the Millions: An Account of Motion Pictures, Principally in America (London: Batsford, 1937), p. 44.
3.It is unclear when Chaplin’s films were first shown in both countries, but it is likely to have been after 1918. According to Jay Leyda, the first showing in Russia was of A Dog’s Life, during the Civil War, though he doesn’t specify on which side. Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960), p. 145.
4.Viktor Shklovsky, Literature and Cinematography, trans. Irina Masinovsky (Champaign, IL and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), p. 64.
5.Ibid., p. 65.
6.‘Let’s hope the psychological, high-society film, whose action takes place in a drawing-room, becomes extinct.’ Shklovsky, Literature and Cinematography, p. 68.
7.The scenes are from The Gold Rush:
Eating the boot (with proper table manners, removing the nail like a chicken bone, the index finger pointing outward). The film’s mechanical aids: Chaplin appears to his starving friend as a chicken. Chaplin destroying his rival and at the same time courting him.
See Brecht on Film and Radio: A Critical Edition, ed. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 2000), p. 10.
8.Tut Schlemmer (ed.), The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, trans. Krishna Winston (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), pp. 126–7.
9.Walter Benjamin, ‘Chaplin’, (1929) in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 2: Part 1, 1927–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 199–200.
10. Ibid., p. 94.
11.Ya Braun, ‘Bio . . . Fascism (thoughts at the dispute “The Rout of the Left Front”)’, in Teatr, no. 6, 1922, in Aleksey Morozov (ed.), Constructivism: Annotated Bibliography (Moscow: Kontakt-Kultura, 2006), p. 10.
12.Aleksandr Rodchenko, Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Essays, Letters and Other Writings, ed. Alexander Lavrentiev (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005), p. 147.
13.Ibid., p. 148. Edison also features in an (unproduced) FEX scenario:
In Edison’s Woman, an agitational film scenario written in 1923, Edison creates a robot that comes to Petrograd to ‘save the city from the cult of the past’, of Petersburg. Once the light of Volkhovstroy (power station) is turned on, the old Petersburg disappears.
Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 202.
14.Karel Teige, ‘Poetism’, in Eric Dluhosch et al. (eds), Karel Teige: L‘Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 66–7.
15.Ibid., p. 70.
16.The edition of World of Laughter consulted here is a facsimile reprint, published in Prague in 2004 of Karel Teige, Svet, Ktery Se Smeje (Prague: Odeon, 1928). The 1930 follow-up, World of Smells, features a more Dadaist choice of illustrations.
17.Cendrars and Léger’s version of Chaplin is remarkably similar in approach to Schlemmer’s, quoted earlier: the schematicised Chaplin sketches that appear in the Ballet Mécanique film make the connection between the comedian’s movement and that of the products of the Second Industrial Revolution. Léger’s Chaplin images are not as ‘iconic’, or severely Suprematist as Stepanova’s, but have more of a chaotic, urban feel to them, fusing the disconnected parts of the marionette’s body with fragments of the post-war city.
18.Something that would be reciprocated later, with Chaplin’s very public advocacy of Vertov and Eisenstein.
19.Quoted in Aleksandr Gladkov, Meyerhold Speaks, Meyerhold Rehearses, written 1934–37, ed. Alma Law (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997), p. 112.
20.Interestingly, Buster Keaton, usually seen as a less politicised figure than Chaplin, films a far more disruptive and pointed scene set in a bank in The Haunted House (1921). As a bank cashier, Keaton accidentally ends up spilling glue over the notes, covering his bourgeois customers in money that they physically can’t remove from their bodies, in an impressive making obvious of their pecuniary fixations, a device that fits neatly alongside the stock market sequences in Pudovkin’s 1927 The End of St Petersburg. However, a comparison of two films in which the actor-directors play convicts (Chaplin’s The Adventurer [1917] and Keaton’s Convict 13 [1920]) is instructive. Although the humour in the latter is more mordantly cynical, most notably in a farcical execution scene, Keaton is in prison because of a case of mistaken identity. The tramp of The Adventurer however actually is an escaped criminal, which makes his subsequent charming of an upper-class woman and humiliation of her father all the more threatening. In this sense, Chaplin’s sly ‘inhumanity’ is particularly remarkable, as he is able to elicit pathos to the point where his crime doesn’t even need to be explained.
21.It should be noted that more ‘conscious’ political elements can appear at the edge of the frame; Simon Louvish points out that in 1914’s The Fatal Mallet a chalked ‘IWW’ (the Industrial Workers of the World, or ‘Wobblies’) can be seen in the background of one scene (Simon Louvish, Chaplin: The Tramp’s Odyssey [London: Faber & Faber, 2009], p. 60). This association of Chaplin and the American libertarian communist union is also made by Hoberman, who finds in Chaplin’s ‘urban chaos and visceral class awareness’ a ‘Wobbly esprit de corps’. Jim Hoberman, ‘After the Gold Rush: Chaplin at 100’, in Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991), p. 121.
22.Julian Smith lists the elements that: ‘would delight a Marxist critic searching for images of exploitation’ in early Chaplin:
in Work, Charlie is an undersized beast of burden; the drab janitor surrounded by the wealth and glamour of The Bank fights back in the only way he can, with incompetence, laziness, and a final pathetic flight into the fantasy that he has some value in the marketplace; in Shanghaied, a corrupt businessman wants to blow up the ship to collect the insurance. Contemplating the last of the Essanay films, the Marxist critic would die and go to heaven, for in Police Chaplin plays a convict released from the security of the prison where he had been fed, sheltered and protected into a world of hunger, exploitation and danger.
Julian Smith, Chaplin (London: Columbus Books, 1986), p. 31.
23.This is a reversal of the usual order, in Keaton’s case. Brought up in a vaudeville family, mechanics was the fantasy of the actor, not vice versa. Edward McPherson quotes Buster Keaton’s autobiography:
I was so successful as a child performer that it occurred to no one to ask me if there was something else I would like to do when I grew up. If someone had asked me I would have answered ‘civil engineer’.
McPherson notes the obvious, that ‘his engineer’s mind would serve him remarkably well in his career as a filmmaker. Edward McPherson, Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat (London: Faber & Faber, 2004), pp. 16–17.
24.Viktor Shklovsky, ‘The Man in the Glasses’, in Harold Lloyd (Leningrad: 1926), pp. 3–4. Many thanks to Thomas Campbell for kindly translating this gratis.
25.There is a short catalogue of Chaplin’s interactions with machines in André Bazin’s What is Cinema?, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), and Raymond Durgnat has an exceptionally smart discussion of Chaplin’s own machinic nature, which is closely akin to, if clearly arrived at separately from, the ideas of Shklovsky.
Often Charlie moves according to the most rigorous mechanical laws. If he wants to turn a corner at speed, he has to stick out one leg by way of counterbalance. If he wants to run away, he first has to rev up by running on the spot.
Durgnat adroitly links this both to Taylorism, and to the contemporary theories on comedy by Henri Bergson, where ‘we laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing.’ Raymond Durgnat, The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American Image (New York: Horizon Press, 1970), pp. 70–1.
2. Red Clowns to the Rescue
1.Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber, Harpo Speaks (Falmouth: Coronet, 1978), pp. 321–2.
2.Sergei Tretiakov, ‘Our Cinema’, in October 118, Special Issue: Soviet Factography, eds Devin Fore et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 41.
3.Teachers’ Labour League, Schools, Teachers and Scholars in Soviet Russia (London: Williams and Norgate, 1929).
4.Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, trans. Bernard Guilbert Guerney (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 21. We is often taken as a specifically anti-communist satire, which seems unlikely given that it was preceded by The Islanders, a satire of 1910s England in remarkably similar, anti-Taylorist lines. Yevgeny Zamyatin, Islanders and The Fisher of Men (London: Fontana Flamingo, 1985).
5.Zamyatin, We, p. 47.
6.Ibid., p. 24.
7.Ibid., p. 90.
8.Ibid., p. 61.
9.René Fülöp-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1928), p. 33. But see his less critical description of an actual Soviet Taylorist laboratory, Gastev’s Institute of Labour:
The Institute works on the lines of the Taylor experimental investigations in America, but with the idea that the new Bolshevik man of the future can be produced here. On entering the building, you find here a number of investigators engaged in fixing the maximum output capacity of the human organism, and there, in a psycho-technical laboratory, other people, who are trying to ascertain how much energy is used in every movement, and how this movement can be made in the most economical way [. . .] Precision in the investigation of the energy of the organism here celebrates rousing triumphs.
p. 301. This at least is confined to the factory. Meanwhile, the notion that, by ending the avant-garde experiment, Stalinism thus ‘saved humanity’ (albeit at the cost of millions of lives) is memorably advanced in Slavoj Žižek’s In Defence of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2009); though it is anticipated in the work of Boris Groys.
10.Louis Lozowick, Survivor from a Dead Age (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), p. 235. In general, Lozowick’s account shows an awareness of America’s industrial and technological specificity via his encounter with Berlin and Moscow’s left artists – not, at first, from his direct experience. Meanwhile, on Taylorism and ‘biology’, Lozowick provides the following intriguing anecdote:
The social meaning and function of art were to Moholy-Nagy of prime importance. In this connection I came across a minor but curious case of distortion applied to his thought. In his book, Von Material zu Architektur, a footnote reads as follows [. . . ] here is the literal translation. ‘The Taylor System, the conveyor belt, etc., are mistakes so long as they turn man into a machine and his manifold contributions serve no one but the employer (perhaps the consumer also, but least of all the worker, the producer) [. . .] And this is the way the translation appears in the English version: ‘The “Taylor System”, the conveyor belt and the like are mistakes in so far as they turn man into a machine without taking into account his biological basis’ [. . .] I wonder whether Moholy-Nagy was aware of this ‘biology’.
p. 191.
11.Lozowick, Survivor from a Dead Age, p. 235.
12.Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 161.
13.Vsevolod Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. and trans. Edward Braun (London: Methuen, 1991), p. 314.
14.Ibid. pp. 312–4.
15.It should be noted that Eisenstein later repudiates this, through ‘ecstatic’, cathartic montages such as the Odessa Steps massacre and, most of all, the cream-separator sequence in The General Line (1929).
16.Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, p. 202. Ippolit Sokolov’s own conception was more straightforwardly machinic, redolent again of Chaplin-theory’s ideas of automatons and marionettes, here with some faintly eugenic undertones:
The actor on the stage must first of all become a mechanism, an automaton, a machine [. . .] henceforth, painters, doctors, artists, engineers, must study the human body not from the point of view of anatomy or physiology, but from the point of view of the study of machines. The new Taylorised man who has his own new physiology. Classical man, with his Hellenic gait and gesticulation, is a beast and savage in comparison with the new Taylorised man.
Quoted by Mikhail Yampolsky, ‘Kuleshov’s Experiments and the New Anthropology of the Actor’, in Ian Christie and Richard Taylor (eds), Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 49.
17.Quoted in Alan M. Ball, Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), p. 29.
18.See Stites on ‘Fordizatsiya’, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 148.
19.Huw Beynon, Working for Ford (Wakefield: E.P. Publishing, 1975), p. 109. For a critique extending this to Gastev’s own seeming indifference to – or embrace of – the suffering in industrial labour, see Rolf Hellebust, Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
20.Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, pp. 197–8.
21.An example of Taylor’s unadorned contempt, which is – like much Taylorist thought – based on the assumption that those ‘fit’ for manual work are wholly distinct from those ‘fit’ for intellectual work, a ‘natural’ theory of the division of labour:
Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental makeup the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work. He is so stupid that the word ‘percentage’ has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before he can be successful.
Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Dover, 1998), p. 28.
22.Henry Ford with Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work (New York: CruGuru, 2008 [1922]), p. 73.
23.Ibid.
24.Ibid., p. 75.
25.Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, pp. 199–200.
26.Viktor Shklovsky, ‘The Art of the Circus’, in 1922’s Knight’s Move (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005), p. 87.
27.Ibid.
28.Herbert Marcuse, ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’, in Negations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 116.
29.Mike O’Mahony notes that the presence of the circus in Bolshevik cultural politics dates from as early as 1918, where ‘the recently formed International Union of Circus Artists attended the parade to celebrate the first anniversary of the October revolution.’ Critical Lives: Sergei Eisenstein (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), p. 31.
30.An honourable exception to this: Werner Graeff’s ‘Pleasurable Abundance – by Means of New Technology’, in G issue 4, March 1926.
Amusement park, pleasure flying, jazz band, elegance, Chaplin and snowshoeing – in addition, world-travel now and then, and, if need be, spas – all this for everyone, and on demand, is no less important than clean streets and spacious, salutary dwellings. And all this with a two or four hour work day: it is achieved through a complete instrumental organisation of the earth.
G – An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design and Film, 1923–1926 (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2010), p. 190.
31.Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Montage of Attractions’, in The Film Sense (London: Faber & Faber, 1986).
32.Sergei Tretiakov, ‘The Theatre of Attractions’, in October 118, Fall 2006, p. 21.
33.Sergei Tretiakov, ‘The Theatre of Attractions’, in October 118, Fall 2006, p. 25.
34.Boris Arvatov, ‘Art or Science’, LEF, Vol. 4, translated in Screen (Winter 1971–72), p. 47.
35.Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, Sergei Yutkevich, Georgi Kryzhitsky, ‘Eccentrism’, in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (eds), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939 (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 58.
36.Konstantin Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre: Tradition and the Avant-Garde (London, New York: Thames & Hudson, 1988), p. 124.
37.Although jazz may not have had this implication in The Magnanimous Cuckold, which according to Konstantin Rudnitsky marked the first use of it in any context in Russia, although Edward Braun claims this to have been in D.E. – Give Us Europe.
38.Edward Braun, Meyerhold – A Revolution in Theatre (London: Methuen, 1998), p. 198. The apparently accidental portrayal of the Americanised enemy as more seductive than the revolutionaries opposed to them appears to have been fairly common. Elizabeth Souritz’s Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s, trans. Lynn Visson, ed. and trans. Sally Banes (London: Dance Books, 1990) profiles the Bolshoi Ballet choreographer Kasian Goleizovsky’s efforts in 1923 to create ‘reshapings’ and ‘imaginative reworkings’ of ‘a foxtrot, a two-step and a tango’ into what he called an ‘eccentric erotica’ (p. 167). In the 1927 ballet The Whirlwind, with Constructivist sets and costumes by Boris Erdman, Goleizovsky attempted to combine eroticism, nudity (with the express support of Lunacharsky), eccentrism, futurism and proletarian revolution. However, the result was apparently a failure, irrespective of the Communists’ skimpy costumes: ‘the forces resisting the revolution (“black marketeers, hooligans and riff-raff”) were shown as incomparably more interesting.’ p. 213. A. Petrysky’s costumes for Goleizovsky’s 1922 ‘Eccentric Dance’ are indeed raffish and erotic, with more than a note of Suprematism’s scything spatial drama: see the drawings in Olga Kerziouk, ‘Kharkov’, in Stephen Bury (ed.), Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant-Garde, 1900–1937 (London: British Library, 2007), p. 100.
39.Mayakovsky was particularly scathing about the onstage juxtaposition of an (actual) jazz band and the (actual) red fleet, mocking its military pretensions as ‘some kind of theatre institute for playing at soldiers’. Quoted in Edward Braun, Meyerhold – A Revolution in Theatre, London: Methuen, 1998), p. 199.
40.Christie and Taylor (eds), The Film Factory, p. 60.
41.Ibid., p. 60.
42.This poster is reproduced in Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre, p. 124.
43.Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 180.
44.Leonid Tauberg, ‘The Red Clown to the Rescue!’, in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (eds), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939 (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 104–5.
45.Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960), p. 201.
46.The use of abstraction in the FEX films appears in a different form in the far less circus-like The Overcoat (1926), scripted by and clearly under the theoretical influence of the Formalist Yuri Tynianov; a depiction of commodity fetishism under heavy German Expressionist influence. The abstraction of objects (most obviously the titular coat) induces its own kind of defamiliarisation, in a far quieter, less immediately disruptive form. Vladmir Nedobrovo wrote in 1928 of this approach as ‘the Eccentric association of objects, the disassociation of the object from its normal mileu and the demonstration of its relationship with unusual surroundings’. Ian Christie and John Gillett (eds), Futurism/Formalism/FEXS: Eccentrism and Soviet Cinema, 1918–1936, (London: British Film Institute, 1978), p. 20.
47.Barbara Leaming, Grigori Kozintsev (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1980), p. 40.
48.Ibid.
49.Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (London: Redwords, 1991), p. 267.
50.Leyda, Kino, p. 172.
51.Lev Kuleshov, ‘Mr West’, (1924) in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (eds), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939 (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 108.
52.Olga Bulgakova, ‘The Hydra of the Soviet Cinema’, in Lynne Attwood (ed.), Red Women on the Silver Screen: Soviet Women and Cinema from the. Beginning to to the End of the Communist Era (London: Pandora Press, 1993), pp. 154–6.
53.Ibid.
54.Boris Barnet and Fyodor Otsep’s three-part serial Miss Mend (1926) is a masterpiece of Kuleshov-style Soviet Americanism, but like Mr West its satirical target is American anti-Soviet conspirators, rather than the ‘new stupidities’; though the final scenes, both in the depiction of the Red Army’s failure to get the baddies and in the lead conspirator’s striking death via elevator shaft, are notable, to say the least. Pudovkin’s Chess Fever (1925) meanwhile, although a formally advanced film (with its use of the ‘Kuleshov effect’ of montage to make Chess champion Capablanca ‘star’ in the film inadvertently) has no particular political purpose, which stops it from being directly relevant to this chapter – although it does stand as especially clear evidence that avant-garde methods could result in light, enjoyable comedy rather than arid didacticism, unless perhaps the popularisation of this favourite game of Lenin’s was considered of urgent educational value.
55.Ian Christie and Julian Graffy (eds), Yakov Protazanov and the Continuity of Russian Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1993), p. 36.
56.Yet for all its interesting devices, the slow pace and theatrical acting which apparently made it more palatable to Soviet audiences make it appear immeasurably more dated to the twenty-first-century viewer than the work of the FEX or Eisenstein, let alone Vertov. J. Hoberman, meanwhile, considers Aelita to be a ‘Trotskyist’ film – something which does not seem altogether far-fetched. J. Hoberman, The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998), pp. 145–8.
57.As in many works heavily concerned with Byt, objects have their own life in the film; as contemporary critic L. Vulfov pointed out at the time, ‘the bed and the sofa that stand in the room – these are the real heroes of the picture’. Quoted in Julian Graffy, Bed and Sofa: The Film Companion (London: IB Tauris, 2001), p. 97.
58.Denise Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 36–7.
59.Ibid., Fig. 25. Vance Kepley Jr posits that the filmic avant-garde can be divided into a commercial, Americanised, narrative-driven faction (Kuleshov, Barnet, Pudovkin) and an abstract, non-linear, experimental wing (Vertov, Eisenstein, Dovzhenko). In this case, it’s clear that it is only the latter who Youngblood critiques. Yet the crossover between these groups is immense, with Pudovkin frequently ‘abstract’, Eisenstein frequently comic and ‘Americanist’, Vertov’s films’ use of fiercely driven, if non-traditional narrative dynamics, etc. And Kozintsev and Trauberg fit both descriptions equally well; so the use of the divide is unclear. Vance Kepley Jr, The End of St Petersburg: The Film Companion (London: IB Tauris, 2003).
3. No Rococo Palace for Buster Keaton
1.Louis Lozowick, Survivor from a Dead Age (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), p. 226.
2.Dziga Vertov, ‘Film-Makers, A Revolution’, in Screen (Winter 1971–72), p. 54.
3.A joke expanded upon in the extraordinary, life-threatening stunt at the end of Steamboat Bill Jr (1928).
4.René Fülöp-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1928), p. 54.
5.Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 105.
6.Fülöp-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, p. 307.
7.Ibid., p. 70.
8.Ibid.
9.Theodore Dreiser, Dreiser Looks at Russia (London: Constable, 1928), p. 27.
10.Ibid.
11.Dreiser, interestingly, sees them as examples of the same species; Dreiser, Dreiser Looks at Russia, p. 90.
12.An exemplary analysis of advertising-utopianism: the ‘Bullrich Salt’ ad discussed in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge and London: Belknap Harvard, 1999), pp. 173–4.
13.I owe this reference to Gail Harrison Roman, ‘Tatlin’s Tower – Revolutionary Symbol and Aesthetic’, in Gail Harrison Roman and Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt (eds), The Avant-Garde Frontier: Russia Meets the West, 1910–1930 (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1992).
14.Kurt Johansson, Aleksej Gastev: Proletarian Bard of the Machine Age (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1983), p. 88.
15.On Hugh Ferris and the formal logic of the zoning code, see Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994).
16.Norbert Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to the Revolution (London: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 129. A recent and hysterical take on ‘God-building’ as a means of raising the dead by killing millions can be found in John Gray’s The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death (London: Allen Lane, 2011).
17.Ibid.
18.Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future, trans. Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov (New York: New York Review of Books, 2009), pp. 17–21.
19.Ibid.
20.Ibid.
21.Vladimir Tatlin, Tevel Shapiro, Iosif Meerzon, Pavel Vinogradov (trans. Catherine Cooke), ‘The Work Ahead of Us’, in Catherine Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde: Theories of Art, Architecture and the City (London: Academy Editions, 1995), p. 97.
22.Johansson, Aleksej Gastev, pp. 65–6. In an article on Futurism (on which, like Trotsky and Lunacharsky, he hedged his bets) Gastev wrote: ‘contemporary futurism is a child of the street – the street of consumers, not the street of producers.’ Ibid., p. 66.
23.Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 171.
24.Pavlov’s reflexology proceeds entirely along the paths of dialectical materialism. It conclusively breaks down the wall between physiology and psychology. The simplest reflex is psychological, but a system of reflexes gives us ‘consciousness’ [. . .] but the psychoanalyst does not approach problems of consciousness experimentally, going from the lowest phenomena to the highest, from the simple reflex to the complex reflex; instead, he attempts to take all these intermediate stages in one jump, from above downwards, from the religious myth, the lyrical poem, or the dream, straight to the physiological basis of the psyche.
Leon Trotsky, ‘Culture and Socialism’, (1926) in Problems of Everyday Life: Creating the Foundations for a New Society in Revolutionary Russia (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), p. 233.
25.These sketches are all collected in Selim Khan-Magomedov, Nikolai Ladovsky (Moscow: Russian Avant-garde Foundation, 2007).
26.Nikolai Ladovsky, ‘The Psychotechnical Laboratory of Architecture: Posing the Problem’, in Catherine Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde: Theories of Art, Architecture and the City (London: Academy Editions, 1995), p. 98.
27.Ibid.
28.Münsterberg’s applied psychological laboratory work was applied by the author in interestingly Taylor-like terms to industrial and clerical work as well as advertising in Hugo Münsterberg, ‘The Market and Psychology’, in American Problems: From the Point of View of a Psychologist (New York: Moffat, Yard & Co., 1910), p. 151–76; the fixation on psychological perceptions of space was most likely of interest to Ladovsky.
29.This tower, produced in Ladovsky’s Vkhutemas atelier, is variously credited to Silchenko (by Cooke) and to Lopatin (by El Lissitzky). The clearest image is on page 61 of El Lissitzky’s Russland: Architektur für eine Weltrevolution (Berlin: Ullstein, 1965, original 1929). That a skyscraper of this design would not have the psychotechnical effect of inducing a socialist consciousness can be fairly clearly seen in its status as a possible source (unacknowledged, entirely possible, given Ludwig Hilberseimer’s role in Chicago architecture in the 1960s) for the Sears Tower, finished in the early 1970s and still the tallest building in the USA.
30.Ladovsky, ‘The Psychotechnical Laboratory of Architecture’.
31.Quoted in Ben Brewster, ‘Documents from Lef’, in Screen (Winter 1971–72).
32.Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
33.Richard Pare, The Lost Vanguard: Russian Modernist Architecture 1922–1932 (New York: Monacelli Press, 2008), p. 38.
34.The idea of the New York style building helping affect the rest of the city by example that is central to the discussion here of the Mosselprom tower is supported in Lars T. Lih’s essay on Trotsky and war communism:
Maybe next spring, Trotsky mused at the end of (1920), we could tear down some of Moscow’s rotten, filthy, disease ridden apartment buildings and replace them with ones like those in New York City – buildings that included a bath, that provided gas and electricity and where the trash was collected every day. If we could build just one building like this, the response would be colossal. Because up to now the workers see the wheels turning but they don’t see the economic machinery working.
It’s telling that, given the changed priorities of NEP, the building when constructed was a department store rather than a residential building – which, when constructed, around the same time in the Sokol district, followed a practical but decidedly rustic mode (on Sokol, see Pare, The Lost Vanguard, pp. 54–5). Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys (eds), History and Revolution: Revisiting Revisionism (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 131–2.
35.A scorn shared by Bogdanov. Ben Brewster notes that: ‘the Proletkult denounced the “advertising artist Mayakovsky”’ A.A. Bodganov, ‘Critique of Proletarian Art’, in Proletarskaya Kultura, No. 3 (1918), referenced in Screen (Winter 1971–72), p. 60.
36.Vladimir Mayakovsky, Listen!: Early Poems 1913–1918, trans. Maria Enzensberger (London: Redstone Press, 1987), p. 21.
37.Kestutis Paul Zygas, Form Follows Form: Source Imagery of Constructivist Architecture, 1917–1925 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981), p. xxii.
38.Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde, p. 112.
39.This is certainly what is implied in the Mayakovsky-Rodchenko posters translated by Kiaer in Imagine No Possessions, in which the Mosselprom consumer is: 1) personalised as working-class; and 2) spoken to both as a political subject, and someone who will appreciate the humour of exaggeration and coarseness. The argument, which for all its facetiousness is directly linked to the internal politics of NEP, in which state-run or co-operative stores like Mosselprom had to compete with private enterprise, is essentially – ‘this beer (or cooking oil, or biscuit) kills capitalism!’. Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, pp. 143–98.
40.Jencks shows an especially vivid example of these in San Francisco. A similar experiment to Vesnins’ is the Bila Labat department store in Prague, designed by a group of Czech left Constructivists, Josef Kittrich, Josef Hraby and Jan Gillar. Jaroslav Andel notes:
the architects were proponents of radical functionalism who saw architecture as science, not art. As members of the Left Front and the Socialist Union of Architects professing social radicalism, their commitment to the building type which was seen as a symbol of organised capitalism might seem a glaring contradiction. However, the ideas of rationalisation and scientific approach which they advocated in architecture were associated with the department store from its beginnings in the 19th century – a fact that becomes obvious by realising how many of the features presented by the architects as novelties, including lifts, conveyers, pneumatic post, and a special system for lighting and advertising, were already present in the department store.
Indeed; but we should note with Benjamin how many of these things have their ancestry in Fourier. In this sense, the Vesnin brothers and the Czech architects were unconsciously bringing these novelties back to their roots in utopian socialism. Jaroslav Andel, The New Vision for the New Architecture: Czechoslovakia 1918–38 (Zurich: Scalo Verlag, 2006), p. 59.
41.See for instance the design process of the Vesnin brothers’ ‘Theatre of Massed Musical Activities’ in Kharkov. First a modernist building, which is then accepted with the proviso that monumental sculpture be included as part of the building, then a forcible redesign with the Stalinist apparatchiks of VOPRA, then finally the monumental principle takes over the entire design – while the Modernists never had to be forced to turn their works into billboards. Catherine Cooke and Igor Kazus, Soviet Architectural Competitions: 1920s–1930s (London: Phaidon Press, 1992), pp. 50–7.
42.Mayakovsky and Tretiakov (eds), Novyi Lef, No. 10 (1927). An intriguing backstory to these illuminations is suggested in Ivan V Nevzgodin’s ‘“Press – Fight for Socialist Cities!” Perception and Critique of the Architecture of Novosibirsk, 1920–40’. In reference to a plan for slogans to be projected on the clouds outside the Siberian city’s ‘Lenin Institute’, Nevzgodin claims a possible Futurist root: the ‘skybooks’ promised by Velimir Khlebnikov in Lebedia of the Future. The article is in Thema, Vol. 7, No. 2 (January 2003).
43.Regardless, this should at least in part be regarded as a successful mystification. A very different version of the same celebration could be found in the memoirs of a Left Oppositionist, for whom this was all an enormous distraction from the perversion of the revolution’s original aims – for Serge, it was the precise date of the Soviet Thermidor. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 225–6.
44.Meyer’s co-op works are reproduced in K. Michael Hays’ Modernism and the Posthuman Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
45.Anikst, Figure 198.
46.For instance in Maria Gough’s The Artist as Producer, or Christina Lodder’s Russian Constructivism.
47.See Christopher Mount, Stenberg Brothers – Constructing a Revolution in Soviet Design (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1997), p. 47.
48.Ibid., pp. 50–1.
49.Ibid., p. 66.
50.I outline these at some length in ‘One Better than Stonehenge: On the Gosprom Building and Dzherzhinsky Square, Kharkov’, in AA Files 62 (2011).
51.Which, in its use in Marfa’s dream sequence, perfectly exemplifies the Constructivist ‘dream of efficiency’. In ‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’, Eisenstein uses a dynamic, heavily foreshadowed shot of Burov’s fantasy factory farm as a depiction of ‘spatial conflict’ within the shot, via the intersection of architectural planes. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Hartcourt, 1977), plate 4.
52.I was able to check this impression due to the screenshot in Anders Kreuger, Asa Nacking, After Eisenstein (Lund, 2008), p. 38.
4. The Rhythm of Socialist Construction
1.Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960), p. 282.
2.‘A Statement’, in Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Hartcourt, 1977), p. 257.
3.Ibid., p. 258.
4.Ibid., p. 259.
5.This scene is replayed as phallic sexual innuendo in Dusan Makavajev’s Love Affair – the Tragedy of a Switchboard Operator (1967).
6.This generalised mass of noises, often not precisely distinguishable, led to criticism at the time – one viewer complaining:
if Comrade Vertov and his entire group, who worked on this film, do indeed perceive a difference among these sounds, for the spectator they all merge nonetheless into an unbroken roaring noise without proper nuance. Thus, they do not affect [the viewer] organically, but affect instead his nervous system. Listening to these terrible sounds, at moments one closes one’s eyes and feels like falling asleep.
Quoted in John McKay, ‘Disorganised Noise: Enthusiasm and the Ear of the Collective’, at: www.kinokultura.com/articles/jan05-mackay.html (accessed 1 September 2010). McKay quotes another description of the work as ‘a poster in sound’, and if so it is clear what sort of poster.
7.Viktor Shklovsky claimed at the time that the viewers were ‘physically exterminated by Vertov while watching the film’. Quoted in McKay, ‘Disorganised Noise’. McKay also notes that among the film’s few contemporary defenders were several actual Donbas workers, supporting the film’s stress on the unromantic difficulty of their labour. Perhaps this point is more relevant in reference to the film’s closing scenes on a kolkhoz, where this time it is Ukrainian folk songs that are made weird and metallic – the scenes of agricultural abundance here would be followed by famine just over a year later.
8.As in, the left-wing appropriation of the notion of ‘the worse, the better’. See Benjamin Noys’s Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014).
9.Cf. Ian Christie, ‘Enthusiasm’, Sight and Sound, March 2006.
10.On Hanns Eisler’s use of industrial sound, see his ‘Blast-Furnace Music: Work on a Sound Film in the Soviet Union’, in Manfred Grabs (ed.), A Rebel in Music: Selected Writings, trans. Marjorie Meyer (London: Kahn & Averill, 1999).
11.Antonio Gramsci, ‘Americanism and Fordism’, in Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (eds), Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2005), p. 305.
12.Alan M. Ball, Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), p. 123.
13.For a fine analysis of the play of languages and noises in Men and Jobs, see Emma Widdis, ‘Making Sense Without Speech’, in Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina (eds), Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014).
14.The original is in Joseph Stalin, Foundations of Leninism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1941), p. 112.
15.Isaac Deutscher, ‘Socialist Competition’, in Heretics and Renegades, and Other Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), p. 138.
16.Ibid., p. 143.
17.Ibid., p. 146.
18.Ibid.
19.Ernst Toller, Which World: Which Way?: Travel Pictures from America and Russia, trans. Hermon Ould (London: Sampson Low, 1931), p. 114.
20.Ibid., p. 116.
21.Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960), p. 297.
22.The most reliable account is R.W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
23.Irina Margolina, quoted in the booklet to Soviet Propaganda, Russia’s Animated Propaganda War: Capitalist Sharks and Communism’s Shining Future (DVD, Odeon Entertainment, 2007).
24.Emma Widdis argues that Happiness’ form was indebted to Medvedkin’s viewing of Grandma’s Boy in 1930; she describes the director‘s scientific response to its humour, as ‘Medvedkin later recalled that he spent four days writing out the entire script of the film from memory, frame by frame, with a full analysis’. Emma Widdis, Alexander Medvedkin (London: IB Tauris, 2005), p. 20.
25.Widdis, Alexander Medvedkin, p. 52.
Conclusion: Life is Getting Jollier, Comrades!
1.Internationale Lettriste issue 1, 1952, at: www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/flatfeet.html (accessed 30 October 2008). Originally distributed as a leaflet on the occasion of a Chaplin visit to Paris to promote Limelight (1952).
2.The phrase is used throughout Kestutis Paul Zygas, Form Follows Form: Source Imagery of Constructivist Architecture, 1917–1925 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981).
3.This oft-quoted Stalin line, taken from a speech to the first conference of Stakhanovites in November 1935, lends itself to the title of Karen Petrone’s Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), which charts the ‘new outbreak of festivity’ following the first Five Year Plan. The full quote is: ‘life has become better, comrades, life has become more joyous; and when you are living joyously, work turns out well.’ Petrone, p. 6.
4.Theodor Adorno, ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 70.
5.Ibid., pp. 73–5.
6.Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber, Harpo Speaks (Falmouth: Coronet, 1978), pp. 318–19.
7.Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 155.
8.Quoted in Richard Taylor, ‘The Happy Guys’, in Birgit Beumers (ed.), The Cinema of Russia and the Former Soviet Union (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), pp. 79–89.
9.This fact I owe to S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union 1917–1991 (New York: Limelight Editions, 1994), p. 154. It is worth noting, however, that Jay Leyda convincingly finds the influence of Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel in the film; Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960), pp. 307–8.
10.For an account of a not-dissimilar flight and its less utopian results, see Langston Hughes’s Soviet travelogue, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), pp. 205–9.
11.Quoted in J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939, trans. Benjamin Sher (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 87–9.
12.Raymond Durgnat, The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American Image (New York: Horizon Press, 1970), p. 82.
13.Sergei Eisenstein, Notes of a Film Director (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), p. 169.
14.Ibid., pp. 178–9.
15.Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, p. 472.
16.Slavoj Žižek, Did Someone Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 102–3.
17.See Alexei Yurchak, Everything was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).