In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the Soviet avant –garde looked to Hollywood. Rob Sharp discuss this unlikely story with Owen Hatherley
Buster Keaton drives away his newly built house in One Week (1920). Owen Hatherley's engaging and provocative The Chaplin Machine, his latest book, is an erudite historical investigation into how, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the Soviet avant-garde looked to Hollywood film, including the work of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. They saw not just slapstick comedy, but something that spoke to their own sensibilities over work, aesthetics and performance.
At a similar time, they also drew on the writings of industrial theorist Frederick Taylor – attempting to improve workers' performance using scientific principles – and Henry Ford. "As a rule, these are treated as rather separate phenomena," writes Hatherley, of these two cultural themes. Though so ideologically different, the Soviets could see elements of the US that they could admire in both ideas, striving to pull together "Americanism in technology, Bolshevism in politics [and] slapstick in everyday life".
As with any cultural message, the tale was distorted in the telling. Hatherley's work, adapted from his doctoral thesis, tells how many in the USSR saw the US as a "gigantic act of collective dreaming," more akin to their own ideals than no doubt it was.
By moving through cinema, design, architecture, and politics he succeeds in uniting these two poles, rewriting conventional understanding of both modernism and this unique point in Soviet history. Hatherley explained to openDemocracy some of the book's key ideas.
Rob Sharp: To what extent did serendipity and miscommunication play a role in Soviet appropriation of US filmmaking aesthetics in the contexts you describe?
Owen Hatherley: I don't know about serendipity, but miscommunication was endemic. This is at the start of a mass media age. But it's still just beginning. You have mass distribution of Hollywood films but other than that the dissemination of American culture was fairly rudimentary.
The most interesting versions of American culture are always those which get it wrong. The Beatles are more interesting than Johnny Halliday. The direct reproduction of the American archetype is always pretty tedious, and you can see that in British music. The ways in which it's endlessly got American music wrong have been interesting. You could make an analogy between that and cinema and theatre in the USSR, and the way they interpreted American cinema.
One thing filmmakers were well aware of was what they did and didn't want from American film. They liked fast cutting, they liked action, special effects, all things which lots of art cinema people think are ghastly. The slow take world that now passes for artistic ambition would have been utter anathema to these people. Eisenstein would have hated Béla Tarr with a fucking passion. They would have thought Michael Bay was better than Béla Tarr, I can say that for certain.
Eisenstein would have hated Béla Tarr with a fucking passion. They would have thought Michael Bay was better than Béla Tarr, I can say that for certain.
They also didn't like the politics, the explicit racist politics of Birth of a Nation or the more subtle confederate politics of Buster Keaton's The General. They saw that and didn't like it. They didn’t like happy endings and didn't like stars. One of the big changes in 1930s Soviet cinema – roughly between 1930 and 1934 – is a shift towards those American things. Big budgets, musicals, happy endings, stars. They are not necessarily bad films, but they accept much more of American cinema.
But if you look at something like at the acceptance of Taylorism, which is really at the heart of the book in many ways, I don't think they knew to what degree they misunderstood it. There's a wonderful anecdote. One of the American painter and engraver Louis Lozowick going to the USSR and Russians asking: "Do you have biomechanics over there?" And him replying: "No, what are you talking about?" All of these things they thought of as American, the actual American was telling them: "No, this is you". There is also a great story about an emissary from the Ford Motor Company being shown a biomechanics troupe and him saying: "This has nothing to do with what we're doing." And they thought it did. People like Meyerhold, Eisenstein, they really thought this was in the continuum of scientific management. And for actual scientific management, it was meaningless.
OH: Perhaps athletics, aerobics. The fact that aerobics doesn't happen until the 1970s is probably telling. It's very difficult to explain what biomechanics was. Especially since we don't have any film footage of the Meyerhold theatre. The nearest we have is the acting style in the early Eisenstein films or the films of Kozintsev and Trauberg. It's a very strange thing which on the one hand is circus-like, which aspires to be mechanized and industrial, but also quite aerobic. And of course it had a huge theoretical justification which went into it, which one is at liberty to find convincing or not convincing. I don't find it particularly convincing.
RS: So it was just a form of performance?
OH: You can also link it to Eisenstein's theories about the Montage of Attractions. And people forget that attractions part. This is circus attractions, that's what he's talking about. If you watched people doing these things it was meant to have this shocking affect which Eisentstein reckons the Montage of Attractions has. I don't know if it's plausible.
RS: What would be a good contemporary equivalent of what the Soviets were doing in appropriating these aesthetics?
OH: One of the weird things about Soviet cinema in the 1920s is it's one of the few examples anywhere of the state sponsored avant-garde. The people they were corresponding with were in France and Germany. Hans Richter was trying to scrape the budget together to make a 20-minute short. Eisenstein was given massive resources and a cast of thousands. That ability to do things on that scale is really unique in the twentieth century. Like many things about the Soviet avant-garde it's unique and probably unrepeatable. Or unrepeatable without the kind of political upheaval seen in the aftermath of 1917. But scaling it down somewhat I do think that music has several examples of that kind of misunderstanding.
More :
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/slapstick-and-soviet-avant-garde/
