For example, it is curious that the
> Russians were at
> the very apex of international modernity pre-WWI and
> the very early
> Twenties and completely abandoned these
> international modernist styles
> by the end of the decade. The usual explaination in
> the west is the
> authoritarian regime under Stalin and the
> politically correct
> oppression of socialist realism for the masses. But
> that doesn't
> explain why these modern works had become suddenly
> decadent,
> bourgeois and capitalist, when just a few years
> before they were
> revolutionary and anti-bourgeois. Certainly Soviet
> film making
> persisted with its modernity a few more years. Well,
> yet another
> chapter that needs a re-write. (Chris?)
>
--- You know, this was one of the most interesting posts I've seen in some time.
I've been having loose thoughts rattle around in my head for a while in no particular order on the transition from the high modernity/pre-modernity of the Silver Age of Akhmatova and avant-garde futurism of Mayakovsky et al. to SocRealism for a while. I have no well-thought-out theory.
However I think it is important to note that the Akhmatovs and the Mayakovskys and the Malevichs represented a small percentage of the population located in the bouregousies of St. Petersburg and Moscow. The majority of the population had very different tastes -- it was made up of people like Khrushchev, with his fourth-grade education and peasant/working class roots. If anything Social Realism represented a move in the direction of the tastes and world view of the general masses.* Note the similarity in structure between the Socialist Realist novel and the popular 19th-century Orthodox Lives of the Saints.
Famously, when the Bolsheviks organized a modern-art exhibition in Moscow at some point in the late teens or early 20s and arranged for peasants to come from the countryside to view it, the latter thought they were seeing the work of the Devil.
Of course, experimentalism in film was not killed by SocRealism -- e.g. Tarkovsky, though he had problems. For instance I recommend the 1979 Expressionist film Rasputin.
Also, official Soviet ciname DID produce a lot of very good, though certainly not stylishly adventuristic, films. I'm thinking here especially of the comedies like Irony of Fate and Girl with a Guitar, and a slew of terrific WWII movies. I can't remember the name of it, but there's one famous one involving a group of teenage girls and an old man who have to hold back the Wehrmacht using their wits while the Red Army arrives. There's a gripping scene with one 17-year-old girl manning an Ack-Ack gun, blasting the hell out of a Luftwaffe plane while another girl feeds her ammo belts. Eventually they get the plane, they pilot bails out, and they keep firing at the descending pilot until they finally waste him. I didn't describe it very well, but it's a very gripping scene.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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