Machine, Montage, and Myth: Experimental Cinema and Politics of American Modernism during the Great Depression
2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0950236x.2011.569177
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 313. Experimental Cinema, 1:1 (February 1930), cover. It should be noted that whilst this article is focussed on Experimental Cinema, the magazine was just a small part of a thriving left-wing small press during the 1920s and 1930s that included variously New Masses, The Left, New Theatre, Film Front, Modern Quarterly, Partisan Review, International Literature, Soviet Russia Pictorial, Fire!!, Cauldron, Left Review, Challenge: A Literary Quarterly, and of course The Daily Worker. There has been much useful archaeology concerning these journals in the last few decades. In particular see Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), and Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (Newhaven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2002). For some contextualization of Experimental Cinema within the cultural exchanges between America and the Soviet Union, see Barnaby Haran, 'The Amerika Machine: Art and Technology between the USA and the USSR, 1926-1933', PhD Thesis, University of London, 2008. Lewis Jacobs, 'Experimental Cinema in America: (Part One: 1921–1941), Hollywood Quarterly, 3:2 (Winter 1947-1948), p. 124. The group consisted of Jacobs, Jo Gerson, and Lewis Hirshman, and produced a number of short experimental pieces including Transition (1927), Mobile Composition No. 1 (1928), and The Story of a Nobody (1930). An advertisement for the News Reel Laboratory in Philadelphia appeared in the first issue of the magazine. Experimental Cinema, 1:1 (February 1930), opposite p. 24. 'Announcement', Experimental Cinema, 1:1 (February 1930), verso. Ibid. David Platt, 'The New Cinema', Experimental Cinema, Vol. 1, No. 1, February 1930, p. 1. Ibid, pp.1-2. David Platt, 'Focus and Mechanism', Experimental Cinema, 1:2 (June 1930), p. 3. Jane Heap, 'Machine Age Exposition', The Little Review, Spring 1925, p. 22. Ibid. Isidor Schneider, 'E. (i.o.u.) Noncummings', New Masses, 25 June 1935, p. 26. Michael Gold, 'Loud Speaker and Other Essays', New Masses, March 1927, p. 6. Sergei Eisenstein, 'The Montage of Attractions', Lef, June/ July 1923, reprinted in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896-1939, trans. R. Taylor (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), p. 87. Alexei Gan, 'From Constructivism', 1922, trans. John Bowlt, in Stephen Bann, ed., The Tradition of Constructivism (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 35. Vsevolod Pudovkin, 'Film Direction and Film Manuscript', trans. Christel Gang, Experimental Cinema, 1:1 (February 1930), p. 5. Seymour Stern, 'Principles of the New-World Cinema', Experimental Cinema, 1:1 (February 1930), pp. 15–16. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid. Ibid. Harry Alan Potamkin, 'Film Problems of Soviet Russia', Experimental Cinema, 1:1 (February 1930), p. 3. Ibid. Ibid, p. 4. Ibid. Ibid. Harry Alan Potamkin, 'Film Novitiates, Etc.', Close Up, 3:5 (November 1930), p. 319. Editor's Note, Experimental Cinema, 1:3 (February 1931), p. 34. Ibid. Ibid. 'Statement', Experimental Cinema, 1:3 (February 1931), p. 3. Lawrence Schwartz writes that 'the proletarian Kharkov resolutions were the dominant guidelines for American Communists from 1930 to 1935, including the first American Writers' Congress', which was held in 1935. Lawrence H Schwartz, Marxism and Culture: The CPUSA and Aesthetics in the 1930s (New York: Authors Choice Press, 1980), p. 41. Harry Alan Potamkin, 'Film and Photo Call to Action', Workers Theatre, July 1931, p. 5. Ibid. Ibid. 'Workers Films in New York', Experimental Cinema, 1:3 (February 1931), p. 37 Ibid. Tony Stafford, 'Samuel Brody Interview: The Camera as a Weapon in the Class Struggle', Jump Cut, No.14, 1977, p. 28. Intertitle, America Today, Leo Seltzer and Lester Balog for Workers Film and Photo League, 1931–33. Available on two-reel collection of WFPL films at the Film Department, Museum of Modern Art, New York. William Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film From 1931 to 1942 (Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 33. Seymour Stern, 'A Working-Class Cinema for America?', The Left, 1:1 (Spring 1931), pp. 69-70. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid. Ibid., p. 73. Seymour Stern, 'Principle of the New-World Cinema, Part II: The Film as Microcosmos', Experimental Cinema,1:3 (February 1931), p. 31. Ibid., p.34. Charles Wolfe, 'Straight Shots and Crooked Plots: Social Documentary and the Avant-Garde in the 1930s' in Jan-Christopher Horak, ed., Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde 1919–1945, (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 253. Lewis Jacobs, 'Highway 66: Montage Notes for a Documentary Film', Experimental Cinema, Vol. 1, No. 4 February 1933, p. 40. Ibid. The film was thought to have been lost in 1940, but was unearthed in the 1990s. It is available on the seven DVD box set Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1894–1941. Alexander, Film on the Left, p. 16. Alexander writes that the film was made during lunch breaks whilst working for a film trailer company. Ibid., p. 16. The film much impressed Eisenstein and landed Leyda a place at the Mezhrabpom-Russ film school, and he was the first American to study film in Russia. Lewis Jacobs, 'Eisenstein', Experimental Cinema, 1:3 (February 1931), p. 4. Edmund Wilson, 'Eisenstein in Hollywood' (1931), The American Earthquake, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), p. 398. Seymour Stern, 'Hollywood Bulletin: Eisenstein in Mexico', Experimental Cinema, 1:3 (February 1931), p. 22. Agustin Aragon Leiva, 'Eisenstein's Film on Mexico', Experimental Cinema, 1:4 (February 1933), p. 5. Theodore Dreiser, 'A Statement by Theodore Dreiser', Experimental Cinema, 1:4 (February 1933), p. 3. 'Editorial Statement', Experimental Cinema,. 1:4 (February 1933), p. 1. 'Manifesto on "Que Viva Mexico" ', Experimental Cinema, 1:5 (February 1934), p. 14. 'Notes on Activities of Experimental Cinema During 1933', Experimental Cinema, 1:5 (February 1934), verso. Ibid. Lens, 'Flashes and Close-Ups', Daily Worker, 17 January, 1934, p. 5. 'Notes on Activities of Experimental Cinema During 1933', Experimental Cinema, 1:5 (February 1934), verso. S. M. Eisenstein and V. G. Alexandrov, ' "Que Viva Mexico" ', Experimental Cinema, 1:5 (February 1933), p. 5. Wilson, 'Eisenstein in Hollywood', p. 404. Sinclair was highly suspicious and critical of Stern, who led the campaign and reneged on his promise to end hostilities in September 1932. His chequered role as Eisenstein's unofficial spokesman in America was considered by Geduld and Gottesman to be 'particularly distasteful', for making unfair accusations against Sinclair. Harry M. Geduld and Ronald Gottesman, eds., Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: The Making and Unmaking of Que Viva Mexico!, London: Thames and Hudson, 1970, p. 350. Sinclair himself told Dreiser in a letter that the trustees of the film considered Stern to be 'too utterly rash, immature, and dishonest' to be trusted in any capacity in relation to the film. Upton Sinclair to Theodore Dreiser, 5 September 1932, Geduld and Gottesman, p. 355. Dziga Vertov, 'The Factory of Facts', Pravda, 24 July 1926, reprinted in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939, trans. R. Taylor (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), pp. 150–151. Michael Gold, 'Change the World!', The Daily Worker, 5 November 1934, p. 7. Ralph Steiner, 'Revolutionary Movie Production', New Theatre, September 1934, p. 22. Ibid., p. 24. Hurwitz and Steiner's secession over the constraints of creative filmmaking heralded the oncoming WFPL split, although the real deathblow to the group came in 1935 with the dismantling of WIR by the Nazi regime in Germany. Combined with the closure of the Soviet section, the demise of WIR meant that the WFPL was left to fund itself and so limped on until 1937, by which time most of the original members had already been absorbed into the New Deal projects. Nykino was short-lived, and in 1937 was replaced by the better-funded Frontier Films, an organization that produced Hurwitz and Strand's feature length dramatized documentary Native Land in 1942, which was arguably the closest American filmmakers came to emulating Eisenstein and his peers. Eisenstein himself was by this stage a broken man, marginalized in the Soviet cinema but perhaps lucky to have survived the purges. Ibid., p. 22.
Referência(s)