Машины зашумевшего времени

Several times, Soviet montage was interpreted as a radicalization of Western European and pre-revolutionary Russian (e.g. Andrey Bely) montage aesthetics. However, Soviet montage also strongly influenced left-wing artists in various countries: the image of history as a dynamic-conflicting becoming corresponded with leftist worldviews, and with Marxist and socialist ones first of all.

Meanwhile, different versions of montage aesthetics developed in Western Europe and in the USA. Take, for example, the work of Alfred Döblin, Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Ruttmann in Germany; Karel Čapek in Czechoslovakia; John Dos Passos in the USA; James Joyce in Ireland and France; and Ezra Pound in Great Britain. Not all of these artists were connected with socialist circles: Čapek was a liberal, Joyce’s political opinions were also more or less liberal, and Ezra Pound was, as is well-known, close to Italian fascism.

«Epic Polyphonic Political Art» (EPPA) was the most important montage movement formed during the twenties and early thirties. This movement includes the films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, the plays of Bertolt Brecht and Vsevolod Vishnevskii, the theater performances directed by Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold, and, as strange as it may seem, the Jefferson Cantos by Ezra Pound. The most common EPPA plot featured a major historical turning point and an approaching anthropological transformation. EPPA existed in the USSR, Central Europe, and the USA. Hence, this movement functioned as an interactive space between Soviet culture and Western left (and even non-left) artistic movements of the 1930s.

Some authors living in the USSR transformed montage’s meaning in their texts in order to critically revisit the Bolshevik image of history, and to resist state-controlled propaganda. Such texts — including prose works by Lev Luntz, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Daniil Kharms — were kept from the Soviet public, or were «written for the drawer,» without the expectation of receiving the censor’s approval. Such texts and works of art are designated non-censored art, to utilize a term that has been accepted in Russian underground criticism since the 1970s.

The image of a «creative violent modernity» was significantly transformed during the 1930s in Western Europe, North America, Nazi Germany, and the USSR; however the shifts in this image had different sources and varied in their results. In Western Europe and North America, the collective feeling of an impending social crisis, generated by the rupture of the social order after WWI, became weaker or more habitual. The growth of mass culture, as well as the collective rush towards emotional escapism in the face of WWII’s approach, prompted the expansion of comforting melodramatic plots in cinema and literature. These plots did not require sharp montage; on the contrary, such stories inclined writers and directors to use even-tempered, non-conflicting styles of narrative and/or portrayal.

In Nazi Germany, montage devices, which propagandist media associated with «left» and «degenerate» (i.e. «Jewish») art, became forbidden. Artists who used montage techniques were often forced to leave the country. However, several artists became the creators of the «Nazi avant-garde,» which combined sharp montage and pseudo-neoclassical aesthetics, as in the work of notorious film director Leni Riefenstahl.

At the same time, during the 1930s Soviet authorities initiated a radical cultural and political turn toward «national-Bolshevism» (to use David Brandenberger’s understanding of this term). This shift was marked by the emergence of a new image of Soviet contemporaneity as the «space of triumph» (rephrasing Mikhail Ryklin’s term «the spaces of jubilation»), and not as the launching pad for utopia. In its self-representation, the USSR turned away from a project aimed at a utopian future for all mankind, and instead toward the image of a flourishing but isolated empire that had already accomplished everything desired. Under these new circumstances, melodramatic plots (demonstrating Soviet interpretation of Hollywood style), encouraged the «indigenous» weakening of montage aesthetics. These plots sought to emotionally mobilize the audience, and to represent neo-imperial Bolshevik ideology as natural, kind, and inevitable. However, the futuristic connotations of montage techniques were revived in the aesthetics of Soviet pavilions for international exhibitions; former avant-garde artists were among the designers of these pavilions, including Nikolai Suetin, who, as a student, worked closely with Kazimir Malevich.

The only artists who maintained a taste for montage in Western European and American literatures of the late 1930s and 1940s were those who interpreted the historical period before and during WWII as transitional or catastrophic, rather than progressive: Döblin, Brecht, Dos Passos, Čapek.