Title: October: Ten Days That Shook the World
Director: Sergei M. Eisenstein
Years
1917 Genre: Drama
1. The sudden recovery, even in Italy, general studies and monographs on Soviet cinema and the directors of the '20s, accompanied by anthologies of theoretical writings and memories and testimonies of the leaders, is certainly a sign positive that bridges, in part, old gaps, pushing to revise the "accommodation" archaic or hasty, proposes, as happened in France, but hopefully with other critical consciousness, a point of reference, historical, theoretical, and the explosion postsessantottesca after reflow "doctrinaire" the debate on the relationship between cinema and revolution.
This is, again, the anthology that do not cover all the dissatisfaction and curiosity for the many texts (Eisenstein, Vertov, the Feks) waiting to be translated and available in reliable editions and philological ordered according to strict historical criteria . While endures, of course, the Italian malaise fueled by poor circulation works and experiences in relation to which the theoretical writings raised in terms of widespread production, rather than as a closed theory in its "specific".
For this, baffles security, often peremptory, which experiences very articulate, contradictory and often conflicting, are, by some of our scholars, the first similar to the common denominator of a generic notion of "cutting edge" and traced, then , in a scheme "theoretical" argument that, from October '17 to Piano, "begins to be implemented progressively, with a stiffness that will not leave any more space, the process of reconstruction of the entire working class, reduced to the role of workforce, productivity in a socialist, and, in parallel, the ideological identification of socialism with developing the work done, the reorganization of productivity ', a process that would, among other things, the effect of promoting' the organic integration of ' vanguard in a society that gradually slips into the all-embracing consolidation and reduction of the identical in all the social plan. "Hence, by deduction really" totalitarian "and ignoring the analysis of individual and often irreducible individual and group contributions, the conclusion that "the vanguard of the revolution put together as self-awareness and self-development 'and' carries in itself, beyond the trial and denial, a particular technology, underground, with productivity, that is integrated to the ideology of the reorganization of work. " So, in an apocalyptic hindsight, "by Mayakovsky to constructivism, the eccentric to the development itself as Eisenstein emergency revolutionary practice of violent transformation that breaks the old Tsarist world-farmer and opens on the future of technology and mass production on planning as a value in itself. "
And, therefore, with more explicit and categorical formulation by others, "the methodological and technical restructuring proposed by Eisenstein and other Russian formalists in the production Art 'is not merely "the answer, smarter and more advanced culture to new demands and new structure required by the political and economic system: Eisenstein and the future - even more than the formalism - are presented as the rational development of ideology and functional Soviet economy and society as a whole '. "' And, hailing passionately involved in the inevitable and recurring target of these executions:" The Cinema of Eisenstein intends to maintain the ambiguity between formal research and revolutionary commitment, objectively However, as a formal research is part of the general ideology of "technological myth" of the years immediately following the NEP, and end up as a particular audience, the vanguard of bourgeois intellectual and "not" bourgeois revolutionary commitment as it is merely the saga of communism, he reconstructs the great moments of its history, now seen as a process already, already made and concluded, that you can only sing the glories: it is only the object of revolutionary cinema of Eisenstein, not its real function '' `. And thus "the commitment of Eisenstein's film runs out to" sing "- a voice that only hearts can feel noble intellectual avant-garde - the past of the revolution, its glorious history, its big business, but do not care for no development of the revolution, its future, its real possibilities of change. "Where disconcerting, in a serious scholar and reliable, along with the peremptory unverifiable judgments, the simultaneous liquidation, in one of three fundamental issues: the location-specific historical and productivity theoretical and practical experience of Eisenstein, the general problem and historically specific dialectic between society groups, intellectuals and revolutionaries in a revolution in progress or not yet fully and finally passed off in the totality of "consolidation" and the "development", function and responsibility in promoting and organizing the party - or not - an active reception, socialized, and a critical mass of certain current and artistic experiences.
But anyhow: what press has concluded, with the inevitable Asor of "Mating," which "make for good literature, socialism was not essential. To make the revolution will not be necessary writers. "Within this" gap ", the story of Eisenstein would run from the beginning, because they tend to answer the 'need to ensure communication processes more streamlined and controllable, capable of operating linearly under official ideology, "in" fundamentally at odds with the significant productivity and negative provocative avant-garde "( Potemkin), the Eisenstein's project to develop tools and methods stressing in practice to think dialectically is, in substance, "a form of reduced construction concept of life, which was drawn up by avant-garde (such as behavior modification socio-existential group), a practice of ideological transformation of consciousness through the use of cognitive tools and expressive good "
And, while acknowledging that" Eisenstein to ensure that the materialistic and revolutionary character of the attitude formation is the ability to bring in film form and the dialectic of factory, as determined by the complexity of the relationship of production and circulation of struggle, as Emergency level of qualification alive and productive labor of its denied in the revolutionary process, "it is stated immediately after the" point of view of the factory is partly reduced and simplified forms theoretically inaccurate, and partly stolen from a royal intervention in dynamics of intellectual production, that is not an abstract ideological determination to do a critical form of denial, but tends to summarize the characteristics and the operational structure of socialist ideology. " While Pasqualotto, less tortuous, but also with more dismissive impatience and going straight to the "End of proof", "Eisenstein's films are advocating revolution of '17, are the" accommodation " revolution occurred as a universal palingenesis [...]. Ideology of socialism made enforced by a recovery and reactivation of certain narrative patterns and some of the highest ideals of the epic tradition bourgeois ideals and schemes undertaken as universal and eternal , also apply to the Bolshevik Revolution, also valid for the '17 '.
2. In recent writings of 1923, Bettelheim points out, "Lenin also returns on the theme of" cultural revolution "as a prerequisite to the development of socialism. Of course, what he has in view "to start" (ie not for arrestarvisi) is a "bourgeois culture" that allows to get rid of "pre-bourgeois culture, ie bureaucratic feudalism. "It is indeed clear that when he speaks of" bourgeois culture "is to reject the prefabricated conceptions of" proletarian culture ", from" many of our young writers and communists, "and not to reject a genuine proletarian culture could to inform the costume really, "to become a habit." But by May 1924, just months after the death of Lenin, confrontation and division on these issues, come back on animation, in particular during the meeting of the press section of the Central Committee devoted to party politics in the literature. In the explanatory memorandum, Voronskij still adheres to the position "tolerant" and antiamministrativa ("Art by its nature, such as science, does not lend itself to be adjusted with the same ease with which you provide some other spheres of our lives "), reconfirms the commitment of the party to support the" revolutionary groups "," without making its own point of view of a particular literary group ', and repeats the productivity of a "critical assimilation of the old art and culture." But Vardin, speaking now on behalf of Na postu ( the guard post), counterattacked fiercely opposing the strengthening of bourgeois ideology, and thus parallel to the "growth of kulaks in the countryside 'and that of' capital private cities " rejects the free movement of the mass of literature "counterrevolutionary" and asserts that they constitute "a Bolshevik fraction in the literature ':' this cell, this fraction is the group of Communist writers."
Yet nell'asprezza the contrast between the opening "tolerant" of sectarianism and Voronskij indication of the "proletarian" Vardin of at least one common factor, and not insignificant, there is: the paternalistic concept of the masses, "backward "for a" perishable "on the other. The problem of a creative relationship, critical, not just "teaching" between party and masses, and is out on the edge of the battle. The resolution of the Central Committee, the following year (July 1, 1925), resume, essentially, the conclusion Voronskij and the majority of the press section, "if the proletariat has already in hand infallible criteria for assessing the socio-political content of any literary work, it did not yet so precise answers to all problems of artistic form. " And again, "using all the technological achievements of ancient art, to develop an appropriate form, understandable to the broad masses."
is precisely on this ground that engages, reversed, the "project" of Eisenstein, apparently in the margins of the heated discussions of the biennium 1924-25, actually entering it on its merits with great clarity and awareness For him, in fact, the "technique" of the "old" art is not neutral. The article in the '25 ( materialistic attitude toward the form ) is organized around two references and key aims: the foundation of the materialist form, moving from the centrality of production processes, the expansion of revolutionary cinema, starting with the struggle ongoing class (the 'cine-eye "can not avoid the" danger that the spirit and daily contaminate the petit-bourgeois revolution').
This will be, until 1929 (with driving voltage proposals) and beyond (in ways more and more tortuous, "masked" and indirect), the privileged area of \u200b\u200bresearch-practice-practice teoricalteorico Eisenstein's "organize" the audience (thereby reversing the position of "passive") through a material organized. 1925: "[...] the work of art is above all a tractor, plowing deeply the psyche of the viewer, in a given direction class" (The materialistic attitude toward the form), 1927-28 " cinema "old" resume action on many points of view. The new one features a view of many actions ( How to bring to the screen Marx's Capital), 1929: "I think now we can only begin to imagine the ways in which we build a truly Soviet cinema, a cinema that is not only for the class membership is opposed to the bourgeois, but it is also a radical in overcoming his own methodology, and if in the 'period of war communism' and in 'the "troubled times" NEP "," we tried to provoke a sudden rush of emotions, new works should instead set in motion processes that occur in intellectual depth, by the action of them, not once, not once, not suddenly, but at the time you will experience deep inner turmoil, a thousand times more radical and decisive in against our class enemy, "the emotions, torn apart by five years" (Preface . For the book by Guido Seeber "Technique Cinetrucco" ) 1942-1946: "Great God! Because right now we are able to do this with one of the more abstract philosophical issues. It is not enough: with a great emotional effect on the viewer, the audience laughed! This means that you can film an entire system of this kind, a film capable of reducing the abstraction of a thesis to flourish in an emotional way. This means that you can "intellectual cinema" ( Evil Voltera ) '. In
"floating design" theory and understanding, as has also rightly pointed out recently that "Eisenstein does not capitalize its theoretical acquisitions," reinvest in practice, the red wire and the immense work svariante persists: clean and recognizable. The legacy of the "vanguard" - anti-naturalism, experiment, "fattografia" - is recovered within a re-foundation of the materialist form as confrontational and subversive trend restrike in the process of turning that is open, not closed, with the 'October: "All means must art always strive in order to exacerbate the current conflict and not to distract the viewer. The middle class is a great specialist in alleviating the acute contradictions of the contemporary era, so beautifully composed in the philosophy of "happy-ending." The art, without departing from itself but revolutionizing its procedures, it can, and must, promote the practice of critical mass capable of becoming "a habit".
3. For the last Shklovsky, reassured of great contrasts and differences of the past, and October The End of St. Petersburg would be "optimistic tragedies on the destruction of what is old ': Eisenstein and Pudovkin," both worked as researchers in the laboratory of the great art of the future, but in different departments of the laboratory. " In fact, they could not give a working hypothesis the most diverse and divergent, in the present and the future.
In an article, very well known, in 1926, Lunacharsky had attacked "the big and little pedantic of Soviet cinema," which proclaimed the era of "film without a plot, and no heroes without heroism", a film that would not have found "a mass psychological outlet." Pudovkin If you accept, and even without difficulty and a "high" level, an indication of the Commissioner for the culture of the people ("We know we seduce our audience), the answer is still a denial of Eisenstein, the most intransigent and" provocative "as possible. The alleged "epic" that haunts some Italian and French, was so very painful that the first draft of October had to suffer the well-known, and never "compensated" mutilation. And the partial version was not spared. In fact, the film was attacked on side of the "celebration" as on that of "fattografia. Vehemently opposed to the first reading a current of '17 ("we will fight to force people to go back ten years), the second requirement of interpretazioneproposta lines of force of the revolutionary past. Too much "made" for some, "traditionalist" for others (according to a well-known distinction of Trotsky), Eisenstein melt trends surge "contemporary" with the clarification of the historical tension. Attacked, the images are sharp and crystallize in a distance not calmed, to return to melt and act in the consciousness of the "spectator". Eisenstein confirms that making a film in the> mean and the revolution, for him to make a revolutionary film in structure and cadences of speech and intellectual-emotional relationship with the recipient, hence the rejection of linear narrative and psychological mediation of disguise anecdotal (" October remains essentially a model solution on two levels: the "deaneddotizzazione" is actually a piece of "tomorrow", that is a prerequisite for the next job: Capital "). The protagonist of the film is still the mass, both in the repression sequences (a sea of \u200b\u200bheads and bodies on the run: summoning and conduct of Strike) and those in preparation (the Smolny) and the taking of the Winter Palace (with they retained, expanded, tension, almost unbearable).
In this world of faces, fists, mouths open in a scream opposes the world of things ( «October is a film about the end of the objects, a different world, but at the same time describes the old world through his articles) and men become - reduced to - things: the statue of Alexander III (who reconstitute during the Kerensky government), the plaster Bonaparte, the glasses left on the table of government on the run, the glasses, curtains, the drapery, the speakers of crosses of war, the Egyptian antiquities. The 'shelf life' of the Sphinx in the opening sequence of bridges, seems to epitomize this universe of immobility in a "fixation" unattainable cultural and monstrous. The Winter Palace became the mausoleum of power, tradition, culture, the past, of history made: the revolution in history has done, to take physical possession of the old, digging, playing with (the boy soldier who jumps on the throne and laughs tsars), desecrated (play and desecration that would return in some fragments, the highest, the with petrol). The relationship between old and new is harsh, unyielding conflict (see the fury with which the bourgeois gentleman - the same as those in white dress and parasol, waving in time Potemkin "romantic" of the revolution? - Rage on the young Bolshevik), in moments of high tragedy marked the horse suspended from the bridge, the dead girl and details of the hair on which the "camera" lingers lovingly.
The use of metaphor (the scale of Kerensky, the peacock), the similar (the speeches of the Mensheviks and the harp strings) of synecdoche (the bicycle wheels of an otherwise dazzling Balla contextualized), the series (images of gods and their "poverty", whereby each of these changes and degrades the previous one, relativizing the false universalism of the God of Kornilov) and, in general, all applications of the "intellectual cinema" prelude to a Poetics of "estrangement" avant la lettre: between the viewer and the screen action, in the distance mode, a filter of sarcasm, intellectual awareness, while in contrast a sentimental and eroicizzante use of the revolutionary past, returns to the alternative of the present. Even the caption assumes a dialectic scan 'the All, "Lenin, on its framing of the pope, a doubtful" All? "To reconfirm the initial impulse in the peremptory. And yet, Eisenstein was the first to "dramatize" the revolution, not as spectacle but as a permanent seizure of power (the "misrepresentation", as compared to the modesty of the facts of the conquest of the Palace), to hear her experience as established at reject the creating museums: even redemption of the brilliant "pantomime mass" of Petrograd in a sort of happening governed by a collective interpretation fitting and more. But even through times of abandonment: the "pause" the battalion of women, a pensive figure of the old soldier next to the statue of the lovers of Rodin. And with the persistent suggestion, intellectually objective, the interpenetration of pomp and degradation, composure and violence, and destructive fury glory mortuary (the soldiers among the furnishings of the Palace, the riflemen in the room of the Empress, on the sofas, the destruction of objects).
Assembly, shortened intervals and gathering the full picture, embracing a multilateral historical and conceptual spaces (Smolny / flight of Kerensky, Aurora / Building, Central Committee / roads and garrisons) that retrieves and highlights the time, complessività in the event, its trends and strengths, emergencies individual / collective composure against the "big picture", the permanent break against the peaceful contemplation. The "experiments" even those "old" or unresolved, are here, within this pattern, their qualification: significance and meaning, fact and interpretation, ideas and images tend to coincide in a sign of pregnancy that you want to total , no residue, this is an inflection sarcastic (yet the peacock) or a reflection in action (still deities) or, in the words of Eisenstein himself, a "build-ironic parody" ("From the great to the ridiculous pace is very short." Whether the substance of the phenomenon, both in the principles of its solution coniPositiva) stay in of choice, the attraction-eccentricity relationship came unfolding and enriching, over time, as teoriaprassi involvement / alienation of emotion / reflection. The "shock" is only a wound, a traumatic attack on the ability of addiction (latent and "hetero") of "spectator" (cinematic and otherwise): it causes the rebound refers to the intelligence and choice, but not historically determined Unique, adjustable class in one direction or another.
4. In the debate of 1927, the "Novy Lef," Tretyakov had again rejected the "revolution" in the themes, which left intact the "old methods of manipulation", "There is nothing easier for an artist who change the subject . Change the method would become another man. " This is the "general rule" of research and work of Eisenstein, though, apparently, compared to that debate, he takes a middle position, "compromise" is a film October "played" at least in part but not organized around a plot, one or more characters in a story or parable example (as it happens, in St. Petersburg). In an article in 1928, Eisenstein points out that "between the two litigants who is right is the third 'between' feature film" and "film is not subject to", "means that the third party's right, that is, the film off-topic, the film that stands beyond of feature films and what not to subject the film that is straight on his legs, although its terminology is not yet well defined. " And the "legs" of the film, if not those of the theater and the novel, not even those of "news", the "factory of facts", etc.. If it is true that, for Eisenstein, "the fetishism of the matter ', which replaced the "fetishism aesthetic, "" is not material. " "If in the previous period was dominated by the subject, the object, which had taken the place of the 'soul' and 'feeling', the next step will change the visual presentation of fact (matter, object) with the deductions derived from a fact and the opinion on the subject, articulated through the ideas finite. Now that the film begins to operate with reduced word abstract to the concrete concept . The new stage proceeds "under the sign of the idea, under the banner of the slogan."
rethink / rephrase October, and do so through certain choices (the mass character, the conflict past and present, concepts, slogans, the multilateral register epic, didactic, epigrammatic, and presented explicit metalinguistic awareness) means, in the refusal of the celebration, find the trend of "deductions" and pressures that make the body with the events, the "matter", and orient it brings, without any mediation of the old dramas. The insistence on 'agitation, "the extraordinary rate of '24 (" The first thing to note is that, outside of the' agitation ', the film does not exist, or rather, should not exist ") while confirms that, for Eisenstein as Mayakovsky, the problem of settling definitively "a literature that is served as a dessert "is still open, also shows that the evocative account of Jakobson about the writer (" The poet captures the future with the insatiable ear, but he is not given to enter the promised land ") is not'' extensible director of October. The theory and practice of 'agitation' is at the level of the "superstructure" of cinema and its language-specific but not unrelated, a discourse which takes emphasis on the subject of revolution, the potential of this still latent and unexpressed. Discourse "lonely," "anachronistic", "backward", etc.. etc..? Of course, if and when it was assumed - not assume - the existence of absolute good as possible. But it was precisely this refusal, materialistic, not idealistic, directed by Eisenstein? He was not here the value and productivity over time, its not reconciliation?
Sreaming
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