The documentary impulse offered theorists and practitioners from a wide variety of artistic factions an opportunity to make their art relevant to the revolutionary project. Participation in this trend was supported not only by the avant-garde, which initiated it, but by representatives of artistic movements across the political and stylistic spectrum, in a variety of media. In using documents and documentary methods, writers and filmmakers of the era imparted to their artistic work a kind of authenticity, conveying a sense that they were producing an objective record of a reality that was being rapidly and radically transformed. At the same time, through the act of recording the building of socialism they became participants in the process, thus responding to a perceived historical imperative.
As Soviet artists struggled toward the objectivity of historical processes, however, the tension between the two competing aspects of the documentary impulse—its evidentiary quality "fact" and its discursive quality "artifact"—grew into a contradiction. The anxiety of Soviet authors to be relevant to the revolution led them to the near effacement of authorship itself. Papazian analyzes the works of Sergei Tretiakov, Dziga Vertov, Maxim Gorky, and Mikhail Zoshchenko to reveal how the documentary impulse defined each author's individual artistic trajectory and led him inexorably to the socialist realist aesthetic.
The documentary impulse offered theorists and practitioners from a wide variety of artistic factions an opportunity to make their art relevant to the revolutionary project. Participation in this trend was supported not only by the avant-garde, which initiated it, but by representatives of artistic movements across the political and stylistic spectrum, in a variety of media. In using documents and documentary methods, writers and filmmakers of the era imparted to their artistic work a kind of authenticity, conveying a sense that they were producing an objective record of a reality that was being rapidly and radically transformed. At the same time, through the act of recording the building of socialism they became participants in the process, thus responding to a perceived historical imperative.
As Soviet artists struggled toward the objectivity of historical processes, however, the tension between the two competing aspects of the documentary impulse—its evidentiary quality "fact" and its discursive quality "artifact"—grew into a contradiction. The anxiety of Soviet authors to be relevant to the revolution led them to the near effacement of authorship itself. Papazian analyzes the works of Sergei Tretiakov, Dziga Vertov, Maxim Gorky, and Mikhail Zoshchenko to reveal how the documentary impulse defined each author's individual artistic trajectory and led him inexorably to the socialist realist aesthetic.
Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture
296Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture
296Hardcover(1)
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780875803890 |
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Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
Publication date: | 09/12/2008 |
Series: | NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies |
Edition description: | 1 |
Pages: | 296 |
Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |