From the Avant-Garde to Socialist Realism: Some Reflections on the Signifying Procedures in Eisenstein’s Stachka and Donskoi’s Raduga

Abstract

Twenty years and vastly divergent socio-political contexts separate the two films which I shall discuss here. Stachka (1925), Eisenstein’s first feature-length film, was made in the Soviet Union at a time when an exceptionally euphoric vitality and unprecedented innovativeness was observable in all walks of artistic and intellectual life. Despite their turbulence and extreme material hardships, these first years of Soviet power were the scene of an exuberant rupture with old values and of an attempt to redefine art in such a way that it would correspond to the needs of a new and more just society. The theatre of Meyerhold, the poetry of Mayakovsky, and the plastic art of the Constructivists are among the most well-known examples of this ardent desire to break with the past. For the cinema, the revolution brought about changes which were perhaps even more substantial than those which occurred in the other arts. Nationalised in 1919, and declared by Lenin to be ‘the most important of all the arts’, the cinema found itself propelled virtually overnight from a side-show attraction to a major form of national culture, important not only as a powerful tool of political propaganda on the one hand, and means of artistic expression on the other, but as a medium in which the two could be synthesised into a truly political form of art.