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Introduction: Revolutionary Rupture and National Stability The task of the total transformation of the world was not an end in itself—the end was ideal humanity, freedom from economic material necessity, and most important, freedom to create. Hence all avantgarde movements . . . however diverse their aesthetic sensibilities, were ultimately concerned with the identical problem: the development and implementation of a modern utopian science scheme that would affect the leap from the present to the future, or, in the idiom of the day, from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. But though Marx posited the fusion of art and life in The German Ideology, neither Marx and Engels nor the Bolsheviks articulated a coherent aesthetic theory. As a result, providing blueprints of the ideal future, particularly models of a new man, became the task of the artistic avant-garde. —Irina Gutkin, Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic (1999) Whenever a new social group, especially a new class, first appeared in history, it was seized for a time with a kind of fever to build. People would joyously start to remake the face of the earth in the image and likeness of their own conceptions of social justice, and their literature acquired an earthy, insistently urgent, and efficacious quality . . . a revolutionary form was invented that most hit the mark. —Nikolai Chuzhak, “Pisatel'skaia pamiatka” (1929) 2 Post-Revolution Nonfiction Film It seems to me important that we advance by way of the very difficult combination of continuity and rupture. If you go too far ahead, nobody will follow you, you’re not efficient because you don’t communicate. If you limit yourself to respecting the level of the masses at a given moment, they may pass you by and leave you becalmed and paralyzed. If you go too far ahead in your search, you can become dangerously isolated from your audience—just as one runs a risk by choosing the well-traveled road and not achieving a personal advance. I think the will ought to be always to do violence to the public. —Manuel Perez, in Isaac Leon Frias’s, “Entrevista con Manuel Perez,” Hablemos de ciné (1979) Energy, Innovation, and Audiences Periods immediately following revolutions are often charged with artistic energy and creative experimentation. Industrial leaders, scholars, critics, and artists debate the value and role of artistic practice in a new society. They negotiate their own aesthetic theories with the politics of the victorious party and seek access to scant resources. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the goals of political revolutionaries and revolutionary artists were complementary and integrated in ways never before experienced in each country. Each group supported political and aesthetic experimentation and believed that such practices could and would lead to a society of new men and women in the immediate future. Leon Trotsky envisioned an individual who “will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical . . . . The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”1 And Che Guevara anticipated an individual who was “more complete, with much more inner wealth and much more responsibility,” one with the potential to reach “total consciousness as a social being.”2 The duty of providing models of the new man, as Irina Gutkin describes in Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, fell in part to the artistic avant-garde.3 Even nonfiction film, associated with the communication of events and experiences of the everyday world, was drawn into the culture of experimentation. Soviet and Cuban leaders, in fact, privileged nonfic- .218] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 15:23 GMT) 3 Introduction tion film as a form uniquely capable of aiding the effort to shape the new man and to unify, edify, and modernize the citizenry as a whole. In the clarity of its language and in its visual and narrative pleasures, they saw considerable agitational, propagandistic, and economic potential. Onlocation shooting, use of found footage material, and limited need for elaborate sets and costumes: all this made documentaries and newsreels economically efficient in comparison to fiction films. And nonfiction film was thought to be consistent with Marxist-Leninist principles in that it grounded its artistic production in material reality. But the dimensions and directions these forms should take were not at all self-evident, even to the Cubans, who at least had...

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