Transition from Soviet avant garde to socialist realism - and its repercussions in cinema

What is avant garde?

Avant-garde is one of the artistic currents which emerged in the late nineteenth
century as a response to the changes in the relationship between humans and nature: the main
dynamic of industrialization. As humans developed more sophisticated means to dominate
and modify nature, the idea that the human intelligence was potent to question and reshape
reality gained momentum. Just as nature was reimagined and rebuilt, human societies could
be reimagined and restructured. The avant garde artists sincerely believed this possibility and
saw themselves as the agents of this process of reshaping the society. On what grounds
should this 'new' society be constructed? The avant gardes, on this point, would propose that
'future' (a catchphrase used both by avant gardes and socialist realists) would be built not on
tradition but on completely new footholds. In the field of fine arts, they rejected European
realist tradition and searched for new subjects, new forms and new media.
Avant gardes were convinced that the technological destruction of nature was not
anymore stoppable, and humans now had no other way to find a new state of harmony with
the universe than with the aid of technology.

The loss that technology caused to the world would be compensated...by the single
total project of reorganizing the entire universe, in which God would be replaced by
the artist-analyst. The goal of this total operation was to halt all further development,
labor, and creation forever. Arising out of all this is a new "white humanity." (Groys,
16)

Quite in line with their ideas, avant garde artists were politically very active, much
involved in agit-prop projects. They can be said to have taken important part in the
'aesthetization of politics' as demonstrated by Güleç and Savaşır. Rodchenko's Design for a
Kiosk "Future - our Only Goal" (Güleç and Savaşır, 307) is an example to cite. Not only
posters, costumes, stage designs etc. which their nineteenth century predecessors already
realized, but they also designed radio stations, loudspeakers, educational huts, among other
facilities and objects that participated in and shaped daily lives of the envisioned society.

Avant garde in cinema

 In the sphere of the moving image, the avant-garde experimentalism resulted in
constant search for novel means and techniques of expression; for both of which Dziga
Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera is a shining example. Vertov experimented with
different rhythms, angles and above all, montage techniques and his experimental film (later
accused of being 'documentary' and 'formalist' in Stalin period) moved on to be a marked
point in the history of cinema. These kinds of avant-garde movies in the 1920s Soviet context
were not at all merely aesthetic productions. As Richard Taylor delineates, they served the
ideological purpose of offering tangible evidence of technological progress and making
people familiar with it. If used 'correctly,' these movies would deliver political messages
much more directly and clearly when compared to other media such as radio and press:
Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin is one such propaganda film with an easily discernable
propaganda message. Another function of these movies was, not surprisingly, the financial
gains they brought: 184 Soviet movies were imported by USA between the years 1926 and
1936, along with significant profits in the domestic market and imports to other countries.
Avant garde and socialist realism - a total break?
Although socialist realism and avant garde are perceived by many to be antagonistic
in terms of their world outlook and the sort of relationship they establish between art and
politics, Boris Groys challenges this assumption and presents a way of seeing the
continuities. The Stalin era, he argues, was in fact a continuation of what preceded it, but the
tools and techniques that it used to achieve the same aim - shaping the world by means of art
- differed from the previous:

The Stalin era satisfied the fundamental avant-garde demand that art cease
representing life and begin transforming it by means of a total aesthetico-political
project. Thus if Stalin is viewed as the artist-tyrant who succeeded the philosopher-
tyrant typical of the age of the contemplative, mimetic thought, Stalinist poetics is the
immediate heir to constructivist poetics. (Groys, 36)

Boris Groys points to some differences, the first of which is the attitude towards
classical heritage. Avant-gardists were criticised about being "liquidationists". The Soviet
realism can be said to have saved the classical heritage from a possible destruction by radical
avant gardists. The second difference is that socialist realism chose to shape the reality by
means of utilising realistic language, rather than breaking completely apart from it. And the
third distinction is that socialist realism coincided and interacted with the new romantism and
a realization of the place of the individual as an agent.

Main questions of cinema in Stalin era

One of the main concerns in the Stalin era of cinematic production was "failure to
reflect or instill Soviet ideology." Scriptwriters and directors which failed to come up with
sufficient "content" were regularly accused of being "formalists." But while achieving
ideological indoctrination, filmmakers were not to ignore the hearts as well as minds, and
Lunacharsky's pronouncement in 1928 highlights this point: "We must choose and find a line
that ensures that the picture is both artistic and ideologically consistent and contains romantic
experiences and experiences of an intimate and psychological character." (cited in Taylor,
190) The latter two requirements were meant to satisfy the emotional expectations of the
audience, but in these lay another danger, that of being imitative or commercially motivated.
A third concern of the 1930s cinema which Lunacharsky does not invoke here is that a movie
should be intelligible 'to the millions.' An experimentalism such as Vertov's would, in Stalin's
era, be perceived as utter irresponsibility on the artist's part; not to mention being labelled as
"formalism". This particular word "formalist," in fact, turned out to be a very instrumental
catchphrase in these years that one could throw onto any movie director, painter, composer,
writer that one disliked. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was on not-so-few
occasions accused to be one, even though he had gained at least some appreciation of Stalin
by composing the Zlatiye Gori or winning several Stalin Prizes.

Ideological concerns aside, filmmakers of this era concerned themselves with the
aesthetical question of how to deal with the advent of sound in movies. The silent
aesthetic had taken such root that imagining 'talking' pictures would irritate an
important number of directors. The notion behind this sentiment was that the advent
of sound could be detrimental to the clear distinction they had been endeavouring to
set between theatre and cinema. (Taylor, 195-6)

Economic policies and cinema - NEP to FFFP

A point not to forget is that the economic policies of the Soviet state influenced the
cultural sphere as well. NEP period was marked by relative "non-intervention in culture,"
although this designation often came into question, as the article by A. Kemp-Welch
delineates. This explains how a larger space for artistic experimentation existed to make
movies such as The Man with the Movie Camera possible. The 20s saw, however, the growth
of an opposition to the policy of "neutrality" in culture: the growing influence of agit-prop
and RAPP can be counted among these. In May 1925, agit-prop pronounced its demands for
stricter policies in the cultural field. In cinema, this translated into the requirement to "secure
a clearly proleterian line." (Kemp-Welch, 461) The oppositional institutions grew stronger
and led to the formation of what Kemp-Welch calls "for the first time, a communist cultural
policy" by 1929. (Kemp-Welch, 462)
The same year Lunacharsky resigned, and Shunyatsky took over his position.
Meanwhile, an ongoing centripetal tendency in the field of culture had brought about
organizations such as ARRK (Society to Proleterianize Cinema), established under the First
Five Year Plan, and Soyuzkino, into which the Soviet film industry was centralized. Strict
standards were put up for movie scripts and thematic plans were created for the next year.
Party cells were established in movie studios to provide positive discrimination for
employees with proleterian background. But the Proleterianizing period did not outlive the
First Five Year Plan. With the adoption of socialist realism as the "guiding doctrine" at the
Party Committee in 1932 and the shift towards a more "classless" view of Soviet society, the
emphasis on proleterian visibility diminished. Another important feature of 1930s cinema
was the rise of a "cult of personality" and its implications on cinematic language. The genre
of "historical-revolutionary" movies were particularly suitable for celebrating a father/leader
figure, legitimizing Stalin's individual rule. Among other genres were "musicals" and
"comedies," out of which I have seen Circus and St. Jorgen's Day.
Two movies
Circus (1936) is a musical produced by Grigoriy Aleksandrov in an outright political
context: to celebrate the Stalinist Constitution of 1936. It narrates the experience of a female
American circus performer coming to Moscow to perform. She meets there another talented
Soviet circus artist and falls in love. The third main character is the protagonist's American
partner who is portrayed as a capitalist, racist and sexist Westerner. This man's "American"
sense of morality is contrasted sharply to that of the Soviet people - the audience in the circus
sing in various languages such as Georgian and Armenian, they delight in the sight of the
black boy and do not shame the woman on the grounds of illegitimacy. By clearly defining
"the other," embodied here in the American capitalist, the movie achieves a self-definition of
what being Soviet means. In the closing scenes of the movie, the American actress is shown
carrying the Soviet flag along with thousands of others, marching in a gigantic parade,
singing the Soviet march. This scene instills a sense of equality, solidarity and progress in the
audience. Overall, the movie is not a predominantly experimental one, but is easily
accessible. It is a self-reflective work, in the scenes which we are shown how the circus
directors search for actors and actresses for specific numbers from among their circle rather
than importing them from elsewhere, which Alexander Prokhorov explains as:

The transition to sound in Soviet cinema coincided with the increasing political
isolationism of Stalinist Russia and the revamping of film industry along the lines of
domestic film production, without using revenues from Western imports. In Circus,
Aleksandrov perpetuated Stalinist ideological codes by means of the backstage
musical's self-reflective conventions. (Prokhorov, 4)

St. Jorgen's Day (1930) is a comedy directed by Yakov Protazanov taking place
during the preparations for the St Jorgen's Day. It satirizes the ecclesiastical circles as greedy,
earthly people; making money off of people's ignorance. Meanwhile, Michael Korkis, a
criminal who has recently fleed from prison, decides to take this opportunity to acquire at
least some of the profit made by the clergy. On the day of the St. Jorgen, he dresses up as the
long-gone saint and appears before the people just at the moment when the priest calls for the
saint's apparition. One important motif that we encounter throughout the movie is the popular
obsession with "miracles" and how this is exploited by the clergy; i.e. how the clergy sells so-
called "miracles" in turn for money. In the movie they shoot about St. Jorgen's, for example,
the actor playing St. Jorgen is shown to walk on water, as a miracle. But then, quite
unexpectedly, tourists on canoes intrude the scene, and the camera exposes the sandy ground
just beneath the water on which St. Jorgen actually walks. These kinds of scenes deliver a
clear message under the palatable form of comedy, the message that the belief in "miracles"
is irrational and furthermore, that the people should be freed from the exploitation of clergy
and cling to the light of communism. Similarly to Circus, this movie, especially in the first
quarter, is self-reflective in that it takes the filming process as subject material, too.