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Architectural Works in Moscow and Moscow in Film Akiko Honda, Assistant Professor (October, 2015)

  • Akiko Honda, Assistant Professor (October, 2015)

From Magazine to Film: Architecture in Media

The focus of my research is Soviet/Russian architectural history from the perspective of media studies. This is because I think that post-20th century architectural history should be discussed in combination with media studies. With the emergence of photography, for example, the possibility of architectural works being photographed arose, which is to say, architecture became conscious of the medium of photography. At this time, people would come to know architectural works via the medium before actually seeing them, and so the way they looked at the architectural works was affected by the images they had obtained beforehand. In this way, the intervention of the media changed how people come to know architectural works, and architecture and the media became inseparable. At present, although there are some articles dealing with themes such as architecture in film, there are hardly any independent academic publications discussing theories. I think that the architectural research still has a strong tendency to focus on actual architectural works. It is also true in Russia that there have been few studies discussing Soviet/Russian architecture from the perspective of media studies.

There are various forms of media, but my analysis focuses on architectural magazines that provide official discourse and films that are widely watched by the people. The influence of architectural magazines is limited as they are only read by specialists, but their approaches to understanding architectural works has slowly been conveyed from architecture specialists to other intellectuals including film directors, who finally allowed the knowledge to be embodied in the form of film.

If you ask me why I take up films, my answer is that television was not yet popular at that time, and although literacy rates were gradually increasing, there was a limited number of people who could read newspapers. On top of everything, newspaper was a medium that concentrated on text, and the capacity of photographs to show visual images was limited. Film, in contrast, was a prominent medium to express images of whole spaces. It was a medium that could be watched by people who could barely write their names. The people of the time were all fascinated by film to such an extent that they watched the same films over and over again, and memorized all the lines, songs, and costumes. The medium of film had a lot of influence that may be unimaginable for us.

Figure 1: Cover page of Construction of Moscow (Issue 5-6, 1933)

The cover page shows a montage of an image of Lenin over the final plans of the Palace of the Soviets, for which a huge architectural competition was held by the government of the Soviet Union. The pages of this issue are mostly used for feature articles on the Palace. By the way, it is thought that the Communist Party did not provide instructions on the details of the articles, but that the writers themselves surmised the government policy to create the cover illustrations and write these articles.

Figure 2: People watching moving pictures (1940s)

It is thought that this photo was taken on a battlefield since several persons are wearing military caps.

Architecture and Media, and Authority

In my master’s and doctoral programs, I have been pursuing avant-garde Russian architects. In the age of the Russian Revolution, when they were actively working, it was very important to destroy the traditional authority as a symbolic behavior. However, after destroying the authority, in the era of Stalin, the Soviets changed their focus from complete equality to the need for unifying force in building a new community. A new authority was necessary in order to generate this force, resulting in need for huge construction works that intelligibly represent authority. In this way, instead of the horizontal and transparent construction works that the avant-garde architects aimed for, huge, unrealizable construction works such as the Palace of the Soviets were designed. Moreover, these huge constructions—even if they were not ultimately realized—became known all over the Soviet Union through none other than the media. Therefore, I am now trying to discuss the relationship among the three elements of architecture, media, and political authority, with film at the center.

A Film Director as an Architect of Imagination: Aleksandrov’s The Radiant Path

Before World War II, Stalin came up with the Moscow Master Plan to reform Moscow into a developed monumental city. In response to this plan, the film directors began filming new works against the backdrop of Moscow’s changing cityscapes. Among these, there is one piece of work that featured the city of Moscow as the main character: Medvedkin’s The New Moscow (1938).

Similarly, another film chose the new Moscow as its locale and was highly esteemed: Grigori Aleksandrov’s The Radiant Path (1940). Although the last scene of the film was shot at the real site of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, the architectural space depicted in the film (the arrangement of buildings, for example) was totally different from reality. This was because the director, as an architect of imagination, collected images of existing constructions and created an alternative architectural space on the screen. In other words, by making architecture one of the contents of the medium, the space was transformed to something different and contradictory to reality.

In fact, at that time, it was nearly impossible for people living in rural areas to visit Moscow. This is because the government restricted free movement in order to control the inflow of farmers (who had lost their living places due to collectivization) to the cities. As a result, rural people were barely able to recognize the contradictions between the filmed space and the real space. When an ideal Moscow was depicted realistically in film, the people could not distinguish between Moscow as portrayed in the scenic drops and the real Moscow. People vaguely recognized Moscow as a composition containing images of truth and falsehood. Also, since the projection environment was not as good as ours is now, it must have been more difficult to discern the border between the truth and falsehood.

Figure 3: The last scene of The Radiant Path

This is a scene of the exhibition from The Radiant Path, filmed inside the pavilion of the Republic of Georgia. Although this scene takes place inside the pavilion, the soaring Palace of Soviets is visible in the background. (This construction work was never realized, and the planned location was very far from the exhibition.)

The Myth of Architectural Space

Architecture played a very important role in the Stalin era. Authority was represented through architecture and presented in the form of film to gain further strength. The image of architecture depicted in The Radiant Path was also connected with the personality cult of Stalin. Thus, specific constructions in Moscow were mythologized. In the Khrushchev era, however, such myth came to face criticism. The Communist Party also became aware of the limitations of architecture as a means of propaganda, and the role of architecture began to lose its significance. They found that launching spaceships could attract much more public attention than building huge construction works.

However, as long as such architectural space remains, the influence should persist to a certain extent. If so, how was the myth of architectural space established in the Stalin era criticized? How did it transform, or survive or die, until immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s? I think that I should pursue how the myth of architectural space changed through the media over the long term.

Interview and Composition: Seiko Aoyama / Shun Tanigawa
In cooperation with: Waseda University Graduate School of Political Science J-School

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