4 documents
e-flux Criticism
Posted: February 14, 2020
Category
Film, Installation, Museums
Subjects
Exhibition Histories, Libraries & Archives, Temporality, Experimental Film, Video Art
e-flux Criticism
Posted: March 12, 2019
Category
Film, Installation, Ideology
Subjects
Soviet Union, Science, Violence
# 91
Articulations of (Socialist) Realism: Lukács, Platonov, Shklovsky
Robert Bird
Two puzzles dominate recent discussions of Soviet literature and Marxist aesthetics in the 1930s. The first is how the official Soviet system tolerated and even at times celebrated such an idiosyncratic writer as Andrei Platonov, who in the last twenty-five years has emerged as the central literary artist of the time. The second puzzle is how socialist realism, a literature wholly focused on the future, came to model itself on nineteenth-century realism, with the result that the bulk of…
e-flux Journal
Posted: May 9, 2018
Category
Marxism , Aesthetics, Literature
Subjects
Soviet Union, Socialist Realism
# 88
How to Keep Communism Aloft: Labor, Energy, and the Model Cosmos in Soviet Cinema
Robert Bird
Set in the “immediate future” of 1946, The Cosmic Voyage narrates the first manned mission to the moon by a venerable academic with similarities to rocket scientist and cosmist theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who in fact consulted on the film’s design and who approved its screenplay before his death in the year of the film’s release. Though The Cosmic Voyage was billed as a sound film, the soundtrack is wholly musical, and the actors follow conventions of silent cinema. And yet, despite its stylistic archaism, the film exhibits several features that make it into a powerful model not only for the “immediate future,” but also for a future cinema.
e-flux Journal
Posted: February 5, 2018
Category
Communism, Film, Labor & Work, Marxism
Subjects
Soviet Union, Cosmism