Alexander Medvedkin served with the Red Cavalry beginning in 1917, and was eventually promoted to the rank of general and placed in charge of propaganda for the entire Soviet Army. Medvedkin gave up his rank to produce movies for soldiers, including the hygiene film Watch Your Health. Stalin's five-year plan began in 1928, and by the early 30s, Medvedkin was placed into service. He designed the Cine-Train - a film laboratory, an editing room, an animation stand and a projection room built into a passenger train. The goal was to travel the Soviet Union to instruct or assist in the kulkak's maintenance of the kolkhoz (collective farms) and industrial facilities. Medvedkin and a crew stopped the train in towns all over the Soviet Union, shot film, immediately processed the footage and screened the results to the towns people. Films like Journal Number 4, How Do You Live Comrade Miner?, and The Conveyor Belt presented cinematic propaganda as quickly as possible given the available means. The films presented best practices in harvesting or steel production to provide those in lagging collective forms and industries with side-by-side examples of how things were not supposed to operate. The animators created captions ("Comrades this can't go on") and the Cine-Train mascot: a disapproving animated camel that was paraded across the screen for the benefit of workers that failed to meet their goals. The aforementioned films all appear on Disc One of the Icarus DVD set.
Once the Cine-Train came to a halt, Medvedkin made the 1934 tragic-comedy Happiness. In his travels throughout the Ukraine, Medvedkin came across a kulkak whose expectations did not conform with life in the collective farm. This peasant's plight inspired the film's story of Khmyr, a man whose life is squeezed from all sides by the monarchy, the state and the church. Khmyr has simple dreams of happiness but like his ancestors, basic comforts elude him. Khmyr attempts to commit suicide but the aristocrats, the army (all of whom wear the same ghoulish grinning mask), and the church descend on him. "Who gave you the right to an improvised death?" they ask. Khmyr is eventually shown the way to happiness by his wife, who embraces the life of the farm by mastering the machines and techniques necessary to make the system work. The film's knowing portrayal of peasant life, its brutal representation of the Tsarists and the Russian Orthodox Church, and the flashes of eroticism can be found in works like Alexander Dohvenko's Earth and what exists of Eisenstein's Behzin Meadow. The surreal mix of gallows humor and Buster Keaton-style physical comedy, however, seems unique amongst works of this era.
The above is available in English - an excerpt-Years ago, precisely in this in-depth column, Massimo Fini defined the West as a kind of perfect machine of unhappiness. In essence, the condition of perennial dissatisfaction in which contemporary man lives in our portion of the world could be traced back to the postulates of liberalism. Fini, therefore, throws the question into politics by pointing his finger at our way of life based on unbridled consumerism and the obsessive search for goals (economic, but also existential) that are always new. Goals that must be achieved at any cost, on pain of the collapse of the entire system. A certainly suggestive reading for a theme which – at the dawn of one of the most serious economic and social crises since the post-war period which will further raise the wave of discontent – is once again very topical.
We talk about it with the writer Marcello Veneziani who has published an essay entitled Scontenti for a few weeks for Marsilio Editore .
Let's get straight to the heart of the problem: to what do we owe this condition of permanent dissatisfaction that characterizes us? Is it the increasingly crushing weight of power – what you called “the Cloak” in your previous essay – that makes us unhappy? Or is there more?
I believe that discontent must be broken down on three levels: there is an inner, profound discontent that derives from our human condition as mortals, exposed to pain, sickness, limitations, and that is a malaise that worsens in nihilistic times , who have no faith in any further horizon, religious or sacred. Then there is private discontent, and it is the one in which the Great Machine of Consumption and the New Power have a strong influence, who want us dissatisfied because in this way we are needy, dependent, desiring. We want to change age, condition, gender, country, status and therefore Power needs to have disgruntled citizens and users to exercise its power and enslave us. But the factory of private discontent collapses at a certain point: when a series of emergencies, health, war, economic, environmental, they put before us a series of renunciations and restrictions, then the discontent pushed back into the private sector forcefully returns to the public, it becomes political. And today's widespread discontent is born.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LGx3n3I_LE
Alexander Medvedkin served with the Red Cavalry beginning in 1917, and was eventually promoted to the rank of general and placed in charge of propaganda for the entire Soviet Army. Medvedkin gave up his rank to produce movies for soldiers, including the hygiene film Watch Your Health. Stalin's five-year plan began in 1928, and by the early 30s, Medvedkin was placed into service. He designed the Cine-Train - a film laboratory, an editing room, an animation stand and a projection room built into a passenger train. The goal was to travel the Soviet Union to instruct or assist in the kulkak's maintenance of the kolkhoz (collective farms) and industrial facilities. Medvedkin and a crew stopped the train in towns all over the Soviet Union, shot film, immediately processed the footage and screened the results to the towns people. Films like Journal Number 4, How Do You Live Comrade Miner?, and The Conveyor Belt presented cinematic propaganda as quickly as possible given the available means. The films presented best practices in harvesting or steel production to provide those in lagging collective forms and industries with side-by-side examples of how things were not supposed to operate. The animators created captions ("Comrades this can't go on") and the Cine-Train mascot: a disapproving animated camel that was paraded across the screen for the benefit of workers that failed to meet their goals. The aforementioned films all appear on Disc One of the Icarus DVD set.
Once the Cine-Train came to a halt, Medvedkin made the 1934 tragic-comedy Happiness. In his travels throughout the Ukraine, Medvedkin came across a kulkak whose expectations did not conform with life in the collective farm. This peasant's plight inspired the film's story of Khmyr, a man whose life is squeezed from all sides by the monarchy, the state and the church. Khmyr has simple dreams of happiness but like his ancestors, basic comforts elude him. Khmyr attempts to commit suicide but the aristocrats, the army (all of whom wear the same ghoulish grinning mask), and the church descend on him. "Who gave you the right to an improvised death?" they ask. Khmyr is eventually shown the way to happiness by his wife, who embraces the life of the farm by mastering the machines and techniques necessary to make the system work. The film's knowing portrayal of peasant life, its brutal representation of the Tsarists and the Russian Orthodox Church, and the flashes of eroticism can be found in works like Alexander Dohvenko's Earth and what exists of Eisenstein's Behzin Meadow. The surreal mix of gallows humor and Buster Keaton-style physical comedy, however, seems unique amongst works of this era.
https://www.marcelloveneziani.com/lo-scrittore/interviste/anche-lo-scontento-puo-dare-buoni-frutti/
The above is available in English - an excerpt-Years ago, precisely in this in-depth column, Massimo Fini defined the West as a kind of perfect machine of unhappiness. In essence, the condition of perennial dissatisfaction in which contemporary man lives in our portion of the world could be traced back to the postulates of liberalism. Fini, therefore, throws the question into politics by pointing his finger at our way of life based on unbridled consumerism and the obsessive search for goals (economic, but also existential) that are always new. Goals that must be achieved at any cost, on pain of the collapse of the entire system. A certainly suggestive reading for a theme which – at the dawn of one of the most serious economic and social crises since the post-war period which will further raise the wave of discontent – is once again very topical.
We talk about it with the writer Marcello Veneziani who has published an essay entitled Scontenti for a few weeks for Marsilio Editore .
Let's get straight to the heart of the problem: to what do we owe this condition of permanent dissatisfaction that characterizes us? Is it the increasingly crushing weight of power – what you called “the Cloak” in your previous essay – that makes us unhappy? Or is there more?
I believe that discontent must be broken down on three levels: there is an inner, profound discontent that derives from our human condition as mortals, exposed to pain, sickness, limitations, and that is a malaise that worsens in nihilistic times , who have no faith in any further horizon, religious or sacred. Then there is private discontent, and it is the one in which the Great Machine of Consumption and the New Power have a strong influence, who want us dissatisfied because in this way we are needy, dependent, desiring. We want to change age, condition, gender, country, status and therefore Power needs to have disgruntled citizens and users to exercise its power and enslave us. But the factory of private discontent collapses at a certain point: when a series of emergencies, health, war, economic, environmental, they put before us a series of renunciations and restrictions, then the discontent pushed back into the private sector forcefully returns to the public, it becomes political. And today's widespread discontent is born.