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Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Emma Widdis
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Abstract

In this article, Emma Widdis suggests that a sensory history is a crucial counterpart to the recent emotional turn in Russian and Slavic scholarship on Russian and Slavic history and culture. In particular, the Soviet revolutionary project was a unique attempt to create new models of human experience to correspond to the new political order—an attempt to shape sensory experience itself. Widdis suggests that the still-young medium of cinema was a privileged site for the investigation of new models of sensory perception, for the working out of the problematic relationship between the body, the mind, and the world that had such ideological potency in early Soviet Russia. Linking close readings of little-known films from this period to a broader analysis of the discursive field within which they operated, Widdis suggests that, in the period of transition between 1928 and 1932, intensified sensory (and particularly tactile) experience emerged as a new and revolutionary mode of being in the world.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , Fall 2012 , pp. 590 - 618
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2012

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References

With sincere thanks to Julian Graffy, Lilya Kaganovsky, Steven Lovell, Susan Larsen, Jan Plamper, Eric Naiman, Mark D. Steinberg, and the anonymous readers at Slavic Review for their very helpful comments during the writing of this article. I am also very grateful to Isobel Palmer for her invaluable assistance with this project.

1. Jan Plamper, “Introduction,” to Jan Plamper, ed., “Emotional Turn? Feelings in Russian History and Culture,” special section of Slavic Review 68, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 229. Notable works include Jan Plamper, S. Schahadat, and M. Elie, eds., Rossiiskaia imperiia chuvstv:Podkhody kkul'turnoi istorii emotsii. Sbornikstatei (Moscow, 2010); Steinberg, Mark D. and Sobol, Valerie, eds., Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe (DeKalb, 2011).Google Scholar

2. Mark D. Steinberg and Valerie Sobol, “Introduction,” to Steinberg and Sobol, eds., Interpreting Emotions, 6.

3. Sensory history outside the Slavic field is a rich field, too dense to detail fully here. One might note, however, the pioneering work by cultural anthropologists: David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor, 2003); Classen, Constance, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures (London, 1993)Google Scholar; and Constance Classen, The Book of Touch (London, 2005). In history, core work has been done by Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley, 2008), and the special issue of the fournal of Social History 40, no. 4 (Summer 2007) is dedicated to work in the history of the senses. The journal Senses and Society provides one of several other fora in which scholarship in sensory history is published and discussed. In Slavic studies, key works to note in this field include: Vladimir V. Lapin, Peterburg: Zapakhi i zvuki (St. Petersburg, 2007); Alexander M. Martin, “Sewage and the City: Filth, Smell, and Representations of Urban Life in Moscow, 1770-1880,” Russian Review67, no. 2 (April 2008): 243-74; Alison K. Smith, Recipes for Russia: Food andNationhood under the Tsars (DeKalb, 2008).

4. The conference took place 15-21 March 1928; minutes were published a year later as a volume: B. S. Ol'khovyi, ed., Puti kino: Vsesoiuznoe partiinoe soveshchanie po kinematografii (Moscow, 1929). See Taylor, Richard, The Politics of the Soviet Činema, 1917-1929 (Cambridge, Eng., 1979), 106-13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Youngblood, Denise J., Soviet Činema in the Silent Era, 1918-1935 (Ann Arbor, 1985; Austin, 1991), 155-61Google Scholar; Kenez, Peter, “The Cultural Revolution in Činema,” Slavic Review 4:1, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 418-19Google Scholar; Miller, Jamie, Soviet Činema: Politics and Persuasion under Stalin (London, 2010).Google Scholar

5. P. A. Bliakhin, “K itogam kino-sezona 1927-28 goda,” Kino i kul'tura, 1929, no. 2 (February): 3-16. See also, for example, A. Krinitskii, “Nuzhen reshiteln'yi sdvig,” Pravda, 25 March 1928, 3. In particular, Bliakhin demanded clearer attention to the “distinguishing characteristics” of the new byt, as produced by the conditions of urban labor.

6. N. K., “Byt ‘ideologicheskii,’ byt ‘kassovyi,’ byt ‘zhivoi,'” Sovetskii ekran, 1928, no. 27: 5. See also “Chto khotiat videt’ rabochie? Svoiu, sovetskuiu zhizn'!” Kino, no. 5 (31 January 1928): 20. In 1930, Adrian Piotrovskii made a speech at the Komakademiia, also published, in which he distinguished two “tendencies” in Soviet Činema during its first decade: “intellectualism” (exemplified by the work of Sergei Eisenstein) and “emotionalism” (of which directors Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Ivan Cherviakov were representatives) . Adrian Piotrovskii, “Khudozhestvennye techeniia v sovetskom kino,” from his book Khudozhestvennye techeniia v sovetskom kino (Moscow, 1930); reprinted in Adrian Piotrovskii, Teatr, kino, zhizn', ed. Alisa A. Akimova (Leningrad, 1969), 232-56.

7. K. Gazdenko, “Sovetskii byt na sovetskom ekrane,” Kinofront, 1927, no. 1: 9.

8. Abram Room, “Moi kinoubezhdeniia,” Sovetskii ekran, 1926, no. 8: 5.

9. I. Davydov, “Order na zhizn',” Sovetskoe kino, 1928, no. 1:5.

10. N. K., “Byt ‘ideologicheskii,'” 5.

11. Viktor Shklovskii, “Sherst', steklo i kruzheva,” Kino, no. 32 (9 August 1927): 2. Shklovskii also discussed a further film, Boris Svetozavrov's Zolotoe runo (Golden Fleece, released 3 April 1928), about wool production.

12. The term fotogenichnyi had particular resonance in the film press of diis period. It was drawn from French film theorist Louis Delluc, whose Photogénie (Paris, 1920) was published in Russian in 1924: Lui Deliuk [Louis Delluc], Fotogeniia, trans. T. I. Sorokin, with introduction by Iu. Potekhin (Moscow, 1924).

13. Mikhail Bleiman, “Chelovek v sovetskom fil'me 1: Istoriia odnoi oshibki,” Sovetskoe kino, 1933, nos. 5-6: 48-57. This was the first of three parts. “Chelovek v sovetskom fil'me 2: Fil'ma obozrenie,” Sovetskoe kino, 1933, no. 8: 51-60; “Chelovek v sovetskom fil'me 3: V poiskakh novogo stilia,” Sovetskoe kino, 1933, no. 9: 27-42.

14. Nikolai Iezuitov, “O stiliakh sovetskogo kino,” Sovetskoe kino, 1933, nos. 5-6: 44. This was a continuation of an article published in the previous issue of the journal: “O stiliakh sovetskogo kino (kontseptsiia razviuia sovetskogo kinoiskusstva),” Sovetskoe kino, 1933, nos. 3-4: 35-55. The publication was a transcript of a speech presented to the Komakademiia on 22 April 1933. Both Iezuitov and Bleiman made frequent reference to Piotrovskii, “Khudozhestvennye techeniia v sovetskom kino.“

15. For further support for this claim, see Widdis, Emma, “Sew Yourself Soviet: The Pleasures of Textile in the Machine Age,” in Dobrenko, Evgenii and Balina, Marina, eds., Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style (London, 2009), 115-33.Google Scholar

16. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The German Ideology: Parts I and III, trans, and ed. Pascal, R. (New York, 1947), 35.Google Scholar

17. Jacques Rancière, “Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art,” Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 10, at http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2nl/ranciere.html (last accessed 6 June 2012).

18. See, for example, Hellebust, Rolf, Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution (Ithaca, 2003).Google Scholar Hellebust addresses the concept of the “manufacture” of new Soviet man in terms relevant for this study.

19. Trotskii, L. D., Literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1923), 189.Google Scholar Published in English as Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor, 1975), 256.

20. Trotskii, Literatura i revoliutsiia, 189.

21. Many articles on psychology were published in major newspapers: see, for example, 1. V Frankford, “G. I. Chelpanov v roli ‘Marksista-psikhologa,'” Pravda, 24 October 1926, 2. See David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History (Oxford, 1989), 210, 224, 505n 4. According to Margarete Vohringer, of 55 institutions organized by Narkompros during the 1920s, 24 were explicidy linked to physiology and psychology: Margarete Vöhringer, “Professionalisiertes Laientum: Nikolaj Ladovskijs Psychotechnisches Labor fur Architektur,“ in Matthias Schwarz, Wladimir Velminski, and Torben Philipp, eds., Laien, Lektiiren, Laboratorien: Künste und Wissenschaften in Russland 18600960 (Frankfurt, 2008), 333.

22. Joravsky, Russian Psychology, 212.

23. Aron Zalkind, in Estestvoznanie i marksizm, 1929, no. 3: 22, cited in Joravsky, Russian Psychology, 250.

24. Vygotskii, Lev, “Istoricheskii smysl psikhologicheskogo krizisa,” Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (Moscow, 1982), 1:435.Google Scholar

25. It is important to note, however, that chuvstvo also most directly translates the English “sense” (the five senses: touch, smell, etc.). See, for example, Mangol'd, E., Organy chuvstv cheloveka (Moscow-Leningrad, 1925).Google Scholar

26. Aleksandra Kollontai, Liubov’ pchel trudovykh (1923). Steinberg, Mark D., Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925 (Ithaca, 2002)Google Scholar; Carleton, Gregory, Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia (Pittsburgh, 2005).Google Scholar See also Naiman, Eric, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997).Google Scholar

27. Kollontai, Aleksandra, “Dorogu krylatomu erosu,” Molodaia gvardiia, 1923, no. 3: 111-21.Google Scholar

28. V. I. Lenin, “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy,” in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow, 1972), 14:17-362. This quotation is drawn from chapter 1, “Oshchushcheniia i kompleksy oshchushchenii” (Sensations and Complexes of Sensations), cited in Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, ed. Otto Iu. Shmidt, lsted. (Moscow, 1926-49), 43:727.

29. Lenin, “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,” 727.

30. Joravsky, Russian Psychology, 264.

31. The dominant movement in Soviet psychology before 1930 was the study of reflexes— the study of the physiological responses of the human subject to objective stimuli, and their link with cognition and emotion. The predominance of discussion of “reflexes,“ as Irina Sirotkina has shown, reflects the materialist “fashion” that dominated debate in many fields in Soviet Russia in this period. Sirotkina, Irina, “The Ubiquitous Reflex and Its Critics in Post-Revolutionary Russia,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 32, no. 1 (March 2009): 70–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed Itwas this principle that underlay “psychotechnics” (psikhotekhnika) and “Industrial Psychology” (the “practical” application of psychological knowledge), most famously realized in Aleksei Gastev's experiments in his Central Institute of Labor (Tsentral'nyi institut truda), which sought to create the optimal conditions for efficient, rationalized labor processes.

32. Zalkind, Aron, “Die Psychologie des Menschen der Zukunft,” in Groys, B. and Hagemeister, M., eds., Die neue Menschheit: Biopolitische Utopien in Russland des 20 fahrhunderts (Frankfurt, 2001), 648.Google Scholar

33. Ibid., 671.

34. Bukharin's Speech to the First Pedological Conference in 1927, cited in Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, trans. Noah and Maria Rubins (Boulder, Colo., 1997), 264-65.

35. Christina Kiaer's illuminating discussion of avant-garde engagements with material objects has traced the spread of these ideas into product design; constructivist projects for clothing, architecture, furniture, and even crockery reveal the impulse to reform the self through a reconstructed material environment. Kiaer, Christina, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).Google Scholar

36. See Vöhringer, Margarete, Avanlgarde und Psychotechnik: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik der Wahrnehmungsexperimente in der frühen Sowjetunion (Gottingen, 2007), 107-68Google Scholar; also Amy Sargeant, “Russian Physiology and Pudovkin's The Mechanics of the Brain (The Behavior of Animals and Man),” Vsevolod Pudovkin: Classic Films of the Soviet Avant-Garde (London, 2000), 29-45. Barbara Wurm has noted the importance of Činema in Gastev's psychotechnics. See Barbara Wurm, “Gastevs Medien: Das ‘Foto-Kino-Labor’ des CIT,“ in Schwarz, Velminski, and Philipp, eds., Laien, Lektüren, Laboratorien, 347-93. Ute Holl has noted the influence of Bekhterev on Dziga Vertov. Ute Holl, “The Bildung des Menschen im Kino-Eksperiment. Laboratorien,Apparaturen und Dziga Vertovs Kinowahrheit als Medientheorie,” in Schwarz, Velminski, and Philipp, eds., Laien, Lektüren, Laboratorien, 299-325.

37. John MacKay, “Disorganized Noise: Enthusiasm and the Ear of the Collective,“ Kinokul'tura, no. 7 (January 2005): 4 - 5 at http://www.kinokultura.com/articles/jan05-mackay.html (last accessed 6 June 2012). Oksana Bulgakowa has also worked extensively on film's “sensory” apparatus: Oksana Bulgakova, Sovetskii slukhoglas: Kino i ego organy chuvstv (Moscow, 2010). Note also that much has been written about Eisenstein's theories of perception and the extent to which his notion of “sensuous thought” was influenced by Lev Vygotskii's work on “inner speech“: David Bordwell, “Eisenstein's Epistemological Shift,” Screen 15, no. 4 (1974): 29-46.

38. Although Bulgakowa acknowledges the significance of “tactile seeing” she does not develop this idea. Bulgakova, Sovetskii slukhoglas, 9.

39. Several new psychological periodicals were established in 1928-29: Psikhologiia (closed 1932); Pedologiia (closed 1932), and Psikhqftziologiia truda i psikhotekhniki (renamed Sovetskaia psikhotekhnika in 1932 and closed in 1934); see Kozulin, Alex, Psychology in Utopia: Towards a Social History of Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), x.Google Scholar

40. Graham, Loren R., Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (London, 1966), 365-66.Google Scholar

41. Ibid., 366. “Industrial psychology” was, in Etkind's words, “blasted to pieces” in 1934. Etkind, Eros of the Impossible, 17.

42. Bleiman, “Chelovek v sovetskom fil'me 1,” 49.

43. Irina Grashchenkova, “Vospitanie chuvstv: O stsenarii i fil'me ‘Ukhaby,'” Iz istorii kino (Moscow, 1974), 9:87. The Soviet film industry at this time was still producing historical melodramas such as Ledianoi dom (Ice House, dir. Konstantin Eggert, 1927) and Iurii Tarich's Kryl'ia kholopa (Wings of a Serf, 1926), and the overall repertoire was by no means dominated by the kind of “revolutionary” films exemplified by the work of Eisenstein and other avant-garde directors. Room's Tret'ia Meshchanskaia (Bed and Sofa, 1927) was another film praised for its new direction; Friedrikh Ermler's Parizhskii sapozhnik (The Parisian Shoemaker, 1927) was also much discussed. I have selected Ukhaby and Kruzheva as case studies because of their focus on the faktura of materials, but the broader endeavor certainly extended into the work of other filmmakers, and the work of Ermler and Ivan Cherviakov (Moi syn, [My Son, 1928]) is particularly important in this respect.

44. Abram Room, “Kak delalis’ ‘Ukhaby,'” Kino, no. 44 (1 November 1927): 5. The crew included cameraman D. Fel'dman and V. Kuznetsov in charge of lighting and Viktor Aden as khudozhnik (set designer).

45. The Gus'-Khrustal'nyi, founded in 1756, is one of the oldest crystal factories in Europe

46. Shklovskii, “Sherst',” 2.

47. For an excellent account of the avant-garde understanding of faktura, see Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley, 2005). For further analysis of the term in relation to film of this period, see Emma Widdis, “Faktura: Depth and Surface in Early Soviet Set Design,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Činema 3, no. 1 (March 2009): 5-32.

48. Set designer Sergei Kozlovskii, for example, recalled the mid-1920s as a period when he “sought new types of faktura,” emphasizing an interest in different types of material surface. Kozlovskii cited in G. I. Miasnikov, Ocherki istorii sovetskogo kinodekoratsionnogo iskusstva (1918-1930) (Moscow, 1975), 45. In 1925, Sergei Iutkevich criticized the poor quality of Soviet Činematography for not exploiting the faktura of different materials, for making “silk look like calico.” Sergei Iutkevich, “Plat'e kartiny,” Sovetskii ekran, 1925, no. 39: 7.

49. The script was published by Irina Grashchenkova in 1974. Abram Room and Viktor Shklovskii, “Ukhaby,” h istorii kino (Moscow, 1974), 9:96-121. Like Room's two previous films, Predatel’ (The Traitor, 1926), and Tret'ia Meshchanskaia, the screenplay was written by Shklovskii, adapted from a short story by A. Dmitriev. It is notable, indeed, that both Ukhaby and Kruzheva drew their screenplays from short stories by rabkors ﹛rabochie korrespondenty). Brooks, Jeffrey, “Public and Private Values in the Soviet Press, 1921-1928,“ Slavic Review 48, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 16–35;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Gorham, Michael, “Tongue-Tied Writers: The Rabsel'kor Movement and the Voice of the ‘New Intelligentsiia’ in Early Soviet Russia,“ Russian Review 55, no. 3 (July 1996): 412-29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50. (“Worker“) A. Vasil'ev, “Eshche ob ‘Ukhabakh,'” Kino, no. 9 (28 February 1928): 3. The film was not universally considered successful in this respect, however: writing in the leftist Kinofront, M. Shneider accused Room of treating the “moral” and “domestic“ issues of the film in a retrogressive fashion, with its resolution based on traditional bourgeois familial structures: seeing Tania returned to a conventional relationship, rather than liberated and granted her independence. M. Shneider, “Ukhaby,” Kinofront, 1928, no. 1: 19-22.

51. See Chadaga, Julia Bekman, “Light in Captivity: Spectacular Glass and Soviet Power in the 1920s and 1930s,” Slavic Review 66, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 82–105 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for discussion of the particular potency of glass as substance and metaphor in the Soviet cultural imagination.

52. Grashchenkova, “Vospitanie chuvstv,” 90.

53. Room and Shklovskii, “Ukhaby,” 97.

54. Shneider, “Ukhaby,” 21.

55. Room, “Moi kinoubezhdeniia,” 5.

56. “Tret'ia Meshchanskaia (beseda s rezhisserom A. M. Roomom),” Kino, no. 37 (14 September 1926): 1-2. Emphasis added. Cited in translation by Julian Graffy in Bed and Sofa (London, 2001), 11.

57. K. Fel'dman, “Byt v sovetskom kino,” Sovetskii ekran, 1928, no. 27: 4. This was published as part of a cluster of articles in this issue, together with an editorial, “Trudnyi etap,“ 3, which called for a debate on the problem of byt.

58. N.K., “Byt ‘ideologicheskii,'” 5. Emphasis added.

59. It is no accident that Kruzheva and Ukhaby shared many thematic and formal preoccupations. By 1927, lutkevich had worked twice with Room, serving as set designer for Predatel’ and Tret'ia Meshchanskaia, Shklovskii's influence on both filmmakers was also significant: it was he who suggested that the short story “Stengaz” be adapted into the screenplay for Kruzheva, attracted by the setting of the film in a lace factory, which “set film on ‘materialist’ tracks.” Sergei lutkevich, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, vol. 1, Molodost' (Moscow, 1990), 327.

60. The stengazeta (wall newspaper, a single-page “newspaper” posted on a wall in the factory) of the original story plays a vital role in creating a sense of collective responsibility.

61. L. Vaks, “ODSKnaprosmotre ‘Kruzhev,'” Kino, no. 21 (22 May 1928): 5; “O ‘Kruzhevakh,'“ Kino, no. 17 (24 April 1928): 3. According to lutkevich, Kruzheva was a victim of a dispute between Sovkino and RAPP (Leopold Averbakh, Aleksandr Fadeev, Iurii Libedinskii, Pavel Kirshon), in which members of RAPP accused Sovkino of being market-led. Probably as a result of this difficult time in the studio, the film was negatively received by the Sovkino audiorities, and its release was delayed—but the film was, lutkevich recalls, supported by RAPP. It was eventually released to generally positive acclaim (especially in open meetings held in ODSK (Obshchestvo druzei sovetskogo kino) and ARK (Assotsiatsiia revoliutsionnykh kinematografii). It was also, according to lutkevich himself, responsible for Iutkevich being invited, by Fridrikh (Friedrich) Ermler, to join the Leningrad branch of Sovkino. See Iutkevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:331-32.

62. Neznamov, P., “Kruzheva,” Sovetskii ekran, 1928, no. 23: 9.Google Scholar Vladimir Nedobrovo praised the film's “recognizable” characters and its picture of rabochii byt. Vladimir Nedobrovo, “O ‘Kruzhevakh,'” Leningradskaia gazeta kino, no. 27 (1 July 1928): 3.

63. Cited in Vaks, “ODSK na prosmotre ‘Kruzhev,'” 5.

64. Iutkevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:330.

65. Shklovskii, “Sherst',” 2.

66. In Eisenstein's October: TenDays That Shook the World (1928), we see a similar juxtaposition of the filigree of lace against block shapes of machinery, when the Women's Battalion hangs a lace bra over the solid blocks of a billiard cue stand. Eisenstein's own interest in filmic faktura, of course, merits much further exploration, as one of the key sources of the avant-garde interest in material.

67. Turovskaia, Maiia I. and Khaniutin, Iurii M., Sergei lutkevich (Moscow, 1968), 46.Google Scholar

68. Sobchack, Vivian, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, 2004), 63.Google Scholar

69. Marks, Laura, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Činema, Embodiment and the Senses (Durham, 2000), 162.Google Scholar

70. Stratling, Susanna, “Das buchstäbliche Erscheinen und Verschwinden: Zur De-Materialisierung von Schriftflächen zwischen konstruktiv und konkret (El’ Lisickij und Carlfriedrich Claus),” Plurale: Zeitschrift för Denkversionen 0 (Berlin, 2001), 107-39.Google Scholar

71. Powell, Kirsten H., “Hands-on Surrealism,” Art History 20, no. 4 (December 1997): 516-33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

72. Neznamov, “Kruzheva,” 77. See also Nedobrovo, “O ‘Kruzhevakh',” 3; V Strakhov, “Kruzheva,” Leningradskaia gazeta kino, no. 38 (8 July 1928): 2.

73. Iutkevich, “Plate kartiny,” 7.

74. Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Marshall Cohen, Gerald Mast, and Braudy, Leo, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1992), 677.Google Scholar Emphasis added.

75. Balázs, Béla, “The Close-Up,” in Mast, , Cohen, , and Braudy, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, 260.Google Scholar Balazs lived in Moscow in the early 1930s, and his work was frequendy published in the Soviet film press.

76. Benjamin's near-contemporary Siegfried Kracauer shared a similar view of film's redemptive potential, with particular political inflection. For insightful analysis of his interest in filmic materiality and its political repercussions, see Hansen, Miriam, “With Skin and Hair: Kracauer's Theory of Film, Marseille 1940,” Critical Enquiry 19, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 437-69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

77. Shklovskii, “Sherst',” 2.

78. Steinberg has explored the “mindfulness” of emotion in the writings of early proletarian writers in detail. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination, 129-46 (esp. 129-36).

79. Platonov, Andrei, “Proletarskaia poeziia,” Kuznitsa, no. 9 (1922): 28–29 Google Scholar, reprinted in A. A. Platonov, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh (Moscow, 1985), 3:523. Emphasis added.

80. Platonov, “Proletarskaia poeziia,” 523. Platonov defined oshchushchenie and chuvstvo in this essay in terms opposite to those I have proposed here, describing oshchushchenie (along with “intuition“) as a false, subjectively created idea of the world and chuvstvo (along with “consciousness“) as an outwardly directed “true” understanding of the world. See Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination, 130. The complexities of these definitions notwithstanding, what is significant is Platonov's clearly expressed focus on the encounter with the external, material world as the defining condition for the creation of a new subjecthood.

81. Viktor Shklovskii, “Iskusstvo kak priem,” O teorii prozy (Moscow, 1925), 12 [my translation]. Emphasis in the original; reprinted in English as “Art as Device,” Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Scherr (Urbana, 111., 1991), 1-15.

82. For further discussion of the potency of Shklovskii's formula for film studies, see Oever, Annie van der, ed., Ostranenie: On “Strangeness” and the Moving Image (Amsterdam, 2010).Google Scholar

83. Iutkevich was explicit about his use of shadow as a “decorative” element in film: Sergei Iutkevich, “Dekoriruem svetom,” Sovetskii ekran, 1925, no. 29: 43, reprinted in Iutkevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:304-5.

84. I think of the work of Jean Epstein and Dimitri Kirsanoff in particular. Iutkevich, indeed, recalls how he had seen parts of Epstein's Le coeur fidèle (1923) and Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant (1926), brought back from Paris by Il'iaErenburg, and how these films had shown him that everyday life could be “photogenic.” Iutkevich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:329-30.

85. In posters for that film, the woman's face is also obscured by lace. For consideration of the use of lace in film, see Webber, Andrew, “Cut and Laced: Traumatism in Luis Bunuel's Un Chien andalou ,” in Sabbadini, Andrea, ed., Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representation of Loss in European Cinema (London, 2007), 92–101.Google Scholar

86. Cavendish, Philip, Soviet Mainstream Cinematography: The Silent Era (London, 2008), 53.Google Scholar

87. Kozintsev also saw Menilmontant when he visited Paris to shoot location material for Novyi Vavilon. For further discussion of Kozintsev and Trauberg's use of textile in this film, see Nesbet, Anne, “Émile Zola, Kozintsev and Trauberg, and Film as Department Store,” Russian Review 68, no. 1 (January 2009): 102-21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

88. In their 1926 adaptation of Nikolai Gogo'l's Shinel’ (The Overcoat), for example, Akakii Akakievich's obsession with his coat, and the status it represented, provides the premise for an evident visual pleasure in exploring texture and materiality.

89. Khersonskii, Khrisanof, “Chto na ekrane,” Sovetskii ekran, 1928, no. 16: 23.Google Scholar

90. Strakhov, “Kruzheva,” 3.

91. Nedobrovo, “O ‘Kruzhevakh,'” 3.

92. Ioffe, Ieremiia, “Kul'tura i stil',” (1928), in Ioffe, I., Izbrannoe: 1920-30-e gg., ed. Kagan, Moisei S., Smirnov, I. P., and Grigor'eva, N. Ia. (St. Petersburg, 2006), 87.Google Scholar

93. Bleiman, “Chelovek v sovetskom fil'me 2,” 57.

94. Grashchenkova, “Vospitanie chuvstv,” 86-95.

95. Piataev, A. S., “Chto takoe individual'nost'? V diskussionnom poriadke,” Kino, no. 40 (22 August 1933): 3.Google Scholar

96. Iezuitov, “O stiliakh sovetskogo kino (kontseptsiia razvitiia sovetskogo kinoiskusstva),“ 41.

97. Ibid., 46. Emphasis in the original.

98. Adrian Piotrovskii, “Aprel'skie itogi, aprel'skie uroki,” Kino, no. 23 (10 May 1933): 2.

99. Bleiman, “Chelovek v sovetskom ftTme 2,” 56.

100. Bela Balash [Balázs], “Novye fil'my, novye zhizhneoshchushcheniia,” Sovetskoe kino, 1933, nos. 3-4: 19-24.

101. Ieremiia Ioffe, “Sinteticheskaia istoriia iskusstv,” in Ioffe, Izbrannoe, 201.

102. Ibid., 257.

103. Iezuitov, “O stiliakh sovetskogo kino,” 44.

104. Clark, Katerina, The Soviet Novél: History as Ritual (Bloomington, 1981).Google Scholar Note, however, that Odna can also be read as counter to the socialist realist masterplot, not least in its troubled presentation of technology. See, for example, Kaganovsky, Lilya, “The Voice of Technology and the End of Soviet Silent Film: Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg's Alone ,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Činema 1, no. 3 (August 2007): 265-81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also, Neia Zorkaia, “Odna na perekrestakh,” KiNovédcheskie zapiski: Istorichesko-teoriticheskii zhurnal 74 (2005): 143-59.

105. The film's Činematographer, Andrei Moskvin, used “white on white” Činematography for this film, exploiting a range of pure white tones (usually avoided in black-andwhite Činematography) in order to create what critics describe as a “desaturated screen.“ In the city, Kuz'mina is dressed in a white dress, in sunlit white streets, viewing white crockery. See Kaganovsky, “Voice of Technology,” 274.

106. V. Sutyrin, “Ot intelligentskikh illiuzii k real'noi deistvitel'nosti,” Proletarskoe kino 1931, nos. 5-6: 17. Note that Kozintsev and Trauberg's ShineV also offers an oversized teapot; the crockery displays in Odna can be seen as a dialogue with that film, as well as with the department store in Novyi Vavilon. These intertexts provide further support for the reading of this film as a self-reflexive comment on the ideological implications of FEKS's own visual style.

107. Grigorii Kozintsev, Glubokii ekran, vol. 1, O svoei rabote v kino i teatre (Leningrad, 1982), 191.

108. See, for example, N. Iukov, “Odna,” Kino, no. 55 (6 October 1931): 3; Aladin, '“Odna'—krivaia werkh,” Kino, no. 64 (26 November 1931): 2; A. Cherennyi, “Vyzov meshchanstvu: O teme ‘Odna,'” Kino, no. 59 (1 November 1931): 3.

109. See, for example, Zorkaia, “Odna na perekrestkakh,” 76.

110. As my director-protagonists entered the 1930s, they went in different directions, presenting different responses to the new demands. In Zlatye gory (Golden Mountains, 1931) and Vstrechnyi (Counterplan, 1932), Iutkevich presented radically simplified sets and clearly defined heroes. For Kozintsev and Trauberg, Odna marked a transition that led to a trilogy of films focusing on an exemplary “individual,” Maksim. Room, in 1936, produced the ill-fated Strogii iunosha (Severe Youth, 1936), a film in which the director's evident interest in the formal properties of tilings and surfaces, his preoccupation with film as a means of sensing the world, brought severe censure.

111. Shmidt's wife, Vera Shmidt, became the head of the Psychoanalytic Kindergarten, which was opened in Moscow in August 1921, and, in 1927, secretary of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society. Etkind points to Shmidt's importance in psychoanalytic circles in particular. Eddnd, Eros of the Impossible, 193-94.

112. Note that the volume of the encyclopedia including information about chuvstvo was published in 1934: “Chuvstvo,” in in Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, ed. Shmidt, 61:727. See also “Oshchushchenie,” in Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, ed. Shmidt, 43:727.

113. “Chuvstvo,” in Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, ed. B. A. Vvedenskii, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1955-1957), 47:459.

114. “Oshchushchenie,” Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, ed. Vvedenskii, 31: 504.