Page 68 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 68
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
democrats, who saw for themselves a long and difficult fight still
ahead (Patterson, 2000, pp: 435 – 436).
Thus, with my little help, Patterson noticed that cultural factors defi-
nitely played a role at the very start of the curious sequence of occurrenc-
es, which were immediately de-conceptualised as the “transition” without
anyone really knowing from what to where. To have such an icon of the
Western mass culture as Michelle Pfeifer – regardless of how insignificant
or memorable Fred Schepisi’s movie The Russia House (1990) proved to be
– portraying the role of a Russian girl, seriously helped to create an impres-
sion that these times around 1989 were about to bring very real changes.
The fact that the movie in question was a typical cold war spy story would
be in itself unimportant, except for the detail that the movie was shot in the
Soviet Union. This “detail” marked a point in the implementation of glas-
nost, which had a crucial altering impact on the core ideology that support-
ed the socialist system as a part of the world order of two confronted polit-
ical-military-economic blocs. As it became visible much later, this has not
been exactly a deliberate aim of Gorbachev and his supporters. But then
again, it was not the first time that people were “making history” and later
on found themselves made by history.
At the same time, a few other overlapping meanings can be ascer-
tained from this case. In most socialist countries, Western products for the
mass market of cultural goods such as genre films, fashionable transgress-
ing clothing or rock music, were officially looked upon by the loyal intel-
lectuals and party politicians as, at the very least, inappropriate or as prod-
ucts of bourgeois decadence.3 The socialist aesthetics within the framework
of the ruling ideologies was indeed a bit curious. However, the topic of the
aesthetics in the times of the softening of one Party regimes is not very in-
teresting now since many past debates have already made clear everything
about the contexts and the ideological signifiers of the Soviet aesthetics.
However, the “socialist canons” could be understood as a symptom of the
cultural profile of societies, which existed within the socialist states. The
officially supported taste for artistic products varied significantly in differ-
ent countries. In Yugoslavia, for example, all forms of modern art more or
less flourished, except some very specific artistic movements and particu-
3 Such attitudes to mass culture in the Soviet Union were a basis for rather bizarre
reports in the western press about the Soviet leader Leonid Brejnev’s taste for films
of the Hollywood Western genre. Brejnev even collected such items as cowboy hats,
Colt pistols and so on while general Soviet audiences were denied to watch the bulk
of Hollywood and other Western audio-visual products.
66
democrats, who saw for themselves a long and difficult fight still
ahead (Patterson, 2000, pp: 435 – 436).
Thus, with my little help, Patterson noticed that cultural factors defi-
nitely played a role at the very start of the curious sequence of occurrenc-
es, which were immediately de-conceptualised as the “transition” without
anyone really knowing from what to where. To have such an icon of the
Western mass culture as Michelle Pfeifer – regardless of how insignificant
or memorable Fred Schepisi’s movie The Russia House (1990) proved to be
– portraying the role of a Russian girl, seriously helped to create an impres-
sion that these times around 1989 were about to bring very real changes.
The fact that the movie in question was a typical cold war spy story would
be in itself unimportant, except for the detail that the movie was shot in the
Soviet Union. This “detail” marked a point in the implementation of glas-
nost, which had a crucial altering impact on the core ideology that support-
ed the socialist system as a part of the world order of two confronted polit-
ical-military-economic blocs. As it became visible much later, this has not
been exactly a deliberate aim of Gorbachev and his supporters. But then
again, it was not the first time that people were “making history” and later
on found themselves made by history.
At the same time, a few other overlapping meanings can be ascer-
tained from this case. In most socialist countries, Western products for the
mass market of cultural goods such as genre films, fashionable transgress-
ing clothing or rock music, were officially looked upon by the loyal intel-
lectuals and party politicians as, at the very least, inappropriate or as prod-
ucts of bourgeois decadence.3 The socialist aesthetics within the framework
of the ruling ideologies was indeed a bit curious. However, the topic of the
aesthetics in the times of the softening of one Party regimes is not very in-
teresting now since many past debates have already made clear everything
about the contexts and the ideological signifiers of the Soviet aesthetics.
However, the “socialist canons” could be understood as a symptom of the
cultural profile of societies, which existed within the socialist states. The
officially supported taste for artistic products varied significantly in differ-
ent countries. In Yugoslavia, for example, all forms of modern art more or
less flourished, except some very specific artistic movements and particu-
3 Such attitudes to mass culture in the Soviet Union were a basis for rather bizarre
reports in the western press about the Soviet leader Leonid Brejnev’s taste for films
of the Hollywood Western genre. Brejnev even collected such items as cowboy hats,
Colt pistols and so on while general Soviet audiences were denied to watch the bulk
of Hollywood and other Western audio-visual products.
66
