This image appeared in hundreds of Soviet films, including the later classics by Eisenstein. It is the logo of Mosfilm, the official and only distribution agency for USSR films.

It turns out to be a picture of a real sculpture, some sixty feet high, all 75 tons of steel held together by an “innovative method of spot welding”, as designed in 1937 by Vera Mukhina. In 1940, she looked like this, in a painting by Mikhail Nesterov:

Her “The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” was a triumph, the biggest sculpture in Moscow, given pride of place. But she entered a twilight of Soviet indifference, according to Wikipedia:

“In the 1940s Mukhina’s artistic style no longer seemed to fit into the aesthetic standards of Stalin’s era. Her projects were never erected or seriously distorted…”

Now the statue lies abandoned and disassembled -

There is a whole folio of these sad images at English Russia, as located by Goodshit.

Here, by the way, is a Russian fragment about the history of Mosfilm:

‘The history of this huge film town which is situated on the Vorobyev Hills began in the remote 1920.

Exactly that year two film factories which belonged to prominent film producers of the beginning of the twentieth century A.A.Khanzhonkov and I.N.Jermol’ev were nationalized and handed over under the authority of the All-Russia photo-and-film department.

In December 1922 this department was transformed in Goskino, and film studios of Khanzhonkov and Jermol’ev which were under its authority got new names: the First factory and the Third factory of Goskino correspondingly. Mosfilm was founded on the base of these factories, it became a formed creative team collective towards January 1924, when the first full-length film “Up on the Wings” (director Boris Mikhin) was shown on the screens all over the country. Since then this state enterprise which received its present name in 1935 has been produced films regularly.

You can imagine the turmoil under those words, the mixture of idealism, creative excitement and bureaucratic menace that underlies this sketch. A place deformed by the same spirit that haunted Mukhina.

I don’t know what possessed the Muscovites to finally wreck the sculpture after it was moved to the All-Russia Exhibition Centre, already a theme park for Soviet gigantism. It is bloody ugly, but that is part of the point – for good and ill, it symbolises so much of Russian history in the twentieth century.

———-

As an aside, Sit down… takes up the theme of Soviet gigantism by including a clip from New Moscow, a film by Alexander Medvedkin, who was taken up in a long documentary called The Last Bolshevik by Chris Marker. The clip is based on wonderful modelwork which shows just what Mosfilm could do in the final years before the war and the slow, horrible impact of Stalinism.

The piece used seems to be serious; I remember this as a climactic showing of the film the protagonists made in the rest of the story. The projector breaks and the image catches fire to undermine the empty triumphalism.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 12:59 am and is filed under history, visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.