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Soviet Montage Cinema As Propaganda and Political Rhetoric

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Soviet Montage Cinema As Propaganda and Political Rhetoric Soviet Montage Cinema as Propaganda and Political Rhetoric Michael Russell Doctor of Philosophy The University of Edinburgh 2009 This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Professor Dietrich Scheunemann. ii Propaganda that stimulates thinking, in no matter what field, is useful to the cause of the oppressed. Bertolt Brecht, 1935. iii Abstract Most previous studies of Soviet montage cinema have concentrated on its aesthetic and technical aspects; however, montage cinema was essentially a rhetoric rather than an aesthetic of cinema. This thesis presents a com- parative study of the leading montage film-makers – Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Eisenstein and Vertov – comparing and contrasting the differing methods by which they used cinema to exert a rhetorical effect on the spectator for the purposes of political propaganda. The definitions of propaganda in general use in the study of Soviet montage cinema are too narrowly restrictive and a more nuanced definition is clearly needed. Furthermore, the role of the spectator in constituting the rhetorical effectivity of a montage film has been neglected; a psychoanalytic model of the way in which the filmic text can trigger a change in the spectator’s psyche is required. Moreover, the ideology of the Soviet montage films is generally assumed to exist only in their content, whereas in classical cinema ideology also operates at the level of the enunciation of the filmic text itself. The extent to which this is also true for Soviet montage cinema should be investigated. I have analysed the interaction between montage films and their specta- tors from multiple perspectives, using several distinct but complementary theoretical approaches, including recent theories of propaganda, a psycho- analytic model of rhetoric, Lacanian psychoanalysis and the theory of the system of the suture, and Peircean semiotics. These different theoretical approaches, while having distinct conceptual bases, work together to build a new and consistent picture of montage cinema as a propaganda medium and as a form of political rhetoric. I have been able to classify the films of Kuleshov, Eisenstein and Pu- dovkin as transactive, vertical agitation propaganda and the films of Vertov as transactive, horizontal agitation propaganda. Furthermore, I show that montage cinema embeds ideology in the enunciation of its filmic text, but differs from classical cinema in trying to subvert the suturing process. I conclude that Vertov at least partly created a non-representational cine- matography and that he could be regarded as being at least as much a Suprematist film-maker as a Constructivist one. iv Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Main focus of the research . 1 1.2 Questions addressed . 3 1.3 Methodology . 5 1.4 Significance of the research . 6 1.5 Thesis outline . 10 2 Soviet Montage Cinema in Context 12 2.1 Tsarist cinema . 13 2.2 The Great War (1914-18) . 16 2.3 Revolution and Civil War (1917-21) . 19 2.4 The early careers of the montage film-makers . 24 2.5 Agitki films and agit-trains . 32 2.6 Vertov’s kinoki network . 37 2.7 Intolerance in the Soviet Union . 42 2.8 Mayakovsky, montage cinema and the “social command” . 49 3 Soviet Montage Cinema as Propaganda 58 3.1 Defining “propaganda” . 58 3.2 Cinema and propaganda in the Soviet Union . 65 3.3 Rhetoric and transactive propaganda . 72 3.4 Agitation propaganda and integration propaganda . 75 3.5 Truth and falsehood in propaganda . 78 3.6 The infectious art of montage cinema . 84 4 Soviet Montage Cinema as Transactive Rhetoric 87 4.1 The “problem of the spectator” in Soviet montage cinema . 88 4.2 Projective idealisation and transactive rhetoric . 93 v 4.3 The Kuleshov Effect and “projective idealization” . 106 5 Classical Cinema and the System of the Suture 116 5.1 Hollywood classical cinema and Soviet montage cinema . 116 5.2 The system of the suture . 134 5.3 Suture, propaganda and rhetoric . 148 6 Montage Cinema and the System of the Suture 157 6.1 Suture and the Kuleshov Effect . 157 6.2 Montage cinema: subverting the system of the suture . 162 6.3 The system of the suture and “non-objective cinema” . 186 7 Soviet Film Montage and “Non-objective Cinema” 189 7.1 Malevich on cinema and politics . 190 7.2 Malevich, montage cinema and Peircean semiotics . 197 7.3 Malevich and the “abstract moments” of montage cinema . 206 7.4 The political implications of non-objective cinema . 212 7.5 Eisenstein contra Malevich . 216 7.6 Vertov’s “kino-eye” and non-objective cinema . 219 8 Conclusions 228 8.1 Summary of the conclusions . 228 8.2 Possible future research . 237 Bibliography 254 vi List of Figures 6.1 Still from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin: the sailor smashes the dish, first by throwing it down from over his left shoulder. 178 6.2 Still from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin: . and then from over his right shoulder. 179 6.3 Still from Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera: a woman opens the same shutters from one perspective. 180 6.4 Still from Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera: . and again from another perspective. 181 6.5 Still from Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera: an example of Vertov’s use of Constructivist camera angles and framings. 185 6.6 Still from Eisenstein’s Potemkin: the battleship rupturing the cinema screen. 186 7.1 Malevich, Black Square (1920s), oil on canvas. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. 191 7.2 Still from Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera. 208 7.3 Still from Eisenstein’s The Old and the New. 209 7.4 Still from Eisenstein’s The Old and the New. 210 vii Acknowledgements My thanks first of all to the late Professor Dietrich Scheunemann, without whom neither my research nor this thesis would have happened; to Dr. Dorota Os- trowska, for her crucial help and encouragement; to Martine Pierquin for in- troducing me to film studies; and to Dr. Kate Forrest, for her Russian language tuition. My thanks also to the staff of Edinburgh University Library and the staff of the National Library of Scotland, for their unfailing helpfulness, and also to the staff of the British Film Institute for supplying copies of Soviet montage films and to the staff of the Scottish Screen Archive in Glasgow for providing viewing facilities. I am also profoundly grateful to Kate Marshall, the Administrative Officer of Edinburgh University’s Graduate School of Literatures Languages and Cultures, for her efficient and indispensible help. And last, but by no means least, I would like to thank my parents, who made all of this possible. viii Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Main focus of the research To examine the nature of Soviet montage cinema as a form of rhetoric, as I intend to do in this thesis, is to implicitly make a distinction between aesthetics and rhetoric. Most studies of Soviet montage cinema have concentrated on its aesthetic and technical aspects, but montage cinema was essentially a rhetoric of cinema. It was a conscious attempt to use cinema as a medium for political propaganda. Whereas aesthetics is the study of what is pleasing and beautiful, rhetoric is the art of persuasion; that is, it is the set of techniques required to construct effective discourses. To examine a film as rhetoric is to examine the effect it has on its intended audience and the means by which it achieves that effect, and therefore to foreground considerations of the interaction between the filmic text and the spectator. I believe that what Jacques Aumont wrote two decades ago remains true even now: it seems to me that almost all of Eisenstein’s commentators underestimate the role of the mental processes of the spectator (imperative not only with regard to the intellectual work necessary for producing “good” association, but also with regard to the production of emotional “value”). (1987:169) The fact that film montage itself is a form of rhetoric rather than simply an aesthetic device has long been recognised. Jowett and O’Donnell, for example, have stated that [t]he great Russian propaganda films such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Battle- ship Potemkin (1925), Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Storm Over Asia (1928), and 1 1.1. Main focus of the research 2 Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) all used montage as a central tech- nique for eliciting the proper audience response. (1992:94) Even Dziga Vertov’s non-fiction documentary films have been recognised to be rhetorical discourses rather than merely re-presentations of actuality. As Plantin- ga has noted, “like the fiction film, nonfictions are rhetorical constructs, fashioned and manipulated and structured representations” (1997:32). Some critics have even recognised the montage films as a form of rhetorical discourse but have disapproved of that fact, such as Mikhail Bleiman in 1927: Visually, [Vertov’s film A Sixth Part of the World (1926)] is disappointing. It is a speech of an orator, not a picture. It is full of rhetorical devices, rhetorical repetitions. The film shouts out slogans, sometimes declaims. Declamation is the film’s main drawback. Too many repetitive, obtrusive titles. They turn the film into a collection of moving photographs. (Qtd. in Tsivian 1997:67) However, there have also been dissenting voices which have tried to downplay the role of Soviet montage cinema as political propaganda, apparently fearing that such a label would damage its artistic or even moral status. Richard Taylor has denied the value of montage cinema’s function as propaganda by claiming that “to discuss each film in terms of whether it may be regarded as agitation or propaganda would be a worse than fruitless exercise, for it would actually obscure the real value of the film” (1998:29), and Peter Kenez has asserted that [t]o look at the work of Soviet directors purely as an exercise in propaganda is to miss what is truly interesting in their work.
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