Art in Revolution - ACE032.4

Design for a mobile Agit-prop theatre by Alexei Babichev (1926). Photographs of the Moscow-based Blue Blouse collective, which performed outdoors, in clubs and in factories. Model of set for Meyerhold’s production of Nikolai Erdman’s The Warrant (1925). Photographs. Photographs from Meyerhold’s production of Mayakovsky’s The Bathhouse, designed by Alexander Deineka (1930). Model for set of Tretiakov’s I Want a Child (Meyerhold and Lissitzky, 1930), showing how theatre design and theatre architecture had more or less fused, becoming "the prototype of modern ‘total theatre’." Photographs of Mayakovsky reading his poetry (recording heard over). Photographs of posters, etc. Film of May Day celebrations. Electrification programme: workers installing telegraph wires. Photographs of power station designed by Ivan Sholtovsky (1927). Pylons; photographs of Moscow’s Sukhov radio mast built by Alexei Shchusev (1926). Film of Lenin broadcasting (recording heard over), designs for radio equipment; slogans forming shapes similar to loudspeaker stands, etc. Various posters designed by Klutsis. Montage of these and scenes from film of electrification agricultural scenes with wires and pylons in background factory chimneys, etc. Electrification facilitated the spread of the new Soviet cinema which Lenin prized above all other art forms in political importance. Photographs and film of film-makers. Sequences about cinema-going from Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera / Chelovek s kinoapparatom. Poster for an edition of Kino Glaz and quotation from Vertov describing the camera/himself as "a mechanical eye … showing you the world the way only I can see it…." Film posters from the 1920s intercut with more film. These include: Forward Soviet / Shagai sovet, One Sixth of the Earth / Shestaya chast’ mira, Judas / Iyuda, The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty / Padenie dinastii Romanovikh, The Battleship Potemkin / Bronenosets Potëmkin; October / Oktiabr’, Spring / Vesnoi and Earth / Zemlya ( by Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg). Film of Lenin addressing crowd. More posters, including some for non-Russian productions such as Symphonie of the Big City / Sinfonie der Grossstadt. Further extract from Man with a Movie Camera.