All Roads to Revolution: The Construction of the Agitated Viewer via Both Revolutionary Theory and Bourgeois Melodrama

• In Event: Reclaiming Voices in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture

Abstract

This paper analyzes the artistic current of the revolutionary Soviet period attempting to marshal montage to promote class-conscious politics and dispel bourgeois melodrama. It specifically remarks on the ironic thematic convergence of the revolutionary-cinematic form the early Soviet critics lauded and the bourgeois-theatrical content they wished to dispel.
Eisenstein identifies a particular “energy” in the American cinema of the silent era, one defined by rhythmic cutting, and narrative parallelism. Eisenstein praises these “amazing (and amazingly useless!) works from an unknown country” and considers the “possibilities of a profound, intelligent, class-directed use of this wonderful tool.” This harnessing of Griffith’s sentimental montage, often of dualistic social entities (troubled/untroubled, haves/have-nots) to Eisenstein’s exploration of class contradictions has been the traditional evolutionary model of montage, one that ultimately leads to Eisenstein’s “agitational spectacle,” to energize and transform the people to in turn energize and transform reality.Here, Bauer stages an interesting intervention. Bauer doesn’t have the Griffith-Eisensteinian energy of cutting, but his multiple visual planes and deep, treacherous compositions demand the viewer to view the image consciously and selectively. His narrative ambiguity dealing with tragic, entangled domesticity defers the judgment to the viewer to read his films in various ways as critics have throughout the ages. Eisenstein agitates via energy, but Bauer creates a necessity, two roads that arrive at the same small revolution: the transformation of the passive viewer into a visually and socially active one.

Author

• Youngkwang Shin, Harvard U