Socialist Senses Film and The Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Author(s): Emma Widdis Source: Slavic Review, Vol.
71, No. 3 (FALL 2012), pp. 590-618 Published by: Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5612/slavicreview.71.3.0590 . Accessed: 03/01/2014 05:54
Subjectivity
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Slavic Review.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 92.75.110.143 on Fri, 3 Jan 2014 05:54:40 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Emma Widdis
Strictly speaking, all senses come down to oneto touch [osiazaniiu]. Vladimir Dal, Tolkovyi slovar russkogo iazyka, 1909
The years between 1928 and 1933 are often described as a transitional period in Soviet cultural history: the end of the avant-garde and the New Economic Policy years, the institution and completion of the rst Five-Year Plan, and the gradual move towards the cultural hegemonies that were formalized in 1934 as socialist realism. Historians are agreed that this conventional categorization needs rigorous investigation if it is to hold. The transitional status of this period is certainly evident in the discursive elds relating to feeling/emotion (chuvstvo) and sensation (oshchushchenie) and, in particular, to their interrelationship. This was a period when the contours of the new Soviet subject were in formation. Between 1928 and 1933, sensation was foregrounded in discussions of Soviet psychology; intensied sensory (and particularly tactile) experience emerged as a new mode of being in the worldand one that appeared to correspond to the revolutionary project. The still-young medium of cinema became a privileged site for investigating new models of the relationship between modes of sensory perception, a space for the working out of the problematic relationship between the body, the mind, and the world that had such ideological potency in early Soviet Russia. This article will draw on three types of evidence. First, I will discuss the energetic debates in the Soviet lm press about the role of lm in creating prototypes of Soviet subjectivity and in offering new models of sensory and emotional experience. Second, I will show how these discussions invoked ideas that ltered down from the attempts of Soviet Marxist psychologists to formulate a specically materialist model of psychology, to theorize the relationship between sensation and emotion according to a new ideological framework. In the elaboration of models of Soviet subjectivity on screen that took place in this period, the ideological/political agenda of forging a new model of individuality came together with a formal and technical interest in the capacity of lm to provoke new modes of perception. This, I suggest, gave a particular coloring to earlier constructivist experiments in the sensory remaking of the Soviet subject. The result was an ambitious, and ultimately doomed, project in Soviet cinema: to forge an alternative psychological model for Soviet man and woman one in
With sincere thanks to Julian Graffy, Lilya Kaganovsky, Steven Lovell, Susan Larsen, Jan Plamper, Eric Naiman, Mark D. Steinberg, and the anonymous readers at Slavic Review for their very helpful comments during the writing of this article. I am also very grateful to Isobel Palmer for her invaluable assistance with this project. Slavic Review 71, no. 3 (Fall 2012)
591
which individual emotion would be formed in direct relation to a sensory encounter with the world and where tactile experience was foregrounded. The contours of this project can be traced in the case studies of three lms that provide my third level of evidence here. Two lms from 1928, Sergei Iutkevichs Kruzheva (Lace, released 1 June 1928), set in a lace factory, and Abram Rooms Ukhaby (Potholes, released 10 January 1928), set in a crystal factory, will be compared with a lm from 1931, Odna (Alone, dir. Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg). Film provides access to what might be called a sensory history of Soviet Russiaa crucial counterpart to the recent, and very productive, emotional turn in scholarship on Russian and Slavic history and culture.1 Recent work has sought to consider human emotion as a core object of interrogation, operating at what Mark D. Steinberg and Valeria Sobol call the knotty intersections of body, self, society, culture, and power.2 It is notable, however, that the emotional turn in Slavic studies has not been accompanied by a parallel sensory turn. Although sensory history has become a rich area of scholarship in elds outside our own, it has not yet developed fully in studies of Russia and eastern Europe.3 In the case of the Soviet period in particular, I suggest, this is a signicant omission. For the Soviet revolutionary project was distinguished by the ambition that its far-reaching social and political revolution would be accompanied by a revolution in sensory experience. The education of emotions was to be carried out through the senses, and a new model of subjectivity created. It is this complex project that provides the focus of this article. How, though, can a study of cinema be part of a sensory history? How can lm, a visual medium, represent or explore sensoryand specically tactile experience? First, we may examine how lms picture the relationships between people and things. How, literally, do Soviet men and women touch the world, and how does it touch them? Second, what
1. Jan Plamper, Introduction, to Jan Plamper, ed., Emotional Turn? Feelings in Russian History and Culture, special section of Slavic Review 68, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 229. Notable works include Jan Plamper, S. Schahadat, and M. Elie, eds., Rossiiskaia imperiia chuvstv: Podkhody k kul turnoi istorii emotsii. Sbornik statei (Moscow, 2010); Mark D. Steinberg and Valerie Sobol, eds., Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe (DeKalb, 2011). 2. Mark D. Steinberg and Valerie Sobol, Introduction, to Steinberg and Sobol, eds., Interpreting Emotions, 6. 3. Sensory history outside the Slavic eld is a rich eld, too dense to detail fully here. One might note, however, the pioneering work by cultural anthropologists: David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor, 2003); Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures (London, 1993); and Constance Classen, The Book of Touch (London, 2005). In history, core work has been done by Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley, 2008), and the special issue of the Journal of Social History 40, no. 4 (Summer 2007) is dedicated to work in the history of the senses. The journal Senses and Society provides one of several other fora in which scholarship in sensory history is published and discussed. In Slavic studies, key works to note in this eld include: Vladimir V. Lapin, Peterburg: Zapakhi i zvuki (St. Petersburg, 2007); Alexander M. Martin, Sewage and the City: Filth, Smell, and Representations of Urban Life in Moscow, 1770 1880, Russian Review 67, no. 2 (April 2008): 243 74; Alison K. Smith, Recipes for Russia: Food and Nationhood under the Tsars (DeKalb, 2008).
592
Slavic Review
kinds of sensory encounters does the lm offer to the spectator? How does lm spectatorship offer models of living in, or feeling, the world? These two related lines of inquiry offer a provocative perspective on Soviet lm during this formative period and reveal its role in the project of sensory reeducation that was part of the revolutionary mission. Cinematic Subjects In 192728, prompted by the rst All-Union Party Conference on Film in Moscow, calls went out for a second stagea new stylistic and thematic frameworkfor the maturing Soviet lm industry.4 Vigorous debates before, during, and after the conference made clear that cinema had its part to play in the rst Five-Year Plan. There were two key elements to these discussions. First: subject matter; the newly centralized lm studio Sovkino announced a production plan in July 1928 with clear thematic guidelines for lmmakers and scriptwriters and growing calls for lms to reect Soviet byt (everyday life). Early in 1929, Pavel Bliakhin (ofcial of Sovkino), pointed out that of 135 lms made in 192728, only 58.5 percent were on contemporary Soviet material, and he called for more on workers byt.5 Second, there was increased debate on the necessity and signicance of the representation of individuals on screen. As a reaction to the intellectualism of the Soviet avant-gardeand in particular to Sergei Eisensteins mass heroeslmmakers were called upon to create developed, three-dimensional characters, who would make ideological messages real.6 In the words of K. Gazdenko in 1927, We have outgrown propaganda.7 The obvious ironies of this last statement aside, itand all of these ideologically inected debateshas much to tell us about the discursive eld within which Soviet lm was shaped. In particular, the question of
4. The conference took place 1521 March 1928; minutes were published a year later as a volume: B. S. Olkhovyi, ed., Puti kino: Vsesoiuznoe partiinoe soveshchanie po kinematograi (Moscow, 1929). See Richard Taylor, The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 19171929 (Cambridge, Eng., 1979), 106 13; Denise J. Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918 1935 (Ann Arbor, 1985; Austin, 1991), 155 61; Peter Kenez, The Cultural Revolution in Cinema, Slavic Review 47, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 418 19; Jamie Miller, Soviet Cinema: Politics and Persuasion under Stalin (London, 2010). 5. P. A. Bliakhin, K itogam kino-sezona 192728 goda, Kino i kul tura, 1929, no. 2 (February): 3 16. See also, for example, A. Krinitskii, Nuzhen reshitelnyi sdvig, Pravda, 25 March 1928, 3. In particular, Bliakhin demanded clearer attention to the distinguishing characteristics of the new byt, as produced by the conditions of urban labor. 6. N. K., Byt ideologicheskii, byt kassovyi, byt zhivoi, Sovetskii ekran, 1928, no. 27: 5. See also Chto khotiat videt rabochie? Svoiu, sovetskuiu zhizn! Kino, no. 5 (31 January 1928): 20. In 1930, Adrian Piotrovskii made a speech at the Komakademiia, also published, in which he distinguished two tendencies in Soviet cinema during its rst decade: intellectualism (exemplied by the work of Sergei Eisenstein) and emotionalism (of which directors Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Ivan Cherviakov were representatives). Adrian Piotrovskii, Khudozhestvennye techeniia v sovetskom kino, from his book Khudozhestvennye techeniia v sovetskom kino (Moscow, 1930); reprinted in Adrian Piotrovskii, Teatr, kino, zhizn, ed. Alisa A. Akimova (Leningrad, 1969), 232 56. 7. K. Gazdenko, Sovetskii byt na sovetskom ekrane, Kinofront, 1927, no. 1: 9.
593
three-dimensional characters was complex: how should lmmakers negotiate the relationship between the individual and the collective and picture the emotional inner life of the new Soviet subject? Director Abram Room had suggested as early as 1926 that Real cinema is one that is emotionally saturated.8 These new lm heroes must be individuals, not a mass, but also distinctly Soviet: I. Davydov criticized lmmakers for showing people with individual, but not social characteristics and suggested that social identity (sotsialnost) must become the structuring principle of lm characterization.9 Films should show characters motivated by a love for ideas and for the great project of construction. The new Soviet individual, moreover, was to be pictured in everyday life. As an article in Sovetskii ekran suggested: A persons relationship with objects leaves an impression on the everyday conditions of his life; for he is organically linked with objects by production, craft, or trade.10 This curious statement points to a key aspect of these discussions of screened subjectivity. The new Soviet man or woman was not just in everyday life; he/she was created by the conditions of everyday life. And lm had the unique potential to reveal this interrelationship. In 1927, Viktor Shklovskii published an article entitled Wool, Glass and Lace, in which he praised Iutkevichs Kruzheva and Rooms Ukhaby for two things: for attempting to capture real workers everyday life and for a clearly expressed privileging of the material [ustanovka na material].11 The rst category is straightforward: like other critics, Shklovskii argued that Soviet byt had yet to make its appearance in lm; the urgent task was to show rabochii byt as photogenic.12 Shklovskiis second criterion for praisethe lms privileging of the materialbears further consideration. It was the duty of lm, Shklovskii suggested, to convey our relationship to the object [predmet]. And that relationship, he suggested, must be intensely material. The task of lm was to provoke a renewed relationship with the object world. Shklovskiis statement brings together two preoccupations that were evident in debates in the lm press from late 1927 until late 1933 and points to an important focus on material that underlay discussions of how to represent the new Soviet subject on screen. Five years after Shklovskiis article, critics Mikhail Bleiman and Nikolai Iezuitov each wrote substantial multipart essays in the journal Sovetskoe kino in which they identied the period 1928 33 as marking an evolution towards a new psychological focus in cinema. Bleiman looked back to 1928 as a point when, in reaction to
8. Abram Room, Moi kinoubezhdeniia, Sovetskii ekran, 1926, no. 8: 5. 9. I. Davydov, Order na zhizn, Sovetskoe kino, 1928, no. 1:5. 10. N. K., Byt ideologicheskii, 5. 11. Viktor Shklovskii, Sherst, steklo i kruzheva, Kino, no. 32 (9 August 1927): 2. Shklovskii also discussed a further lm, Boris Svetozavrovs Zolotoe runo (Golden Fleece, released 3 April 1928), about wool production. 12. The term fotogenichnyi had particular resonance in the lm press of this period. It was drawn from French lm theorist Louis Delluc, whose Photognie (Paris, 1920) was published in Russian in 1924: Lui Deliuk [Louis Delluc], Fotogeniia, trans. T. I. Sorokin, with introduction by Iu. Potekhin (Moscow, 1924).
594
Slavic Review
the anti-psychologism that had characterized the rst half of the decade, Soviet cinema had engaged in a search for a new stylespecically, for a way of rendering the particular psychology of Sovietness on screen.13 Iezuitov concurred, describing 1928 as the beginning of a move towards a cinema of socialist emotions/feelings [sotsialisticheskikh chuvstv], which was replacing the cinema of concepts/abstractions [poniatii] that had dominated the previous decade.14 The shift identied by Bleiman and Iezuitov, from Shklovskiis privileging of the material to a cinema of feelings, is my focus here, an evolution of preoccupations from the material to the emotional. I will suggest that, in key lms produced between 1928 and 1933, the move towards feeling can be traced through changes in the representation of sensory experience, of the material. Feeling Soviet Filmmakers interest in sensory experienceand sensory reeducation can be linked to a broader movement in Soviet culture of the 1920s. The revolutionary project was, I suggest, a unique attempt to create new models of human experience to correspond to the new political order, to fulll Karl Marxs call for an emancipation of the senses.15 In this respect, it was an attempt to shape sensory experience itself. According to Marx, after all, the sensuous world was not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society.16 As such, a new political and social order could and should create a new sensuous world. In related terms, Jacques Rancire has described the French Revolution as bringing about a new conguration of the sensible, a new sensorium.17 Rancire describes a cultural shaping of the human sensorium that is important for my purposes: culture, in all its forms, participated in the project of creating the new Soviet subject, promoting new models of sensory experience. It is in terms of this broader sensory reeducation that we must con13. Mikhail Bleiman, Chelovek v sovetskom lme 1: Istoriia odnoi oshibki, Sovetskoe kino, 1933, nos. 5 6: 48 57. This was the rst of three parts. Chelovek v sovetskom lme 2: Filma obozrenie, Sovetskoe kino, 1933, no. 8: 51 60; Chelovek v sovetskom lme 3: V poiskakh novogo stilia, Sovetskoe kino, 1933, no. 9: 27 42. 14. Nikolai Iezuitov, O stiliakh sovetskogo kino, Sovetskoe kino, 1933, nos. 5 6: 44. This was a continuation of an article published in the previous issue of the journal: O stiliakh sovetskogo kino (kontseptsiia razvitiia sovetskogo kinoiskusstva), Sovetskoe kino, 1933, nos. 3 4: 3555. The publication was a transcript of a speech presented to the Komakademiia on 22 April 1933. Both Iezuitov and Bleiman made frequent reference to Piotrovskii, Khudozhestvennye techeniia v sovetskom kino. 15. For further support for this claim, see Emma Widdis, Sew Yourself Soviet: The Pleasures of Textile in the Machine Age, in Evgenii Dobrenko and Marina Balina, eds., Petried Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style (London, 2009), 11533. 16. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Parts I and III, trans. and ed. R. Pascal (New York, 1947), 35. 17. Jacques Rancire, Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 10, at www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/ranciere.html (last accessed 6 June 2012).
595
sider the relationship between material and feelings in the cinema press. The project to create a new man in Soviet culture is well documented.18 It is most famously expressed in Lev Trotskiis Literature and Revolution: Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings . . . to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type.19 Trotskiis suggestion that this elevation of the self would be carried out by social construction and psycho-physical self-education points to the complex matrix of society-body-mind that was at the heart of discussions of psychology in this period.20 How was the relationship between emotion and sensory experience theorized and discussed? And how did it lter down into the discourse of lm? Many Bolshevik luminaries were interested in psychology, and discussion of psychological and physiological science had a prominent place in public discourse.21 Nikolai Bukharin, chief ideologue of the party during the 1920s, touched on psychology and neurophysiology repeatedly, as David Joravsky says, always with evasive vagueness.22 In the words of psychologist and pedologist Aron Zalkind in 1929: In the USSR as nowhere else enormous attention is drawn to the study of human personality.23 As psychologist Lev Vygotskii phrased it: In the new society, our [psychological] science will be at the center of life.24 Debate in these elds was marked by the ambitious ideal of forging a specically Marxist framework for psychological sciencea science that would describe a renewed relationship between inner and outer life, between mind and body, self and world. It is useful here to consider two terms, chuvstvo (feeling/emotion) and oshchushchenie (feeling/sensation), that have particular weight in the linked discussions of material and feelings in the lm press. In simple terms, chuvstva are subjective, oshchushcheniia are objective.25 And in early Soviet Russia, this distinction had vital ideological sig18. See, for example, Rolf Hellebust, Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution (Ithaca, 2003). Hellebust addresses the concept of the manufacture of new Soviet man in terms relevant for this study. 19. L. D. Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1923), 189. Published in English as Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor, 1975), 256. 20. Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia, 189. 21. Many articles on psychology were published in major newspapers: see, for example, I. V. Frankford, G. I. Chelpanov v roli Marksista-psikhologa, Pravda, 24 October 1926, 2. See David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History (Oxford, 1989), 210, 224, 505n 4. According to Margarete Vhringer, of 55 institutions organized by Narkompros during the 1920s, 24 were explicitly linked to physiology and psychology: Margarete Vhringer, Professionalisiertes Laientum: Nikolaj Ladovskijs Psychotechnisches Labor fr Architektur, in Matthias Schwarz, Wladimir Velminski, and Torben Philipp, eds., Laien, Lektren, Laboratorien: Knste und Wissenschaften in Russland 18601960 (Frankfurt, 2008), 333. 22. Joravsky, Russian Psychology, 212. 23. Aron Zalkind, in Estestvoznanie i marksizm, 1929, no. 3: 22, cited in Joravsky, Russian Psychology, 250. 24. Lev Vygotskii, Istoricheskii smysl psikhologicheskogo krizisa, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (Moscow, 1982), 1:435. 25. It is important to note, however, that chuvstvo also most directly translates the English sense (the ve senses: touch, smell, etc.). See, for example, E. Mangold, Organy chuvstv cheloveka (Moscow-Leningrad, 1925).
596
Slavic Review
nicance. The status of emotion was complex. Individual emotion, after all, was a bourgeois construct, a remnant of the old orderand a threat to the new. From a simplistic communist perspective (famously satirized in Evgenii Zamiatins novel My [We, 1921]), emotions needed to be regulated and controlled in the creation of the socialist collective; in Iurii Oleshas 1927 novel Zavist (Envy), the disaffected intelligent Ivan Babichev has invented Ophelia, the pinnacle of his conspiracy of emotions (zagovor chuvstv), which seeks to safeguard human emotion in the collectivist machine age. Mark Steinberg and Gregory Carleton, among others, have explored how the making of the Soviet proletariat was envisaged as a remaking of romantic and sexual feeling, most famously expressed in Aleksandra Kollontais proclamation of revolutionary feelings.26 In her open letter of 1923, Make Way for the Winged Eros, Kollontai called for a communist victory in worldview (mirovozzrenie) and feelings, a complete transformation of the sexual and social order.27 What, then, did Iezuitov mean when he called for a cinema of feelings (chuvstv)? What was to be the specicity of Soviet feelings, and how were they linked with oshchushcheniia? Oshchushchenie, dened by Vladimir Lenin in his Materialism and Empiriocriticism (written in 1908, published in Moscow in 1920) as the direct connection between consciousness and the external world was a key term in Soviet psychology of this period.28 In Lenins much-quoted phrase, oshchushchenie was the transformation of the energy of external excitation into a state of consciousness.29 In its emphasis on the sensory experience of the body as a determinant of consciousness, this denition signals the positivist-materialist emphasis of early Soviet physiological and psychological science. Whatever the differences between the several schools of Russian psychologists, they were broadly united by a materialist monism that viewed mind and body as a single reality, which could therefore be describedand ultimately shapedby a single science.30 The boundaries between physiology and psychology were blurred, and psychology became a science of the relationship between the human subject and the objective material world that surrounds and forms him or her.31
26. Aleksandra Kollontai, Liubov pchel trudovykh (1923). Mark D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910 1925 (Ithaca, 2002); Gregory Carleton, Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia (Pittsburgh, 2005). See also Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997). 27. Aleksandra Kollontai, Dorogu krylatomu erosu, Molodaia gvardiia, 1923, no. 3: 11121. 28. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow, 1972), 14:17362. This quotation is drawn from chapter 1, Oshchushcheniia i kompleksy oshchushchenii (Sensations and Complexes of Sensations), cited in Bol shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, ed. Otto Iu. Shmidt, 1st ed. (Moscow, 1926 49), 43:727. 29. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 727. 30. Joravsky, Russian Psychology, 264. 31. The dominant movement in Soviet psychology before 1930 was the study of reexesthe study of the physiological responses of the human subject to objective stimuli, and their link with cognition and emotion. The predominance of discussion of reexes, as Irina Sirotkina has shown, reects the materialist fashion that dominated debate
597
This foregrounding of the body was central to the sensory project in early Soviet culture. For if the psyche was formed by the sensory encounter between the body and the material world, then it followed that changes in the conditions that provoke or create oshchushcheniia could bring about changes in psychological make-up could create a new Soviet subject. For Zalkind, the person of the future would be distinguished by a new synthesis between mind and bodya particular sensibility of the organism to the impulses of the cerebral cortex.32 He or she would, moreover, have more perfectly realized sensory organsthe ability to see further, to smell and taste better.33 In Bukharins words in 1927, the profound reorganization that we call the cultural revolution has a socio-biological equivalent that reaches down to the very physiological nature of the [human] organism.34 Avant-garde lmmakers and artists during the 1920s were very much aware of the work being carried out in psychological and physiological science.35 In Mekhanika golovnogo mozga (Mechanics of the Brain, 1925), for example, Vsevolod Pudovkin explored Ivan Pavlovs experiments with conditioned reexes.36 Film itself, indeed, had a role to play in the sensory remaking of Soviet man and woman. John MacKay rightly describes lmmaker Dziga Vertovs main mode of the 1920s as the production or modulation of the senses through the lm-eye and its cinematic feelings/sensations (oshchushcheniia), and Oksana Bulgakowas recent work
in many elds in Soviet Russia in this period. Irina Sirotkina, The Ubiquitous Reex and Its Critics in Post-Revolutionary Russia, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 32, no. 1 (March 2009): 70 81. It was this principle that underlay psychotechnics (psikhotekhnika) and Industrial Psychology (the practical application of psychological knowledge), most famously realized in Aleksei Gastevs experiments in his Central Institute of Labor (Tsentralnyi institut truda), which sought to create the optimal conditions for efcient, rationalized labor processes. 32. Aron Zalkind, Die Psychologie des Menschen der Zukunft, in B. Groys and M. Hagemeister, eds., Die neue Menschheit: Biopolitische Utopien in Russland des 20 Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt, 2001), 648. 33. Ibid., 671. 34. Bukharins Speech to the First Pedological Conference in 1927, cited in Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, trans. Noah and Maria Rubins (Boulder, Colo., 1997), 264 65. 35. Christina Kiaers illuminating discussion of avant-garde engagements with material objects has traced the spread of these ideas into product design; constructivist projects for clothing, architecture, furniture, and even crockery reveal the impulse to reform the self through a reconstructed material environment. Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, Mass., 2007). 36. See Margarete Vhringer, Avantgarde und Psychotechnik: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik der Wahrnehmungsexperimente in der frhen Sowjetunion (Gttingen, 2007), 107 68; also Amy Sargeant, Russian Physiology and Pudovkins The Mechanics of the Brain (The Behavior of Animals and Man), Vsevolod Pudovkin: Classic Films of the Soviet Avant-Garde (London, 2000), 29 45. Barbara Wurm has noted the importance of cinema in Gastevs psychotechnics. See Barbara Wurm, Gastevs Medien: Das Foto-Kino-Labor des CIT, in Schwarz, Velminski, and Philipp, eds., Laien, Lektren, Laboratorien, 34793. Ute Holl has noted the inuence of Bekhterev on Dziga Vertov. Ute Holl, Die Bildung des Menschen im Kino-Eksperiment. Laboratorien,Apparaturen und Dziga Vertovs Kinowahrheit als Medientheorie, in Schwarz, Velminski, and Philipp, eds., Laien, Lektren, Laboratorien, 299 325.
598
Slavic Review
on sound discusses early Soviet lms project of sensory reeducation.37 Scholars have tended, however, to discuss the interconnections between Soviet cinema and psychological experiment in terms of theories of cinema as a mode of seeing; less attention has been given to the tactile implications of lmmakers interest in oshchushchenie.38 We should also be alert to the particular ideological inection that lmmakers interest in oshchushchenie assumed between 1928 and 1933, and its role in the transition to socialist realist cinema. It is my contention that the rst utopian project of sensory education reached a peak in Soviet cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s and that it can be seen as an attempt to bring together two apparently contradictory preoccupations and imperatives: rst, the avant-garde interest in materiality (faktura) and the broader preoccupation with the remaking/conditioning of physical experience; second, a growing interest in individual psychology and emotion, and increasing political pressure to nd a way of representing real individuals on screen. The specicity of the period 1928 33 is important here. Interest in psychological theoriesand in the possibility of a remaking of human psychologypeaked in Soviet Russia in these years.39 The debates of this period had, however, a particular tone, which provides useful background to parallel debates and transformations in the cultural sphere. Loren Graham suggests that at the end of the 1920s a battle took place between those militant materialists who hoped to swallow up psychology in a purely physiological understanding of mental activity and defenders of the psyche and consciousness as a category.40 He suggests that this battle ended, in the early 1930s, in victory for the defenders of the psyche. The body was no longer a key to the transformation of consciousness.41 This movement away from the utopian ambitions that underlay the physiological emphasis on oshchushchenie as a key to the reformation of the inner self, and towards a more conventional understanding of individual subjectivity, was echoed in literary and cinematic shifts towards socialist realism. It is in this context that we must situate discussion of the
37. John MacKay, Disorganized Noise: Enthusiasm and the Ear of the Collective, Kinokul tura, no. 7 ( January 2005): 4 5 at www.kinokultura.com/articles/jan05-mackay. html (last accessed 6 June 2012). Oksana Bulgakowa has also worked extensively on lms sensory apparatus: Oksana Bulgakova, Sovetskii slukhoglas: Kino i ego organy chuvstv (Moscow, 2010). Note also that much has been written about Eisensteins theories of perception and the extent to which his notion of sensuous thought was inuenced by Lev Vygotskiis work on inner speech: David Bordwell, Eisensteins Epistemological Shift, Screen 15, no. 4 (1974): 29 46. 38. Although Bulgakowa acknowledges the signicance of tactile seeing she does not develop this idea. Bulgakova, Sovetskii slukhoglas, 9. 39. Several new psychological periodicals were established in 1928 29: Psikhologiia (closed 1932); Pedologiia (closed 1932), and Psikhoziologiia truda i psikhotekhniki (renamed Sovetskaia psikhotekhnika in 1932 and closed in 1934); see Alex Kozulin, Psychology in Utopia: Towards a Social History of Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), x. 40. Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (London, 1966), 365 66. 41. Ibid., 366. Industrial psychology was, in Etkinds words, blasted to pieces in 1934. Etkind, Eros of the Impossible, 170.
599
representation of individual psychology and feelings in lm between 1928 and 1933. The transition was not straightforward, however, and the battle not easily won. Films such as Kruzheva and Ukhaby can be seen as attempts to create a model of individual emotion as formed in relation to tactile experience; inner life would be formed by outer life. This was a model of cinematic subjectivity that attempted to reconcile two competing imperatives in psychological debate. Of Glass and Men As Bleiman suggested, the end of the 1920s saw a search for a model of cinematic individuality that would be appropriate to the new age.42 Against this background, Ukhaby and Kruzheva were consistently cited as examples of a new direction. They were described as komsomolskie l my and praised for their treatment of contemporary Soviet material and, specically, rabochii byt.43 Both lms located their action in factories and featured what Room called production sequences (sequences focusing on factory machinery). The crew for Ukhaby spent three days and nights in the Gus-Khrustalnyi and Velikodvore glass factories near Vladimir.44 Iutkevichs group lmed on location in the Livers lace factory on Savvinskaia Embankment in Moscow. Beyond the search for authentic factory life, the specicity of these factories is important. Both were prerevolutionary; both were also producers of luxury goods.45 Neither lace nor crystal was ideologically central to the Bolshevik industrialization project. In contrast to the mass production of textiles, for example, lace epitomized bourgeois ideals of beauty and ornament. Similarly, the decorative crystal featured in Ukhaby was ideologically out of step with the design imperatives of the novyi byt. Why, then, did Room and Iutkevich choose these particular industrial contexts? The answer to the question must lie in the cinematographic potential of the materials of lace and glass themselves. It was this that Shklovskii described as the privileging of the material.46 The cinematic capturing of
42. Bleiman, Chelovek v sovetskom lme 1, 49. 43. Irina Grashchenkova, Vospitanie chuvstv: O stsenarii i lme Ukhaby, Iz istorii kino (Moscow, 1974), 9:87. The Soviet lm industry at this time was still producing historical melodramas such as Ledianoi dom (Ice House, dir. Konstantin Eggert, 1927) and Iurii Tarichs Kryl ia kholopa (Wings of a Serf, 1926), and the overall repertoire was by no means dominated by the kind of revolutionary lms exemplied by the work of Eisenstein and other avant-garde directors. Rooms Tret ia Meshchanskaia (Bed and Sofa, 1927) was another lm praised for its new direction; Friedrikh Ermlers Parizhskii sapozhnik (The Parisian Shoemaker, 1927) was also much discussed. I have selected Ukhaby and Kruzheva as case studies because of their focus on the faktura of materials, but the broader endeavor certainly extended into the work of other lmmakers, and the work of Ermler and Ivan Cherviakov (Moi syn, [My Son, 1928]) is particularly important in this respect. 44. Abram Room, Kak delalis Ukhaby, Kino, no. 44 (1 November 1927): 5. The crew included cameraman D. Feldman and V. Kuznetsov in charge of lighting and Viktor Aden as khudozhnik (set designer). 45. The Gus-Khrustalnyi, founded in 1756, is one of the oldest crystal factories in Europe 46. Shklovskii, Sherst, 2.
600
Slavic Review
the texture, the faktura, of glass and lace was, he claimed, not just a formal imperative, but an ideological one. It could enable lm to articulate a new relationship with the material world. This term, faktura, had considerable weight in discussions of lm during the 1920s and early 1930s. While it has no single translation into English, it is best understood as texture or materiality. Faktura was an important concept for the Soviet artistic avant-garde, part of a broader emphasis on the sensory rediscovery of the material world.47 In the cinema press, the term had a broad range of application. At its most basic, good cinematic faktura described authentic materials, and the combination of set, lighting, and camera work that revealed them most effectively.48 At a more theoretical level, experiments in faktura were explorations of lms capacity to reveal the sensory immediacy of things. In Ukhaby and Kruzheva, I suggest, faktura was used as an index of revolutionary transformation itself. Ukhaby has not been preserved, and our knowledge of it is therefore limited to the script, extant stills, and reviews and debate in the cinema press.49 The narrative is one of moral education. Young Pavel and Tania marry, but Pavel nds himself drawn to another worker, Nastia, and leaves his wife. The lm charts Pavels public shaming, repentance, and eventual reconciliation with Tania. In the critical press, much discussion focused on Pavels narrative in relation to the moral codes of marriage, and the role of the collective in upholding them. Other reviewers praised the lms realistic portrayal of rabochii byt.50
47. For an excellent account of the avant-garde understanding of faktura, see Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley, 2005). For further analysis of the term in relation to lm of this period, see Emma Widdis, Faktura: Depth and Surface in Early Soviet Set Design, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 3, no. 1 (March 2009): 532. 48. Set designer Sergei Kozlovskii, for example, recalled the mid-1920s as a period when he sought new types of faktura, emphasizing an interest in different types of material surface. Kozlovskii cited in G. I. Miasnikov, Ocherki istorii sovetskogo kinodekoratsionnogo iskusstva (1918 1930) (Moscow, 1975), 45. In 1925, Sergei Iutkevich criticized the poor quality of Soviet cinematography for not exploiting the faktura of different materials, for making silk look like calico. Sergei Iutkevich, Plate kartiny, Sovetskii ekran, 1925, no. 39: 7. 49. The script was published by Irina Grashchenkova in 1974. Abram Room and Viktor Shklovskii, Ukhaby, Iz istorii kino (Moscow, 1974), 9:96 121. Like Rooms two previous lms, Predatel (The Traitor, 1926), and Tret ia Meshchanskaia, the screenplay was written by Shklovskii, adapted from a short story by A. Dmitriev. It is notable, indeed, that both Ukhaby and Kruzheva drew their screenplays from short stories by rabkors (rabochie korrespondenty). Jeffrey Brooks, Public and Private Values in the Soviet Press, 19211928, Slavic Review 48, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 16 35; Michael Gorham, Tongue-Tied Writers: The Rabselkor Movement and the Voice of the New Intelligentsiia in Early Soviet Russia, Russian Review 55, no. 3 ( July 1996): 412 29. 50. (Worker) A. Vasilev, Eshche ob Ukhabakh, Kino, no. 9 (28 February 1928): 3. The lm was not universally considered successful in this respect, however: writing in the leftist Kinofront, M. Shneider accused Room of treating the moral and domestic issues of the lm in a retrogressive fashion, with its resolution based on traditional bourgeois familial structures: seeing Tania returned to a conventional relationship, rather than liberated and granted her independence. M. Shneider, Ukhaby, Kinofront, 1928, no. 1: 19 22.
601
In plot and theme, the lm was a realistic, morally educational lm about factory life. The material (glass) was tied to plot and ideological message (the manufacture, of the new Soviet person) through key intertitles at the beginning (Do you know how glass is made?) and end (That is how glass is made.). Like glass, Pavel has been made; he has been reeducated by the collective. It is clear from extant stills, and from the screenplay, however, that glass was not merely a metaphor, but a material preoccupation. The faktura of glass, and glass manufacture, provided a focus for the lms visual style.51 Large glass bottles appear lled with light and air, like wine, faces are shot through glass of differing thicknesses, and highly polished surfaces reected human gures.52 The moon streams through the window and illuminates the machinery, and the glass of bottles gleams.53 These formal elements were criticized in a number of contemporary reviews: Shneider, for example, described the lms treatment of glass and crystal production as aesthetic rather than functional.54 This apparent tension between thematic and formal preoccupations is symptomatic of lmmaking in this transitional period. It is here, indeed, that my interest lies. I suggest that Ukhaby attempted to present the evolution of a new kind of Soviet subject precisely through a changing relationship with the material; the formal experiment was central to Rooms ideological purpose. In Shklovskiis terms, these experiments demonstrate a privileging of the material [ustanovka na material] and a relationship to the object. As such, they alert us to the use of materiality as an index of evolving models of Soviet subjectivity. Rooms writings are a testament to his preoccupation with the cinematic treatment of things and the creation of a more fully sensory spectatorial experience. In 1926, he proclaimed that we convey a sensation/feeling [oshchushchenie] much more effectively when we do so with the help of a thing, an object.55 Pre-release statements about his 1928 lm Tret ia Meshchanskaia (Bed and Sofa) take a more extreme position, suggesting that things not only reect but may even create the inner life of those that live with them: This room on the real Third Meshchanskaia Street . . . is populated by things . . . Together they all live, breathe, interfere in peoples lives and keep them in close captivity.56 The heroine of Tret ia Meshchanskaia is trapped by the bourgeois world of material possessions; her relationship with the world must be remade. In Ukhaby, similarly, the process of manufacture itself is redemptive: Pavels physical commitment to factory work, his tactile engagement in
51. See Julia Bekman Chadaga, Light in Captivity: Spectacular Glass and Soviet Power in the 1920s and 1930s, Slavic Review 66, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 82 105, for discussion of the particular potency of glass as substance and metaphor in the Soviet cultural imagination. 52. Grashchenkova, Vospitanie chuvstv, 90. 53. Room and Shklovskii, Ukhaby, 97. 54. Shneider, Ukhaby, 21. 55. Room, Moi kinoubezhdeniia, 5. 56. Tretia Meshchanskaia (beseda s rezhisserom A. M. Roomom), Kino, no. 37 (14 September 1926): 12. Emphasis added. Cited in translation by Julian Graffy in Bed and Sofa (London, 2001), 11.
602
Slavic Review
glass manufacture, brings his emotional rebirth. For the spectator, whose attention is consistently drawn to faktura, the lm enacts a parallel process, engaging the eye in a more fully sensory appreciation of the material properties of its lmed objects. Rooms sense of the interrelationship between the human subject and the world was often echoed in the lm press in the late 1920s and points to a broader materialist impetusa frequent emphasis on the interrelationship between self and environment. Emotions chuvstvawere viewed as a product of a dialogue between the individual and their material context. In the words of one critic in 1928, The human individual is not a homunculus, locked up in a transparent cube.57 Film, another writer proclaimed, makes us sense [vvodit v oshchushchenie] everyday life rst and foremost through the representation of surroundings, of objects.58 Cinema would not only reveal the interrelationship between the individual and the material world but could aim to alter it. As such, in lms of this period, changes in the relationship between people and things act as a revealing index of shifting ideological codes. Lace, Handiwork, and Material Like Ukhaby, Kruzheva tells a tale of moral reeducation.59 It tackles the problem of hooliganism and shows the gradual reeducation of undisciplined youth in a lace factory, their transformation into model Soviet workers.60 The lm had a mixed reception: although the Sovkino administration was initially negative, public screenings and discussions offered much more positive appraisals, describing workers praise of the relevance of the theme, and the lms head-on confrontation with the problem of hooliganism.61 Many reviewers echoed P. Neznamov, who de57. K. Feldman, Byt v sovetskom kino, Sovetskii ekran, 1928, no. 27: 4. This was published as part of a cluster of articles in this issue, together with an editorial, Trudnyi etap, 3, which called for a debate on the problem of byt. 58. N.K., Byt ideologicheskii, 5. Emphasis added. 59. It is no accident that Kruzheva and Ukhaby shared many thematic and formal preoccupations. By 1927, Iutkevich had worked twice with Room, serving as set designer for Predatel and Tret ia Meshchanskaia, Shklovskiis inuence on both lmmakers was also signicant: it was he who suggested that the short story Stengaz be adapted into the screenplay for Kruzheva, attracted by the setting of the lm in a lace factory, which set lm on materialist tracks. Sergei Iutkevich, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, vol. 1, Molodost (Moscow, 1990), 327. 60. The stengazeta (wall newspaper, a single-page newspaper posted on a wall in the factory) of the original story plays a vital role in creating a sense of collective responsibility. 61. L. Vaks, ODSK na prosmotre Kruzhev, Kino, no. 21 (22 May 1928): 5; O Kruzhevakh, Kino, no. 17 (24 April 1928): 3. According to Iutkevich, Kruzheva was a victim of a dispute between Sovkino and RAPP (Leopold Averbakh, Aleksandr Fadeev, Iurii Libedinskii, Pavel Kirshon), in which members of RAPP accused Sovkino of being market-led. Probably as a result of this difcult time in the studio, the lm was negatively received by the Sovkino authorities, and its release was delayedbut the lm was, Iutkevich recalls, supported by RAPP. It was eventually released to generally positive acclaim (especially in open meetings held in ODSK (Obshchestvo druzei sovetskogo kino) and ARK (Assotsiatsiia revoliutsionnykh kinematograi). It was also, according to Iutkevich himself, respon-
603
scribed it as a struggle against the disorganization of youth and heroic in its determination to face up to the challenge of representing workers life on screen.62 In general, the lm was considered a major step forward in terms of the representation of Soviet reality: This is life shown in real, familiar detail and muddle. People are shown in ux, changing in relation to other people.63 Kruzhevas engagement with the broader task of emotional and sensory reeducation extended beyond its theme, however. In his memoirs, Iutkevich described it as a polemic with cinematic precedent even with the great Master Eisenstein. He wanted, he says, to replace the latters faceless masses with concrete heroes and to make a lm without a love story, to break away from prototypical (western) plotlines.64 Thus Iutkevich positioned this project as nothing less than the search for a model of cinematic individuality without bourgeois elementsa freeing of the cinematic hero from romantic complications, into a fully realized place within the new collective. Here, the director was part of the broader movement in Soviet lmmaking that we have identied, the shift towards a cinema of specically socialist feelings. Soviet cinema was entering a new stage. Its task was to nd a way of representing a remodelled psychology, a new emotional framework. Iutkevichs response to this changing agenda lay not only in theme and characterization, I suggest, but also in his treatment of material. Just as glass in Ukhaby played a role at both thematic and formal levels, so here lace occupies a central position. The lm begins with an extended sequence of shots of lace-making machinery, plunging the spectator into the material of its title. But it pictures an unexpected relationship between handicraft and technology through the specicity of lace.65 The delicate ligree of the lace contrasts with the block shapes and the horizontal and vertical movements of the machinery (gure 1). We look at the intricate surface patterns of the lace, and through its delicate transparency to the machinery beyond (gure 2).66 As a result of this initial foregrounding, the machinery itself, its cogs and levers, later appear like a metal fretwork or lace, an assemblage of rapidly moving shapes and patterns (gure 3). Thus, the iconic production sequences of Soviet montage cinema are transformed into something subtler and ideologically more complex. Maiia Turovskaia and Iurii Khaniutin suggest that Iutkevichs
sible for Iutkevich being invited, by Fridrikh (Friedrich) Ermler, to join the Leningrad branch of Sovkino. See Iutkevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:33132. 62. P. Neznamov, Kruzheva, Sovetskii ekran, 1928, no. 23: 9. Vladimir Nedobrovo praised the lms recognizable characters and its picture of rabochii byt. Vladimir Nedobrovo, O Kruzhevakh, Leningradskaia gazeta kino, no. 27 (1 July 1928): 3. 63. Cited in Vaks, ODSK na prosmotre Kruzhev, 5. 64. Iutkevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:330. 65. Shklovskii, Sherst, 2. 66. In Eisensteins October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928), we see a similar juxtaposition of the ligree of lace against block shapes of machinery, when the Womens Battalion hangs a lace bra over the solid blocks of a billiard cue stand. Eisensteins own interest in lmic faktura, of course, merits much further exploration, as one of the key sources of the avant-garde interest in material.
604
Slavic Review
Figures 1, 2, and 3. Mechanical lace (Stills from Kruzheva).
achievement in this lm is to humanize machines.67 I would suggest, rather, that he de-industrializes machines, bringing mechanical production closer to handiwork and craft. The contrast between the mechanized efciency of this, and subsequent, production sequences, and the soft, fragile unwinding of the nished product as it drops into a bucket at the end of the production line, is striking (gure 4). It is emphasized here by a cut to an anvil, hammering steel. The symbolic message, we understand, is that lace production too is a form of smelting, a part of the industrial endeavor. Again, however, this message is unclear; the blacksmith, after all, is a symbolic gure not of mechanized production but of a productive encounter between man and metal, between tradition and modernity. In the same way, Iutkevich foregrounds the relationship between worker and product: the nal nished lace is handled, stretched out, the textile brushing against the workers face (gure 5); its delicate patterns are used as a lter and then a dissolve, leading the spectators eye through to a shot of workers on the factory oor. These shots of lace and lace-manufacture engage the spectator in a particular sensory relationship with the lm screen. They might, I suggest, be viewed as what recent lm theorists have described as haptic images. That is, they encourage the spectator into an imaginatively tactile relationship with their material. The eye operates as an organ of touch. This capacity of lm to offer a form of perception that transcends the
67. Maiia I. Turovskaia and Iurii M. Khaniutin, Sergei Iutkevich (Moscow, 1968), 46.
605
Figures 4 and 5. The nished product (Stills from Kruzheva).
purely visual is eloquently captured by contemporary lm theorist Vivian Sobchak, describing her experience of the opening scene of Jane Campions The Piano (1993) as follows: despite the blurring of the visual image, Sobchak writes: my ngers knew what I was looking at. This imaginary tactile experience occurs, she suggests, because we see and comprehend and feel lms with our entire bodily being, informed by the full history and carnal knowledge of our acculturated sensorium.68 Such theories of embodied spectatorship have proliferated in lm theoretical writing over the last two decades and have elaborated rich models of how certain techniques of lmic representation can encourage haptic lookinga form of spectatorship that, according to Laura Marks, tends to move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture.69 Iutkevichs shots of lace are exemplary in this regard: the spectator encounters the surface materiality of the textile, its intricate construction, its woven threads. The material is defamiliarized (we do not simply recognize it) and then reencountered, or felt. As such, our spectatorial experience is transformed from the purely optical into something embodied and tactile. This notion of hapticity proves a useful paradigm through which to consider this lm more broadly and prompts us to evaluate the status of touch in the representation of socialist feelings. Kruzheva, indeed, might be read as an extended commentary on handwork (rukodelie, craft) and its relationship with technology. Hands feature prominently in the lm. It is no accident, surely, that one of the most curious features of the lms seta revolving shell (a nod to art-deco) that emerges and descends from within the youth clubs stagereveals to us an old woman (custodian of the club), endlessly crocheting, and apparently oblivious to her unusual setting. The art of crochet, like lace and lace-making (immortalized in Vermeers famous painting, The Lace Maker), is emblematic of manual labor. In the Soviet context, the status of manual labor was complex. On the one hand, the cult of the machine, and of technology,
68. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, 2004), 63. 69. Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (Durham, 2000), 162.
606
Slavic Review
appeared to relegate the manual to a retrograde, premodern era. On the other, the validation of the manualthe power of the ordinary worker and his or her capable handswas highly appropriate to the ideological discourse of the new age. Hands, indeed, play an important role in the iconography of the Soviet avant-garde.70 In Vertovs Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), the hands of a woman worker are privileged (and the lm, like this one, dwells extensively on spindles and mechanized weaving), and, as the camera dwells on Svilovas hands at the editing table, Vertov makes an explicit link between the handiwork of weaving and that of lmmaking itself. Varvara Stepanovas 1933 poster, Results of the First Five-Year Plan, features a hand unrolling a scrolled map; El Lissitzkys series of self-portraits as Konstruktor (1924) feature the artists hand holding a compass; Elizar Langmans 1934 photograph, Studentka, shows its subjects hand in close-up, again holding a compass. In these images, the hand is a symbol of the reconstructed Soviet self, the artist turned worker, or the newly educated youth, building a new world. How then should we understand the emphasis on hands and touching in Kruzheva and those other cultural products? Looking at the prevalence of hands in French surrealist texts and images, Kirsten Powell identies what she calls a kind of anti-modernist gesture: Even when hands are juxtaposed with machines or repeated elements that recall the factory assembly line, there is something that willfully counters the idea of mechanical reproduction in the ubiquitous presence of the hand, that timeless sign for declaring human presence, human marking, and art-making.71 In the Soviet case, by contrast, I suggest that the human hand functions as a symbol of a reanimated, sensory encounter with the world, and one that is certainly not opposed to the ideal of industrialization. In Kruzheva, it is linked to a sensory fascination with the material properties of things. White dinosaur bones, props to an unappealingly serious lecture (laid on as entertainment in the youth club), acquire material potency against an otherwise dark background. Bored youths, uninspired by the educational talk, play with wooden toys, and the camera dwells with fascination on the mechanical movement of wooden chickens heads, bobbing up and down. Elsewhere, the young protagonists fool around with gym equipment. In part, this interest in things could be viewed as evidence of Iutkevichs formalist leanings, as a cinematic transformation of the material world. This, indeed, was an accusation that contemporary critics made of the lm: Neznamov, for example, described the lm as cinematographically extravagant, overlled with attractions.72 Certainly, props and set design here point to a formal interest in the surface of the lm, and in how dif70. Susanna Strtling, Das buchstbliche Erscheinen und Verschwinden: Zur DeMaterialisierung von Schriftchen zwischen konstruktiv und konkret (El Lisickij und Carlfriedrich Claus), Plurale: Zeitschrift fr Denkversionen 0 (Berlin, 2001), 10739. 71. Kirsten H. Powell, Hands-on Surrealism, Art History 20, no. 4 (December 1997): 516 33. 72. Neznamov, Kruzheva, 77. See also Nedobrovo, O Kruzhevakh, 3; V. Strakhov, Kruzheva, Leningradskaia gazeta kino, no. 38 (8 July 1928): 2.
607
ferent material properties construct its visual impact. Yet this is a distinctly embodied and material cinematic formalism. It is the tactile quality of the objects on screen that we feel most profoundly: they interact directly with the human subject. They are touched on screen and, perhaps most signicantly, the cameras close relationship with them offers the spectator what Iutkevich called a revelation of the faktura of real materials.73 It encourages a synaesthetic substitution of the eye for the hand, offering the spectator an imaginatively tactile experience. And this, I suggest, aims to offer a fuller apprehension of the concrete reality of the object, to provide knowledge through the body as well as through the eye. The interest in materialitythe sense that cinema could enable a tactile encounter with the worldis evident in the writing of many lm theorists of this period. Walter Benjamin famously expresses this in his essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), which describes the penetration of reality made possible by the lm camera:
Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eyeif only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. . . . The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this uctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics.74
Cinemas unconcious optics allow us to recover aspects of life that we habitually ignore. They offer a more immediately sensory encounter with the world as lived. In similar terms, Hungarian lm theorist Bla Balzs described lm as uncovering the hidden mainsprings of a life we had thought we already knew so well and the intricate visual details of life.75 For Balazs and Benjamin, this gave lm the potential to redeem a sense of the material world that had, implicitly, been lost.76 And a similar ideologically driven redemptive impulse, I suggest, underpinned the discussion of byt in the Soviet lm press. Film had the capacity to forge a reanimated relationship between the human body and the material world that was a precondition for the new Soviet world. A key to this may be
73. Iutkevich, Plate kartiny, 7. 74. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Gerald Mast Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1992), 677. Emphasis added. 75. Bla Balzs , The Close-Up, in Mast, Cohen, and Braudy eds., Film Theory and Criticism, 260. Balzs lived in Moscow in the early 1930s, and his work was frequently published in the Soviet lm press. 76. Benjamins near-contemporary Siegfried Kracauer shared a similar view of lms redemptive potential, with particular political inection. For insightful analysis of his interest in lmic materiality and its political repercussions, see Miriam Hansen, With Skin and Hair: Kracauers Theory of Film, Marseille 1940, Critical Enquiry 19, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 437 69.
608
Slavic Review
found in Shklovskiis discussion of work on location for Ukhaby. Recalling the sights and sounds of factory life, Shklovskii tells a true story of small children, whose parents transport them around the factory in industrial trolleys instead of pushchairs: This is an industrial detail in everyday life, he proclaims: Life is built from such details.77 This statement bears analysis. Life is made out of details, Shklovskii tells us; and the role of cinema in this respect is twofold. First, lms must reveal those detailsmust bring us to an awareness of the real material conditions that shape everyday life. Second, lm must shape our relationship with those material conditions; it must offer the spectator a new sensory proximity with the world. The role of lm is to reveal the physical world. In so doing, it will redeem that physical world. The act of seeing or, more signicantly, sensingthe world afresh is one of reappropriation, discovery, or even remaking. This idea that an enhanced ability to see or feel the material world was a route to potential salvation had a potent echo in the early writings of several proletarian writers in the early to mid-1920s, and perhaps most strikingly in Andrei Platonov.78 Platonovs 1921 essay Proletarian Poetry described art as a means of enabling a more concrete knowledge of the material world, a closer relationship between matter and consciousness: Until now, what we have called the world is our image of the world. Now we are reaching a point where what we call the world is not our feeling for the world, but the world itself .79 Such heightened material knowledge of the world, Platonov suggested, was a precondition for the new Soviet subject: Salvation is not inside us but external to us. That is what we have discovered recently. More and more penetratingly, and with more attention, we peer into a world that we did not know before, and that we have still not fully discovered.80 Soviet man or woman would be constituted from the outside in, in concrete interrelationship with the material world. The capacity of lm in particular to provide this heightened knowledge, redeeming the physical world in all its plenitude, is a key to its considerable signicance, and revolutionary potential, in the Soviet context. Shklovskiis emphasis on the materiality of lm as provoking a more intense encounter with the world echoes his famous formulation in Art as Device (1919), describing the role of art as to make the stone [feel] stony, to provide a feeling/sensation [oshchushchenie] of things,
77. Shklovskii, Sherst, 2. 78. Steinberg has explored the mindfulness of emotion in the writings of early proletarian writers in detail. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination, 129 46 (esp. 129 36). 79. Andrei Platonov, Proletarskaia poeziia, Kuznitsa, no. 9 (1922): 28 29, reprinted in A. A. Platonov, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh (Moscow, 1985), 3:523. Emphasis added. 80. Platonov, Proletarskaia poeziia, 523. Platonov dened oshchushchenie and chuvstvo in this essay in terms opposite to those I have proposed here, describing oshchushchenie (along with intuition) as a false, subjectively created idea of the world and chuvstvo (along with consciousness) as an outwardly directed true understanding of the world. See Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination, 130. The complexities of these denitions notwithstanding, what is signicant is Platonovs clearly expressed focus on the encounter with the external, material world as the dening condition for the creation of a new subjecthood.
609
as they are seen, and not as they are recognized.81 Here, then, seeing became multisensory; and lm in particular, we might suggest, could offer an experience of vision as sensation.82 In the latter years of the 1920s, Shklovskiis avant-garde manifesto acquired a different ideological inection. In Kruzheva and Ukhaby Iutkevich and Rooms project was to reveal new Soviet reality, and subjectivity, as enmeshed in fakturaand specically in the faktura of industrial production. At a thematic level, faktura and specically manufacturehas the potential to reconstruct psychology. Characters are drawn into a renewed relationship with the material, which is a key to their social and personal redemption. At a broader level, the lms sought to offer the spectator a parallel, reanimated sensory encounter with the world. Lace: From Bourgeois Veil to Revolutionary Flag Why, though, did Iutkevich choose lace? It is an ornamental textile, the preserve of bourgeois luxury and individual erotic fantasy. As such, the cinematic reworking of this particular material in Iutkevichs lm reveals greater ideological and formal complexity than I have so far acknowledged and points to a key aspect of these cinematic explorations of texture and materialthe substitution of an alternative model of sensory fulllment for erotic pleasure. As if taking its cue from lace, a formal preoccupation with pattern and transparency can be traced through the lm. In one sequence, the stretched threads of the lace provide intricate patterns across the screen (gures 6 and 7); skeins of thread are echoed in shots of electrical wires silhouetted against the sky above the factory roof. In later shots, the geometric struts of electrical pylons form a kind of metallic lace (gure 8). Such designs are key to the lms visual style: interiors are framed by lace curtains; shadows create a trellis on the walls; windows are back-lit, patterning the screen.83 In part, these lace patterns are used to explore the relationship between surface and depth on the cinematic screen. They articulate the surface, but also invite us to look through that surface, both impeding and enabling vision, giving it a multisensory dimension. In this respect, Iutkevichs use of lace as visual lter echoes the work of French impressionist lmmakers.84 In the opening sequence of Dimitri Kirsanoffs Mnilmontant (1926), for example, lace provides a frame and lter for the cameras entrance
81. Viktor Shklovskii, Iskusstvo kak priem, O teorii prozy (Moscow, 1925), 12 [my translation]. Emphasis in the original; reprinted in English as Art as Device, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Scherr (Urbana, Ill., 1991), 115. 82. For further discussion of the potency of Shklovskiis formula for lm studies, see Annie van der Oever, ed., Ostranenie: On Strangeness and the Moving Image (Amsterdam, 2010). 83. Iutkevich was explicit about his use of shadow as a decorative element in lm: Sergei Iutkevich, Dekoriruem svetom, Sovetskii ekran, 1925, no. 29: 43, reprinted in Iutkevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:304 5. 84. I think of the work of Jean Epstein and Dimitri Kirsanoff in particular. Iutkevich, indeed, recalls how he had seen parts of Epsteins Le coeur dle (1923) and Kirsanoffs M-
610
Slavic Review
Figures 6 and 7. Threads of interconnection (Stills from Kruzheva).
Figure 8. The lacework of electricity (Still from Kruzheva).
into new spaces. There, however, lace is explicitly sensual and feminine. Like a veil, it simultaneously conceals and reveals; it invites voyeurism, luring the eye of the spectator into depth.85 This association between lace and sensuality is familiar, but it has important ideological resonance in the Soviet context. In much cinema of the 1920s, both heavily patterned textiles and lace acted as ideological shorthand for bourgeois aspiration and ideological impurity. In Rooms Tretia Meshchanskaia, for example, Liudmilas face is symbolically obscured when latticework casts a lace-like shadow.86 In Vertovs Chelovek s kinoapparatom, the camera observes the awakening of a young woman with an evident, but ironic, pleasure in the textures of lace and textilea mockery of lms traditional voyeurism. Iutkevichs treatment of lace is more complex than these ideologically clear symbols, however. When coquettish anti-heroine Tania is pictured
nilmontant (1926), brought back from Paris by Ilia Erenburg, and how these lms had shown him that everyday life could be photogenic. Iutkevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:329 30. 85. In posters for that lm, the womans face is also obscured by lace. For consideration of the use of lace in lm, see Andrew Webber, Cut and Laced: Traumatism in Luis Buuels Un Chien andalou, in Andrea Sabbadini, ed., Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reections on the Representation of Loss in European Cinema (London, 2007), 92 101. 86. Philip Cavendish, Soviet Mainstream Cinematography: The Silent Era (London, 2008), 53.
611
as a profusion of patterns (surrounded by lace, viewing her reection through lace), we are in familiar territory, mocking the textiles traditionally seductive allure. But Iutkevich is also concerned to rescue lace, to recongure its sensual allure in materialist terms. In one scene, a young man has stolen lace from the factory, to sell on the black market. He carries it, hidden beneath his clothes, wound around his torso. This saboteur is undone when he is discovered, in the basement of a bar, slowly rotating as his customer laboriously unwinds the lace. A ght ensues, and our villain crawls away, dragging a forlorn strip of lace behind him. Images such as this, together with the lms consistent focus on manufacture, draw our attention to the distinct, complex, and textured materiality of lace. As such, they recongure it as an object, rather than a symbol. We might suggest that they transform the erotic into the haptic. In a similar way, in Kozintsev and Traubergs Novyi Vavilon (New Babylon, 1928), a mannequin in the eponymous department store is wrapped inelegantly in lace. Scrunched up and wound messily around an otherwise naked doll, the fabric takes on an almost rebarbative materiality far from its customary luxurious sensuality. In this way, the lm performs a rejection of the fabrics traditional allure that is almost grotesque.87 When the lms heroine is seen waving fragments of lace at French revolutionary barricades, Novyi Vavilon performs the nal appropriation of that most bourgeois of fabrics. Kozintsev and Trauberg had a longstanding interest in the cinematic transformation of things, and the relationship between people and objects, and Novyi Vavilon can be seen as part of the same avant-garde materialist movement exemplied by Ukhaby and Kruzheva.88 For my purposes, however, Ukhaby and Kruzheva were distinctive in seeking to make their materialist inclinations serve the call to represent real Soviet life and new Soviet subjects. Their success in that project is questionable. Contemporary reviewers tended to point to the incompatibility of the social theme and the formal experiment. The inuential critic Krisanof Khersonskii was uncompromising: Iutkevich perceives the industrial world of machines and people not directly, but impressionistically, and through the prism of that cultural-aesthetic worldview that he brings to cinema, as an aesthete above all.89 Only V. Strakhov praised the original, interesting moments of play with objects.90 The lm was, as one review described it, contentious (spornaia).91 Although Kruzhevas thematic purpose was praised, reviews did not pick up on what Shklovskii had identied as its
87. Kozintsev also saw Mnilmontant when he visited Paris to shoot location material for Novyi Vavilon. For further discussion of Kozintsev and Traubergs use of textile in this lm, see Anne Nesbet, mile Zola, Kozintsev and Trauberg, and Film as Department Store, Russian Review 68, no. 1 ( January 2009): 102 21. 88. In their 1926 adaptation of Nikolai Gogols Shinel (The Overcoat), for example, Akakii Akakievichs obsession with his coat, and the status it represented, provides the premise for an evident visual pleasure in exploring texture and materiality. 89. Khrisanof Khersonskii, Chto na ekrane, Sovetskii ekran, 1928, no. 16: 23. 90. Strakhov, Kruzheva, 3. 91. Nedobrovo, O Kruzhevakh, 3.
612
Slavic Review
principle agenda: the articulation of a relationship with the material. The formal and thematic aspects of the lm did not cohere; the project of creating a reformulated sensibility was incomplete. This is not surprising. The question of how to reconcile Shklovskiis privileging of the materialwhat Bleiman called the thirst for the materialwith the new imperative to represent real people on screen was a complex one. Theorist Ieremiia Ioffe went so far as to suggest that silent cinema was simply not equipped to convey psychology: cinema understands the physical man, actions, behaviour, but not psychology.92 For Bleiman too, in the rst Soviet lms that attempted to picture real individual heroes (such as Kruzheva, and Fridrikh Ermlers Oblomok imperii [Fragment of an Empire, 1929]), there was a rupture between the individual siuzhet of the lm and its material.93 It is this very rupture that provides my point of interest, however. Bleimans descriptions of the thirst for the material as a motivating force in lms prior to the advent of sound is important, but we should also note that in a number of key lms from this transitional period, this thirst for the material was inected by particular ambition. It was linked to the project that Grashchenkova calls the education of feelings (vospitanie chuvstv).94 Attention to the possible relationship between formal and thematic impact and message adds a new and important dimension to the material focus of Soviet cinema. It provides an ideological framing to the broader cinematographic interest in faktura and distinguishes the Soviet cinematic project from those of its European and American counterparts. Faktura was a means of representing even of creatingthe intensied tactile connection with the world that was a condition for a new model of subjecthood. The Return of the Individual As Soviet cinema entered the 1930s, the call for individuals in cinema did not abate. Indeed, it became a key feature in discussions of the emerging frameworks for the cinema that came to be called socialist realist. According to A. S. Piataev, The individual is emerging.95 Which individual? he went on to ask: The individual builder of socialism, the many millions of individuals who make up the collective of builders of socialism. In Iezuitovs words, For Soviet cinema of this period the theme of the rebirth of man was not accidental, but essential. The intellectual style had revealed the relationship of the revolution to the person; the new style would show the relationship of the person to the revolution.96 This was the new model of cinema that Iezuitov described as a cinema of socialist feelingsa Soviet sentimentalism (crucially distinguished
92. Ieremiia Ioffe, Kultura i stil, (1928), in I. Ioffe, Izbrannoe: 1920 30-e gg., ed. Moisei S. Kagan, I. P. Smirnov, and N. Ia. Grigoreva (St. Petersburg, 2006), 87. 93. Bleiman, Chelovek v sovetskom lme 2, 57. 94. Grashchenkova, Vospitanie chuvstv, 86 95. 95. A. S. Piataev, Chto takoe individualnost? V diskussionnom poriadke, Kino, no. 40 (22 August 1933): 3. 96. Iezuitov, O stiliakh sovetskogo kino (kontseptsiia razvitiia sovetskogo kinoiskusstva), 41.
613
from any earlier [eighteenth-century] sentimentalism by its union of reason and feeling).97 Adrian Piotrovskii wrote that the task of cinema was to underline a new, socialist essence in the characters of our heroes, and our life and setting.98 According to Bleiman, cinema must reconcile the concrete individuality of each character with their social role.99 An emphasis on the changing relationship between the Soviet individual and the material world continued to inect debate in the rst few years of the decade, however. In an article published in 1933, Bla Balzs praised Oleksandr Dovzhenkos Ivan (1932) and Boris Barnets Okraina (Outskirts, 1933) as succeeding in presenting a new sensation of life (zhizneoshchushchenie): This new sensation is the product of the unique union of labor and life in socialist society, he wrote, and is creating a new style in art.100 In the same year Ioffe described the new Soviet art in terms of a radically altered interaction between the human subject and the object world. Echoing early discussions that viewed man as formed by the (new) conditions of everyday life, he described how, as a result of industrialization, the world has ceased to be external, objective, for man.101 Thus, he concluded, the opposition between individual and social cognition, between subject and object . . . is obliterated.102 In key lms of the early 1930s, as Soviet cinema struggled towards a transition to sound, we can still trace a concern for a shifting sensory relationship with the world as an index for emotional development. Kozintsev and Traubergs Odna of 1931, one of the rst Soviet sound lms, is a key work in this respect. Odna is a lm with an explicit and thematic focus on the individual (alone) and was hailed in the cinema press as one of the rst Soviet lms attempting to deal with human psychology, to show the inner struggle of a person. In Iezuitovs view, it was exemplary of the new cinema of socialist feelings (sotsialisticheskikh chuvstv).103 The plot is straightforward. City resident Kuzmina has graduated as a teacher and anticipates a life in the big city. Under some pressure, she agrees to a posting in Altai. There, her idealized visions of teaching stumble against the sordid reality of rural life in this distant corner of the Soviet state. A series of trials contribute to Kuzminas eventual emergence as a truly committed member of the Soviet collective. As such, the lm is a prototype of the familiar socialist realist masterplot.104 Beyond its primary ideological message, however, Odna is a lm about the need for Soviet citizens to re97. Ibid., 46. Emphasis in the original. 98. Adrian Piotrovskii, Aprelskie itogi, aprelskie uroki, Kino, no. 23 (10 May 1933): 2. 99. Bleiman, Chelovek v sovetskom lme 2, 56. 100. Bela Balash [Balzs], Novye lmy, novye zhizhneoshchushcheniia, Sovetskoe kino, 1933, nos. 3 4: 19 24. 101. Ieremiia Ioffe, Sinteticheskaia istoriia iskusstv, in Ioffe, Izbrannoe, 201. 102. Ibid., 257. 103. Iezuitov, O stiliakh sovetskogo kino, 44. 104. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington, 1981). Note, however, that Odna can also be read as counter to the socialist realist masterplot, not least in its troubled presentation of technology. See, for example, Lilya Kaganovsky, The Voice of Technology and the End of Soviet Silent Film: Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Traubergs Alone, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 1, no. 3 (August 2007): 265 81. Also, Neia
614
Slavic Review
Figures 9 and 10. Look, dont touch (Stills from Odna).
nounce their dreams of a material good life. At a more complex level, it explores the sensory relationship between an individual and the material world, and how the new social order might change that relationship. The lm begins with a shot of Kuzminas sleeping head, sunk into a pillow, and the lace cuff of her nightdress. In an attempt to escape the call of her alarm, the heroine buries her head beneath her pillow. Within the otherwise denuded space of her room, the silken bedspread and the lace of her cuff acquire a poignant materiality. These signs of bourgeois comfort protect her from the onslaught of real (and implicitly collective) life. At the beginning of the lm, Kuzmina takes evident pleasure in the sensory world of urban living, and the narrative uses her relationship with objects as a key index of her emotional, moral, and ideological evolution. In a key early scene we see her, with her anc, window shopping for crockery. Later, after learning of her posting to Altai, she returns to the same shop window, and her hand lingers longingly and regretfully on its glass, the transparent barrier between her and the object (gure 9). The camera focuses on a single cup and saucer, simultaneously encouraging and denying an appreciation of their material texture. The reective white surfaces of the crockery, enclosed behind reective glass, are at and smooth, rather than textural (gure 10). In their intransigent and indifferent materiality, these objects seem to look back at Kuzmina and at the spectatorindifferent and untouchable. If the rst part of Odna pictures a world that cannot be touched, or felt, then the second, set in Altai, pictures one that must be touched.105 A different sensory code structures the screen. Local men and women shear sheep (gure 11), their hands grasping the wool, cutting, rubbing; a dried horses skin is stretched on poles; a series of close-ups reveal the heavily lined faces of the laboring villagers (gures 12 and 13). The graphic
Zorkaia, Odna na perekrestakh, Kinovedcheskie zapiski: Istorichesko-teoriticheskii zhurnal 74 (2005): 143 59. 105. The lms cinematographer, Andrei Moskvin, used white on white cinematography for this lm, exploiting a range of pure white tones (usually avoided in black-andwhite cinematography) in order to create what critics describe as a desaturated screen. In the city, Kuzmina is dressed in a white dress, in sunlit white streets, viewing white crockery. See Kaganovsky, Voice of Technology, 274.
615
Figures 11, 12, and 13. The textures of Altai (Stills from Odna).
physicality, the texture, of these images signal the ethnic space, emphasizing the otherness of the native byt. In simple terms, they signify backwardness. They also, however, establish an alternative model of experience. The smooth surfaces of the objects that surrounded Kuzmina in the city are replaced by textures, by a more tactile interaction between the human body and the elements. The contemporary critic V. Sutyrin interpreted this aspect of the lm as a self-reexive statement of purpose, a rejection of the stylization of the directors previous work, and a commitment to socialist realism: And thus FEKS, like the heroine of their new lm, became more and more densely [eshily plotnei-plotnei] enmeshed in the reality of life.106 In Odna, tactile experience is redemptive: Kuzminas increasingly eshy encounter with the world allows for her transformation. In parallel, Sutyrin suggests, the lm itself is a manifesto for a cinema that engages in fully sensory ways with the material world. In his memoirs, Kozintsev described Odna in terms that echo the broader shift from Shklovskiis privileging of the material to Iezuitovs chuvstva: I grew up infatuated with fakturabeloved word of young artists. But now I feel more clearly that a person, limited on screen to mere
106. V. Sutyrin, Ot intelligentskikh illiuzii k realnoi deistvitelnosti, Proletarskoe kino 1931, nos. 5 6: 17. Note that Kozintsev and Traubergs Shinel also offers an oversized teapot; the crockery displays in Odna can be seen as a dialogue with that lm, as well as with the department store in Novyi Vavilon. These intertexts provide further support for the reading of this lm as a self-reexive comment on the ideological implications of FEKSs own visual style.
616
Slavic Review
external appearance, and to signs of the simplest emotions, will appear articial, illusory. Its like a door, drawn on a set wall: you sense that it has no volume [ob em].107 Odna was an attempt to represent human volume, to make inner life visible. Kuzmina escapes the false, dematerialized surfaces of her previous life and encounters a real materiality. In a sense this lm achieved the synthesis between self and world, between thematic and formal preoccupations, that Kruzheva and Ukhaby had failed to realize. For the critics, at least, Odna offered a less contentious picture of Soviet subjectivity.108 But it is no accident, perhaps, that it was only in the spatial emptiness of the Altai sequences that this emphasis on sensation could be made clear. The simplication of the set cleared the way for a new feeling for the world, a synergy between emotion and sensory experience. This model of tactile redemption, of reanimated sensory engagement with the world, however, never fully took shape as the prototype for a new Soviet self. Odna is commonly viewed by critics as a beginning: one of the rst Soviet sound lms, it is described as part of Soviet lms transition towards socialist realism.109 I suggest that it may also be seen as an end point. In its focus on materiality and sensory experience, this lm was the culmination of Soviet lmmakers attempt to forge a vision of tactile experience as a redemptive, revolutionary mode of being in the world. From the mid-1930s on, as the guidelines for socialist realism became more xed, lmmakers sought to create heroes and heroines who were at once individual and archetypal, whose feelings were shaped by their participation in the collective. As the new prototype of the Soviet cinematic hero was consolidated, the tactile, material, sensory emphasis of the late 1920s disappeared. The transition from silent to sound lm was signicant in this respect, enabling a greater focus on individual psychology, and with an inevitable shift of focus away from the necessity of material objects, touch and gesture as key indices of emotional experience.110 This article has traced an evolution in the cinematic representation of the relationship between human subjects and the material world and linked it to changing models of individual psychology. This evolution reected, broadly speaking, a comprehensive shift in the ambitions of Soviet psychological science, and their communication to a nonspecialist read107. Grigorii Kozintsev, Glubokii ekran, vol. 1, O svoei rabote v kino i teatre (Leningrad, 1982), 191. 108. See, for example, N. Iukov, Odna, Kino, no. 55 (6 October 1931): 3; Aladin, Odnakrivaia vverkh, Kino, no. 64 (26 November 1931): 2; A. Cherennyi, Vyzov meshchanstvu: O teme Odna, Kino, no. 59 (1 November 1931): 3. 109. See, for example, Zorkaia, Odna na perekrestkakh, 76. 110. As my director-protagonists entered the 1930s, they went in different directions, presenting different responses to the new demands. In Zlatye gory (Golden Mountains, 1931) and Vstrechnyi (Counterplan, 1932), Iutkevich presented radically simplied sets and clearly dened heroes. For Kozintsev and Trauberg, Odna marked a transition that led to a trilogy of lms focusing on an exemplary individual, Maksim. Room, in 1936, produced the ill-fated Strogii iunosha (Severe Youth, 1936), a lm in which the directors evident interest in the formal properties of things and surfaces, his preoccupation with lm as a means of sensing the world, brought severe censure.
617
ership, revealed in two editions of the Bol shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, the rst of which was begun in 1929, under the general editorship of Otto Shmidt, astronomer, publisher and politician; the second, edited by B. A. Vvedenskii, was begun in 1949.111 In the rst edition, chuvstvo is described as the simplest emotional process, and oshchushchenie is the most basic cognitive [poznavatel nyi] process.112 This volume explains in considerable detail the wider scientic interest in the relationship between feelings and sensation, and its lengthy exegesis of both terms reects the active debates in psychological arenas during this period and the extent to which these debates spilled out into public life. The second edition of the encyclopedia reveals a marked shift in the signicance and vitality of psychological investigation. Here, the denitions of both chuvstvo and oshchushchenie are more ideologically inected: feelings are no longer only scientic and empirically veriablethey are also hierarchical and value-driven, with an emphasis on important higher feelings (moral, aesthetic, and intellectual).113 Oshchushcheniia, meanwhile, are relegated in 1955 to the merely physiological.114 The rst edition of the encyclopedialike the lms that I have discussed herereected a sense of the possibilities of psychological science and the extent to which the relationship between chuvstva and oshchushcheniia could be reshaped. In psychological debate and experiment during the 1920s and into the early 1930s, it seemed possible that chuvstva would no longer be a domain of unknowable and unregulated individuality. Rather, they could be moderated by the regulation of sensation (oshchushchenie). In a sense, then, the emphasis on a reanimated tactile encounter between the human subject and the material world in the culture of this period can be seen as an act of substitution: the de-libidinizing of touch, the replacement of the erotic by an alternative model of sensory plenitude. It was this act of substitution that underpinned Iutkevichs haptic experiment in Kruzheva. Soviet man or woman was to be reborn into a state of heightened sensitivity to the material environment; emotions would be created through the senses, in interaction with the world. In conclusion, we might identify three stages in the way in which the relationship between sensation and emotion was discussed and formulated in cinema, and more broadly. First, in the early to mid-1920s, utopian visions of the making of the new Soviet subject envisaged a total physical and mental remaking and positioned a reanimated sensory encounter with the world at the center of this transformation. In the culture of so111. Shmidts wife, Vera Shmidt, became the head of the Psychoanalytic Kindergarten, which was opened in Moscow in August 1921, and, in 1927, secretary of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society. Etkind points to Shmidts importance in psychoanalytic circles in particular. Etkind, Eros of the Impossible, 193 94. 112. Note that the volume of the encyclopedia including information about chuvstvo was published in 1934:Chuvstvo, in in Bol shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, ed. Shmidt, 61:727. See also Oshchushchenie, in Bol shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, ed. Shmidt, 43:727. 113. Chuvstvo, in Bol shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, ed. B. A. Vvedenskii, 2d ed. (Moscow, 19551957), 47:459. 114. Oshchushchenie, Bol shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, ed. Vvedenskii, 31: 504.
618
Slavic Review
cialist realism from approximately 1932 33, there is a marked shift away from any focus on a sensory relationship with the material as a condition for selfhood, and a return to more conventional models of psychological interiority. Between these two poles, however, in the transitional years 1928 33 that have been the subject of this article, we can trace an ambitious attempt to nd a middle ground between two competing imperativesto retain the revolutionary and utopian ambitions evident in avant-garde explorations of materiality and to link them to the increasingly strident calls for a model of Soviet individual emotion on screen. The cinematic culture of 1928 33 provides an intriguing vision of this project. The representation of Soviet feelings in lm in this period of transitiontowards established Stalinism, towards socialist realism, from silent to sound cinemawas complex. It was caught up in a broader consideration of the very nature of feeling, and of the relationship between self and world. Film was a key medium through which these questions could be addressed, a testing ground for different ways of feeling the world. At the threshold between vision and sensation, cinema offered a brief dream of a reanimated sensory proximity between the human subject and the material world as a precondition for Soviet subjectivity.

Socialist Senses Film and The Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Socialist Senses Film and The Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Author(s): Emma Widdis Source: Slavic Review, Vol.

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Figures 1, 2, and 3. Mechanical lace (Stills from Kruzheva).

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Figures 4 and 5. The nished product (Stills from Kruzheva).

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Figures 6 and 7. Threads of interconnection (Stills from Kruzheva).

Figure 8. The lacework of electricity (Still from Kruzheva).

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Figures 9 and 10. Look, dont touch (Stills from Odna).

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

You might also like