Shklovsky in the Cinema, 1926-1932

Abstract

The following research project is grounded in the interrelated contexts of the Russian intelligentsia’s ambivalent engagement with post-revolutionary culture and cinema’s rise as an artistic medium and instrument of Russian cultural development. By examining Viktor Shklovsky’s earliest activities in the Soviet film industry, this project will explore how narrative, aesthetic, and ideological programmes were repeatedly and variously moulded, undermined, and complicated by the twentieth-century Russian avant-garde interest in dissolving creative boundaries between the domains of the ‘internal’ (embracing private, individual, and domestic concerns) and ‘external’ (their public, communal, and social counterparts) in a bid ‘to turn space outwards’ (vyvorachivat´ prostranstvo vovne). These critical enquiries will lend themselves to an investigation of how the behaviours of Shklovsky, his colleagues, and his artistic creations were affected by internal and/or external loci of control and how these activities were reconciled (if at all) in a society where the relationship between freedom and necessity was in a constant state of fluctuation.

This research aims not simply to establish the extent and significance of Shklovsky’s influence on cinema as an individual, but rather to utilise his personal narrative for an assessment of the levels of interaction between theory and practice and between the verbal and the visual as integral to the intelligentsia movement. The project will investigate the part that Shklovsky played in conceptualising the boundaries, exchanges, and conflicts that arose between different artistic media and the critical institutions that developed around them, before considering how these relations changed as Soviet culture entered and emerged from the period of Cultural Revolution. In addition, an exploration of the effects of personal and professional tensions between different ideological groups will not only develop a better understanding of Shklovsky’s role in the cinema as theorist, critic, polemicist, screenwriter, and ‘creative administrator’, but will also help to establish the similarities and/or disparities between his film-works and contemporary cultural experience.