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I nAugust 1922,with the publication of the film journal Kino-Photo (Kino-fot), speed in effect entered early Soviet cinema.A forum for the country’s constructivists who had recently turned their attention to film,this journal presented the dynamism of cinema as a unifying trend of avant-garde art. Through a series of theoretical articles and manifestos that would help shape the development of Soviet cinema during the 1920s, Kino-Photo’s contributors—many of whom were soon to emerge as leading avant-garde filmmakers and film critics —touted film’s powerful fast pace and energy. In advocating this dynamic approach to the medium, contributors such as Dziga Vertov and Lev Kuleshov emphatically ushered in a revolutionary new velocity for Soviet cinema.1 The first issue of Kino-Photo included, among a number of theoretical articles , film reviews, and innovative design work,Vertov’s“WE: Variant of a Manifesto ,” which called for a kinochestvo—a neologism denoting filmic art—that boasted“hurricanes of movement,”and Kuleshov’s declaration“Americanism” (“Amerikanshchina”), in which the young filmmaker stated his preference for Hollywood’s fast-paced vitality over Russia’s slower moving prerevolutionary cinematic fare.2 Other contributors to Kino-Photo likewise championed a style of cinema capable of amplifying the speed of the era.As the critic Ippolit Sokolov wrote in this same issue, “Today cinema should reflect the technology and labor of our epoch amid its feverish tempo of zooming automobiles, locomotives , airplanes, machines, and the worker’s physical gestures.”3 This first issue of Kino-Photo, edited by the constructivist Aleksey Gan, also provided a sampling of Western European film criticism, for instance, the essay “Dynamic Painting” (with the parenthetical subtitle “Nonobjective Cinema”) by the German theorist and architect Ludwig Hilberseimer. In“Dynamic Painting ” Hilberseimer argued that recent film work by the German artists Viking 161 Early Soviet Cinema Tricks and Kinesthetics 5 Eggeling and Hans Richter represented an attempt to overcome the inability of the plastic arts to convey time and speed. The author contended here that dynamic cinema“arises not from the superficial impression created by mechanical movement,but from within,from the recognition of [movement’s] essence.”4 The speed of cinema, Hilberseimer suggested, was not simply quick motion on the movie screen, but rather a rigorous exploration of speed’s abstract visual attributes.As if in response to Hilberseimer, Soviet filmmakers would soon dedicate themselves to uncovering techniques and images inherent to the medium of film and its underlying dynamism. Above all, Hilberseimer’s advocacy of abstract filmic speed, coupled with Kuleshov’s embrace of American-style editing andVertov’s kinochestvo of rhythmical movement,offered a compelling blueprint for early Soviet cinema. Although the journal Kino-Photo lasted less than a year, the ideas set forth on its pages had a far-reaching impact on how speed would figure in the era’s films. Subsequent issues of the journal included a range of features that likewise celebrated the dynamism of cinema and its increasing relevance for Soviet cinema: articles devoted to the plasticity of Charlie Chaplin, contributions from the cubo-futurist poet Mayakovsky, prescriptions for fast-paced propagandistic (or“agitational”) cinema, and illustrations by the constructivist artists Rodchenko and Stepanova. Despite one scholar’s contention that Kino-Photo was an “isolated phenomenon,” the journal’s call for greater dynamism in cinema had far-reaching effects for the burgeoning medium.5 Indeed, the themes and theories broached early on in Kino-Photo anticipated much of Soviet cinema’s development in the 1920s, during the course of which avant-garde filmmakers shifted away from Hollywood-inspired velocity to purer, often abstract depictions of Soviet speed that expanded on the dynamism of Russian avant-garde poetry and painting. As the initial issues of Kino-Photo suggest, early Soviet filmmakers saw speed as essential to the medium’s underlying aesthetic as well as to cinema’s propagandistic power.While the czarist regime had offered only tepid support to early filmmakers, the post-1917 political order embraced cinema and its dynamism; cinema thrived, at least initially, under a political regime that envisioned this mass medium as an extremely effective instrument for spreading Socialist ideology .6 In an oft-cited account from the first Soviet minister of culture Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lenin acknowledged cinema’s propagandistic potential when he allegedly declared film“the most important of the arts.”7 By the mid-1920s, cinema had accordingly evolved into a key Soviet art form, a...

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