Languor Management

The Soviet Union's Russell and Mary Wright...

Alexander Rodchenko and Lyubov Popova, "the first designers":

 Both artists felt strongly that ideology should form the lifeblood of their work, and nothing shows this more than Rodchenko's design for a Workers' Club, which he exhibited in the International Arts and Crafts Exhibition in Paris in 1925. Tate Modern will have a reconstruction of the club, direct from his designs. This was design with function that went beyond utilitarianism: it was created to enable leisure, an essential tenet of Lenin's revolutionary ideal. Labourers should use their free time outside of work relaxing – but within a context that was productive, communal, and with design at its centre. As such, there was to be a Lenin Corner of the club with Constructivist magazines and a screen on which could be projected signs. This was typical of the Constructivist movement's approach to art, as they branched out to graphic design, theatre stage sets and posters. This Workers' Club was a theatre of sorts, where each worker would play his part.

Hankering for a Soviet food poster?

Yum. [Spaceeba, Amos]

Sidestepping realism

    

Anthology Film Archives (New York City) seems to be holding something of an Eisenstein festival:

STRIKE / STACHKA
1925, 106 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent. With Russian intertitles; English synopsis available.
Eisenstein’s interest in the Freudian father complex drives this psychological scenario in which non-actors step forward to acknowledge the viewer, illustrating Eisenstein’s desire to penetrate to the heart of cinema, sidestepping realism by “being real.”
Upcoming Showings: Saturday Jan 31 4:45 PM

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN / BRONENOSETS POTEMKIN
1925, 74 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent. With English intertitles.
Eisenstein’s constructivist montage and rigid, super-structured plot share equal weight with a seemingly spontaneous, inflamed emotion.
Upcoming Showings: Saturday Jan 31 8:45 PM, 7:00 PM

OCTOBER / OKTYABR
1928, 143 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent. With Russian intertitles; English synopsis available.
Eisenstein celebrates the baroque in OCTOBER, as opposed to the Greek classicism of POTEMKIN, disappointing contemporary audience expectations. "Intellectual cinema" starts here.
Upcoming Showings: Sunday Feb 1 7:30 PM

OLD AND NEW
1929, 120 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent. With Russian intertitles; English synopsis available.
Known also as THE GENERAL LINE, this is one of Eisenstein’s least-known films. With it, he developed and perfected his theories of “mise-en-cadre,” using the montage of characters in the foreground and background to conjure meanings, and “overtonal montage,” bringing silent film to its zenith.
Upcoming Showings: Sunday Feb 1 5:00 PM

Strange fruit

This story reminds me of my own office, which is disguised as a laundry room in a *garden* apartment tucked away in the Polish-occupied Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. Visitors would come to pretend to buy fruit and leave with pamphlets of dissension to distribute:

The blue, discolored facade at 55 Lesnaya Ulitsa says "Kalandadze's Wholesale Caucasian Fruits Trade," but no lemons have been sold there for more than 70 years. Hidden behind the store is a little-known museum dedicated to what was once a secret printing house.

The Museum of the Underground Printing House 1905-06, a filial of the Museum of Contemporary History, gives visitors a glimpse of the conspiratorial atmosphere of tsarist times when the socialist opposition rallied for reform using the written word to call for strikes and argue for human rights, free press and revolution.

Satire on the fetters of serfdom

Chris Lethem on Marian Schwartz’s "lively" translation of Oblomov (an LM favorite) for Bookforum:

Like all good aristocrats, he has a first-class liberal education and seized in his student years on “the pleasures of lofty thoughts.” But such intoxication faded almost as quickly as it descended: “Serious reading exhausted him. The great thinkers could stir no thirst in him for speculative truth.” Much the same convulsions of ardor and entropy mark Oblomov’s adult life—except entropy now has the upper hand. Absurdly, as his estate succumbs to neglect and declining income, he envisions grand, abstract reforms: “a brand-new plan that conformed to the demands of the era, a plan to organize his estate and administer his peasants.” But since these ideas involve forsaking his dust-filled apartment, Oblomov remains on-site, fretting, sleeping, eating, and sleeping some more.

The last sentence sounds unnervingly like my writing career.

When in the starving regions

 In the heady days of 1992 after Russia's new leader, Boris Yeltsin, declaimed that the secret KGB and Soviet archives should be open to scholars and publishers, Jonathan Brent, the editorial director of Yale University Press, flew to Russia to secure the rights to publish selected material from the archives for YUP's Annals of Communism project. Brent's memoir, Inside the Stalin Archives, according to Martin Walker for the New York Times Book Review, reveals as much about the grim realities of post-Soviet life and bureaucracy as it does about the archives themselves.

Through Yeltsin’s wretched early years of poverty and dislocation in the 1990s and through the sleeker but more menacing times of Putin’s oil-enriched restoration of traditional authority, Yale University Press has published more than a score of important books. It has recently published newly discovered stenographic records of some 30 Politburo meetings in the 1930s and ’40s, and it is working on Stalin’s personal archive.

Brent is among the first to stress that none of this could have been achieved without the brave and honest work of Russian archivists and scholars in the Soviet period and after. He relates one haunting anecdote of a respected and elderly historian who just two years ago published a straightforward study that included the historically true statement that Red Army troops had occupied Lithuania even before Hitler's invasion of 1941. Officially ­threatened with the loss of his apartment and pension, and retaliation against his daughter’s career if he dared repeat such allegations, he tells Brent: “It is a return to the 1970s. There is nothing to do about it.”

Different Questions, My Dream, My Dog Thoughts

Some lines end with something like a fish hook--a "question mark" refers to a question.

Me? I wonder about five questions. Why Zina's daddy says that his eyes "popped out of his head." They haven't gone anywhere, I say. Why does he say such rubbish? I crept up to the cupboard, sat in front of the mirror, and bulged my eyes out as far as they could go. Woof! My eyes didn't go anywhere--they stayed right in place.

Are there any fox terriers living on the moon? What do they eat? And do they howl at the earth like I sometimes do at the moon? and where do they disappear to when the moon goes out of sight for many days? Micky, Micky! Someday you'll go crazy!

Why do fish swim into an empty net when it's clearly a trap? Since you're not able to live above water, just sit quietly in your pond, I say. I really pity them! In the morning, they blow bubbles up to the surface, and in the evening they're digested in a dark human stomach--or worse! The mean cat takes them away...

Why was Zina's nanny a brunette yesterday, but today her hair looks like golden straw? Zina giggled, but I was frightened and thought, "Well, Micky, thank God you are a dog." Who would marry such a parrot? Black on Tuesday, orange on Wednesday, and on Thursday--blue with green stripes...Foo! It's getting hot in here.

How come, when I act badly, they put a muzzle on me, but when the gardener gets drunk as a mad bull twice a week they do nothing about it? Zina's uncle says that the gardener is shell-shocked, so we must indulge him. By all means! I will learn what shell-shocked means, then I will become shell-shocked, too. Then they'll have to indulge me. I'm going to chomp on a bone (Where did I bury it? I'll never tell!), then I'll write some more.

--From "Micky the Fox Terrier's Diary", a children's story by Sasha Chernyi, translated by me.