We & Film
Part 1

“Cinematography is the most powerful weapon”

721 words

Translated by Ondrej Mann.

Films have played a significant role in shaping the 20th century man and continue to do so today. We have therefore decided to identify some trends, titles, and names in cinema that a “man of a certain type” should be familiar with.

“We” and Film

Conservatives and reactionaries of all stripes have viewed cinema and film from the outset as mere entertainment for the masses, almost as part of the “rebellion of the masses” (Ortega y Gasset), and soon, allegedly, under the almost exclusive control of Jewish capital.

Their passionate or resigned condemnations of the pernicious influence of the “cinema” on a modern population liberated from most traditional ties can be summed up in a single word: “blbograf” (idiotograph). Even the first state attempts to stimulate and direct “public opinion” during World War I through propaganda on the screen, let alone Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), did not change this perspective in any significant way. [1]

At the very least, distrust of the “art of film” persisted among all the great “reactionaries” and traditionalists, if they acknowledged it at all, throughout the entire century. Incidents such as the stormy disagreement of an otherwise certainly hardened section of the Cannes festival audience with the awarding of the Palme d’Or to Maurice Pialat’s chamber film Sous le soleil de Satan (Under the Sun of Satan, 1987), based on the novel of the same name (1926) by Catholic writer G. Bernanos, a former supporter of the French Action movement who unreservedly adores the spiritual dimension of the original work, prove them right. [2]

The revolutionary elites in Soviet Russia, fascist Italy, and later also in National Socialist Germany, on the other hand, were clearly aware of the potential of cinema to create a “new man” and revive group identities and corporations (the ruling class, estates, communities) and wanted to fulfill this potential.

“Film must be a powerful tool of communist education and agitation in the hands of the party,” reads the resolution of the 13th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Marinetti, in his manifesto “Futurist Cinema”, demands that film “exploit all its technical possibilities.” Even earlier, the new invention had attracted the “poet and soldier” D’Annunzio, who believed it could give rise to a “new aesthetic of movement.” And Joseph Goebbels called on German filmmakers to accept “binding political and morally patriotic norms” in their work. All three states therefore gradually established state film institutions, which were subsequently lavishly built, and to varying degrees also developed censorship (from the Latin censeo – to value, to evaluate) legislation, [3] in order to protect their respective populaces from the destructive (read: individualizing) and negative tendencies of Western bourgeois, purely commercial productions.

Given that a great deal has been written in our country about the Soviet film avant-garde and socialist realism up to 1989, at the very least, the names of great directors such as Dovzhenko, Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin have entered the general cultural consciousness, so we will limit ourselves here to outlining a few points and contours in the vast areas of Italian and German cinema up to 1945.

Notes

[1] The Birth of a Nation, a three-hour epic film about the Civil War between the North and the South, filmed with 18,000 statists. Griffith came up with a number of new techniques and is therefore considered one of the most important innovators of film language. Politically, he clearly sided with the white Southerners, which allegedly earned him protests from “anti-racist organizations” as early as 1915. According to the director, black people simply need to be disciplined: one of the main characters joins the Ku Klux Klan in the epilogue after his sister commits suicide to escape rape by a black soldier.

[2] “You don’t like me? I don’t like you either!” the director shouted to the audience, undeterred by the boos and whistles in the festival palace auditorium.

[3] We would just like to point out that censorship measures existed at that time in all democratic states (the US, for example, had been boycotting de-Judaized German films since 1933, while American films were shown in Germany until 1940! Various restrictions, large and small, still apply today, because the state, as an instrument of society, can never completely abandon its educational or socializing function for the benefit of society or at least for its preservation.