Cinema After Revolution(s): Reproduction, Communication, Affect (1917/1968)
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Germanic Languages and Literatures
First Advisor
MacKay, John
Abstract
My dissertation studies different forms of political cinema in the twentieth century. It focuses on two historical conjunctures: the first part analyzes revolutionary filmmaking in the 1920s Soviet Union through the cinema of Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) and Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), the second part contrasts different approaches to political filmmaking from France, West Germany, and Cuba during the “global sixties” or the “long ’68,” looking at the filmmakers Chris Marker (1921–2012), Claudia von Alemann (*1943), Jean-Pierre Thorn (*1947), Harun Farocki (1944–2014), and Santiago Álvarez (1919–1998). The historical, conceptual, and aesthetic links between the two parts originate in the strong reverberation of the October Revolution in the 1960s. At the same time, the emerging political and social movements in this later period distinguished themselves from the revolutionary legacies of 1917 and sought to find new forms of political and aesthetic expression. In both cases, this study frames filmmaking as a set of multi-pronged practices of reproduction in time and communication in space insofar as revolutions appear as essentially mediated events and processes of differential scales. While the 1920s were a site of revolutionary artistic experimentation and remained important in the political imaginary of artists, activists, and movements in the decades that followed, the sixties opened up new possibilities for political filmmaking as collective practice.The first part begins with the so-called agit-train program in the early years of the Soviet Union spearheaded by Vertov. Examining cinema as a “new” audiovisual medium for mass education and information, the chapter reflects on the difference between documentary and fiction film. The second chapter continues the study of Vertov’s film practice and theory by reading his A Sixth Part of the World (1926) against the background of revolutionary internationalism and the program of socialist construction. Moving to Eisenstein, the third chapter looks at the period of agricultural collectivization at the end of the 1920s through Eisenstein’s The General Line (1929) and his film theoretical writings on montage, pathos, and ecstasy. The fourth chapter returns to Vertov and his first sound film, Enthusiasm: Symphony of Donbass (1931), made during the process of accelerated industrialization. Through different formal means, both filmmakers seek a radical transformation of the spectator: in Eisenstein’s case as direct neurological and affective stimulation through filmic montage; in Vertov’s case as “socialist emulation” through audiovisual montage. The revolutionary legacies of the 1920s underwent transformations throughout the 1960s and early 70s. The second part of the dissertation studies the formation of militant film collectives in France and the role of radical filmmakers like Marker and Joris Ivens. I trace transnational exchanges between France and West Germany in 1968 through von Alemann, her involvement in the États généraux du cinéma and her film about new modes of production and distribution in the wake of the May events. The sixth chapter revisits an influential intellectual debate between French philosopher Louis Althusser and Italian journalist Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi on the contradictions of the student movement in 1968. The final chapter takes a comparative perspective on films against the war in Vietnam as one of the central sites of struggle in the global sixties. It studies the collaborative French film project Far from Vietnam (1967), the West German film Inextinguishable Fire (1968) by Farocki, and the Cuban film 79 Springs (1968) by Álvarez. In contrasting these stylistically and ideologically heterogeneous works as three distinct modes of political filmmaking, this chapter also reflects on the North-South difference, the different relationalities of decolonization and the contradictions of solidarity cinema in the Global North.
Recommended Citation
Hegel, Lorenz, "Cinema After Revolution(s): Reproduction, Communication, Affect (1917/1968)" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1272.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1272
