Chris Doss wrote:
>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.
>
Well, yes true. Still, I would not want to exalt one at the expense of
the other.
It's a lot more complicated than that. The high-modern can be as formulaic as the lives of the saints and, as Villion shows, simple is not necessarily simple minded. As for the lives of the saints, I saw a couple of Rublev's icons and I was blown away.
...and in film the neo-realist achievements -- which to my mind embraces Eisenstein (yes I know anachronism), De Sica, Ray -- are supreme...
Joanna
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