American museums have all become so look alike and all show such similar works by the same small handful of artists, all of whom apparently knew how to Make Money in the best free market sense, that it is absolutely refreshing to go to the art galleries and to see things that have limited commercial value and that are hardly ever seen under the strictures of corporate America sponsorship. This exhibition of Soviet film posters is a good example of what I mean. I suppose that in a more liberal era we might once have seen these at MOMA, but certainly not in this current climate so rigidly proscribed by lock step Reagan Republicanism. So much for the GOP claim that it is the one true and only path to freedom of expression.
In the standard American museum, and in most of the really commercially successful galleries, each art work is placed one in each vertical unit of space …unlike the old style museums in which the massive paintings were “skied”, or splattered over the whole surface of the walls. Here most of these very large posters are hung in pairs, one above the other, on all four walls of each of the two galleries (there are fifty in each room …Count them 50!). The effect is overwhelming but, frankly, my dear, I don’t mind being overwhelmed by art. Add to that that the style is dynamic, bold, and in your face, meant to grab your attention and to encourage your participation, and you have a gallery going experience through which it is impossible to drift along in a somnambulist state or to chit chat merrily with your cousin Betty who is in town visiting from Louisville. (“This one’s nice. Oh I know a wonderful place where we can have lunch!”)
If that style, the Russian constructivists school of thought, is successful at capturing the essence of each of these films, none of which I have seen outside the Harold Lloyds, the Buster Keatons, and the Eisenstein classics, I could not say. But I have my doubts. The poster for Buster Keaton’s The General shows us Keaton twice against on an all-over ground of small steam engines and suggests a benign working class drama about what might be a pair of twins who work in a toy factory. Others so blatantly promise studio manufactured modern day horror, chills, and thrills that, when one recalls that these were Party agenda docudramas, it could be surmised that the Soviet film industry was the Fox News of its day.
As regards the aesthetic, I find most of these designs too self consciously constructed, as in nearly synonymous with contrived. It is almost as if these were the result of an ongoing art school project in which the search for a unique style lead down many interesting dead end streets. In fact the dread “interesting” is about as attention commanding as the individual posters become. Nothing is completely “outrageous”, nothing is “magnificent”, nothing is “beautiful”, nothing really “sings”. There’s never the sense in any of these that the perfect concept has been married to line, form, and color resulting in the expression of a sentiment for the subject (the film). And while the aesthetic is “interesting” I did not find it in any way inspiring. I was most favorably impressed with #84, Living Corpse. It is more Baus Haus than constructivist and I’m afraid that was my prejudice going in. I suspect that the design has nothing to do with the film. Furthermore, even though it’s a nice design, but it didn’t induce me to want to see the film: there is a decided sense that each was a separate entity.
In fact, none of them induced me to want to see any of these films. So have they done their work? No, they haven’t.
As for their all being of a specific style, an objection I could imagine being raised by those who continue to view the dead Soviet world as the still viable evil empire and who denounce it as the command post of conformity, I have only to remember that when I was growing up in the 50’s it was a simple matter to know which studio, Fox, MGM, Warners, etc, produced the proffered film simply by looking at the one sheets: every studio had it own aesthetic yet none of them too very much different for their time. It wasn’t until the demise of the studio system in the late fifties that each film, produced independently, had a poster with an individuated design: I still remember being jolted out of my childhood movie going reverie by the art work for The Man with the Golden Arm. More than that, it was one of those events that awakened me to “art”.
All of the posters appear to be in mint condition and I assume none of them is a reproduction although there are reproductions of some of them for sale. They are lithographs and as that is beyond my area of interest or expertise, I’ll not go on about it.
Typical of galleries in our time each poster has a very heavy bevel cut matte and is glazed in a swank black museum style frame. As the posters are all so similar stylistically, this repetition in the presentation is, I suppose, laudatory. However, I wondered, sitting there, if it might not be wonderful to see an exhibition of skied art works in which all the mattes were in a different material, all of the frames riotously colored, and all of the art works in different styles, a field of chaos that referenced the heavens above our heads. This union of two conformities saddened me with the realization that in eighty years the political pendulum has swung from one kind of conformity to its polar opposite and all the while the human race appears to be content in being merely a huddled mass of dispassionate spectators.
Ralph Waldo Emerson; wherefore art thou?
On the left of this page is an “images” link where you can see these posters.
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