Red Propaganda! Re: David Lynch

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Yoshie, if your point is that there were artists that
>were in the various CPs then that is beyond question.
>You are right.  But count how many of the below
>actually hailed from "socialist" countries.  I mean,
>Pasolini had a tenuous, at best, relationship with the
>Italian CP, a party much less strict than even the
>other Eurocommunist parties.  Aragon, Picasso and
>Eluard all had important surrealist phases...can you
>imagine that being promoted in the Soviet bloc?
>
>Thomas

My point is a more general & simple one: self-consciously political 
art (be it realist or modernist or whatever) can be aesthetically as 
good as -- nay, often better than -- art that does not seek to 
instruct politically.

As for the Soviet bloc, it produced many fine artists aside from such 
film giants as Vertov and Eisenstein.  Andrzej Wajda, Andrei 
Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr (check out Jonathan Rosenbaum's comments at 
<http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/0596/05106.html>), Andrzej 
Munk, Marta Meszaros, Mikhail Kalatozov, Krzysztof Kieslowski (whose 
films produced under socialism were superior to his post-communist 
works), Peter Kahane, Frank Beyer, Heiner Carow, Konrad Wolf, and so 
on, and so forth.
-- 
Yoshie

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