4 - Soviet Film: Montage, the Camera Eye, and Ideology

Summary

Throughout his career, Dos Passos credited film technique as a stylistic influence. As he wrote in National Review in 1968, he came to believe while in Paris during the postwar explosion in the arts that he must “record the fleeting world the way the motion picture film recorded it,” using “contrast, juxtaposition, montage.” Critics commonly define the narrative devices of Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A. as cinematic; certainly, U.S.A. was directly influenced by the works and artists, such as Meyerhold and Eisenstein, he encountered during his 1928 travels in the Soviet Union. Dos Passos's emerging awareness of the power of montage as originated and practiced by these artists and other Russians—and by the American D.W. Griffith—was already influencing the exploratory methods of the war novels and the filmically edited 1925 Manhattan Transfer. That awareness became more fully informed and predominant after Dos Passos witnessed firsthand how the Soviets’ work exerted its ideological force.

His trip to Russia was undertaken initially to experience the immediacy of a form of theater that Dos Passos felt successfully used art, without sacrificing its integrity, in the service of revolutionary politics. He had seen precedents for such a multivalent art just the year before, when he had spent several weeks in Mexico early in 1927. There, he had absorbed the work of visual artists such as Diego Rivera, who had managed to integrate indigenous folk motifs and methods and the essence of the struggle against dictatorship into a visual art that succeeded in articulating the revolution to common people who often could not read and in enlisting their investment in the republican effort. As a cooperative, the artists’ union was succeeding also, subordinating individual agendas to a collective body of work in ways that Dos Passos already could tell was problematic for the New Playwrights, given the strong artistic and ideological characters involved. By the time the peripatetic Dos Passos arranged his travel to the Soviet Union the next year, he was increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for the New York drama initiative, given the lack of public and critical enthusiasm for its productions;