Media and Society: From the Cinema Screen to Television

The review was prepared within the joint project “Book Review” of the Political Sphere Institute “Political Sphere” and the Center for European Studies in Minsk.

Gornykh, A. A. Media and Society. – Vilnius: EHU, 2013.

The book was published in the EHU series “Visual and Cultural Studies,” founded in 2003. A. A. Gornykh is an EHU professor, Candidate of Sciences in Philosophy, and the author of a number of scholarly articles and educational projects in visual studies. One of his projects was the educational DVD “Society, History, Cinema: World War II in Soviet Cinema of the 1940s and 1960s” (2006–2008, EHU, VisCult), whose materials and developments were partially incorporated into the monograph.

The review was prepared by Volha Ramanava.

According to Andrei Gornykh’s concept, in his new book “Media and Society” (Vilnius, EHU, 2013), verbal and visual languages should be present “on equal terms,” when film frames become not merely an additional illustration to a “literature-centered” study, but a parallel text open to further interpretations.

The book “Media and Society” consists of two parts: the first examines models of representing the wartime past in Soviet cinema (“Cinema: History and Memory. World War II in Soviet Cinema of the 1940s–1960s”), while the second considers the modifications of academic knowledge and the “logic of capital” in contemporary mass media (“Television: the Production of Knowledge”).

The theoretical framework that unites both parts is the problematics of modernization (as A. Gornykh said at the book presentation, “the meaning of the ‘thaw’ era has become clear now, when the utterance has been completed,” that is, when the path toward an atomized consumer society has been traversed), as well as a shared research optics in which cinema and television appear as a specific field for reflecting social processes and producing cultural meanings.

According to the author, this book is “an experiment in the medialization of knowledge” and is conceived as a practical guide to analyzing visual text. The methodology of “reading” images is programmatically opposed to traditional film studies analysis: here, the main meaning-forming elements of screen text are not genre, directorial style, or narrative, but camera work and editing. The experiment consists in the fact that, in the author’s analysis of visual material, the emphasis is not merely shifted: the former is removed altogether in order to make the latter the language of description and reflection.

The format of the publication is also experimental. According to the concept, verbal and visual languages should be present on the pages of the book “on equal terms,” when film frames become not merely an additional illustration to a “literature-centered” study, but a parallel text open to further interpretations. This idea determined the nonlinear architectonics of the text, giving the reader freedom in the “editing” of verbal and visual information.

As in any well-designed experiment, some of the author’s hypotheses are confirmed, while others can be questioned again.

 

“The Famous Forelock, Like a Streak of Resin from Infernal Designs”

The first half of the monograph is built as a catalogue of visual images from war films of the 1940s–1960s, on the basis of which Stalinist and thaw-era cinema are compared. The material is very successfully distributed into four blocks (Hero, Enemy, Event, Everyday Life). In each block the author identifies significant cinematic topoi (for example, in the Enemy block in Stalinist war cinema he describes “The Führer” and “The Fritz,” while in thaw-era films he identifies “The Germans” and “The Adversary”). Each of the 26 topoi forms a separate subsection, consisting of a generalizing introduction and a series of analytical commentaries on fragments from various films. The text is accompanied by a strip of individual film frames, by looking at which the reader-viewer is, in principle, supposed to see cross-cutting plots and shared visual practices.

Both the introductions to the subsections and the analytical fragments are scattered with precise formulations and metaphors, significant observations, and theoretical generalizations. Many of them deserve to be developed further; however, this concision and dispersion across the text provide good didactic potential, since each of them can become a readerly discovery or an impetus for independent research.

Moreover, the original style of the author’s text should be noted. What is especially attractive in it is the free movement from the theoretical to the poetic, when a detached description of camera movements and montage cuts is replaced by fragments that can be read as free verse: “Hitler’s black locks fall downward, forming the famous forelock on his forehead, like a streak of resin from infernal designs… Hitler resembles an eccentric gargoyle, splattering the black bile of irrational evil in contrast to the spherical figure of Stalin, without holes or asymmetries, glowing with an even radiance of wisdom” (p. 47).

Alongside analysis, the author’s main instrument is an imaginary pair of editing scissors, with which, from a set of original war films of the 1940s–1960s, he creates two films: one canonical Stalinist film and one typical thaw-era film. On the one hand, this reconstruction is conceptually justified: it demonstrates vividly that the political and utopian imagination of an era crystallizes in film language itself.

On the other hand, in the author’s “montage folds” additional meanings disappear, meanings introduced into the film by artistic conventions (genre, music, registers of the “comic” or the “tragic,” location or studio shooting, color or black-and-white film, “stars” of the 1930s in leading roles or “new faces,” different ways of combining ideology and style, and so on). Thus, for example, the Stalinist cinematic canon is constructed without nuance from fragments of films of different genres: melodramas, comedies, musical films, and so-called documentary dramas (a special genre invented by Soviet critics for Stalinist war films).

On the whole, the nonlinear “ruptures” between the verbal and the visual, which, according to the book’s concept, the reader is supposed to fill in, turn out to be a problematic site for that reader. In addition, discrete film frames are in principle not equivalent to film episodes, and therefore detailed descriptions of camera movements and montage cuts are “visualized” in the mind only by someone who has seen the film (and preferably very recently). Otherwise, reading the texts and looking at the pictures becomes disconnected, and at times meaningless.

In other words, the reader-viewer of the first part desperately lacks context, at least at the level of information about the film’s plot and genre, its place in the director’s filmography, the degree of its popularity among viewers, and the subsequent fate of the film (for example, in the subsection “Commander,” a fragment is mentioned from the second part of L. Lukov’s film “A Big Life” (1946); despite the presence of this visually canonical episode, the film was fiercely criticized in a special Central Committee resolution as “false,” “fake,” and “vicious,” and was released only in 1958).

The selection of films for the “Stalinist” part of the book shows that the totalitarian model of war cinema was created mainly during the years of “few films,” when Stalin personally corrected all scripts, that is, when he was in effect the co-author of almost every one of them. In the author’s view, Stalinist cinema was above all oriented “toward reconstructing contemporaries’ memory of the war” and offered the Soviet viewer “a compensatory experience of a victorious war” in order to erase from collective memory the catastrophic human losses of its first months (p. 62). In this connection, a conceptual question arises: how suggestive were Stalinist war films for contemporary viewers who had only just lived through the war? How “objective” was Stalinist optics for them, through which, as the introduction states, “contemporaries see the past and, at the same time, distinguish themselves in this vision” (p. 11)?

That Stalinist war films could be perceived with a considerable degree of detachment is evidenced by folk jokes as well as by statements of contemporaries (although such information is scarce; by and large, this topic still awaits its researcher). For example, the story of Lieutenant Colonel E. Chernonog, a war hero and participant in the storming of Berlin, recently published at http://www.urokiistorii.ru/history/people/2065, testifies to the “spontaneous de-Stalinization” that occurred during the war years. He received eight years in the camps for one phrase uttered at a screening of “The Fall of Berlin.” Seeing Stalin in a white tunic descending from the heavens to accept victory, he could not restrain himself and joked: “And what angel is this who has flown in? I did not see him in Berlin.” In a better-known source, the report to the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev, to the ritual “laughter in the hall,” easily isolates and destroys the foundation of the “Stalinist cinematic canon”: “… take our historical and war films, or certain works of literature, which are nauseating to read. After all, all of them are intended precisely to propagate this version, to glorify Stalin as a genius military commander. Let us recall, if only, the film “The Fall of Berlin”. There is one Stalin acting there: he gives instructions in a hall with empty chairs, and only one person comes to him and reports something – that is Poskrebyshev, his constant armor-bearer… /(Laughter in the hall.)/”

I would suggest that Stalinist optics, with its concept of a victorious war and its image of the non-individualized “heroic people,” began to “work” with a time lag of 10–15 years, during the years of “stagnation.” During this period it became fixed in official lyric-bureaucratic rhetoric and in the style of military parades on 9 May (one of their obligatory structural elements became, for example, the technique of citing “impressive figures” for weapons and equipment, which the author identifies as one way of characterizing mass in the context of the Stalinist canon (p. 25)). Moreover, in this ritual-bureaucratic format the Stalinist canon is fragmentarily present in contemporary post-Soviet Belarusian or Russian contexts as well.

 

The Thaw and the “New Memory” of the War

If the social utopia recreated by Stalinist postwar cinema can be called “dead,” then during the thaw it was modified and became “living” once again. The author’s analysis of thaw-era films demonstrates that the war is represented in them as a utopian experience of genuine brotherhood, behind which stands a renewed form of the Soviet communist Project. The subject and addressee of these dreams is the Soviet intelligentsia, which for the first time speaks about itself as a community from the Soviet cinema screen.

In Stalinist war films, the Leader, the Mass, the Commander, the Fighter, and the Woman were identified as “hero”-actants. In the thaw-era version, the first four are displaced by the Individual and the Group. The hero acquires individuality, a past, a peaceful profession, a vulnerable body, complex shades of feeling, dreams, and the features of an urban intellectual of the 1960s. “The thaw-era war is no longer won by broad-shouldered generals, but by thin, thoughtful, romantic boys” (p. 94). In this context, the author’s thesis that such a hero is, in many respects, “a romantic vision of itself in the mirror of war by the emerging middle class” seems debatable to me. At the very least, it lacks proof that Soviet technical and humanities intelligentsia became its basis (rather than officials, the nomenklatura, managers at various levels in trade and production, and the “golden youth”).

A very successful move by the author is the identification in post-Stalinist films of the “group hero” – “a communal, everyday community, sufficiently unofficial and autonomous in relation to the state” (p. 100). The socio-historical context that determined its emergence was the formation of a “kitchen culture” of the 1960s, informal and distanced from the state. Against this background, wartime everyday life is represented as an experience of heartfelt brotherhood and a “common cause,” compensating for the lack of communal togetherness and social integration among the intelligentsia under the conditions of the collapse of the Stalinist Utopia.

The author traces in detail the shift in film language that occurred in thaw-era cinema at both the visual and narrative levels. Freer camera angles, panoramas and “handheld camera,” nonlinear editing with an abundance of close-ups, and the growth of “plotlessness” in narration are treated not as consequences of social change or technological innovation, but as ways of producing meanings behind which stands the “logic of modernization.”

Thanks to “modernist optics,” features of the urban culture of the 1960s, which was undergoing a second cycle of modernization, begin to appear in war films. Images of fighters as “workers of war” turn out to be close to the “modernist subject of labor,” with its qualification, social mobility, inclusion in small groups, and immersion in ongoing everyday life, which is represented on screen in the form of a wartime “chronicle” opposed to the structured Great Stories of Stalinist cinema.

In essence, the author names the reasons why thaw-era war films today seem more comprehensible and “human” to us than Stalinist ones (even students watch “Ballad of a Soldier” with greater ease and interest than, say, “The Battle of Stalingrad”). First, there are clear traces of individualized urban culture, which make the chamber-like and psychologized thaw-era world closer than the “superhuman” and hierarchical Stalinist one. And second, there is the utopia of a “fraternal community,” whose life is filled with meaning and purpose; its absence gapes in the present no less than it did in the 1960s.

 

From Utopian Collectivism to a “Strong Ego”

If Soviet cinema was founded on the idea of utopian collectivism, then at the center of contemporary television and advertising stands an equally utopian model of the “strong Ego” – integral, socially successful, and not subject to aging or disease. The second part of the book, devoted to television, examines various media technologies for its “strengthening” and “formatting.” The focus of the study is on editing techniques that give any television information an “effect of authenticity,” as well as on the phenomenon of the “television flow” and the ways it is segmented.

This part consists of three sections: “TV Knowledge: the Spectacle of Technology,” “Knowledge as Psychological Investigation,” and “Television Flow: Technologies for Strengthening the Ego.”

The first two examine the specific nature of the modification of academic knowledge in television programs. The author analyzes in detail a number of programs from Western channels that specialize in creating high-budget popular-science content in the style of infotainment (Discovery Channel, National Geographic, History Channel). Their analysis demonstrates how the signified of programs of different genres – about historical epochs, travel, or reality shows – becomes the “logic of capital,” according to which the viewer’s visual pleasure is converted into motivation to consume goods and brands.

It turns out that any TV knowledge ultimately tends toward advertising – either of particular goods or of the values of individualism, comfort, technological progress, and pleasure. At the same time, socio-historical logic is bracketed off, as are any social tensions – gender, cultural, value-based, or racial.

Thus, for example, a widespread model for explaining socio-historical phenomena is the “psychological” one, according to which any historical event can be explained through the prism of the biography and psychology of individual persons (“the USSR collapsed because Yeltsin triumphed over Gorbachev”). In this context, the author’s observation is significant that the heroes of such programs are surrounded by a special atmosphere of mystery, which “serves as one of the symptoms of the increasing difficulty of constructing an integral Ego under the conditions of the ‘schizophrenic’ spatio-temporal experience of postmodernity” (p. 251). At the same time, the solutions to the mystery are of a single type: all historical characters are endowed with “belief in themselves” and a special wholeness of personality.

Another such symptom can be called the concept of “becoming oneself” (in particular, very widespread in contemporary popular psychology, which occupies an ever larger segment in mass media, “personal growth” trainings, and trainings for increasing “personal effectiveness”). The author notes that in consumer society the individual’s “selfhood” begins to be built according to the logic of capital accumulation as a result of investments in something “new”: “the individual in consumer society is also a constant process of becoming oneself with the help of various ‘new products’” (p. 294). Accordingly, this process has no “final solution”: advertising permanently offers ever new “secrets” of this becoming and of the improvement in quality of life that accompanies it. At the same time, the main technology of advertising’s “strengthening of the Ego” becomes the construction of an ideal body, appearance, and ideal surfaces of things, which seem to oppose the destructive action of time.

In this context, the indication is interesting that, at the macro-level of television flow (the general principles of structuring broadcasting), advertising of goods serves as a “buffer zone of stability” and represents a set of stories about overcoming time: “Dramatic or amusing fragments of stories in the television flow form a single open meta-serial, endlessly postponing the resolution, the restoration of justice, the achievement of a goal, etc. The space of advertising, by contrast, tells completed micro-stories of the restoration or establishment of some final state (joy, love, health, happiness),… serving as a field for resolving the tensions and anxieties generated by the television flow” (p. 298).

In the author’s view, television as a whole is a “capitalist cultural form.” He concludes that the common denominator of all techniques for producing knowledge in the television flow is the transformation of liberal principles, with their postulate of the fundamentality of private property, into natural values. One qualification needs to be made here: this conclusion is based on an analysis of programs, announcements, and idents from five popular Western channels and one Russian channel, NTV (using the example of the program “Maximum”). Beyond the scope of the study remain, for example, the ideological foundations of other programs and channels of Russian TV, or such a phenomenon as Belarusian television.

Moreover, the television flow is a particular case of the visual flow in which the contemporary person is immersed (all the more so because few television viewers immerse themselves in the television flow completely; as a rule, they break it up through zapping). Overall, the visual media field proves to be much more mosaic-like and disorienting: the “strong Ego” appeals to us alongside Mr. Freeman, Homer Simpson, the macabre stuffed animal of the Stoned Fox, and other anti-capitalist memes and “demotivators.”

In conclusion, it should be said that “Media and Society” is a fundamental and original study. It is undoubtedly relevant both in light of the urgent need to find new forms of academic work with visual culture and in light of the non-obviousness of many processes taking place in the “culture of Post” – post-Soviet, post-industrial, and postmodern.