Electricity and Enthusiasm. Designs for a New Man in the Soviet Cinema of the Late 1920s

The process of ordering films into an epoch is not a cumulative one, but is far more akin to a montage. And in just the same way as it occurs between individual images, a sense of tension also emerges between entire films. The focus of the Electricity and Enthusiasm film series is the Soviet cinema of the late 1920s, with paradigmatic points of intersection. Revolution: as a watershed, an act of destruction, an iconoclasm – but also as enthusiasm and the ecstasy of building up something new. Cinema as a dream factory, a utopia, a wish machine and as the dream of a new industrial society. The country of the muzhiks, the peasant farmers, becomes a utopia of overflowing productivity – at the price of starvation. In all these films, the spotlight is on productivity: as a thematic focus on factories, on work processes – and on their aesthetic design. Physical labour becomes a ballet, the programme of electrification opens the path to brightness as an illumination of Soviet progress, and cinema as a whole proves to be a redeeming wish machine.

Venue
Zeughauskino im Deutschen Historischen Museum
Unter den Linden 2
10117 Berlin

Film Programme (PDF, 204 kB)