John Mackay. The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies. Editor: Jonathan Auerbach & Russ Castronovo. December 2013.
It is normally forgotten that the word “propaganda” derives from the Congregatio de propaganda fide, or the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, a committee of cardinals first convened by Pope Gregory XV in 1622 to take charge of foreign missions, and in existence—now operating under the moniker given it by Pope John Paul II, Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples—to this day. Propaganda thus refers historically to proselytizing or even education (in a specific doctrine, to be sure). This meaning has been largely lost to us, for whom “propaganda” tends to connote a purely (and tendentiously) rhetorical rather than pedagogical practice, even if, in some modern languages—Argentine Spanish, for instance—the word’s range of reference usefully extends beyond specifically political rhetoric to include commercial advertising.
The social-democratic tradition that informed early Soviet propaganda practice, however, sustained a keen awareness of propaganda’s roots in teaching and the slow work of conversion, no doubt both due to a familiarity with the Catholic institution and because of an association, perhaps not wholly derogatory, of revolutionary teachings with “propaganda” that seems to have taken shape after 1789. Indeed, the early Soviets crucially distinguished the pedagogical labor of propaganda from more spectacular and temporally condensed interventions known as agitation. The difference between “agit” and “prop” has been slighted or ignored in some of the historical literature on “Soviet propaganda,” where “agitprop” tends to be seen as a diffuse cluster of practices of persuasion, political pedagogy, and/or mind control. For the study and especially the close formal analysis of early Soviet media practice, however, it is an indispensable distinction of which historian Matthew Lenoe provides the best account:
According to Lenin, propaganda involved extended theoretical explanations of the socioeconomic processes that underlay surface phenomena such as unemployment. By appealing to audience members’ reason, the propagandist aimed to cultivate in them a whole new worldview. Propaganda was a process of education that required a relatively sophisticated, informed audience. Agitation, on the other hand, motivated the audience to action by appealing to their emotions with short, stark stories. The agitator did not seek to change his listeners’ worldview, but to mobilize them. Agitation was the tool of choice for unsophisticated, even ignorant audiences when quick action was required. Definitions from the first edition of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia link propaganda with education and agitation with organization/mobilization.
Perhaps the distinction survives for us today primarily in the recoded form of the now-familiar opposition between a “cinema of attractions” and narrative cinema, with (in Tom Gunning’s words) the “theatrical display” of the former pitted against the “narrative absorption” of the latter. Gunning indicates that he derived the term “attraction” from the early writings of Sergei Eisenstein, of course; and the Eisensteinian pedigree strongly suggests the rootedness of “attraction,” at least in its Soviet manifestations, in social-democratic ideas about the agitation-propaganda distinction—ultimately reworked by Eisenstein into the contrast between “attraction” and “intellectual montage”—as much as in popular entertainments and fairground displays. At any rate, the difference between agitation and propaganda was fully and productively operative for activists, constructivist designers (like Aleksei Gan), filmmakers (like Dziga Vertov), and other “cultural workers” engaged in building a new communist society in the 1920s.
To be sure, the Russian Orthodox Church, which the militantly atheistic Bolsheviks hoped to extirpate, had had no “congregatio de propaganda” as such. Yet the Church had promoted much “propagation of the faith” in Russia, and the long pre-revolutionary tradition of what would later be called “religious propaganda”—mobilizing printed publications, imagery, ritual, oral preaching, and much else—would have been familiar to Soviet activists. Indeed, they would have taken it as a given that Orthodox faith, far from being autochthonous, had been nourished by propaganda, which they would meet with counter-propaganda—much as Vertov would counterpoise his own nonfictional and experimental film practice to the “opiate” of mainstream fictional cinema as well. One of Vertov’s proposed but never-used intertitles for his One Sixth of the World (1926), written in Futurist-agitational poetic style, makes the association clear:
Here is
A machine
The long-range weapon of the bourgeoisie
Bourgeois agitprop
Capital educates at a distance
Together with God’s word
Together with the Bible and beads Moves the filmstrip
Yet, as much recent historical work has stressed, Marxist and non-Marxist socialists also borrowed, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, from the Christian imagination, especially its demand for justice, its yearning for transcendence of the present, and its capacity to offer a “totalizing” vision of the universe that would link individuals, society, nature, and the divine in a single unity. Aleksandr Bogdanov, the great theorist of “proletarian culture,” argued that religious art provided a model for a “socially organizing” cultural practice—one that “united the faithful together with one another and with the divine … as a kind of social bond,” through temples, statues, texts and so on—in contrast to bourgeois aesthetics with its fetishes, born of individualistic ideology, of l’art pour l’art. Indeed, as we will see, the early Soviet insistence on the “socially organizing” capacity of the new mass art of cinema can be regarded as a secular adaptation of the strategies of religious propaganda. (Of course, the interest of Soviet artists in what appears on the surface to be an “enemy” cultural practice—here one thinks particularly, again, of Eisenstein, but also of critics like Nikolai Punin and artists like Kazimir Malevich—might have been grounded in more traditional motives of artistic ambition as well, avant-garde denunciations of the category of “art” notwithstanding. After all, religious art had been produced by such esteemed figures as Andrei Rublev, Raphael, and Michelangelo; and surely their example, for artists in the Soviet 1920s, gave confidence to those who hoped, at least privately, that the propaganda art necessary at present could also be a great art.)
It is evident that propaganda as pedagogy, whether religious or secular, involves both the articulation of truth claims—the demonstration of the rightness of one’s position, and the falsity of the opponent’s—and the more strictly rhetorical or performative gesture of consolidating or “organizing” a group around those claims. To be sure, the epistemological imperative is hard to separate from the rhetorical one: truth claims need to convince if they are to be recognized as truth claims, even as we can always question whether rhetorical “organization” of a collective—arguably propaganda’s true telos—has really occurred. In what follows, and on the basis of a single early Soviet example, I hope to demonstrate something about how epistemology and rhetoric confound one another even (or especially) in the most “modern” and self-aware forms of propaganda. Specifically, the need to demonstrate that the propaganda lesson has been and will be successful, or has moved and will move a group of minds from one set of convictions to another, leads to the adoption of rhetorical strategies that replicate the very falsity— here, the falsity of theatrical guise, of visual deception—that the propaganda denounces.
We will observe this paradoxical dynamic playing itself out in a little-known propaganda subgenre that thematizes the powers of cinema—which, for many Soviet activists, was the “new” representational practice par excellence—more or less directly. I have in mind the small group of “exposure-of-saints’-relics” films that were made during the Civil War period (1918-1921), depicting how the remains of saints—which were not subject to decay, according to Orthodox lore—were forcibly removed from the arks containing them and exposed, as fully decayed, to surrounding spectators and to the movie camera. At least sixty-five such exposures occurred between October 23, 1918, and December 1, 1920, and at least three of them were filmed.
One of the most broadly displayed “exposure” films, on the legendary agitational trains and elsewhere, was the earliest, Exposure of the Relics of Tikhon of Zadonsk (filmed by Petr Novitskij on January 28, 1919), much of which consists of one shot depicting the chairman of the Zadonsk Cheka (political police), watched by (according to an intertitle) “members of the Cheka, the [local] Executive Committee, doctors … Archimandrite Aleksandr, Father Innokentij, the brotherhood of monks, parishioners and Red Army soldiers of Zadonsk,” as he unwraps Tikhon’s remains and demonstrates the findings to those assembled and to the camera. The discoveries are recounted in a series of intertitles that preserve a dispassionate tone:
Let us go on to expose what was beneath the clothing … The bones of the chest cavity and backbone had been replaced by an iron carcass, beneath which, in a pile of wadding and rags, they found a handful of decayed bones.
In the wadding were discovered fragments of shinbone which had disintegrated into powder.
Through what was no more than an opening cut into a glove, devotees had been kissing [wadding] wrapped in flesh-colored cardboard.
The version I have seen concludes with an ironic citation from the Holy Synod’s Anniversary Collection on Tikhon of Zadonsk:
The body of St. Tikhon, notwithstanding its 78-year stay in the ground, was preserved without decaying thanks to the benefaction of God.
and adds that this quote appeared in the Collection’s twentieth edition, “published by the Most Holy Synod in 1911 … on page 27,” thus contributing to the “scientific” demeanor of the entire presentation.
The film incorporates a couple of shots of crowds gathered in the monastery square, presumably during or in anticipation of the exposure. They are filmed with backs turned to the camera, imparting a sense of the intensity with which those witnesses were awaiting the results of the procedure. A penultimate image of a skull, with eye, nose, and mouth cavities stuffed with cotton wadding, is matched by a final image of a largely expressionless crowd, apparently “reacting” in some hard-to-read way to the exposure. In fact, “general,” uninvited audiences were almost certainly not present at the exposure, though they did file past the unsealed remains, usually kept inside a church or chapel, in the days following. It is difficult not to take these images of audience as figures for those watching and responding to the Tikhon of Zadonsk film itself, and specifically to the way that moving photography corroborates, preserves, and propagates the exposure’s anti-theatrical lesson, offered in accord with propaganda’s pedagogical, even scientific mission: what were thought to be timeless remains are revealed by cinema to be but clothed wadding, carapace, and “flesh-colored cardboard” on top of bones.
Th e Exposure of the Relics of Sergius of Radonezh—in whose production both Dziga Vertov and Lev Kuleshov were controversially involved, as we will see in a moment— presents an unsealing carried out on April 11, 1919, at the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, the most famous of all Russian Orthodox monasteries, and adopts a more tendentious manner from the outset. After providing a view of the town of Sergiev (later Zagorsk, today Sergiev Posad)—“built on a lie,” an intertitle informs us—and of stock footage of a religious procession, the film depicts a huge crowd outside the Trinity Cathedral, waiting to see the results of the exposure. After members of the local Executive Committee and other representatives arrive, Archimandrite Ioann is shown, filmed from the top or head-end of the coffin, meticulously unwrapping the body of the saint, until “Doctor Popov” steps in to examine the entirely unsealed remains. The film concludes more polemically than does Tikhon:
Swindling the wretched, poor and ignorant people out of their last hard-earned cent, for five hundred year the priests and monks nasally intoned: “And here as the sun rose, your good remains were found to be imperishable …”—above this heap of decayed rags, dirt, dead moths and traces of bone.
Throughout the brief film, shots of the exposure are intercut with images of the crowd outside the church—again, presumably “looking on” but in fact not actually observing the procedure. The film’s image track culminates with a view of Sergius’s exposed skull, followed by a “reaction shot” of the crowd of mostly female faces, gazing in uniformly frontal if oddly varied directions and a final image of the “decayed rags … traces of bone” and so on referred to in the intertitle.
The films and photographs of the exposures were shown widely and free of charge in cities and towns in Central Russia, and (on the agit-trains) beyond as well, especially from 1919 to 1921. The Sergius film was readied in time for an Easter week screening in Moscow in 1919, as requested by Lenin, and “souvenir postcards with pictures of the exhumed saint” were sold in theater lobbies.
Fundamentally, of course, these films are displays of power—specifically, of the capacity and willingness of the regime to carry out the desecrations, and of cinema’s ability to capture and disseminate “truth”—and of powerlessness, insofar as the theatrics of religion prove incapable of preserving anything. It is worth recalling, in this connection, the popular atheistic pamphlet published right around this time (1920) by the famous Marxist political theorist Mikhail Rejsner—entitled Must We Believe in God?—and its optimistic arguments about film as both a cancellation and fulfillment of religion:
If one compares what we achieve today with the help of science and technology with the miracles [wrought by] some old gods or other, then it turns out that we have long since surpassed all these creators and makers and their powers. The briefest overview of our achievements will provide sufficient proof to show who is stronger now, the new human being, or the old God … And if it’s necessary, to prove the power of humanity, to call up the dead from their graves—to make them speak and to display them to our sight as though alive—then that, too, has been achieved. On the gramophone record, human speech is recorded for an eternity. A reflection of our lives is laid upon cinematic film. And it is only a matter of placing the images of those long silent and forgotten into an electrical machine, and they will rise before us as though alive, speaking to us again in their authentic voice and language. It’s not necessary now to turn to the prophetess or the sorcerer; there’s no need to pray to God. We ourselves resurrect the dead for our eyes and ears.
Rejsner’s rhetoric was not unique, to be sure: a project for setting up an agitational steamboat in the Volga region in 1921 underscored the need to maintain a photographic lab on the boat in order to demonstrate “the miracle of photography” in a struggle against those “other miracles” that commanded the faith of people in “the most backwards areas.” Photos, the project suggested, would show peasants the ability of image technology to capture large swathes of the past, including images of the village, of village families, speeches by orators, and the boat’s own journeys. Technology, now in the hands of a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” would satisfy popular religious longings for redemption better than religion itself, through its power at once to reveal truth, preserve the past, and bring spectators together.
At the same time, the great effort taken to arrange, carry out, and film the unsealings, at considerable expense and during a time of war, suggests that anxiety about the power of religious-theatrical deception also motivated the exposure wave: would these disguises, which had retained their hold over the popular imagination for so long, not continue to do so? The test, of course, would be the actual response of audiences to the exposures; but how was that to be measured, and (still more importantly for us) registered silently on film? Not surprisingly, perhaps, the exposures seem to have generated ambiguous effects, beyond the violent unrest that accompanied many of the actual procedures (at Trinity-Sergius, for example). Sources indicate responses ranging from “instantaneous conversion” to atheism to a “religious upsurge,” although the absence of disinterested reportage on the events makes evaluation almost impossible. Cinema’s value as a token of humankind’s superior “strength,” to use Rejsner’s vocabulary, nevertheless needed to be underwritten by spectators: thus, the careful suturing together in the Sergius film of evidence of the saint’s bodily decay with the crowd’s response of … dismay? Sadness? Shock? Perplexity? Fear? (Even boredom?) Of course, that penultimate image of the crowd is no document of immediate “response” to the sight of the relics in any case, but rather a constructed “reaction shot” taken from material filmed that day and incorporated into a rhetorical structure: indeed, the image might well register response to the camera, rather than to the exposure.
At this point, it becomes genuinely interesting to recall that both Vertov and Kuleshov claimed to have made the Sergius film. Clearly, both were involved in some way with its making, although the exact proportions of their respective contributions will probably never be known. It was around this time (probably in 1920-1921) that Kuleshov conducted his famous experiments with associative montage—which demonstrated how a single, emotionally neutral shot of the face of actor Ivan Mozzhukhin was interpreted by spectators as expressing grief, sexual desire, or hunger when juxtaposed with (respectively) a shot of a corpse, a woman, or a bowl of soup—and it is hard to avoid reading the intercutting of that crowd at Trinity-Sergius with the relics as another, unsung (but perhaps the earliest?) instance of the “Kuleshov Effect,” regardless of whether Kuleshov or Vertov was responsible for it. Not a single face, but a multitude of faces, whose juxtaposition with the relics seems to fuse their expressions into a single, exemplary attitude of stunned disappointment: or does it?
Why was the shot of the crowd included in any case? To begin with, it affirms quite simply that the exposed relics were seen, then and there (or then and thereabouts). Exposure for the “camera eye” alone would be insufficient, insofar as the real event sought out—or staged—by the authorities was not mere unwrapping of dust and rags, but an analogous reduction of religious belief to dust and rags, predicated on the notion that the sight of the saint’s intact body had been the material support for that belief. Indeed, the event of exposure would not be complete, as the referent of the film, without an audience’s regard, even a “constructed” one.
If we go on to assume that the film audience, or at least part of it, was perfectly aware of the construction—given that the exposure itself is clearly filmed in the dark interior of a church, while the crowd is seen outside in the Lavra’s square—an intriguing identification effect may have been created here by confronting the film audience with another audience, also temporally (though not geographically) out of sync with the actual exposure, but positioned as “responding” to it within the rhetoric of the film. (If we postulate that the audience in the film was anticipating the exposure, then it appears that Kuleshov-Vertov are generating a peculiar kind of Hitchcockian suspense-effect as well: the onscreen crowd, filmed in the (then) recent past, would be “reacting” to a sight that they will see but which we have already seen in the film.) Though physically located in Sergiev, and thus tied “indexically” to the day’s events, that onscreen audience is also a displaced—that is, cinematic—observer of the exposure.
What this means, additionally, is that both audiences, onscreen and off, are linked by virtue of seeing—entirely figuratively in one case, less so in the other—through the implacable, “objective” gaze of the movie camera.28 It is far from clear that this can be called an identifi cation with the camera. The results of the camera’s gaze are presented confrontationally, as a challenge, as though human powers of sight had suddenly and jarringly been supplanted by other, greater ones that made those earlier powers seem like blindness. Importantly, the audience depicted in the film is primarily made up of women—that is, one of the groups most susceptible to the blandishments of mere image, according to age-old iconoclastic prejudice, and whose vision, therefore, is least trustworthy.29 That this audience literally confronts the camera rather than the relics can stand as another figure, not for revelation, but for revelation of the power to reveal.
None of this makes any difference unless the audience’s “response” is the correct one, of course; and we might well feel reluctant to read a response out of that crowd of faces, although we are certainly prompted (or being trained!) to do so associatively, in order to formulate and affirm our own response. It would seem (though it is not certain) that the crowd is gazing intently, even curiously, and most of the faces bear an expression we might call “anxious concentration.” We might have trouble getting more precise than that, or extracting any sense of their positive or negative evaluation of what is/has been/ will be seen. The task of the Kuleshov Effect is to narrow those interpretive choices, by taking inchoate, latent features of the image and activating them in specific ways through carefully chosen juxtapositions: thus, “anxious concentration” on these (local women’s) faces is to be read as causally (and not merely rhetorically) linked to what they now can see—or rather, to what the film audience has seen—and as part of a longer causal chain of observation and reaction that would lead, according to the propagandists organizing the exposures, to skepticism.
Applying the skeptical lesson in reverse, we might be tempted to say that Kuleshov-Vertov are staging a response, through the as-yet-to-be-named “Effect,” in much the same way that the clerics staged Sergius’s bodily persistence: one falsifying “montage” replaces another. And I believe that they are indeed doing this, guided by the assumption that (1) audiences like the one depicted in Sergius are deeply bound by religious particularity (i.e., superstition) and (2) that the representational powers of cinema have the capacity of undoing that inertia even (or perhaps especially) in “simple” spectators like these ones. They are, in other words, staging their own desire, what they want cinema to be able to do to people they assume to be a certain way. The paradoxical character of the strategy is evident: we spectators of Sergius come to “know” that those other, model spectators have learned to mistrust appearances, even or especially when sanctioned by sacred authority; yet this is a knowledge produced by visual trickery.
However, it is crucial to recall that the Kuleshov Effect, vulgar exegeses of it notwithstanding, in no way posits a human cognition that mechanically links A to B to C to produce the required interpretation, as though tied to a leash. On the contrary, it presupposes a spectator actively seeking true meaning within texts that are held, at least provisionally, to be coherent. (No meaning in Mozzhukhin’s face would be sought at all, if spectators were not concerned to discover it using the clues provided within that array of visual signs to which the “face” belongs.) Because the crowd’s expression(s) remain(s) unreadable, I would argue that it is with an impression of that activity, rather than any articulated expression, that we are left with when looking at those faces in S ergius. Indeed, the capacity to perceive is thematized—for us, if not for Kuleshov-Vertov—at least as much through an exposure of the limits of cinema’s ability to discern and affix meaning, as it is demonstrated through any confident filmic presentation of “objective evidence,” or by artfully linking and articulating disparate images. The crowd is looking, like the audience watching Sergius, like the camera and cameraman; and all of these looks remain heterogeneous powers, even as they seek to assign a meaning and identity to the looks that surround them.
Thus a fundamental tension within early Soviet ideas about perception is exposed as well: between perception as (on the one hand) thoroughly shaped and limited by historically determined and determining conditions of class, gender, confession, and ethnos, as codified in the representational schemata of state propagandists; and perception as (on the other hand) human subjects’ own energies and powers of discernment, powers augmentable via technology, and necessary if those subjects were ever to be capable of “building socialism.” This tension finds expression over and over again in the cultural production of the period, but perhaps nowhere more clearly than in Vertov’s films and writings. We can think of all of his counterpoising of “revelatory” non-acted cinema to the role-driven artifice of theatre, fiction film, and even the “theatricalization” of everyday bourgeois life; his plentiful demonstrations of the capacity of editing to direct interpretation; and (in Man with a Movie Camera above all) those meticulous unsealings of the ultimate fetish objects, cinematic images themselves.
Just as importantly, he will incorporate countless figurations of individual and collective spectators, as they perceive through the mediation of cameras and projectors, recording and playback devices, newspapers, photographs, or naked eyes and ears. (It may seem strange to designate “naked eyes and ears” as instruments of mediated perception, but Vertovian logic doubtless leads to that designation: in the wake of the emergence of technological media, and especially after cinema, no perception can be understood as unmediated. Corneas and cochleas themselves are “machines” of perception—inadequate ones, as it turns out!) In his films, spectators and filmmakers alike are epistemologists—driven, that is, to seek out true meaning with their organs and machinery of perception—even as their capacity to know is conditioned through and through by whatever has “socially organized” them: the rhetorics of belief, of ideology, of technology itself.
But what, finally, of the specific juxtaposition of cinema with religion—or rather, of film viewing with religious adoration—in the exposure films? Mikhail Rejsner claimed that cinema was capable of resurrection; and although Vertov famously spoke of film as an instrument to be put at the disposal of a demystifying “consciousness,” he also attributed to it a creative power that might be called demiurgic:
Stupefaction and suggestion—the art-drama’s basic means of influence—relate to that of a religion and enable it for a time to maintain a [person] in an excited unconscious state.
[…. ]
Only consciousness can fight the sway of magic in all its forms.
[…. ]
I am kino-eye. I create a [person] more perfect than Adam …
Seven years after the Sergius film, the witty Aleksandr Kurs would note of Vertov’s pet symbol,
Kino-Eye is a little terrifying, and for some reason it reminds you of either a Masonic or a theosophical symbol.
Surely, the exposure films propose a new authority, and new authoritative images, to replace the old, though whether the authority (film plus communism) and those images are themselves “religious” in some sense depends on what meaning attaches to that adjective. That the authority seems to derive from human praxis rather than anything beyond it—“We ourselves resurrect the dead for our eyes and ears”—might seem a distinguishing feature, although a full accounting would have to consider Vertov’s later Lenin iconographies, to be sure. We might suggest, again preemptively, that Vertov will create not a religion, but a myth of cinema, but now in philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s sense: a device for managing, and even incorporating all those often brutally recalcitrant differences—of geography, of culture, of language, of class, and so on—into a single representational frame that will articulate them all (“a visual bond between the workers of the whole world”).
In the meantime, the tropes of religion—transcendence and sacrifice above all—will enter Vertov’s discourse as they did that of early Soviet culture as a whole, partially as a reaction to that hurling together of disaster with revolutionary triumph that characterized the period. I conclude with this cryptic verse dated October 1, 1921, written by Vertov in the midst of the devastating famine that had begun in the spring of that year, would ultimately take five million lives, and on which Vertov would report in his first Kino-Pravda experimental newsreel about nine months later:
To whistle.
A death-newsreel.
Wan
With leaves.
A two-step of events.
Funerals of centuries,
Primers with yats,
Tsarist civil servants with whips,
Archbishops with crosses,
Alleluia in an eight-voiced canon
And through
Intestinal worms of German measles
….
and through
the dim honeycombs of sadness
Christ the mechanic gazes
Intently,
With an electric eyelid.
“Enter!”