“Aesthetic Expression as Historical Narrative – the 20s in the Soviet Union”
Seminar at the Norwegian University Centre in St. Petersburg
26-29.05.2009
“Aesthetic Expression as Historical Narrative – the 20s in the Soviet Union”
Non-written sources, as photography, film, art, architecture and music have, as a rule, been considered as a problematic field by historians. In the discourse of modern historiography, however, these sources have often been put into use as historical narratives, i.e. as forms of expression that may be analyzed in an historical context, often allowing a deeper understanding of the historical period they represent.
The 1920s decade in the Soviet Union is, in many ways, a suitable example for illustrating this through the artistic avantgarde´s interesting – and highly problematic – encounter with the political reality shaped by Lenin and his successors in the Soviet Communist Party. Centrally positioned here is film art – by Lenin apocryphally described as “the most important of all art” – where the October revolution and the Civil War heralded a group of artists, among those Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov, Dovzhenko and Shub, who were to have a decisive influence on the development of aesthetic film history.
The seminar aims at discussing how the contemporary art scene in 1920s Soviet Union did relate to contemporary historical and political events, using the development of Soviet cinema as example. Cases discussed may be the films about the 1905 revolution (Eisenstein´s The Battleship Potemkin and Pudovkin´s Mother), the films made for the celebration of the 10 year anniversary of the October revolution (where both Eisenstein and Pudovkin re-enacted the storm on the Winter Palace), the contemporary artistic and political commentary provided in Vertov´s documentaries and Esfir Shub´s pioneering use of the film and photography archives of the tsar family for the historical compilation film History of the Romanov Dynasty.
Further examples will be provided from art history, photography, architecture and other visual art forms (e.g. the art of the propaganda poster) and music.
Polina Tsikoreva [administrator@norunivspb.ru]
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