What purpose do the arts serve today? The arts – Music, literature, painting, sculpture, dance etc. – represent vibrant aspects of human culture. They don’t provide us with food or have any obvious use value but without them we would cease to be human beings in any meaningful sense. We are the only animals to have developed an artistic culture.

The arts form part of the superstructure of society. They arose as an expression of social consciousness and have evolved intimately connected with economic and social developments. But why have the arts evolved into a sophisticated and vital part of our culture? Here, I reflect only on the visual arts and music in an attempt to examine what exactly their significance or use value is.

Artisans assuaging the gods

At the very beginning of human development, those very early drawings/paintings on rocks, of hunting scenes and portraits of wild animals, as well as music, as an accompaniment to dance, were the first expressions of human creativity. They came about in response to a deep psychological need for reassurance, as aids in overcoming our ancestors’ fears and their attempts to assuage the gods (i.e. the forces of nature). In this sense they certainly did have a use value, even if not a tangible one.

Over time, they became increasingly ritualised. Artistic expression became wholly integrated into and part of the social fabric of the tribe, clan or people. At this time, individuals were not designated as ‘artists’ as ‘dancers’ or ‘musicians’, they were simply ordinary members of the group who took on creative tasks. Only later, when society began to produce a surplus of food, and could thus feed ‘non-essential producers’, was the group able to afford to carry individuals such as religious leaders or artists.

For a considerable time, artists (painters and musicians) were treated as mere artisans, as tradesmen, not very different from cobblers, weavers or metal workers. Only with the beginning of the Renaissance did individual artists begin to emerge and achieve special recognition. Artistic skills gained new value and the most skilful and creative of the artists were given due prominence. But still at this time, artists and musicians were obliged to work within a certain ritualistic framework, rooted in a hegemonic religion (whether Muslim or Christian) and within a fixed social hierarchy.

Individualisation and commodification

During the Renaissance, individual artists fought for and began to win increased freedoms of expression and a gradual release from strict religious and social constraints and developed their own individual creativity. This period also saw the dawn of art for itself, in the sense of works of art being no longer viewed as part of a ritual tradition but as aesthetic commodities in their own right. The culmination of this new perception of art would become abstractionism. By definition it offers no message beyond merely aesthetic pleasure or irritation.

The individualisation of the arts went in parallel with its commodification. A price was put on creative works and they were increasingly commissioned and collected by wealthy individuals, rather than by religious institutions. Once the arts’ essential ritualistic role had been eroded, they began to fulfil different purposes. And certainly in Europe, with the severing of that umbilical cord to ritual went the blurring and disappearance of separate cultural identities.

In our modern world of electronic communications, with large global movements of people and cross-cultural fertilisation, individual and separate cultures are being largely eradicated or subsumed into a global culture. This development has been accompanied by an almost complete absence of constraint, censorship or prohibitions.

What have these recent developments meant for the arts, both in terms of function and their place in our cultural life? What role do they play in today’s society and what do we expect from them?

Entertainment and enjoyment

First and foremost, I would argue, that we demand enjoyment, entertainment, and a cathartic experience from the arts. We may also relish a challenge, but that challenge has to incorporate pleasure – otherwise why would we subject ourselves to non-pleasurable or painful experiences?

For the general public the arts certainly do provide entertainment and enjoyment, even if largely of a soporific and passive consumerist nature. Painting and sculpture have today become somewhat marginalised, catering for a small number of (usually wealthy) afficionados. Although there is still a flourishing movement of amateurs alongside professional artists who create largely for their own pleasure – taking part in artistic activity as a practitioner can be rewarding on a purely spiritual level. And lavishly curated exhibitions of great artists of the past, usually accompanied by much media hype, still draw quite large audiences.

Music, on the other hand, has become a truly mass phenomenon. More so than the other traditional arts, music has undergone perhaps the most dramatic change. Traditional, ritualistic and religious music as well as genuine folk music have almost completely disappeared. In an age of secularism and of mass, electronic distribution, musical production has become almost completely commercialised, driven and dominated by large corporations who own rights and distribution networks.

Why do we still listen to music today and what do we seek from it? In its earliest incarnation music was very much a rhythmic sound made on rudimentary instruments. This became an accompaniment to dance and later song, serving as a socially cohesive force, binding groups together. With the continuing development and increasingly sophisticated of instrumentation and then the invention of notation, musical expression evolved radically.

Since the turn of the 19^th century we began to divide musical expression arbitrarily into categories, e.g. classical, jazz or popular etc., such separation, though, serves more to confuse than enlighten. All music – for practitioners as well as audiences – has similar aims: to provide relaxation and to entertain.

Particularly, in our world today, I think, though, that practitioners (musicians and artists) will view/listen to musical works with rather different eyes and ears to non-practitioners. Practitioners will look for and obtain satisfaction largely from discovering innovation and challenges to the traditional, whereas non-practitioners (largely passive recipients or amateurs) will simply expect pleasure.

Clearly, the most popular music globally has become that distributed by the big recording and distribution companies, largely in the form of songs and dance numbers and aimed very much at a market in the younger age-range.

The failure of classical music

So-called classical music has entered a critical phase. The era of classical can be said, with one or two exceptions, to have ended by the turn of the 19^th- 20^th centuries, certainly in its traditional form. We continue to have live performances and recordings from the classical canon but contemporary works categorised as ‘classical’ are few and far between, and obtain minimal airing. This, I would argue, is largely because contemporary composers in that tradition, i.e. classically trained, have failed to find a language that is rooted in the past but which adequately addresses contemporary aural and ‘spiritual’ needs.

So it is largely non-melodic, using few recognisable and catchy tunes. It fails to plumb emotional depths or offer relaxing and enjoyable tonal experiences. Is this perhaps because virtually all possible combinations of melodic and tuneful composition have been exhausted by previous generations? Or is such tuneful and melodic composition in classical form inappropriate for our times? Popular music, too, is rarely genuinely innovative and largely recycles traditional melodic forms.

I can understand that composers, other than jobbing ones or those seeking primarily commercial success would find it frustrating and meaningless to simply repeat compositional forms fully explored by previous generations. They will continually seek new ways of using musical language. The question is: are they able to transform musical composition and innovate while still providing the enjoyment and entertainment audiences in their majority seek? There is perhaps a key contradiction between the needs of most listeners and creators, because, as I say above, the former will be looking primarily for relaxation and enjoyment, while the latter will be looking for new ways of expressing their musical ideas.

Can music convey messages?

A central question when talking about the influence of music – ignoring for a moment the setting of texts to music – is can it convey a message? Music can certainly convey or engender a multitude of emotions, from sad to happy, contemplative to rousing, as well as beautiful and tender. Some pieces of music are said to be full of humanity, but can a piece of music really turn us into a better person, help our humanity unfold? Can it make us more loving and less belligerent?

Those are difficult questions and probably insoluble. As with most other cultural activities, music today is divorced from ritual and is no longer a necessary socially centripetal force. Music on its own can convey no concrete message, but accompanied by lyrics it can, of course, just as the visual arts can convey messages, besides offering aesthetic and visual pleasure,

The pianist, Andras Schiff, recently said that Beethoven’s works ‘carry a humanitarian and spiritual message’ – but can music alone express humanitarianism or communicate a spiritual message? I would love to believe it could but remain sceptical. Many Nazis adored those classical composers deemed to be great humanitarians: Beethoven, Bach, Schubert and Schumann for example. Did it change those Nazis, give them a spiritually beneficial message?

Music has certainly often been used to encourage bellicosity and rouse people to war and as an accompaniment to war, but I can think of no example where it has been used to rouse people to peace. Even Beethoven’s famous 9^th symphony with its setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy and its appeal for social harmony fails on that score:

Thy magic bind again
What vogueish sword has divided
Beggars will be nobles' brothers
Where thy gentle wing abides

This symphony has rarely, if ever, been able to engender true harmony and fraternity.

Once photography arrived on the scene in a big way towards the close of the 19^th century, that traditional role for the visual arts – namely the depiction of events or portraiture and still lives as elements of historical record keeping – became redundant. Although portraits, still lives and landscapes etc. are still being painted, they are no longer vital as records of reality. Such works will, though, still be purchased by collectors in order to possess something individually crafted and unique. For the practitioners, both professional and amateur, artistic activity will continue to provide satisfaction and pleasure.

So, to return to my opening question, what purpose do the arts serve today? On the one hand, they serve the same function that they always have – giving pleasure and providing spiritual nourishment but in a very different way to that which they did in their original form. On the other hand, although there are certainly no longer defined parameters for the arts, both artists and their works have been largely commodified.  

by Chad McCail

Capitalism has expropriated the arts very much for its own profit-making purposes. But in the ongoing struggle for cultural hegemony, the arts can and do play a vital role.  They are also weapons in this struggle, but if they are only used and seen as weapons, they will cease to be art and will be deprived of their unique humanitarian essence.

John Green reviews Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of historical novels. The above image is Hans Holbein's 1530s portrait of Thomas Cromwell

Hilary Mantel’s trilogy on the life of Henry VIII’s secretary, Thomas Cromwell (1485 –1540), has been widely praised, and the first two volumes each won the Booker Prize for fiction. Thomas Cromwell was Henry’s Lord Privy Seal, Vice-Regent and Secretary. In one capacity or another, he was the king’s closest adviser for 7 years. Cromwell has been much maligned by historians and invariably portrayed as a ruthless, Machiavellian manipulator who got his just deserts when Henry had him beheaded in 1540.

Mantel’s fictional biography has helped place him in a more differentiated and positive light, and rightly portrays him as the chief instigator of the English Reformation. For most of us who learned our history in the school classroom, the reign of Henry VIII is indelibly associated with his several wives and having two of them beheaded. England’s break with the Roman Catholic church in 1534 during his reign has also been framed in the context of the Pope’s refusal to sanction the annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. This over-simplification of history has dominated the narrative of this key period in English history for generations.

Mantel is a skilled writer who knows how to tell a tale in a gripping and absorbing way. Her scrupulous research and eye for detail, together with great imaginative flair, give her books their magnetism. In her telling of Cromwell’s life, she emphasises the embedded class system of feudal England, and how it impacted on Cromwell’s own life.

He was born in London’s docklands, the son of a brewer and blacksmith, and grew up in relative poverty. He had no formal education but managed to survive those hard knocks in early life to rise and become one of the most powerful men in the country. As a young man, he had run away from home to Europe, where he slowly managed to escape his allotted place in life, overcoming the handicaps of his background and emerging as a successful, wealthy and intellectually capable citizen.

After his return to England in around 1515, he managed to obtain employment with the all-powerful Cardinal Wolsey, who immediately recognised his talents and nurtured them. Henry eventually fell out with Wolsey because he felt he had amassed too much power and wealth, and expelled him from his court. Wolsey died before he could be imprisoned – or worse. Despite his intimate association with Wolsey, Cromwell was left unscathed.

He progressed from serving Wolsey to serving the king, embarking on a rise so unremarked that few potential rivals in that greedy and thuggish court realised the threat he posed, until it was too late. As a ‘common man’ he had been largely ignored or dismissed by his ‘betters’.

Henry noted his abilities early on and appointed him as Chancellor of the Exchequer, one the most powerful positions in the country. Later he was appointed Lord Privy Seal and then Vice-Regent. This meteoric rise of a lowly plebeian boy to become the most influential man at the royal court was not viewed with equanimity by the aristocratic families of the day, who spared no effort to have him deposed. His humble background was continually raised by the blue-blooded in order to insult and demean him. Those of higher estate found the rise of a brewer’s son to the heart of government difficult to stomach. Still, after the carnage of the Wars of the Roses, many of the noble houses were not particularly ancient and Henry VIII’s England did offer unprecedented opportunities for a new breed of men, willing to risk all for the chance of power and wealth.

Mantel tells Cromwell’s rags-to-riches story eloquently and engagingly, providing the reader with a vivid portrait of Tudor court life. So why am I left disappointed by her trilogy?

I believe the popularity of her fictional biography lies largely in the detailed court goings-on, the gossip and intrigue that she describes so exquisitely and that permeates her narrative. But at no point is the reader helped to understand what the English Reformation meant in terms of the life of the country, international relations and the politics of power. After all, Cromwell was at the centre of this great historical process and, indeed, was very much its motor – but he didn’t work alone.

Democratising the church

What motivated Cromwell to pursue the reformation of the church, and to destroy the power of Catholicism? We know that Henry’s chief reason for breaking with the Roman Church was to get his hands on as much of the enormous wealth in the church’s possession as he could, and gain absolute power. He utilised Cromwell for that purpose. While Cromwell helped fulfil his desires, his own motivation went far beyond merely satisfying Henry’s greed and vanity. He saw the vital need to destroy the church’s absolute power, to democratise it, to make the scriptures available in English rather than in Latin for the first time and tackle church corruption. He was strongly influenced by what had been happening in mainland Europe in the wake of Martin Luther’s challenge to Catholic hegemony, and the writings of Erasmus, Tyndale, Melanchthon and other religious dissidents. This was the period of emerging humanism which would later develop into the 17^th century Enlightenment.

Cromwell had also been influenced by the English theologian John Wycliffe (1320s-1384), whose ideas predated Luther’s by 100 years. Through his radical call for church reform and translating the Bible into the common vernacular, Wycliffe attacked the privileged status of the clergy, which had bolstered their powerful role in England and the luxury and pomp of local parishes. In 1382 Wycliffe completed a translation directly from the Latin Vulgate into Middle English - a version now known as Wycliffe’s Bible. Just like Martin Luther (1483 – 1546), Wycliffe argued that the Church had fallen into sin, that it ought to give up all its property, and that the clergy should live in complete poverty.

The tendency of the high offices of state to be held by clerics was not only resented by the lower orders but by many of the nobles too. Wycliffe regarded the Bible as the only reliable guide to the truth about God, and maintained that all Christians should rely on it rather than on the teachings of popes and clerics. He argued that there was no scriptural justification for the papacy.

In the midst of this came the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. This revolt was sparked in part by Wycliffe's preaching, carried throughout the realm by ‘poor priests’ appointed by Wycliffe (who were mostly laymen). The preachers didn't limit their criticism of the accumulation of wealth and property to that of the monasteries, but included secular properties belonging to the nobility as well. Such views were, of course, incendiary. England’s peasant uprisings came 100 years before Germany’s Peasants’ Revolt.

William Tyndale (1494 –1536), an almost exact contemporary of Thomas Cromwell and someone who followed closely in the footsteps of Wycliffe, had been exiled to Antwerp for his ‘heretical views’. Here he came very much under the influence of Erasmus and published his own (incomplete) translation of the Bible, from Hebrew, into English. His teaching had a considerable influence on Cromwell and while Mantel mentions this, she does not give it much weight.

Cromwell was largely responsible for carrying out the dissolution of the monasteries and confiscating their properties and wealth. At the same time he attacked the industry that had grown up around the worship of relics, the selling of indulgences and other archaic practices which he felt had nothing to do with genuine Christian worship and belief in God. Unfortunately this church wealth, rather than being redistributed to ordinary citizens and peasants, fell into the hands of Henry and his chief nobles.

Mantel underplays this historical context and fails to penetrate the psychology or the thinking of men like Cromwell and his reforming supporters. Nowhere in her books are we made aware of the discussions, debates and disputes that raged at the time, in which Cromwell was very much involved. She fails to grasp the full historical dimension of the Protestant Reformation and gets lost in the minutiae of courtly behaviour, the king’s sexual problems and the machinations of the various noble figures jockeying for power. In all the individuals she portrays, both real and fictional, we are not made aware of any intellectual curiosity or depth. They are treated like chess pieces, to be moved within the confines of the board.

The interconnectedness of the political and economic background with religious reform is in Mantel’s book vague or non-existent. One of the main reasons that the Reformation was so successful in large parts of Europe and in England was because the rising merchant class, the bourgeoisie, wanted to throw off their feudal shackles and escape the church’s suppression of all radical ideas. The church was holding back economic development, stifling the freedom of thought and scientific investigation that were essential if capitalism were to emerge and flourish as it later did.

Even sections of the aristocracy had begun to question why they were still obliged to send large sums of money to Rome in order to support an overblown and largely corrupt clergy. At the bottom of the pile, the peasantry throughout the country were still living in abject poverty, as virtual slaves of the big landowners – including the church – and were burdened with increasing demands on their labour, higher taxation and church tithes. The new Protestant ideas were music to their ears, and provided a stimulus for rebellion.

In Germany these ideas led to the great Peasant War, from 1524 to 1525. In England peasant rebellion on such a broad scale was absent, although in East Anglia, Robert Kett, a Norfolk gentleman, led a rebellion against Henry’s religious policies, the dissolution of the monasteries and the very unpopular enclosure of common lands by greedy noblemen. The rebels were defeated at Norwich by an English army supported by foreign mercenaries. This kind of background, which underlies and determines the lives of the figures who appear in the books, is hardly apparent. I feel we still have to wait for a definitive historical novel of this crucial period in English history.

John Green discusses the obliteration of GDR culture since reunification. The mosaic is in Eisenhüttenstadt, and is by Walter Womacka

This month sees the 30^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, leading a year later to the annexation of the former German Democratic Republic by the Federal Republic. I use the term ‘annexation’ intentionally because despite the people of the former GDR voting in their majority for a unified Germany, what they got was a de facto takeover by the west.

In his recent book ‘The New Faces of Fascism’, Professor Enzo Traverso of Cornell University uses this term unequivocally. He writes that ‘The annexation of the former German Democratic Republic was conceived of as a political, economic and cultural process that inevitably implied the demolition of antifascism …’ Despite the passage of three decades, the territory of the former GDR is in many ways still very different from the former Federal Republic.

Hollensturz in Vietnam by Willi Sitte. Photo by Bob Ramsak / piran café

One might have the impression from the numerous depictions of the GDR in the western media that it was a country characterised by oppression, lack of freedom and a grey, monotonous daily life for its citizens. That it was in fact a country with a relatively high standard of living, with a flourishing industry and a vibrant cultural environment is redacted from the mainstream narrative.

Despite the fact that both postwar German republics were formed as a result of the partition by the Second World War Allies of a unified German nation, there developed in the eastern part a specific and separate culture and way of life, based on socialist principles, even if the system could be characterised as ‘state socialism’ and authoritarian in many of its aspects. Against all the odds the GDR – based on only a third of Germany as a whole and the least industrially developed part, with very few raw materials – managed to build a second German culture based on a clear break with the country’s fascist past and firmly rooted in Germany’s communist and internationalist traditions.

In any state there will always be a tension and sometimes conflict between artists and state institutions and official ideology. And in this the GDR was no different from most other countries, but art and culture were taken seriously by everyone; they were not marginal to people’s lives. The country had a lively book publishing industry, there were theatres and concert halls in even smaller towns, there was a thriving film industry and art scene. Financial support and encouragement were given to amateur art groups, often located in or near people’s workplaces.

The four-yearly GDR art exhibition in Dresden, at which a huge array of contemporary art works were exhibited, was a great draw for visitors from all over the country. There were often animated and fiery discussions about certain of the works exhibited. ‘Socialist realist’ art was the form that was officially sanctioned and encouraged but this was a somewhat elastic concept. Most artists were happy to paint and sculpt in a realist manner but interpreted the world in their own unique way. There were those who preferred to explore abstraction and they got a raw deal in terms of being able to exhibit and survive economically. It is only now, belatedly, that GDR art is slowly being recognised as interesting in its own right and worth exhibiting, even if most selections dwell overmuch on the so-called ‘dissident’ aspect.

The GDR produced its own home-grown song movement with a whole number of groups and individual singers who developed a recognisable ‘GDR style’: socially engaged, internationalist and also critical. Sometimes, as with Wolf Biermann, the critical element went too far for the powers that be and he was banned from publicly performing, before being expelled from the country, but most managed to find a niche and steer clear of official sanction. There was a large annual festival of political song which brought together musicians from around the world, like Pete Seeger from the USA, Inti Illimani and Quilapayun from Chile, Leon Gieco from Argentina and the Sands Family from Ireland, among many others.

What overwhelmingly characterised GDR art and culture was that it was viewed by everyone as an integral part of society, and for artists being engaged as well as critical were taken as given. Broad sections of the population were actively engaged in the arts, either as participants or as audiences and readers. Schools and workplaces organised regular trips to the theatre, concerts, cultural events and exhibitions and these were invariably subsidised by the state.

This unique integration of art, artists and society which is only really possible under a socialist system, came to an end with the demise of the GDR. And although the Federal Republic provides generous support for the arts – in contrast to the UK – they are very much linked to the capitalist structures within which they operate and are often very elitist.

Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, by Bertolt Brecht

While the ruling SED party and GDR government were certainly over-controlling in terms of their cultural policies and over-fearful of what they viewed as potentially negative western influences and anti-socialist activity, they did actively and generously encourage and support the development of an artistic environment that was socially engaged, integrated and committed to humanitarian aims. That legacy has been lost.

Following unification in 1990, almost all GDR industries were very quickly dismantled or taken over by West German firms, and all GDR institutions (e.g. universities, theatres, museums etc.), if not closed, had new managers imposed on them. Most of the staff in GDR universities, colleges and schools, as well as in local and national government, found themselves out of a job or demoted.

The GDR’s media – television, radio and publishing houses – were all closed. Former co-operative and state farms were also closed down. With this total dismantling of the GDR’s infrastructure, people were obliged to migrate to the west to find work, particularly younger people. This left whole areas of the territory virtually devoid of a younger generation. Still today, wages are still lower in the east, as are pensions. The promised affluence has benefited very few and the wealth gap between the population in the former GDR and that of the Federal Republic remains large.

Werner Tübke, History of the German labour movement II, 1961

The imposition of the federal German system on the East has also meant the obliteration of a specific GDR culture. Since unification, the German Federal government and media have attempted to deny anything positive about the GDR, and have deliberately conflated what they call ‘the two totalitarianisms’ i.e. nazism and communism. In doing so, they avow that this time they are determined to undertake a proper reckoning with the GDR and expose its totalitarian essence (implicitly recognising that they had not done this properly with Germany’s Nazi past). Most cultural representations of the GDR have also been eradicated or hidden.

In the concerted attempt to demonise the system and life in the GDR, there have been a plethora of horror stories – virtually all written by western pundits who never experienced the GDR first hand. The most notorious is the much-hyped book ‘Stasiland’ by the Australian Anna Funder, who visited the GDR for a few days as a tourist and returned there after unification to interview people who were ‘victims’ of the regime. Her book is littered with factual inaccuracie,s and reveals an abysmal ignorance of what life was really like in the country, but it is widely seen as the must-read book about the GDR.

The Architects, a film by Peter Kahane. Photo by DEFA

In the cinema, the much-lauded ‘The Life of Others’ by the West German aristocrat, Florian Henckel von Donnersmark was a well-crafted thriller – but a total caricature. His portrayal of GDR artists as subject to Stasi control and at the mercy of arbitrary state coercion was a fantasy, but it perfectly fitted the narrative that the West German elite wished to promote. He spoke to Christoph Hein before making the film, wanting to utilise his experience as a writer who had certainly had his run-ins with GDR state censorship – but Hein himself later distanced himself from the film, and said it bore little relationship to reality.

GDR writers, film-makers and theatre directors have almost all been blacklisted, and have not been given the opportunity of reflecting their own assessments of GDR reality. This is all part of a concerted campaign to erase any positive vestige of GDR culture from the historical narrative.

The most egregious example of the destruction of GDR culture was the controversial demolition of the Palace of the Republic in the centre of Berlin. This modern building symbolised more than any other the confidence, forward-looking attitude and strength of the GDR. The building not only housed the GDR parliament but contained a theatre, concert halls, cafes and restaurants which were much used by the city’s population.

Of course, the two parts of the formerly divided Germany will eventually coalesce, and memories of the GDR are already fading as new generations come along. However, it would be a historical travesty if the many positive sides of the GDR experience and the contribution it made to the world were to be totally obliterated. It would be even worse if this experience and contribution were equated with the Nazi atrocities of genocide and fomenting world war, as part of the same ‘totalitarianism’.

Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It by John Green and Brunhild de la Motte is available from Artery Publications at £10.

John Green reviews a new book about the life and work of Lewis W. Hine, one of the founders of of U.S. social photography.

Lewis Hine's iconic images captured the harsh realities of a country undergoing deep transformation during the early part of the 20^th century.

Hine was born in 1874, in a small-town in Wisconsin, and when his father died he was forced to become the family’s breadwinner. After a series of poorly paid jobs he attended night classes to educate himself and was able to obtain a degree in pedagogy, before going on to study sociology under John Dewey.

In collaboration with the Felix Adler Ethical Culture School which ran classes for deprived children, he started to learn the practical and technical aspects of photography. He is encouraged to document the activities of the school – and thus begins what will become a life-long commitment and passion for documenting the social and working conditions of North America’s labouring classes.

Hine prepared slide shows and made them available on loan, and organised exhibitions to make his work widely available. With his child labour photos, he became a forerunner of social documentary photography, bringing social problems to the attention of the US public. His images of child labour in the cotton spinning mills, mines, strawberry fields, tobacco and beef farms during the first decades of the 20^th century are reminiscent of descriptions given so vividly by Friedrich Engels of Britain’s industrial revolution during the 19th century.

The National Child Labour Committee (NCLC) used Hine’s persuasive imagery for its own propaganda purposes. Child labour at the turn of the century was widespread: in 1910 over a million children either didn’t go to school at all or only irregularly because they had to work. Hine, as a teacher, had a rapport with the children and talks to them, using what they tell him in the captions to his photos. Only in 1938 would a Fair Labour Standards Act come into force, banning child labour.

Hine also took a whole series of photos on Ellis Island, documenting the tribulations of immigrants seeking asylum in the USA. He travelled thousands of miles documenting the country’s labouring classes, depicting them in all their vulnerability and dignity.

His work is almost all black and white portraits. At that time, photographing people in motion was not possible given the available glass plate technology, and without the highly sensitive film stock that came later on.

Alberta McNadd on Chester Truitt’s farm at Cannon, del. Alberta is five years of age and has been picking berries since she was 3. Her mother volunteered the information that she picks steadily from sun-up to sun-down. Cannon, Delaware, 1910

He clearly identifies with the children and the men and women whose labour made the USA what it would become: the world’s leading industrialised nation. It is in the faces that we see the hardship, poverty, shame and abuse. But despite the fact that Hine sees and documents the relationship between industrial production and human misery, he appears to show little curiosity about the economic forces behind this exploitation, and remains seemingly apolitical, as if he fears losing his observer status.

His images have a direct, communicative character, with no self-conscious artiness about them. Hine went on to cover the First World War for the Red Cross, and was the official photographer during the building of the Empire State building, bequeathing us awe-inspiring images of those heroic men who risked their lives to erect this symbolic New York skyscraper.

Workman on the framework of the Empire State Building, New York City, 1931

He went on to work for Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, but from the 1930s commissions declined. He had set up his own photo lab in New York and advertised as a ‘social photographer’, but his work at the time was hardly recognised as art and he found it increasingly difficult towards the end of his life obtaining commissions. He died in poverty in 1940.

In 1977 his work was rediscovered and is now considered to be invaluable not only as a historical document, but as great art. One of his students was the photographer Paul Strand who carried on his tradition.

This beautiful Taschenbuch edition does Hine justice by bringing his searing images to the eyes of a new generation and reminds us all where we’ve come from.

Lewis W. Hine: America at Work by Peter Walther is published by Taschen Biblioteca Universalis at £15. This article is republished from the Morning Star.

John Green reviews a new film about the solidarity and courage of some Scots engineering workers who took action against the Chilean military coup of 1973.

Nae Pasaran tells the incredible but true story of the Scots workers who, from the other side of the world, managed to ground half of Chile’s air force, in the longest single act of solidarity against Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship following the 1973 fascist coup.

The feature-length documentary from young Chilean film-maker Felipe Bustos Sierra charts the story of how, in 1974, a small group of workers at the Rolls Royce aircraft factory in East Kilbride, led by Bob Fulton, Robert Somerville, Stuart Barrie and John Keenan, took the decision not to refurbish Hawker Hunter aircraft engines destined to be returned to Chile.

They were engines from the planes that had been used to bomb the Moneda Palace in Santiago and murder President Allende. Fulton had seen the images of people packed into Santiago’s football stadium and Chilean air force jets strafing the palace and now one of the engines from those very same planes was right there in his factory, waiting to be refurbished.

These workers were not prepared to be made morally culpable and, at the risk of their livelihoods, they said “No” and they carried the whole workforce with them. Little did they realise that their small but courageous action would reverberate around the world and give renewed hope to those who were imprisoned, tortured and persecuted.

The boycott was only one of many actions taken all over the world in protest against Pinochet's dictatorship, but a highly significant one. Bustos Sierra decided that this was a story that had to be told. He tracks down the key men, now retired, and persuades them to retell their story.

Then he takes the thread to Chile, with interviews with those who experienced the horrors of the Pinochet dictatorship and who were given hope by the action of these anonymous Scottish workers.
He also interviews the former chief of the air force under Pinochet, still arrogantly unrepentant, but who admits that the Scottish workers’ action had a significant impact on the Chilean air force’s capabilities. It was dependent on British-supplied Hawker Hunter aircraft and the refurbished engines.

As a moving coda, Bustos Sierra manages to trace one of the Rolls Royce engines, now rusting in a Chilean scrapyard, and transports it back to East Kilbride to serve as a memorial to these men. They are also presented with Chile’s highest honour by the Chilean ambassador in a moving ceremony in East Kilbride.

The boycott endured for four years but the Scottish workers were never, until now, aware of the impact their action had. For them it was simply a matter of conscience and an act of solidarity.

Bustos Sierra — himself the Scotland-based son of a Chilean exile — reunites these inspirational workers to hear their story. With unprecedented access, Nae Pasaran also ventures much further to detail the horrors of the Pinochet years, giving the historical and international context, and meets survivors of the period to hear the Chilean side of the story.

Although over an hour long, the film maintains the tension of a story which is at times deeply emotional, full of humanity and historically informative. This is history as it should be told and reminds us of how vital working-class solidarity is and how effective it can be, particularly in the world we are now living in, when some people are being categorised as of less worth than others and are denied basic human rights.

Don’t miss this film. Ask for it to be shown in your local cinemas and spread the word.

For details of screenings, visit naepasaran.com. This review first appeared in the Morning Star.

John Green introduces some Karl Marx bicentenary cartoons and caricatures.

5 May 2018 marks the bicentenary of the birth of Karl Marx. To commemorate this the Ken Sprague Fund organised an international cartoon and caricature competition which drew over 150 entries from artists around the world.

Ken Sprague was one of Britain’s foremost politically-committed graphic artists and the fund was set up to commemorate his work as well as the ideas he stood for. This competition was dedicated to Tony Farsky, a close friend of Sprague’s and himself a long-time supporter of progressive causes. 

The jury awarded a joint first prize to Stefan Siegert of Germany for his caricature of a laughing Marx (see above) and Ukrainian cartoonist Konstantin Kazanchev for his cartoon of Marx confronting a young skateboarder wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.

Second prize went to Raed Khalil from Syria for his black-and-white drawing of a bust of Marx’s head with a flock of birds breaking into flight from it.

Third prize was awarded to Ehsan Ganji from Iran for his cartoon of an assembly worker manufacturing truncheons for a police force that will then use them to beat protesting workers.

Marx would surely have been tickled — and maybe honoured — to see himself caricatured, lampooned and eternalised in such humorous ways as demonstrated by the images in this exhibition. What the cartoons and caricatures do reveal is a wide range of political interpretations — some portray Marx himself, others indict capitalism and yet others vilify the whole Marxian outlook or ridicule its impact. Some are sharply funny, some deadly serious and yet others acerbic.

Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson says of the catalogue: “I got my first big break doing gags about Karl Marx. The point, however, is that so did he. Any idiot who thinks of Marx as a dour, 'humourless leftie' has never read him and probably never met a proper leftie either. This splendid book should put them right on both counts.”

What is most striking about almost all the submissions to this competition is how unnecessary language or translations are. Despite cultural and language barriers, most use a visual imagery that can be understood internationally, across all cultural, religious or political barriers and boundaries.

Cartooning and caricature have a very long tradition in most countries, but it has never been an easy occupation. Even today in some parts of the world cartoonists risk harassment, imprisonment or worse for taking on the mighty and powerful. In countries where there is no free press or a strongly censored one, cartoons and caricatures take on an added significance.

Cartoonists are the modern equivalent of the ‘Fool’. They are granted a licence to say and visualise opinions and viewpoints that would probably be unacceptable and outrageous if expressed by public figures. They take on leading politicians, celebrities and lampoon them, expose their hypocrisy, shallowness and egotism. Cartoons always work through ridicule, laughter, bitter irony and satirical barbs. They deflate pomposity and strip away the trapping of status and power. Cartoonists provide us with an alternative narrative to that provided by the mainstream media. Their imagination is infinite. Cartoons capture what screeds of print cannot do. They encapsulate complex phenomena in one-off visual metaphors. They also underline the ridiculousness of human beings slipping on their own discarded banana skins - engineers of their own downfall.

Our intention in organising competitions like this – the fourth under the auspices of the Ken Sprague Fund – is also to help stimulate young cartoonists and give encouragement to cartoonists everywhere to use this powerful tool against oppression, the arrogance and pomposity of power and speak up for the little people of the world, those with limited access to the wider media.

The Ken Sprague Fund was set up shortly after his death in 2004, to celebrate and build on his multi-faceted artistic creativity and humanitarianism. Among his many talents, Ken was also a great cartoonist and in celebration of this aspect of his creativity, the Fund organised Britain's first international political cartoon competition in 2006, and has held another three since then.

'Cartoonists', he once said, 'are often, but unfairly, not considered to be artists at all. The question, "but can you draw properly too?" is a familiar one to most cartoonists.' Such attitudes were reflected in the fact that few of the original cartoon drawings from previous generations exist today; they were often discarded after publication, not considered worth keeping. In our somewhat more enlightened times, they are now viewed as vital historical documents as well as works of art in their own right.

The catalogue, I’ll have the Last Laugh Yet! with the winners and a selection of the best images is available online or from bookshops for £8.99 plus p&p. The exhibition ‘Laughing with Marx’ runs from 23 April until Fri 11 May in the Guardian HQ foyer, The Guardian , Kings Place, 90 York Way, King's Cross, London N1 9GU. It is free of charge.

Prints of the caricatures and cartoons exhibited here can also be purchased. For details contact the Ken Sprague Fund, 11 Dorset Road, London W5 4HU or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

'That mankind's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature' - Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844. Cartoon by Stephen Sieger, from the book.

To mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx this year, John Green gives a brief outline of some of the influences of Marxist thought on moviemakers.

What influence has Marx had on film and the cinema? A rather odd if not idiotic question the reader might think. After all, Marx died in 1883 and the first commercial, public screening of moving images, organised by the Lumière brothers in Paris only took place on 28 December 1895 – 12 years later. However, silly as it may at first appear, Marx and his ideas have had a profound influence on the development and evolution of film-making. 

The Soviet film-makers, Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov, founder of one of the world’s first film schools, should probably be credited with being the first to attempt to apply Marxist ideas directly to film-making. They immediately recognised the strong affinity between Marxist philosophy and the peculiar, unique essence of film and the creative possibilities it offered.

For Kuleshov, the essence of the cinema was editing, the juxtaposition of one shot with another. To illustrate this principle, he created what has come to be known as the Kuleshov Effect. In this now-famous editing exercise, shots of an actor’s face, looking at something were intercut successively with different images of objects (a casket, a bowl of soup, etc.), as if the actor were looking at them. Viewers apparently thought they could perceive subtly different expressions in the actor’s face corresponding to what he was supposedly looking at.

In actual fact, however, Kuleshov used exactly the same image of the actor, thus making the point that the mere fact of juxtaposing different images creates a third, imaginative image or perception in the heads of the viewer. Editing techniques can change or influence viewers' interpretations of images.

Another one of his famous inventions was creative geography, also known as artificial landscape. Those techniques were described in his book The Basics of Film Direction (1941) which was later translated into many languages.

But it was Eisenstein who was able to translate Marxist ideas most effectively through his films.  Marxist dialectics, the recognition that change in the world comes about primarily through a conflict of opposites to create a new synthesis, and that human history unfolds as the result of class conflict are central to Eisenstein’s approach.

Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925

While other Marxist film-makers chose more traditional ways of editing (montage) and story-telling, Eisenstein was convinced that the unique medium of film allowed – demanded even – a new approach. He became the father of what we today understand by the term film montage (creative, non-linear, editing). Following Kuleshov, he also recognised that by placing two very different images in conjunction, each would attain new meaning and lead to a new and deeper comprehension of reality.

By consciously framing and arranging elements within the frame of each image, in order to create a formal conflict, he also underlined this contradictory character. In his use of music too, he employed it not as mere accompaniment, to give emphasis to the emotional charge contained in the images, but as an aural commentary upon the visual, and as a counterpoint.

Eisenstein was also a master of choreography, to emphasise the role played by the masses in creating history and underlining the fact that it is not individuals who are paramount in bringing about change, but mass movements. In his films Potemkin or Alexander Nevsky, for instance, this aspect of his approach is demonstrated to awesome effect.

In order to break away from Hollywood’s ‘dream machine’ film-making culture, which used narrative structures that over-emphasised individual characters’ actions, Eisenstein shunned narrative structure by eliminating the individual protagonist. Instead, events were related in which the action is moved forward by the group and the narrative unfolds through a clash of one image against the next, whether in composition, motion, or idea. In this way, the audience is never lulled into a stupor of believing that they are watching real life, but something that has been worked upon, constructed.

While his films are immensely powerful historical statements, and his use of montage has influenced numbers of film-makers throughout the world, Eisenstein’s tendency to over-theorise could become something of a straitjacket on the narrative. Other film-makers, who would also have defined themselves as Marxists, while readily utilising some of his methodology and ideas, chose to follow more traditional narrative paths.

Although strongly influenced by those early Soviet innovators, few film-makers since have chosen to follow Eisenstein’s methodology strictly, but have chosen instead to incorporate Marxist ideas and a Marxist outlook more through their choice of subject matters. Although Bertolt Brecht, in his short foray into the film world, did use similar montage elements to Eisenstein and Kuleshov in his film Kühle Wampe, about working class life in Germany.

Kuhle Wampe, a 1932 film about unemployment, homelessness and left wing politics, conceived and written by Bertolt Brecht

Certainly many film-makers in a whole number of countries have at one time or other been members of their respective communist parties, and have espoused Marxism. Most of the Italian neo-realists were members of the CPI, including de Sica, Rosi, Pasolini, Bertolucci, Visconti. French filmmakers like Jean Renoir and later Jean-Luc Godard and the documentarist Chris Marker, as well as the Dutchman Joris Ivens, were all influenced in very different ways by Marxist ideas.

 The Italian neo-realists sought to tackle the subject of capitalism, fascism and social injustice in their films, clearly indicating, if not overtly, that a socialist organisation of society would be a better alternative. But they did this more through the use of amateur actors, raw, outside settings, and using natural lighting rather than the artifice of studio set-ups.

The Indian Marxist and film director, Mrinal Sen, played a significant role in the development of Indian film. The films he made were overtly political, and earned him the reputation of being ‘a Marxist artist’. He was working during the time of large-scale political unrest in India (1955 onwards). Particularly in and around Calcutta, this period was marked particularly by the Naxalite insurgency. He went on to make a series of films that revealed a shift in focus, and instead of looking at enemies outside the country, he sought the enemy within his own middle class milieu. This was his most creative phase.

British filmmakers like Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and the US-born Joseph Losey, as well as modern filmmakers like Ken Loach, have also been strongly influenced by Marxist ideas, expressed itself largely through their choices of subject matter and a class-based approach to story-telling.

Ken Loach, The Navigators, 2001

There has also been a large body of work devoted to Marxist film theory.  This work, though, has largely taken place in academic circles and media studies departments, rather than in the film industry itself.

Since the French Nouvelle Vague movement of the 50s and 60s, there have been few identifiable groups of filmmakers one could be characterise as following certain guidelines or a unifying philosophy (and even the Nouvelle Vague was a somewhat amorphous group, born from the pages of the French cinema journal, Cahiers du Cinéma).

However, in 1995 a small group of Scandinavian filmmakers, called Dogme 95, did attempt to define a new approach film making in answer to the dominant, commercialised Anglo-Saxon model, and found inspiration in Soviet cinema and Marxism. Founding members were the Danish directors Lars van Trier and Thomas Vinterberg.  In their manifesto they formulated ten rules, involving strict adherence to what they saw as a ‘natural way’ of filmmaking. They also wrote:

1. Sergei Eisenstein and many other Soviet filmmakers  in the 1920s expressed ideas of Marxism through film. In fact, the Hegelian dialectic was considered best displayed in film editing  through the Kuleshov Experiment  and the development of montage.
2. While this structuralist  approach to Marxism and filmmaking was used, the more vociferous complaint that the Russian filmmakers had was with the narrative structure of US cinema.
3. Eisenstein's solution was to shun narrative structure by eliminating the individual protagonist and tell stories where the action is moved by the group and the story is told through a clash of one image against the next (whether in composition, motion, or idea) so that the audience is never lulled into believing that they are watching something that has not been worked over.
4. French Marxist film makers, such as Jean-Luc Godard would employ radical editing and choice of subject matter, as well as subversive parody to heighten class consciousness and promote Marxist ideas.
5. Marxist film theory has developed from these precise and historical beginnings and is now sometimes viewed in a wider way to refer to any power relationships or structures within a moving image text.

So, again we have an example of modern filmmakers seeking inspiration in Marxist ideas when formulating their own cinematic philosophy or filmmaking theory vis-à-vis the hegemonic commercial cinema.

In the British magazine Screen, published in the early seventies, there was a discussion of Screen Theory which is based on a combination of Marxism and psychoanalysis. To discuss that in detail here would be perhaps somewhat outside the scope of this short resumé. But briefly, the theoreticians of the "screen theory" approach – Colin MacCabe, Stephen Heath and Laura Mulvey –describe the ‘cinematic apparatus’ as a version of Althusser’s ideological state apparatus.

According to screen theory, it is the spectacle that creates the spectator and not the other way round. The fact that the subject is created and subjected at the same time by the narrative on screen is masked by the apparent realism of the communicated content. Screen theory's origins can be traced to the essays ‘Mirror Stage’ by Lacan and Miller’s ‘Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier’.

Another group of filmmakers, the so-called Situationists, also adopted an approach based on a critique of capitalist film industry. Situationist film maker Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle,  began his film In ‘girum imus nocte et consumimur igni’ (Wandering around in the night we are consumed by fire) with a radical critique of the spectator who goes to the cinema to forget about his ‘dispossessed daily life’. This resonates with Marx’s ideas on alienation.

Situationist film makers produced a number of important films though, where the only contribution by the situationist film cooperative was the sound-track. In Can dialectics break bricks?  (1973) a Chinese Kung Fu film was transformed by redubbing into an epistle on state capitalism and proletarian revolution. The intellectual technique of using capitalism's own structures against itself is known as détournement.

Marxist film theory has developed from precise and historical beginnings and is now sometimes viewed in a wider way to refer to any power relationships or structures within a moving image text.

A massively broad understanding of Marxist film theory could be viewed as an attempt to decentre the narrative of the film away from individuals as the central drivers of a film, and as an attempt to analyse or re-contextualise hierarchical relationships regarding gender, race, socioeconomic status etc. or as propaganda to raise class consciousness.

One of the latest incursions into Marxist film theory has been made by the flamboyant neo-Marxist philosopher, Slavoj Zizek. in A Perverts Guide to Ideology, made by him in collaboration with Sophie Fiennes. Specifically, A Perverts Guide attempts to examine the hidden ideology immanent in films, and attempts to understand the message this ideology is seeking to convey.

In his terms, ideologies aren't political doctrines codified into ‘isms,’ but rather the fantasies and beliefs that underlie the functioning of all societies. In showing how these are reflected in the stories of individuals conveyed to us through films.

He analyses a number of famous films, ranging from Jaws, Full Metal Jacket to Taxi Driver, using them to explore the deep-seated power of ideologies and how they surface in such seemingly unconnected elements as Nazi propaganda films, the London riots or Coke commercials from the 1980s.

 He remarks, for example, on the similarities between The Searchers and Taxi Driver, and attempts to draw a parallel between such films and the US military experiences in Vietnam and Iraq – one of many instances where he teases out connections between imaginary constructs and political realities. He concludes that, ‘The depressing lesson of the last decades is that capitalism has been the true revolutionising force, even as it only serves itself.’

John Green introduces some Karl Marx bicentenary cartoons and caricatures.

5 May 2018 marks the bicentenary of the birth of Karl Marx. To commemorate this the Ken Sprague Fund organised an international cartoon and caricature competition which drew over 150 entries from artists around the world.

Ken Sprague was one of Britain’s foremost politically-committed graphic artists and the fund was set up to commemorate his work as well as the ideas he stood for. This competition was dedicated to Tony Farsky, a close friend of Sprague’s and himself a long-time supporter of progressive causes. 

The jury awarded a joint first prize to Stefan Siegert of Germany for his caricature of a laughing Marx (see above) and Ukrainian cartoonist Konstantin Kazanchev for his cartoon of Marx confronting a young skateboarder wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.

Second prize went to Raed Khalil from Syria for his black-and-white drawing of a bust of Marx’s head with a flock of birds breaking into flight from it.

Third prize was awarded to Ehsan Ganji from Iran for his cartoon of an assembly worker manufacturing truncheons for a police force that will then use them to beat protesting workers.

Marx would surely have been tickled — and maybe honoured — to see himself caricatured, lampooned and eternalised in such humorous ways as demonstrated by the images in this exhibition. What the cartoons and caricatures do reveal is a wide range of political interpretations — some portray Marx himself, others indict capitalism and yet others vilify the whole Marxian outlook or ridicule its impact. Some are sharply funny, some deadly serious and yet others acerbic.

Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson says of the catalogue: “I got my first big break doing gags about Karl Marx. The point, however, is that so did he. Any idiot who thinks of Marx as a dour, 'humourless leftie' has never read him and probably never met a proper leftie either. This splendid book should put them right on both counts.”

What is most striking about almost all the submissions to this competition is how unnecessary language or translations are. Despite cultural and language barriers, most use a visual imagery that can be understood internationally, across all cultural, religious or political barriers and boundaries.

Cartooning and caricature have a very long tradition in most countries, but it has never been an easy occupation. Even today in some parts of the world cartoonists risk harassment, imprisonment or worse for taking on the mighty and powerful. In countries where there is no free press or a strongly censored one, cartoons and caricatures take on an added significance.

Cartoonists are the modern equivalent of the ‘Fool’. They are granted a licence to say and visualise opinions and viewpoints that would probably be unacceptable and outrageous if expressed by public figures. They take on leading politicians, celebrities and lampoon them, expose their hypocrisy, shallowness and egotism. Cartoons always work through ridicule, laughter, bitter irony and satirical barbs. They deflate pomposity and strip away the trapping of status and power. Cartoonists provide us with an alternative narrative to that provided by the mainstream media. Their imagination is infinite. Cartoons capture what screeds of print cannot do. They encapsulate complex phenomena in one-off visual metaphors. They also underline the ridiculousness of human beings slipping on their own discarded banana skins - engineers of their own downfall.

Our intention in organising competitions like this – the fourth under the auspices of the Ken Sprague Fund – is also to help stimulate young cartoonists and give encouragement to cartoonists everywhere to use this powerful tool against oppression, the arrogance and pomposity of power and speak up for the little people of the world, those with limited access to the wider media.

The Ken Sprague Fund was set up shortly after his death in 2004, to celebrate and build on his multi-faceted artistic creativity and humanitarianism. Among his many talents, Ken was also a great cartoonist and in celebration of this aspect of his creativity, the Fund organised Britain's first international political cartoon competition in 2006, and has held another three since then.

'Cartoonists', he once said, 'are often, but unfairly, not considered to be artists at all. The question, "but can you draw properly too?" is a familiar one to most cartoonists.' Such attitudes were reflected in the fact that few of the original cartoon drawings from previous generations exist today; they were often discarded after publication, not considered worth keeping. In our somewhat more enlightened times, they are now viewed as vital historical documents as well as works of art in their own right.

The catalogue, I’ll have the Last Laugh Yet! with the winners and a selection of the best images is available online or from bookshops for £8.99 plus p&p. The exhibition ‘Laughing with Marx’ runs from 23 April until Fri 11 May in the Guardian HQ foyer, The Guardian , Kings Place, 90 York Way, King's Cross, London N1 9GU. It is free of charge.

Prints of the caricatures and cartoons exhibited here can also be purchased. For details contact the Ken Sprague Fund, 11 Dorset Road, London W5 4HU or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

'That mankind's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature' - Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844. Cartoon by Stephen Sieger, from the book.

To mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx this year, John Green gives a brief outline of some of the influences of Marxist thought on moviemakers.

What influence has Marx had on film and the cinema? A rather odd if not idiotic question the reader might think. After all, Marx died in 1883 and the first commercial, public screening of moving images, organised by the Lumière brothers in Paris only took place on 28 December 1895 – 12 years later. However, silly as it may at first appear, Marx and his ideas have had a profound influence on the development and evolution of film-making. 

The Soviet film-makers, Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov, founder of one of the world’s first film schools, should probably be credited with being the first to attempt to apply Marxist ideas directly to film-making. They immediately recognised the strong affinity between Marxist philosophy and the peculiar, unique essence of film and the creative possibilities it offered.

For Kuleshov, the essence of the cinema was editing, the juxtaposition of one shot with another. To illustrate this principle, he created what has come to be known as the Kuleshov Effect. In this now-famous editing exercise, shots of an actor’s face, looking at something were intercut successively with different images of objects (a casket, a bowl of soup, etc.), as if the actor were looking at them. Viewers apparently thought they could perceive subtly different expressions in the actor’s face corresponding to what he was supposedly looking at.

In actual fact, however, Kuleshov used exactly the same image of the actor, thus making the point that the mere fact of juxtaposing different images creates a third, imaginative image or perception in the heads of the viewer. Editing techniques can change or influence viewers' interpretations of images.

Another one of his famous inventions was creative geography, also known as artificial landscape. Those techniques were described in his book The Basics of Film Direction (1941) which was later translated into many languages.

But it was Eisenstein who was able to translate Marxist ideas most effectively through his films.  Marxist dialectics, the recognition that change in the world comes about primarily through a conflict of opposites to create a new synthesis, and that human history unfolds as the result of class conflict are central to Eisenstein’s approach.

Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925

While other Marxist film-makers chose more traditional ways of editing (montage) and story-telling, Eisenstein was convinced that the unique medium of film allowed – demanded even – a new approach. He became the father of what we today understand by the term film montage (creative, non-linear, editing). Following Kuleshov, he also recognised that by placing two very different images in conjunction, each would attain new meaning and lead to a new and deeper comprehension of reality.

By consciously framing and arranging elements within the frame of each image, in order to create a formal conflict, he also underlined this contradictory character. In his use of music too, he employed it not as mere accompaniment, to give emphasis to the emotional charge contained in the images, but as an aural commentary upon the visual, and as a counterpoint.

Eisenstein was also a master of choreography, to emphasise the role played by the masses in creating history and underlining the fact that it is not individuals who are paramount in bringing about change, but mass movements. In his films Potemkin or Alexander Nevsky, for instance, this aspect of his approach is demonstrated to awesome effect.

In order to break away from Hollywood’s ‘dream machine’ film-making culture, which used narrative structures that over-emphasised individual characters’ actions, Eisenstein shunned narrative structure by eliminating the individual protagonist. Instead, events were related in which the action is moved forward by the group and the narrative unfolds through a clash of one image against the next, whether in composition, motion, or idea. In this way, the audience is never lulled into a stupor of believing that they are watching real life, but something that has been worked upon, constructed.

While his films are immensely powerful historical statements, and his use of montage has influenced numbers of film-makers throughout the world, Eisenstein’s tendency to over-theorise could become something of a straitjacket on the narrative. Other film-makers, who would also have defined themselves as Marxists, while readily utilising some of his methodology and ideas, chose to follow more traditional narrative paths.

Although strongly influenced by those early Soviet innovators, few film-makers since have chosen to follow Eisenstein’s methodology strictly, but have chosen instead to incorporate Marxist ideas and a Marxist outlook more through their choice of subject matters. Although Bertolt Brecht, in his short foray into the film world, did use similar montage elements to Eisenstein and Kuleshov in his film Kühle Wampe, about working class life in Germany.

Kuhle Wampe, a 1932 film about unemployment, homelessness and left wing politics, conceived and written by Bertolt Brecht

Certainly many film-makers in a whole number of countries have at one time or other been members of their respective communist parties, and have espoused Marxism. Most of the Italian neo-realists were members of the CPI, including de Sica, Rosi, Pasolini, Bertolucci, Visconti. French filmmakers like Jean Renoir and later Jean-Luc Godard and the documentarist Chris Marker, as well as the Dutchman Joris Ivens, were all influenced in very different ways by Marxist ideas.

 The Italian neo-realists sought to tackle the subject of capitalism, fascism and social injustice in their films, clearly indicating, if not overtly, that a socialist organisation of society would be a better alternative. But they did this more through the use of amateur actors, raw, outside settings, and using natural lighting rather than the artifice of studio set-ups.

The Indian Marxist and film director, Mrinal Sen, played a significant role in the development of Indian film. The films he made were overtly political, and earned him the reputation of being ‘a Marxist artist’. He was working during the time of large-scale political unrest in India (1955 onwards). Particularly in and around Calcutta, this period was marked particularly by the Naxalite insurgency. He went on to make a series of films that revealed a shift in focus, and instead of looking at enemies outside the country, he sought the enemy within his own middle class milieu. This was his most creative phase.

British filmmakers like Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and the US-born Joseph Losey, as well as modern filmmakers like Ken Loach, have also been strongly influenced by Marxist ideas, expressed itself largely through their choices of subject matter and a class-based approach to story-telling.

Ken Loach, The Navigators, 2001

There has also been a large body of work devoted to Marxist film theory.  This work, though, has largely taken place in academic circles and media studies departments, rather than in the film industry itself.

Since the French Nouvelle Vague movement of the 50s and 60s, there have been few identifiable groups of filmmakers one could be characterise as following certain guidelines or a unifying philosophy (and even the Nouvelle Vague was a somewhat amorphous group, born from the pages of the French cinema journal, Cahiers du Cinéma).

However, in 1995 a small group of Scandinavian filmmakers, called Dogme 95, did attempt to define a new approach film making in answer to the dominant, commercialised Anglo-Saxon model, and found inspiration in Soviet cinema and Marxism. Founding members were the Danish directors Lars van Trier and Thomas Vinterberg.  In their manifesto they formulated ten rules, involving strict adherence to what they saw as a ‘natural way’ of filmmaking. They also wrote:

1. Sergei Eisenstein and many other Soviet filmmakers  in the 1920s expressed ideas of Marxism through film. In fact, the Hegelian dialectic was considered best displayed in film editing  through the Kuleshov Experiment  and the development of montage.
2. While this structuralist  approach to Marxism and filmmaking was used, the more vociferous complaint that the Russian filmmakers had was with the narrative structure of US cinema.
3. Eisenstein's solution was to shun narrative structure by eliminating the individual protagonist and tell stories where the action is moved by the group and the story is told through a clash of one image against the next (whether in composition, motion, or idea) so that the audience is never lulled into believing that they are watching something that has not been worked over.
4. French Marxist film makers, such as Jean-Luc Godard would employ radical editing and choice of subject matter, as well as subversive parody to heighten class consciousness and promote Marxist ideas.
5. Marxist film theory has developed from these precise and historical beginnings and is now sometimes viewed in a wider way to refer to any power relationships or structures within a moving image text.

So, again we have an example of modern filmmakers seeking inspiration in Marxist ideas when formulating their own cinematic philosophy or filmmaking theory vis-à-vis the hegemonic commercial cinema.

In the British magazine Screen, published in the early seventies, there was a discussion of Screen Theory which is based on a combination of Marxism and psychoanalysis. To discuss that in detail here would be perhaps somewhat outside the scope of this short resumé. But briefly, the theoreticians of the "screen theory" approach – Colin MacCabe, Stephen Heath and Laura Mulvey –describe the ‘cinematic apparatus’ as a version of Althusser’s ideological state apparatus.

According to screen theory, it is the spectacle that creates the spectator and not the other way round. The fact that the subject is created and subjected at the same time by the narrative on screen is masked by the apparent realism of the communicated content. Screen theory's origins can be traced to the essays ‘Mirror Stage’ by Lacan and Miller’s ‘Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier’.

Another group of filmmakers, the so-called Situationists, also adopted an approach based on a critique of capitalist film industry. Situationist film maker Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle,  began his film In ‘girum imus nocte et consumimur igni’ (Wandering around in the night we are consumed by fire) with a radical critique of the spectator who goes to the cinema to forget about his ‘dispossessed daily life’. This resonates with Marx’s ideas on alienation.

Situationist film makers produced a number of important films though, where the only contribution by the situationist film cooperative was the sound-track. In Can dialectics break bricks?  (1973) a Chinese Kung Fu film was transformed by redubbing into an epistle on state capitalism and proletarian revolution. The intellectual technique of using capitalism's own structures against itself is known as détournement.

Marxist film theory has developed from precise and historical beginnings and is now sometimes viewed in a wider way to refer to any power relationships or structures within a moving image text.

A massively broad understanding of Marxist film theory could be viewed as an attempt to decentre the narrative of the film away from individuals as the central drivers of a film, and as an attempt to analyse or re-contextualise hierarchical relationships regarding gender, race, socioeconomic status etc. or as propaganda to raise class consciousness.

One of the latest incursions into Marxist film theory has been made by the flamboyant neo-Marxist philosopher, Slavoj Zizek. in A Perverts Guide to Ideology, made by him in collaboration with Sophie Fiennes. Specifically, A Perverts Guide attempts to examine the hidden ideology immanent in films, and attempts to understand the message this ideology is seeking to convey.

In his terms, ideologies aren't political doctrines codified into ‘isms,’ but rather the fantasies and beliefs that underlie the functioning of all societies. In showing how these are reflected in the stories of individuals conveyed to us through films.

He analyses a number of famous films, ranging from Jaws, Full Metal Jacket to Taxi Driver, using them to explore the deep-seated power of ideologies and how they surface in such seemingly unconnected elements as Nazi propaganda films, the London riots or Coke commercials from the 1980s.

 He remarks, for example, on the similarities between The Searchers and Taxi Driver, and attempts to draw a parallel between such films and the US military experiences in Vietnam and Iraq – one of many instances where he teases out connections between imaginary constructs and political realities. He concludes that, ‘The depressing lesson of the last decades is that capitalism has been the true revolutionising force, even as it only serves itself.’

John Green outlines the role of film in the Bolshevik Revolution, and the profound and lasting influence of Russian revolutionary film-makers on cinema not only in the Soviet Union but across the world.

According to the Bolshevik government’s first Commissar for Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lenin remarked that, ‘Film for us is the most important of the arts’. What is particularly significant in this position is that Lenin not only clearly recognised film as an art at a time when many still considered it merely a form of cheap entertainment, but that he also recognised, even at this early stage in its development that it would have a huge and influential future.

The young Soviet Union was faced with a large population made up of many nations and ethnicities. Overwhelming numbers were illiterate and the means of communication in the country were undeveloped. The Bolshevik leaders were faced with the daunting task of explaining the revolution to the people and galvanising their latent energies, but they didn’t have the luxury of time or tranquil conditions in order to do so. The promise of the new medium of film – at that time still only a silent medium and used as a fairground entertainment only ­– was recognized immediately by those with imagination and vision.

The possibilities of cinema as a propaganda, agitational and educational tool intrigued the Soviet leaders. Their fascination with new technology in general as a means of transforming a backward society probably contributed as well. Lenin dictated this note to the Commissariat of Education, which was responsible for the cinema, with a request that it draw up a programme of action based on his directives. In an early conversation that Lunacharsky, the first Commissar for Education, had with Lenin, he recalls that Lenin uttered his oft quoted statement ‘that of all the arts the most important for us is the cinema.’

A declaration was issued by the People’s Commissariat for Education on the organisation of film showings. A definite proportion should be fixed for every film-showing programme. And while it recognised that film is very much a medium of entertainment, in programming it insisted that there must be a strong educational and propaganda component.

The Commissariat for Education also stressed that films ‘From the life of peoples of all countries,’ should be screened in order that film-makers should have an incentive for producing new pictures. ‘Special attention should be given to organising film showings in the villages and in the East, where they are novelties and where our propaganda, therefore, will be all the more effective.’ (First published in Kinonedelia No. 4, 1925).

The new young Turks like Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Vsevolod, Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko took up Lenin’s challenge with alacrity. The young film medium, based as it was on mechanical proficiency and industrial expertise, captured the interest of the new generation of communist artists who realised that the new society they wished to construct could only be built on the basis of rapid industrial development and technological innovation. These pioneers grasped this new ‘entertainment medium’ with both hands and transformed it into a powerful means of communication. These directors were inspired by Marxist theory and saw that they could apply Marxist ideas to the making of films, but each film-maker did so in their own individual way. Eisenstein was, though, the only one to elaborate an all-embracing Marxist theory of film-making. He put this into practice in his own film-making, in terms of selection of camera angle, juxtaposition of images during the editing process, movement within the frame and later in terms of sound and music also. For the first time the ideas of Marx and Marxist theory were applied to film-making.

Eisenstein

Eisenstein was undoubtedly the most influential of the new young Soviet film-makers – a trained architect, he took to film like a duck to water. Seeing far beyond the idea of moving pictures, he developed a whole new science of film-making based on Marxist dialectics. Eisenstein was a pioneer in the use of montage, a specific technique for film editing. He, alongside his colleague and contemporary, Lev Kuleshov, were two of the earliest film theorists to argue that montage was the very essence of cinema, and, used effectively, could enable us to see and comprehend a deeper reality. Eisenstein’s essays and books – particularly Film Form and The Film Sense – explain his theories of montage in detail and provide a theoretical grounding for future film-makers.

By using a unique form of montage i.e. how the individual celluloid takes were spliced together, he demonstrated that meaning could be created by juxtaposing images rather than, as had been done up till then, splicing them in simple chronological sequence. By placing one image (in Marxist terminology, the thesis) immediately next to a very different or ‘opposing’ image (the antithesis), a new concept (the synthesis) is created.

He saw editing as the key to a film’s impact. Film was for him much more than just a useful tool in expounding a scene through a linkage of related images. He felt the ‘collision’ of shots could be used to influence the emotions and consciousness of an audience and that film could achieve a metaphorical dimension. While making films, he developed a comprehensive theory that he termed, ‘methods of montage’.

His iconic film Battleship Potemkin is probably the most famous example of this approach, but Strike (1924) was his first film. It depicts life at a factory complex in Tsarist Russia and the conditions under which the workers laboured. The plot is centred on the workers organising a strike which in response to repression escalates into a full-blown occupation. Such a blunt depiction of ruling class repression had never before been visualised in this way. But what makes this and Eisenstein’s other films so special is that the audience is not allowed for a minute to remain passive, but is drawn into the struggle and becomes almost part of it. It is difficult to imagine today when you look at old grainy prints of Battleship Potemkin, that audiences were so stirred by its imagery that they swarmed out of the cinema determined to make their own revolution. The ruling classes were so frightened of it that its public showing was banned for many years almost everywhere outside the Soviet Union.

After the success of Strike (1924), Eisenstein was commissioned by the Soviet government to make a film commemorating the unsuccessful revolution of 1905. He chose to focus on the crew of the battleship Potemkin. Fed up with the extreme cruelties of their officers and their maggot-ridden meat rations, the sailors mutiny. This, in turn, sparks an abortive citizens' revolt on the mainland against the Tsarist regime. The film's centrepiece is the classic massacre on the Odessa Steps, in which the Tsar's Cossacks methodically shoot down innocent citizens. The image of a dying mother who lets go of the pram she is pushing, leaving it to career down the steps with the baby still in it, has become one of the most iconic and moving shots in the history of cinema.

He was the first cinematographer to develop a proper film language, one appropriate to the challenges facing the new Soviet republic. His best known films, Strike, Battleship Potemkin, October, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible all bear testament to his contribution and the power of his imagery.

Many of his plans were, sadly never brought to fruition. During his unsuccessful sojourn in the USA, he proposed making a film of Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man and of Sutter’s Gold by Jack London but the ideas failed to impress Hollywood producers at the time and were vehemently opposed by anti-communist elements in the Hollywood hierarchy. The same happened with his proposal to film Theodor Dreiser’s American Tragedy. While there, though, he developed cordial relations with Charlie Chaplin who introduced him to the socialist writer Upton Sinclair. Their subsequent attempt to jointly produce a film in Mexico was also, in the end, unsuccessful although the footage they were able to shoot was later, posthumously, edited into the film, Que Viva Mexico.

With all this wasted effort, Eisenstein was getting itchy feet to return home, as the Soviet Film industry was, in the meantime, already experimenting with soundtracks on film. Also, in the wake of an increasing Stalinisation of the arts, his techniques and theories were coming under attack for ostensibly ‘ideological’ reasons and he was being accused of ‘formalism’ and he wished to counter such criticisms.

Back in the Soviet Union he embarked on his epic Alexander Nevsky with a musical soundtrack composed by Sergei Prokoviev. Unfortunately he died at the age of 50 so was unable to realise his mature potential. It is a moot point whether his specific cinematic language could have been adapted to a post-revolutionary period, and in a different historical context. But there is no doubt that his work has influenced numerous film-makers down the ages and still does.

Soviet film-makers and their use of film inspired film-makers and cultural workers throughout the world. What characterised them, in contrast to their many colleagues in the West, was that they viewed film, in the first instance, as an educational medium. They were more interested in the use of film in its educational, propaganda and informative roles than as pure entertainment. and saw the medium primarily as a means of promoting human betterment and the promoting of socialist values.

The influence of Soviet cinema

The influence of Russian film-makers can be seen throughout the succeeding history of film. US classics like Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, with its adventurous camera angles, framing and editing would have been unthinkable without Russian cinema. The Italian Neo-realist wave leant heavily on its Russian forerunners. Directors like de Sica, Rossellini, Visconti and Rosi had all studied the way in which Soviet film-makers had been able to capture life on screen in a totally new, gripping and realistic way that superseded its former theatrical straitjacket. The films of the Hollywood greats like Billy Wilder, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, William Wyler, Howard Hawks and so on all reveal the seminal influence of these early Soviet film-makers.

Early Soviet cinema ‘led the world, and laid much of the groundwork for the practice and theory of film for the 20th century,’ according to Annette Michelson, Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. At a lecture she gave in December 2003, she and Naum Kleiman, Director of the Moscow Cinema Museum, discussed the ways in which Soviet and Russian film have interacted with the American film industry.

Kleiman pointed out that Russian émigrés like choreographer George Balanchine and actor Michael Chekhov, in addition to their influential roles in the world of dance and theatre, were active in Hollywood. As Michelson pointed out, Eisenstein never made a film in the US, after Paramount Pictures invited him to Hollywood in 1935, but the then never took on any of his projects. Nevertheless, she argues that Eisenstein's use of montage influenced American film, and is visible, she says, in such well-known scenes as the shower sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Hitchcock and other American directors re-interpreted montage usage.

According to Michelson, ‘In the hands of those Americans who admired Eisenstein's work, [montage] became a kind of tried-and-true conventional, visual, rhetorical device for indicating the passage of time, or the passage from one country to another.’

Kleiman underlined that many US filmmakers in the 1920s and 30s had seen and admired Eisenstein's films. He noted that in the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola had told him that he had found artistic inspiration in October and Ivan the Terrible. Both Kleiman and Michelson felt that Eisenstein's influence was even more noticeable in movies made outside Hollywood. Michelson argued that montage was an important intellectual and artistic device in independent films produced after the Second World War, such as those by Maya Deren. Kleiman also noted the influence of other Russian artists, such as émigré actress and producer Alla Nazimova. In his opinion, Nazimova's film Salome clearly reflected traditions of Russian literature, theatre and set design. This movie, along with other movies featuring Russian actors and directors, was seen by American filmmakers and influenced their future work in many subtle ways.

Workers' Film Societies

Elsewhere in the West, in response to the dramatic transformation taking place in the young Soviet Union and the new films emerging from the country, progressives grasped the opportunity to use this new potent medium in their own way. Communists here in Britain became centrally involved early on in setting up workers' film societies from the twenties onwards, as a means of creating opportunities for working people to watch Soviet and other progressive films. Ralph Bond, a foundation member of the British Communist Party, published in the Sunday Worker – a forerunner of the Daily Worker – an appeal for interested parties to get in touch to facilitate the setting up of a London Workers’ Film Society, and the response to this appeal surpassed all expectations.

The Soviet director, Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin had an unprecedented impact on audiences everywhere with its revolutionary montage techniques and searing imagery. This was followed by other, equally powerful and iconoclastic films from the Soviet Union. However, these films were banned for public showing in many countries, including the UK, as they were deemed too inflammatory and seen as dangerous communist propaganda. 

The first workers’ film societies were set up to provide a means of showing such films (and they were also seen as a way of getting around the censor, as such films could be shown in private clubs without a licence). The first, founded in London in 1925, had as its object the ‘showing of films of artistic interest, which could not be seen in ordinary cinemas’. Such societies had already been active on the continent of Europe. However, before the new London film society even got off the ground it was already involved in skirmishes with the London County Council (LCC) over permission to show their selected films, even to members. (The LCC was London’s licensing authority for film screenings under the 1909 Cinematographic Act). In 1928, the LCC banned the showing of Battleship Potemkin, and then also banned a showing of Pudovkin’s The Mother. This led many progressive individuals, including J. M. Keynes, Julian Huxley, Sybil Thorndike, Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw, to protest, but even they failed to have the ban rescinded.

When the London Workers’ Film Society’s tried to show two Soviet-made films at the Gaiety Cinema in Tottenham Court Road in November 1929, the cinema owner refused the booking at the last minute after pressure from the London County Council. Such run-ins between the LCC and the LWFS became regular occurrences. While the LCC adhered to its bans on the Soviet films mentioned above, it relented as far as permitting the LWFS to put on Sunday shows in the West End.

After the setting up of the London society, several others soon appeared around the country, and an attempt was made to create a national federation of film societies to facilitate easier access to films, better distribution and co-ordination. The Federation of Workers’ Film Societies (FOWFS) was founded in the autumn of 1929 and led to the creation of a network of local workers’ film societies all over Britain.

The Labour Party itself showed no interest in setting up workers’ film societies but with the success of the London Society, it became highly suspicious of the latter’s activities and denounced the society as being merely a communist propaganda vehicle.

The Communist Charles Cooper was a ‘movie enthusiast whose Contemporary Films opened new horizons for British cinema audiences. His early interest in film had led Charles to become, in 1933, secretary of the Kino group, an association of left-wing film enthusiasts who were determined to circumvent Britain's draconian film censorship, which was especially aimed at the new Soviet cinema. Kino organised 16mm screenings of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin for trade union and Soviet friendship groups, as well as producing a ‘workers' newsreel’ and agitational films such as Bread, in which a starving, unemployed worker is harshly treated by police and magistrates.

Although Eisenstein is undoubtedly the greatest and most innovative of all Soviet film-makers, his contemporaries should in no way be ignored, as they also made innovative and influential contributions to the film medium. Below I take a cursory look at the most significant.

Dovzhenko
After returning to the USSR from a prisoner of war camp in Germany, Dovzhenko turned to film in 1926 after landing in Odessa . His second screenplay was Vasya the Reformer which he co-directed. He gained greater success with Zvenigora (1928) which established him as a major filmmaker. His following Ukraine Trilogy (Zvenigora, Arsenal and Earth) established his reputation worldwide. Its graphic realism was impressive and inspiring. After spending several years writing, co-writing and producing films at Mosfilm Studios in Moscow, he turned to writing novels. Over a 20-year career, Dovzhenko only directed 7 films.

Pudovkin
A student of engineering at Moscow University, Pudovkin, like Dovzhenko, saw active service during the First World War and was also captured by the Germans. During this time he studied foreign languages and did book illustrations. After the war, he joined the world of cinema, first as a screenwriter, actor and art director, and then as an assistant director to Lev Kuleshov.

Pudovkin adopted a very different approach to Eisenstein. While his films are just as revolutionary as the latter’s in terms of the content and their powerful impact, he took a more traditional approach to narrative. A student of engineering at Moscow University, Pudovkin, like Dovzhenko, saw active service during the First World War, also being captured by the Germans. During this time he studied foreign languages and did book illustrations. After the war, he abandoned his professional activity and joined the world of cinema, first as a screenwriter, actor and art director, and then as an assistant director to Lev Kuleshov .

His first notable work was a comedy short Chess Fever (1925) co-directed with Nikolai Shpikovski. In 1926 he directed what came to be considered one of the masterpieces of the silent era: Mother. In this he developed several montage theories, but in a different way to Eisenstein.

His first feature was followed by The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Storm over Asia, about the impact of the Bolshevik revolution on what was then seen as a backward region. After an interruption caused by poor health, Pudovkin returned to film-making, with several historical epics: Victory  (1938); Minin and Pozharsky  (1939) and Suvorov (1941). The last two were often praised as some of the best films based on Russian history, along with the works of his colleague Eisenstein he was awarded a Stalin Prize  for both of them in 1941.

In 1928, with the advent of sound film, Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Grigori Alexandrov signed the ‘Sound Manifesto’, in which the possibilities of sound are analysed, but always understood as a complement to image.

Dzigha Vertov
Vertov attempted to do for the documentary what Eisenstein had been doing in the fictional field. He was born in 1896 and is considered one of the ‘greats’ of early Soviet film-making, a director who concentrated on documentaries. He began by making newsreels but also developed his own theories about film-making that differed markedly from those of the fictional film-makers mentioned above.  His work and writing would be very influential on almost all future documentarists, particularly the British school around John Grierson, Basil Wright, Alberto Cavalcanti and Paul Rotha, but also later on the French Cinéma Verité movement.

After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, at the age of 22, Vertov began editing for Kino-Nedelya (Кино-Неделя, the Moscow Cinema Committee's weekly film series, and the first Russian newsreel), which first came out in June 1918. While working for Kino-Nedelya he met his future wife, the film director and editor, Elizaveta Svilova , who at the time was working as an editor at Goskino  She began collaborating with Vertov, and working as his editor but later his assistant and co-director on subsequent films, such as the iconic Man with a Camera (1929), and Three Songs About Lenin (1934).

Vertov worked on the Kino-Nedelya series for three years, helping establish and run a film-car on Mikhail Kalinin’s agit-train during the ongoing ongoing civil war between the Bolsheviks and the white Russian counter-revolutionaries. Some of the cars on the agit-trains were equipped with actors for live performances and printing presses: Vertov's had equipment to shoot, develop, edit, and project film. The trains were taken to battlefronts on agitation-propaganda  missions aimed at bolstering the morale of the troops, and to engender revolutionary fervour and commitment. In 1919, he compiled newsreel footage for his documentary Anniversary of the Revolution, and in 1921 he compiled History of the Civil War.

Kino-Pravda
In 1922, the year that O’Flaherty’s seminal Nanook of the North was released, Vertov started his Kino Pravda  series. It took its title from the Bolshevik government newspaper Pravda. Kino-Pravda (Film Truth) continued Vertov's agit-prop bent. The Kino-Pravda group began its work in a basement in the centre of Moscow. It was, as he himself described it, damp and dark. There was an earthen floor and holes one stumbled into at every turn. He said, ‘This dampness prevented our reels of lovingly edited film from sticking together properly, rusted our scissors and our splicers’. ‘Before dawn damp, cold, teeth chattering I wrap comrade Svilova in a third jacket’.

Vertov's driving vision, expounded in his frequent essays, was to capture ‘film truth’—that is, fragments of actuality which, when organised together, contain a deeper truth than can be seen with the naked eye. In the Kino-Pravda series, he focused on everyday experiences, rejecting ‘bourgeois concerns’ to film ordinary people, marketplaces, bars, and schools instead, sometimes with a hidden camera. The episodes of Kino-Pravda did not usually include re-enactments or stagings, although he did so on odd occasions. The cinematography is simple and functional. Vertov appeared to be uninterested in traditional ideas of aesthetic beauty or the perceived grandeur of fiction.

Vertov clearly intended an active relationship with his audience in his Kino Pravda series, but by the 14th episode the series had become so experimental that some critics dismissed his efforts as ‘insane’. Vertov responded to their criticisms with the assertion that the critics were hacks nipping revolutionary effort in the bud, and concludes his essay with a promise to ‘detonate art's Tower of Babel’. In Vertov's view, ‘art's tower of Babel’ was the subservience of cinematic technique to narrative.

With Lenin's admission of limited private enterprise through his New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921, Russia began receiving fiction films from abroad, a situation that Vertov regarded with suspicion, calling drama a ‘corrupting influence’ on the proletarian sensibility. In this view, he was taking an extreme and, one has to say, very narrow viewpoint. By this time Vertov had been using his newsreel series as a pedestal to vilify dramatic fiction for several years; he continued his criticisms even after the warm reception of Eisenstein’s Potemkin in 1925.

By this point in his career, Vertov was clearly and emphatically dissatisfied with narrative tradition, and expressed his hostility towards dramatic fiction of any kind both openly and repeatedly; he regarded drama as another ‘opiate of the masses’ – a rather extreme position.

The Man with a Movie Camera

In his essay ‘The Man with a Movie Camera’ Vertov wrote that he was fighting ‘for a decisive cleaning up of film-language, for its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature’. By the later segments of Kino-Pravda, Vertov was experimenting heavily, looking to abandon what he considered film clichés (and receiving criticism for it); his experimentation was even more pronounced and dramatic by the time Man with a Camera was filmed in Ukraine.

Some have criticised the obvious stagings in this film as being at odds with Vertov's principle of ‘life as it is’ and ‘life caught unawares’, but its sense of realism is overwhelming. The film has become synonymous with the use of specifically cinematic technique, with the use of double exposure, fast and slow motion sequences, freeze-frames, jump cuts, split screens and tracking shots etc. He also uses footage played in reverse and the idea of self-reflexivity.

In the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight and Sound poll film critics voted Man with the Camera the 8^th greatest film ever made and the work was later named the best documentary of all time in the same magazine. Although in the Soviet Union at the time it also had its staunch critics who called it ‘formalistic’ a criticism aimed at a number of Soviet film-makers and artists, including Eisenstein.

Like other Russian filmmakers, he attempted to connect his ideas and techniques to the advancement of the aims of the Soviet Union. Whereas Eisenstein viewed his ‘montage of attractions’ as a creative tool through which audiences would be better able to comprehend complex processes and thus the ideological content of the films, Vertov believed that Kino Eye would have an influence on the actual evolution of mankind, from being a flawed creature into a higher, more precise, form of being. ‘I am an eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, I am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see’, he was quoted as saying.

There is no doubt that all these pioneering film-makers and theoreticians during the early years of the Soviet Union have had a lasting influence on film-makers worldwide. Despite the fact that many ‘movies’ made today for cinema and television today show all too clearly that their makers should perhaps return to school and learn from these masters, the better film-makers still reveal in their work the seminal influence of those early Soviet pioneers.