Propaganda: Films and Art

1. Propaganda: Films and Art By Jane Moon, Alice Wong

2. Proletkult • Proletarian Cultural Movement. • Proletarian: move people towards communism. • Moved away from ‘high art’; regarded as bourgeois and elitist. • Encouraged workers and peasant to produce their own culture. • Encouraged during early years of revolution at the end of Tsarist censorship. • Developed as an independent working class organization. • Lenin didn’t tolerate it and had its regional and central offices shut down (1921-1922).

3. How Bolsheviks used art in Propaganda? • Lots of creativity of arts in Russia over the years before the revolution. • Avant garde (innovators in the arts) rejected and destroyed art of the past – bourgeois. • Produced propaganda for the Bolsheviks. • ROSTA (Russian Telegraph agency produced 1000 posters over a year) • Agitprop theatres: audience responded to actors’ acting vocally. • Directors made plays to publicize hatred for bourgeoise things and looked to the new regime.

4. Vladimir Mayakovsky • Young poet, playwright, artist • A futurist; welcomed revolutions • Worked with Bolsheviks to produce posters and 3000 captions and slogans on a range of topics. • 1930: became emotional and volatile. • Committed suicide in April. • 1935: Stalin named him ‘best and most gifted poet of our Soviet Union’. • His word was studied in schools. • No mention of his interest in futurism or anything about his suicide.

5. Art Works • Mayakovky’s works

6. Film/Cinema • Films: primary role for Soviet propaganda from the very beginning. • Civil war caused lack of supplies of film equipment; recovered by summer 1918. • Early 1920s: Proletkino in charge of political films (party’s ideology). • 1925: Politburo decided to not intervene in matter of form and style in arts. • Gave more freedom to Soviet cinema to produce creative works. • Cinemas grew fast and very popular with people. • 1928: Rule – all films accessible to mass audiences and must emphasise on Socialist ideas along strict party lines.

7. Eisenstein • Filmmaker; developed fast moving editing methods. • Soviets preferred Hollywood comedies to his works. • Strike (1924): Clear message on how workers were oppressed and how they could resist. • Stalin proposed he make a film on collectivisation‘The old and the new’ • Excessively re-edited on Stalin’s orders before release

8. Impacts of the Cultural Revolution • Attacked bourgeois specialists in industry and cultural values. • Non Marxists working in academic subjects were denounced. • Impact on Cinema: • Principal task of Soviet cinemas: • To raise cultural level of masses • Straightforward, realistic films must be made with a simple story and plot. • ‘Every film must be useful, intelligible and familiar to the millions – otherwise neither it nor the artist who made it are worth two pence.’ – R Taylor (The film factory: Soviet cinema in Documents

9. Thank you. .