- Copyright Page
- Contributors
- Introduction: The Communist Vision Today
- Socialist Domestic Infrastructures and the Politics of the Body: Bucharest and Havana
- Architecture in Series: Housing and Communist Idealism
- Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architecture, 1930s–early 1950s
- Esfir Shub’s <i>K.Sh.E.</i> (1932) and the Movement of Energy
- Soviet Wall Newspapers: Social(ist) Media of an Analog Age
- Red Stars, Biorhythms, and Circuit Boards: Do-It-Yourself Aesthetics of Computing and Computer Games in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia
- Machines, Nations, and Faciality: Cultivating Mental Eyes in Soviet Books for Children
- Who Doesn’t Like Aleksander Kobzdej?: A State Artist’s Career in the People’s Republic of Poland
- “How-To” Make Art in Communist China: Professionalizing Amateur Artists
- Visions and Visualization of Sustainability: Leningrad Designers in Search of Soviet Recycling System, 1981–1984
- Shaping the Avant-Garde: The Reception of Soviet Constructivism by the American Art Journal <i>October</i>
- The Time Lag of <i>Defa-Futurum</i>: A Socialist Cine-Futurism from East Germany
- The Visitation of the Idea: Badiou on Film and Communism
- In the Name of Internationalism: The Cinematic Memorialization of Norman Bethune in Socialist China
- Listening between the Images: African Filmmakers’ Take on the Soviet Union, Soviet Filmmakers’ Take on Africa
- Brothers at War: The Images of Prison S-21 (Tuol Sleng) in the Framework of Intracommunist Conflicts
- The Constructivist Sartorial Utopia and Its Revolutionary Potential: Then and Now
- “Socialist Realist” Critiques of Neoliberal “Shock Therapy”: East German Artists Respond to the 1973 Putsch in Chile
- Beauty and Quality for All: A Vision of Fashion under Cuban Socialism
- Disappearing from the Picture?: Female Figures in Pattern Books of the Mao Years
- The Subject Who Knows: Photographers and the Photographed in the Late East Germany
- Two Worlds: Boris Efimov, Soviet Political Caricature, and the Construction of the Long Cold War
- The Lyrical Subversions of Socialist Realism in Đặng Nhật Minh’s New Wave Cinema
- The Montage Connection between John Heartfield and László Lakner: Artistic Resistance and a New Leftism in Sixties Europe
- Visual Regimes of <i>Juche</i> Ideology in North Korea’s <i>The Country I Saw</i>
- Television and the Good Times of Socialism
- Futures Remembered: Kosmonauts, the GDR, and the Retrospective Impulse
- Contesting the Cuban-Soviet Visual Rhetoric for the Present
- Komunistki: Visual Memory of Female Communist Agency
- Specters of Europe and Anticommunist Visual Rhetoric in Romanian Film of the Early 1990s
- Lenin in Los Angeles: Counter-Memories, Recycling Socialism
- Coda: Flashes of Arab Communism
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This article contributes to the volume’s effort to understand the history of communist visual cultures by exploring the work of the pioneering Soviet woman documentary filmmaker Esfir Shub’s cultural contribution to the First Five-Year Plan for economic development. Shub’s K.Sh.E. (1932) focuses on the production and circulation of energy both inside and outside human bodies. Her first sound film, K.Sh.E., turns to synchronized and nondiegetic sound to make the invisible transfer of energy and the location of latent energy sensible. The article situates Shub’s work both in relation to earlier visual cultural projects’ use of energetics and contemporary photomontage practices. The period of the Plan was one when forms of nonfiction narration were highly contested; locating Shub’s film and the discourse surrounding it within this terrain allows us to see the range of allowable documentary abstraction at a time when efforts were being made to consolidate aesthetic practice more broadly.
Keywords: documentary film, energetics, Esfir Shub, montage, First Five-Year Plan, early sound cinema
Joshua Malitsky, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Indiana University
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- Copyright Page
- Contributors
- Introduction: The Communist Vision Today
- Socialist Domestic Infrastructures and the Politics of the Body: Bucharest and Havana
- Architecture in Series: Housing and Communist Idealism
- Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architecture, 1930s–early 1950s
- Esfir Shub’s <i>K.Sh.E.</i> (1932) and the Movement of Energy
- Soviet Wall Newspapers: Social(ist) Media of an Analog Age
- Red Stars, Biorhythms, and Circuit Boards: Do-It-Yourself Aesthetics of Computing and Computer Games in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia
- Machines, Nations, and Faciality: Cultivating Mental Eyes in Soviet Books for Children
- Who Doesn’t Like Aleksander Kobzdej?: A State Artist’s Career in the People’s Republic of Poland
- “How-To” Make Art in Communist China: Professionalizing Amateur Artists
- Visions and Visualization of Sustainability: Leningrad Designers in Search of Soviet Recycling System, 1981–1984
- Shaping the Avant-Garde: The Reception of Soviet Constructivism by the American Art Journal <i>October</i>
- The Time Lag of <i>Defa-Futurum</i>: A Socialist Cine-Futurism from East Germany
- The Visitation of the Idea: Badiou on Film and Communism
- In the Name of Internationalism: The Cinematic Memorialization of Norman Bethune in Socialist China
- Listening between the Images: African Filmmakers’ Take on the Soviet Union, Soviet Filmmakers’ Take on Africa
- Brothers at War: The Images of Prison S-21 (Tuol Sleng) in the Framework of Intracommunist Conflicts
- The Constructivist Sartorial Utopia and Its Revolutionary Potential: Then and Now
- “Socialist Realist” Critiques of Neoliberal “Shock Therapy”: East German Artists Respond to the 1973 Putsch in Chile
- Beauty and Quality for All: A Vision of Fashion under Cuban Socialism
- Disappearing from the Picture?: Female Figures in Pattern Books of the Mao Years
- The Subject Who Knows: Photographers and the Photographed in the Late East Germany
- Two Worlds: Boris Efimov, Soviet Political Caricature, and the Construction of the Long Cold War
- The Lyrical Subversions of Socialist Realism in Đặng Nhật Minh’s New Wave Cinema
- The Montage Connection between John Heartfield and László Lakner: Artistic Resistance and a New Leftism in Sixties Europe
- Visual Regimes of <i>Juche</i> Ideology in North Korea’s <i>The Country I Saw</i>
- Television and the Good Times of Socialism
- Futures Remembered: Kosmonauts, the GDR, and the Retrospective Impulse
- Contesting the Cuban-Soviet Visual Rhetoric for the Present
- Komunistki: Visual Memory of Female Communist Agency
- Specters of Europe and Anticommunist Visual Rhetoric in Romanian Film of the Early 1990s
- Lenin in Los Angeles: Counter-Memories, Recycling Socialism
- Coda: Flashes of Arab Communism
- Index