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.

John Green introduces the life of Jack London.

There is a hullabaloo around the quincentenary this year of Shakespeare’s death, but Jack London’s centenary appears to have been forgotten. Yet in his lifetime he became one of the world’s first celebrity writers, and is undoubtedly one of the great novelists of the 20th century as well as an articulate proponent of socialist and progressive ideas.

His incredible life reads like a Boys’ Own fantasy. He was a man driven by raw passion and anger. Born in San Francisco in 1876 as an illegitimate child, he would die aged only 40. But what a mercurial life and creative energy he packed into those short 40 years.

His mother gave him to a black former slave woman to bring up, before she married and was able to take him back into her own care. Jack’s childhood of poverty marked him for life, but he was a boy full curiosity, who refused to let his poor background prevent him gaining knowledge. In 1880 discovered the local public library in Oakland and devoured the books he found there. One of them was a dog-eared copy of The Communist Manifesto, and reading it changed his life irrevocably. In his notebook at the time, he wrote:

The whole history of mankind has been a history of contests between exploiting and exploited… the exploited cannot attain emancipation from the ruling class without once and for all emancipating society at large from all future exploitation, oppression, class distinction and class struggles.

During his school years, he spent his spare time in a saloon bar on the waterfront and when he told the owner he wanted to go to university and become a writer, the owner lent him the money to do so. I don’t know if he was ever repaid, but it was certainly a fruitful investment, as his protégée went on to become a celebrated and wealthy writer. At aged 13, he was working in a cannery for 12-18 hours a day, but he was not cut out for such a life, and was determined to better himself through a devotion to literature.

London soon quit his studies at UCL, Berkeley in 1897, aged 21 after being rejected by his assumed father, an astrologer named William Chaney. He wrote to Chaney but the latter denied paternity and London was devastated. After leaving college, he headed for the Klondike during the gold rush boom. His harsh experience there would give him the raw material for his first stories. To get to the Alaska he made a journey of 2,500km alone in a rowing boat, but turned his experience into a successful short story. His 1903 novel, Call of the Wild, also based in Alaska, was sold to a newspaper and the book rights to Macmillan. It was the book that would win him rapid renown.

Before he was earning enough money from his writing, though, he borrowed money from his foster mother to buy a small sloop and became an oyster pirate in the Bay. This boat was very soon damaged beyond repair, so he signed on as poacher-turned-gamekeeper for the California Fish Patrol. Then later he joined a sealing schooner bound for the coast of Japan. Once he’d managed to establish his credentials as a reporter, he was commissioned to write about the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 as a war correspondent.

What animated Jack London’s life, says one of his biographers, Alex Kershaw, was

above all, a hope that one day poverty and social injustice would decrease, not increase; that the environment would not continue to be regarded as a resource to be continuously exploited; that humanism would one day triumph.

He was driven by passion, anger and a determination to live life to the full. He played hard and drank hard. Already by the age of sixteen he had experienced more than most people do in a lifetime.

After returning to Oakland from the gold fields of Alaska, his health was in bad shape, but he managed to make a fairly quick recovery. Oakland in 1893 found itself the focus of a war of a different kind, one between the bosses and the longshoremen. Witnessing those brutal struggles helped turn London into a socialist activist. He took on gruelling jobs in a jute mill and in a railway power plant, and joined Kelly’s Army – a mass demonstration movement by unemployed workers.

At the same time he was working incredibly hard to get more of his stories published, submitting one after the other to magazines, and was soon making good money at it. His semi-autobiographical novel Martin Eden reflects that period. He cut his teeth in the burgeoning world of magazines, selling his adventure stories widely and establishing a reputation. He would become one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.

More than any North American writer, Jack London had an insatiable appetite for life. He often said he preferred living to writing, and by the age of 16 he had experienced more than most people do in a lifetime. He was always searching for new ideas, new challenges. His thirst for travel took him across several continents and inspired his best fiction.

He also embodied the promise of socialism in his life and writing. He exposed capitalism’s evils, its decimation of the workforce through ruthless profit-making. In some of his most powerful prose, he showed how expendable people are in the process of increasing a governing elite’s wealth.

His stories have been used as the basis for film scripts in countries around the world and in different versions, including Sea Wolf, White Fang and Call of the Wild, set in the Klondike gold-rush era, the semi-autobiographical Martin Eden as a TV mini-series as well as his dystopian iconic novel The Iron Heel.

He was an atheist, an active supporter of the Wobblies, joining the Socialist Labor Party in 1896 and then the Socialist Party of America. He also ran as a socialist candidate for mayor of Oakland.

As London explained in his essay How I Became a Socialist, his views were influenced by his experience ‘with people at the bottom of the social pit’. His optimism and individualism faded, he said, and he vowed never to do more hard physical work than necessary. He wrote that his individualism was hammered out of him, and he was politically reborn. He often closed his letters ‘Yours for the Revolution’.

His progressive political views were somewhat tainted for some by his fascination with a mix of Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s ideas, and the concept of a super race. However, for London this was not in the Nazi sense of one race dominating others, but the idea of everyone become ‘super’ by natural selection. Despite being brought up by a black surrogate mother, he did feel the white Anglo-Saxon people were probably superior to others, particularly the coloured peoples. While such attitudes are inexcusable, they can be explained and understood in the US context and atmosphere of the time. However, they rarely if ever influenced his writing and he could hardly be characterised as a racist in terms of hating or discriminating against others. For him class and the class battles were always central.

As a journalist he wrote an impassioned study of poverty in London’s East End, The People of the Abyss, which prefigured Orwell’s similar Down and Out in Paris and London. His burning indignation came through in so much of his reporting. His reminiscences as a drifter bumming it across America were written long before Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck and others did the same. What comes across in his novels is his first hand experience and understanding of the lives working people and the poor lead. He draws powerful, three-dimensional characters, full of anger, passion and vitality.

London was also a pioneer of environmental awareness. He urged Americans to look for salvation in the wide open spaces, not the canyons of Wall Street, and he led by example. On his farm he introduced many methods that are now common practice on organic farms. He developed the use of liquid manure and hollow block silos as well as pioneering the cultivation of nitrogen replenishing crops like Alfalfa. He was an early animal rights activist, campaigning against cruelty to circus animals.

In 1915, a year before he died, he said in an interview he gave to a journalist from Western Comrade: ‘I became a socialist when I was seventeen years old. I’m still a socialist, but not of the refined school of socialism’. He had by then become disillusioned with the ability of the socialist movement to bring about revolutionary change. This viewpoint is eloquently expressed in his dystopian apocalyptic novel The Iron Heel , published in 1908. It depicts the USA governed by a neo-fascist regime, and the author argues that socialism is the only means of avoiding such a future. It is a forerunner of 1984 and similar dystopian novels. It is one of the most powerful evocations of what can happen to society run by unscrupulous capitalists, determined to maintain their power and privilege. He foresaw German fascism as no other writer did.

He was an avid surfer, and his articles about surfing introduced the sport to America for the first time. He is still celebrated as a cult hero on the beaches of Waikiki in Hawaii.

In 1914 he was sent as a was a war correspondent to Mexico, and following his time there wrote a short story, The Mexican, which has as its hero a Mexican worker who survives a massacre to join the revolution, to free his country of such unscrupulous factory and land-owners.

In 1915 his wife, Chamian, persuaded him to spend time in Hawaii, a relaxing and healthful respite for the two of them. But London's greatest satisfaction came from running his ranch, althogh his ambitious plans kept him in debt and under pressure to write as much as he could in order to pay them off, as well as help out friends and relatives. His determination to write at least 1000 words a day, his continued high consumption of alcohol and unhealthy life style eventually took its toll. But right to the end of his life he was full of bold plans and boundless enthusiasm for the future. When he died, words of grief poured into the telegraph office in Glen Ellen, where he lived, from all over the world.

Ernest Hopkins in the San Francisco Bulletin on December 2, 1916, wrote this:

No writer, unless it were Mark Twain, ever had a more romantic life than Jack London. The untimely death of this most popular of American fictionists has profoundly shocked a world that expected him to live and work for many years longer.

London deserves to be remembered for much more than for his infatuation with surfing, or as a maverick or confused individualist of only historical interest for us today. His works should be read widely, and find a place of honour on every progressive’s bookshelf.

John Green reviews a new exhibition about the great American photographer Paul Strand, pointing to the 'mute, empathetic, visual rapport' that Strand achieves in his images.

The socialist photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976) has long been neglected, although during his lifetime he was very influential on many budding photographers and other artists. The painter Edward Hopper was just one of many artists whose approach to urban scenes was heavily influenced by Strand.

Born in New York, he attended classes in photography, and the photographic club, run by Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture School. The modernist movement in the visual arts was just beginnning, and a visit to Alfred Stieglitz's gallery inspired Strand to explore the expressive possibilities of the medium, which previously he had only considered as a hobby.

Along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, he helped establish photography as an art form. Some of his early work, like Wall Street, Abstraction, Porch Shadows and White Fence show his experiments with formal abstractions.

White Fence, Port Kent, New York © Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Later on, he adopted a more straightforward realistic approach, becoming more interested in using the camera as a tool for social reform, for example in Blind Woman, a candid and anonymous street portrait made secretly using a camera with a decoy lens.

 Blind Woman, New York © Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

He was one of the founders of the Photo League, an association of photographers that advocated using their art to promote social and political causes.

During the 1920s he concentrated on photographing mainly urban sites, continuing with the machine forms begun earlier, and also turned his attention to nature, using large plate cameras and making contact prints on platinum paper. In these works, which were very influential in the evolution of the ‘New Objectivity’, form and feeling are dialectically related.

In addition, Strand's writings, beginning in 1917 with Photography and the New God, set forth the necessity for the photographer to evolve aesthetic principles based on the objective nature of reality. His early semi-abstract works were influenced by Cubism. Many are platinum prints in small format, which give dense contrasting images, but he went on to use a large format camera with excellent quality lenses to increase the clarity and detail of his images.

After service in the Army Medical Corps, where he was introduced to X-ray and other medical camera procedures, Strand collaborated with Charles Sheeler on Manhatta, a 10 minute documentary film about New York released in 1921. Manhatta was hailed as the first avant-garde film, and traces a day in the life of New York from sunrise to sunset, punctuated by lines of Walt Whitman's poetry.

In 1932, he moved to Mexico and worked for the government there, helping its efforts to reconstruct the country after the revolution. While in Mexico, he became a committed socialist, and inspired by the revolutionary movement there, he started to make politically committed still photographs, and to produce government-sponsored documentary films. For example, Redes (Nets) and La Ola (The Wave), released in 1934, showed the economic problems confronting the fishing families in a village near Vera Cruz.

His most ambitious and controversial production, Native Land (1942) evolved from a Congressional hearing into anti-trade union activities, and was about the violations by US employers of their workers' terms and conditions of employment. It was released in 1941 on the eve of the second World War, and so was considered politically unacceptable and banned. It went on to win a number of awards and is today considered a classic of social realist film-making.

As Strand’s career progressed, his work became increasingly politicised, and more focused on social documentary. His choice of where to take photographs was invariably politically motivated: for example, his locations were often places where regional identity was being impacted by global modernity.

 The Family, Luzzara (The Lusettis) © Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

One of Strand’s most celebrated images, The Family, Luzzara, (The Lusetti’s) was taken in a modest agricultural village in Italy’s Po River valley for the photobook Un Paese, for which he collaborated with the Neo-Realist writer, Cesare Zavattini. This hauntingly direct photograph depicts a strong matriarch flanked by her brood of five sons, all living with the aftermath of the Second World War.

He went on to work with Pare Lorentz on The Plough that Broke the Plains, following which he and other progressive filmmakers organized Frontier Films to produce a series of pro-trade union and anti-fascist films. Frontier Films was one of the many left-leaning organisations identified as ‘subversive’ by the US Attorney General and was persecuted in the anti-communist hysteria known as the McCarthy Period.

In 1949, Strand left the USA for France to escape the McCarthy witch-hunts, at the same time as the first trial of his friend, the Communist Alger Hiss. His movements around Europe were still closely monitored by the US security services, however.

Unable to finance film-making after World War II, Strand turned to the printed publication for a format that might integrate image and text in a manner akin to the cinema. He is perhaps best known today through that series of books he produced, which were in the form of portraits of places. He felt he could reach wider audiences this way: Time in New England (1950), a collaboration with Nancy Newhall, sought to evoke a sense of past and present through images of artefact and nature, combined with quotations from the region's most lucid writers.

Other books included La France de Profil (1952), Un Paese (featuring photographs of Luzzara in Italy, with text by Cesare Zavattini, 1955), Tir a'Mhurain/Outer Hebrides (with Basil Davidson in 1962), Living Egypt (1969, with James Aldridge) and Ghana: An African Portrait (also with Basil Davidson, 1976).

His work with Davidson in the Hebrides reflects the social sensitivities of the people who live on the islands and who have fought the elements for centuries, battled poverty and oppression and are still fighting to maintain their autonomy and freedom from exploitation and domination by foreign landlords. You can sense strong elements of resistance, resilience and stoicism, etched in the faces of those portrayed.

Milly, John and Jean MacLellan, South Uist, Hebrides © Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Strand conjured the sights, sounds and textures of a place steeped in the threatened traditions of Gaelic language, fishing and the agricultural life of pre-industrial times.

Because of his socialist sympathies, Strand insisted that his books be printed in East Germany, even though this meant that they were initially banned from the US market. At his death in 1976, he had been photographing for nearly three-quarters of a century, gradually finding his ideal of beauty and sense in nature and the simple life. Strand was one of the greatest and most influential photographers of the 20th century whose images have helped define the way fine art and documentary photography are understood and practised today.

Why was such a great photographer suspected of communism, and monitored by the FBI? Although he was never officially a member of the Communist Party, many of Strand’s collaborators were either Party members, like James Aldridge and Cesare Zavattini or were prominent socialist writers and activists, such as Basil Davidson. Many of his friends were also Communists or were suspected of being so, including the MP D. N. Pritt; film director Joseph Losey; Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid; and the actor Alex McCrindle.

But the main reason was surely because of the way Strand's art expressed his politics. What characterises Strand’s work is the complete lack of artifice. The people in his images come across as perfectly natural, relaxed and unposed, although that belies his meticulous framing and even staging in order to achieve what he wanted. In his photos we are confronted with a rich and varied humanity, made up of individual characters who nevertheless make us feel involved with them, part of their lives.

The French artist Claude Roy said about their collaboration:

‘Strand chooses his path, a slow and temperamental one, not a hasty one, but a thoughtful one, a path that had no system, no other goal but that of capturing the greatness of humanity, the simplest and most naked truth’.

The images speak to us, we enter their lives in a kind of mute, empathetic, visual rapport. The viewer does not have the feeling that the photographer is imposing his own individualistic point of view and interposing himself between the figures in the photograph and the viewer. Strand makes himself invisible, as all great photographers are able to.

This aesthetic expression of his social and political commitment is surely why he was monitored by the anti-communist US state security services. He was a pioneer in 20th century avant-garde photography who was able to demonstrate to the world the effectiveness of art in promoting social change.

Paul Strand: Photography and Film For the 20th Century
Victoria and Albert Museum, London. From 19 March – 3 July 2016.

John Green introduces the life of Alexander von Humboldt, the father of ecology who combined scientific investigation with a sense of high moral purpose. 

It is doubtful that many of the participants at the recent Paris talks on climate change will have heard of Alexander von Humboldt. Yet he is the father of ecology, and was the most admired naturalist and geographer of his age, a scientist with a conscience who Charles Darwin 'always admired and now worshiped'. His name lives on in the many species, geographical areas and institutions named after him – twelve species of animals and plants, six prominent geographical features as well as schools, colleges and even towns – probably more than any other scientist could boast of.

The great liberator of South America, Simon Bolivar said: ‘Alexander von Humboldt has done more for America than all its conquerors; he is the true discoverer of America.’ Humboldt corresponded with a whole array of Europe’s leading scientists, artists and writers, including Schiller and Goethe, who gushed: 'Humboldt showers us with true treasures.'

One can’t underestimate the impact of Humboldt’s’ observations and ideas on the direction of the young Darwin’s research. In fact, it might not be exaggerating to suggest that without Humboldt’s nudging him in the right direction, he might not have conceived his great theory of evolution quite so readily. Darwin referred to him often in his own naturalist’s travelogue, Voyage of the Beagle, and lauded him as ‘the greatest travelling scientist who ever lived…’

The real birth of ecology came about largely as a result of the early midwifery work undertaken by Humboldt in the 18th century. His aim was to achieve a holistic overview of nature: ‘each part contributes its own peculiar activity to the overall activity and the latter is subject to its special impact, so that life in each organised living thing appears as a unity, which comes about as the result of reciprocal actions and reactions of all its parts.’

Thus, individual species were not per se the subject of his studies, but the landscape as a whole, and within them the physiognomy of their plant life. Through the manner in which plant forms expressed themselves, Humboldt attempted to understand what lent specific atmosphere to what he called an ‘Erdgegend’ (what we now call a ‘biome’). This was not dissimilar to the aims of the landscape painters; in his time science and art were not as distant from each other as they are today.

He travelled throughout the continent, using every means at his disposal, including Indian canoe to navigate the Rio Negor and Orinoco, and was the first to attempt an ascent of Chimborazo, Ecuador’s highest mountain. Edgar Alan Poe found Humboldt's attempt to unify the sciences a big inspiration and he dedicated his last major work, Eureka; A Prose Poem, to Humboldt.

Alexander von Humboldt's travels, experiments, and knowledge transformed western science in the nineteenth century. He also pioneered what is perhaps taken for granted today, namely transdisciplinary study, what he called the ‘physics of the world’. He was, though, not only a great scientist in terms of the modernity of his methods and approach to problems, but was a forerunner of our own modern-day ecological movements. Unusually at the time, he countered the idea of nature as an untamed wilderness to be conquered. He saw nature and humanity as part of a complex but cohesive holistic unity and argued that man is not necessarily the centre of the universe: ‘Here, in the interior of the new continent one becomes almost accustomed to viewing people as unnecessary to the order of nature’, he noted.

Humboldt viewed nature as a unity transformed by its own inner forces. He saw it not in a linear form, but as a network of interconnected strands. He considered landscape to be a space of dialectical interaction, both within nature and between nature and humans. Even before the concept of ecology existed, Humboldt wrote: ‘My real and singular aim is to investigate the weft and weave of all nature’s forces, to investigate the influence of dead nature on the lives of all animal and plant creations.’

He realised the value and significance of biodiversity and, already in 1822, was explaining the role of forests in maintaining the health of the planet. He wrote, in 1822, about their role in retaining water and preventing erosion. He castigates the unregulated felling of trees as catastrophic in its affect on water retention: ‘If the forests continue to be destroyed in the way the European colonisers have already done with incautious haste in some areas of America that springs will dry up or become severely depleted; already river beds are devoid of water for periods of the year and at others become raging torrents when the rains are heavy in the mountains.

While researching plant forms, he discovered the relationship between fall in temperature and altitude - the isotherm is his invention. Today he is considered to be the father of modern geography, meteorology, Latin American archaeology and global comparative cultural studies. The specialist branch of plant geography he also pioneered evolved into an important branch of ecology. With the rapid growth of interest and research in natural history at the time, a framework was created for evolutionary theory and geography, based on the interconnectedness between objects of a landscape.

In 1836 Humboldt sent a letter to the Duke of Sussex, the then President of the Royal Society, inviting the co-operation of the Society in the organization of a world magnetic survey. He suggested a programme for the observation of the phenomena of terrestrial magnetism which laid the foundation for the subsequent investigation of the earth’s magnetic fields.

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt was born at the Palace of Tegel, in Berlin to an aristocratic Prussian family on 14 September 1769 and died on May 6, 1859). He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt. His father, who was an army officer, died when he was nine years old so he and Wilhelm were raised by their cold and distant mother. Tutors provided their early education which was grounded in languages and mathematics. Once old enough, Alexander began to study at the Freiberg Academy of Mines under the famous geologist A.G. Werner. In 1792, at the age of 22, he went on to become a government mines inspector in Franconia, Prussia. But a sedentary life in a mundane job were not for him. Meeting George Förster (the scientist who accompanied Captain James Cook's on his second voyage) encouraged his urge to travel. He and Förster embarked on a voyage of discovery around Europe.

His childhood had been a torture, he wrote later, in 1801, from Colombia: ‘For a young soul who was maltreated in his father’s house and forced to live in a straitened, gritty environment over 18 years, once he is granted his own freedom, everything glows and shimmers wonderfully and he can at last take in the wonders of the world.’

Humboldt’s inner restlessness and long periods spent travelling abroad were also undoubtedly not unrelated to the fact that he was probably gay. In the Puritan and staid environment of late 18th century Prussia being a homosexual would have been a precarious if not dangerous existence. By spending long periods abroad, he could lead a gay life with relative impunity. He destroyed many of his personal letters, so we have no first-hand proof, but circumstantial evidence leaves little doubt of his homosexuality.

His mother died, when he was 27, leaving him a substantial income from the estate. This became his means of escape from Prussian provincialism. He could have used this new wealth to enjoy a hedonistic and dissolute life, but instead he dedicated himself to an exploration of the world - his life’s ambition. The following year, he left government service and began to plan travels with Aimé Bonpland, the French botanist. The pair decamped to Madrid, where they were able to obtain special permission and passports from King Charles II to explore South America.

Once arrived in the continent, Humboldt and Bonpland were overwhelmed by its exuberant fauna and flora and were able to study these and the topography of the continent in detail for the first time. In 1800 Humboldt mapped over 1700 miles of the Orinoco River. This was followed by a trip to the Andes and an ascent to the summit of Mount Chimborazo (in Ecuador), then believed to be the highest mountain in the world. They didn't quite make the summit, but managed to climb to over 18,000 feet. While on the west coast of South America, Humboldt measured and discovered the Peruvian Current, which, despite objections of Humboldt himself, was given the name Humboldt Current. In 1803 they explored Mexico, where Humboldt was even offered a position in the Mexican cabinet but declined the honour. The pair was persuaded to visit Washington DC staying there for three weeks, in which time Humboldt had several meetings with Thomas Jefferson and the two became good friends.

In 1804 he sailed back from the Americas to Paris and while resident there wrote up his field studies in thirty volumes. He stayed in France for 23 years and while there carried on a lively exchange with other European intellectuals on a regular basis. He supported and worked with leading scientists, including Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, Justus von Leibig, Louis Agassiz, Matthew Fontaine Maury and, most notably, the Frenchman Aimé Bonpland, with whom he conducted much of his scientific exploration.

Humboldt's fortunes were ultimately exhausted by his travels and the costs of self-publishing his reports and he was forced to seek some form of regular income. As his fame had, in the meantime, spread far and wide, he was invited to Russia by the Tsar and there undertook an in-depth exploration of that country and described, for the first time, discoveries such as permafrost. He recommended that Russia establish weather observatories across the country. This was carried out in 1835 and Humboldt was able to use the data to develop the principle of continentality - that the interiors of continents have more extreme climates due to a lack of moderating influence from the ocean.

The scope of this work may be described as the representation of the unity amidst the complexity of nature, an attempt to unify the various branches of scientific knowledge. Humboldt's work was by and large a synthesis of Kantian views of unity of natural phenomena. Drawing together the methods and instrumentation of the discrete sciences and with inspiration from German Romanticism, Humboldt sought to create a compendium of the world's environment.

He left us 47 volumes in total, containing all his publications, including 29-volumes on his travels in the South American tropics. This contained 1400 engravings and was the most wide-ranging and expensive work that had ever been published by a private academic. On top of that, he bequeathed us over 450 essays and reports published elsewhere and around 50,000 letters.

His quantitative work on botanical geography was foundational to the field of biogeography. He was the first to discover the connection between temperature and ecology and developed the first isotherm map, containing lines of equal average temperatures. During his expeditions in the Americas and Europe, he recorded and reported on magnetic declination. He was also one of the first to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined (South America and Africa in particular).

What singled Humboldt out as a scientist of a special bent was that he combined scientific investigation with a high moral sense. Nature and morality were for him two sides of the same coin. He was truly a man of the enlightenment, inspired by the French Revolution and its demands for freedom, equality and fraternity.

His views on religion, on race and colonialism were far ahead of his time. One of his fundamental beliefs was that ‘everyone is equally destined to enjoy freedom’; science and politics were for him indivisible. Even in his primarily scientific writings he defended human rights, excoriated racism and slavery and called for all human beings to have equal rights. Such attitudes were still seldom in the late 18th century. He was a fierce advocate of rights for indigenous populations and of all races. Welcoming the French Revolution, he wrote in a letter in 1798: ‘If there is only one blessing - the extermination of the feudal system and all aristocratic prejudice under which the poor and nobler classes of people have suffered for so long - it will have been worthwhile.’ He castigated the social system prevalent in Europe at the time as ‘the barbarism of our feudal system which keeps the peasants in abject destitution’.

In his praise of the Aztecs for their astronomical and other attainments of civilisation, he castigates previous authors who described them as ‘barbaric’ – ‘These authors view all human conditions as barbaric that don’t fit the image of the culture they have imagined from their systematic ideas,’ he wrote, ‘We can’t allow the validity of such crass differentiations between barbaric and civilised nations’.

He despised colonialism, particularly after witnessing the ravages it caused to the indigenous population in Spanish-ruled South America. In 1802, he wrote from Colombia: ‘The idea of a colony is in itself an immoral one,’ he writes, ‘the idea of country obliged to pay tribute to another, a land in which one is only allowed to reach a certain level of wellbeing and in which diligent industry and enlightenment are only allowed up to a certain point…Every colonial government is a government of suspicion…and the larger the colony, the more committed European governments become in their political vindictiveness and the greater the immorality of the colonies becomes. How inhospitable European cruelty makes the world!’

The forms of Christianity he witnesses in his travels caused him to despise its practice in the colonies. In a letter from Peru, in 1802, he described graphically the appalling cruelties carried out by Catholic missionaries in Latin America: ‘the present missionaries are a class of people who under the guise of helping the Indios, forcefully take their possessions and make them believe it a sin to complain about it. No religion preaches immorality,’ he admitted, ‘but what is certain is that of all existing ones the Christian religion is the one under whose the mask people are made the most unhappy. The Indios are treated like the Africans: if they are not exactly beaten to death, it’s said, they are living well.’

He was also well aware that his radical views had made him extremely unpopular among the ruling elite in Europe despite his high standing as a scientist and intellectual. In a letter to a friend in 1852 he wrote: ‘I have, yes, during recent years, become an unpopular person; and would have long been sent into exile as a revolutionary and author of the ‘godless’ Kosmos if this had not been hindered by my position with the King. For the Pietists and Christian pamphleteers I am a horror. They would love nothing more than that I were already mouldering in the earth.’

Alexander von Humboldt didn’t propound such world-shattering theories as evolution, like Darwin, or that of relativity like Einstein, but his achievements paved the way for the work of both of them as well as many others.