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I n an October 1922 issue of Kino-Photo, Mayakovsky, addressing his readers , championed cinema’s revolutionary potential: For you cinema is a spectacle. For me almost a weltanschauung. Cinema—purveyor of movement. Cinema—renewer of literature. Cinema—destroyer of aesthetics. Cinema—fearlessness. Cinema—a sportsman. Cinema—a sower of ideas.1 For Mayakovsky, cinema was the embodiment of human motion, a powerful means toward artistic renewal, and a source of Soviet dynamism. Film, the poet emphasized, signified an accelerated, bold step into a bright future. Yet despite his enthusiasm for cinema’s utopian possibilities, Mayakovsky appeared far less sanguine about the current state of the medium in Soviet Russia. As the futurist poet went on to argue in this Kino-Photo piece, moviegoers had tired of American imports, homegrown melodramas, and capitalist control of the medium. Innovation, in other words, was essential, as were more politically charged approaches to film that could grab viewers and alter their worldview. For Mayakovsky , the rise of the Soviet state necessitated a brand of cinema that would correspond to the new nation’s lofty goals, such as the spread of socialism, the triumph of proletarian culture over bourgeois tradition, and the ascendance of a national industrial complex capable of outpacing theWest.Early Soviet cinema, 191 Soviet Cinema’s Great Leap Forward 6 bolstered by the era’s dynamism,would soon accommodate the advocacy of these urgent aims. Soviet filmmakers, concurring with Mayakovsky, jumped at the opportunities provided by film, still an undeveloped medium, to adapt their work to the nation’s ideology. Given the Soviet state’s acknowledged objectives of prompt social progress and rapid industrialization, this was largely an ideology of acceleration ,which a young generation of Soviet filmmakers embraced as they sought out dynamic cinematic techniques and styles commensurate with the nation’s desired transformation. Short, propagandistic agitki and elaborate filming tricks satisfied a good deal of this ambition, yet the so-called avant-garde hoped to go even further. The nation’s foremost filmmakers strove not only to present the motion of the era but also to penetrate it, to offer their own expression of what the human eye fails to comprehend when witnessing speed. As a motionbased art form, cinema, these filmmakers believed, could help instill in Soviet audiences a consciousness receptive to the modernizing world of efficient machinery, rapid transport, and fast, dramatic progress. Simultaneously, however , there was a desire to go beyond these everyday issues to a pure manifestation of speed—be it through individual image or through montage—that could offer insight into the very nature of modernity’s dynamism. This chapter examines the way Soviet cinema moved in the direction of the nonfigurative, that is, pure kinesthetic film, without relinquishing its close ties to ideology. Basing my analysis on several essays by Kazimir Malevich devoted to cinema, I explore how some of Soviet Russia’s foremost filmmakers followed their predecessors in poetry and painting in seeking out the artistic means best suited to conveying the abstract essence of modernism’s velocity,albeit in a postrevolutionary era that saw the merging of dynamism and dogma. The union of speed and politics—whether in nonfigurative forms envisioned by Malevich or in montage sequences evincing revolutionary principles—helped shape many of the era’s most ideologically oriented films, including Eisenstein’s Strike and October, Vertov’s Eleventh Year (Odinnadtsatyi, 1928) and The Man with the Movie Camera, Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia, and Ilya Trauberg’s China Express (or Blue Express [Goluboi ekspress], as it was originally titled). These films challenged audiences in ways that encouraged visual participation in the nation’s anticipated leap past the West.Yet by the late 1920s, cinematic forms of dynamism would begin to diverge from the Bolsheviks’ evolving vision of reality, as increasingly rapid displays of montage on Soviet screens presented too great a challenge for the audiences that the Bolsheviks strove to reach. As a result, the restrictive cultural doctrine of socialist realism,promoting rapid collectivization 192 Fast Motion Pictures and Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, would soon overwhelm these innovative, unruly manifestations of speed. Futurism Revisited As Mayakovsky’s poetic account of cinema suggests, the spirit of futurism that prevailed during the second decade of the century in Russian verse and painting began to reemerge in the cinema of the avant-garde, a broad label given to filmmakers who tended toward the“plotless”(bessiuzhetnoe) or“unacted”(neigrovoe ).2 By the beginning of the...

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