ISSN: 2158-7051 ==================== INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN STUDIES ==================== ISSUE NO. 6 ( 2017/1 ) |
“THE
CHAPLIN MACHINE
SLAPSTICK, FORDISM AND THE COMMUNIST AVANT-GARDE”, By Ayse Dietrich*, Published by: Pluto Press, London. Written by Owen Hartherley. Year
of Publishing: 2016. Subject Area: Culture. Book Type: Cinema, Architecture.
Total Number of Pages: 232. ISBN: 978-0-7453-3601-5
The book is comprised of four main sections in addition to an excerpt from Charles
Chaplin’s speech in the film The Great Dictator (1940)[1], an introduction at the
beginning, and a conclusion along with acknowledgements, notes and an index at
the end.
The introduction, titled Americanism and Fordism – and Chaplinism discusses the immediate
aftermath of the revolutionary wave of enthusiasm among the leaders of the
Soviet Union to develop oppressive and anti-worker methods to increase
productivity in the new Socialist state in accordance with the principles of American
industrial theorist and engineer Frederich Winslow
Taylor’s and Henry Ford. It discusses the interplay between industrial
organization, comic entertainment and socialist politics in the aesthetics of
the avant-garde; and gives a different perspective on Chaplin through the eyes
of the avant-garde, as well as a thorough examination of American comedy in the
late 1910s and early 1920s.
The first section of the
book, Constructing the Chaplin Machine, talks about Chaplinism
and the inhumanity of Chaplin as a consequence of universalism. By being
branded anti-human, Chaplin is treated as a machine and a super human (sur-human) which serves as a paradigm
for the avant-garde. In this chapter the reception of Chaplin by the Soviet and
Weimar avant-garde is also discussed.
The second section titled Red Clowns to the Rescue discusses Taylorism, the appearance of
biomechanics - a fusion of Taylorism and Chaplinism
and Taylorized - acting in the Soviet Union and the
Red Clowns, the circus elements of biomechanics, Eccentrism
and the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEX), the new Soviet comedy, and the
new stupidity which portrays the Western perception of Bolshevism and
stupidities of bureaucracy and the NEP.
The third section titled No Rococo Palace for Buster Keaton: Architectures of Americanism talks about Keaton’s film One Week that was a satirical response to the Ford
Motor Company documentary Home Made (1919) about prefabricated housing. Buster
Keaton’s distorted building shapes even had its influence on the towers for the
Comintern in the 1920s. The film itself is not only slapstick,
but also combines architecture, technology and motorization. Similarly, Soviet
industry, Americanist archetypical skyscraper motifs, Reklamarchitektur,
the display of construction, the characteristics of billboards and posters as a
mass-produced indicator of the political aesthetics of the NEP, and 1920s
modernist architecture (Derzhprom etc.) wereused in many Soviet films as the object of satire or
utopian dreaming.
The final section, The Rhythm of Socialist Construction: Soviet Sound Film and the Creation
of an Industrial Economy, discusses the planned economy, the foundations of
a modern industrial state described in the First Five Year Plan (1928-32), the
assistance of American companies in Soviet industrial expansion (DniproGES etc.), the earlier Soviet sound films using
sound, images, music and the technology of sound recordings (Esfir Shub’s in Komsomol Patron of Electrification etc.), the national vs. international
context of the Soviet sound films (Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Deserter etc.), and animated films
depicting the situation after collectivization in the Soviet countryside
(Nikolai Khodataev’s The Little Music Box etc. ).
In the conclusion, the eccentric
period of the Soviet cinema where the combination of historical accounts of workers’
struggles and the devices from slapstick, the musicals which influenced the
Soviet productions Jolly Fellows, Circus,
Volga-Volga, Eccentric Manifesto and the Chaplinesque
approach of Circus, and the end of Chaplinism in Soviet Circuses around the late 1970s are all
discussed.
In his book, Owen Hatheley has provided a masterly presentation depicting the
parody which existed under a communist regime; and showed how Soviet film, art
and arhitecture could not avoid the influence of capitalist
Americanism (Fordism, Taylorism) and Chaplin’s slapstick style of comedy. It is
a pioneering work in the field of early film studies and politics.
[1]The Great Dictator is a 1940
American political satire comedy-drama
film written, directed, produced, scored by and starring Charlie Chaplin.
This was Chaplin's first true sound film.
*Ayse Dietrich - Professor, Part-time, at Middle East Technical University, Department of History. Editor and the founder of the International Journal of Russian Studies. e-mail: editor@ijors.net, dayse@metu.edu.tr, dietrichayse@yahoo.com
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