Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012)
Review: Cristina Vatulescu (2010) Police Aesthetics.
Literature, Film and the Secret Police in Soviet Times.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Laszlo Strausz1
With the opening of state archives across Eastern Europe, historians are
starting to rethink a thesis that has dominated the study of cultural life
during the Cold War era. This overdue change in the orientation of the
historical work on the socialist-communist decades in the region does away
with the dogma that imagines the cultural sphere under state party rule as
the simple dichotomy of the authorities on one hand, and the artists and the
audiences on the other. For many years, research on the literary or cinematic
output of countries like the former Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia, Poland
and Hungary has been guided by the assumption that each artistic decision
by the region’s important writers or filmmakers is a resistant political
statement in itself. Channelling this attitude through the concepts of the
political parable or allegory, interpreters have been busy revealing how the
apparatus of the Soviet-type governments intentionally or unintentionally
overlooked complex artistic images that referenced dictatorial political
circumstances, and in some cases allowed the criticising of the system so as
to create an image of a permissive cultural atmosphere. Janina Falkowska’s
1995 article sets up a useful conceptual framework for describing how the
parables, or allegories of Eastern European filmmakers have been
interpreted as political mostly by the audiences, who wanted to read
resistant statements into the cinematic texts.
According to the author, in the films of Cold War-era Eastern
Europe, ‘he concept ‘political’ seems to be an empty vessel, which is filled
by semantic substance by the audiences at a particular time of viewing’
(Falkowska 1995, 39). On one hand, this formulation about the historical
nature of the connections between text and reader clearly represents an
important move away from the unproblematic dichotomy mentioned above
by emphasising the audience’s role in the production of meaning. On the
other, Falkowska’s description does not challenge the simplistic role
assigned to the authorities in this equation, according to which the artist
creates amidst an heroic struggle with the repressive state, which tries to
police the artefacts’ political content and supervises its consumption. A
weak link in this formula is that it overlooks how artists and authorities
were both invested in allegorical language. While it is not particularly
surprising that authorities wanted to erase traces of their collaboration or
1
Eötvös Loránd University: [email protected]
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censorship in works of 1960s authorial cinema in order to promote an image
of artistic freedom at international film festivals for example, this
collaboration - as Cristina Vatulescu’s Police Aesthetics. Literature, Film
and the Secret Police in Soviet Times clearly shows - has a rich history
going back to the establishing of the young Soviet state, and the immediate
post-WWII years in the satellite countries.
From a theoretical perspective, the audience’s activity of filling the
text with semantic substance is not an ‘innocent’ process, but one that is
largely overdetermined by the rhetorical features of the text that assign a
reading position to the reader/viewer in any given political situation.
Cristina Vatulescu’s study argues that the rhetoric of select early Soviet-era
and cold war texts (literary and cinematic) was to an important extent
determined by some form of interaction between state organisations and the
artists. The voluntary or involuntary cooperation between artists and
authorities resulted in a much more complex production of literary and
cinematic meaning than previously imagined, where both the state and the
artists acknowledged each other’s role and took advantage of the mutual
connections. While the reading position of the audiences vis-à-vis these
texts is not in the forefront of Vatulescu’s book (she concentrates on the
complex connections between the two producers of meaning), I have found
that this might be one of the most fascinating theoretical implications of her
study. Before turning to these possible consequences of Police Aesthetics’
argument, I will introduce this ambitious book that will have an important
impact on studying the connections between state authorities’ reliance on
artistic expression and vice versa.
The chapters of the book loosely follow the temporal stages that
characterise the collaboration of the authorities and the artists, while also
taking into consideration the medium of the text examined. As the author
declares, she is interested not so much in attempting to cover an exhaustive
range of artefacts but rather in closely examining a limited number of texts
and extra-textual material (i.e. both literary works and reports on these by
the secret police for example), which reveal not only how wide-ranging, but
also how deep the connections between culture and policing were (23).
Vatulescu does not read the files, the books and films in order to get a
historically accurate understanding about the fates of the characters or
artworks involved. Rather she wants to bring to light the authorities’
conceptions about evidence, state records, writing, human nature and
criminality (13). Whether intended for internal use (the secret police file) or
for the larger audience (books, documentaries, fiction films), Vatulescu’s
term ‘police aesthetics’ usefully brings together various documents and
artefacts that simultaneously reveal the authorities’ need for selfrepresentation, how the authorities represent the person investigated, and
probably most importantly, the police’s manipulative casting of its viewers
in ‘roles as different as sheltered spectator, suspect, witness, and accused’
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(25). Police aesthetics, as a concept illustrates the interdependence of the
state and the artists in their need for representation. The consequences of
this interdependence for the audiences surface at various points in
Vatulescu’s text, which repeatedly suggests that their subject position is
overdetermined through the rhetoric of the texts.
Vatulescu launches her study with a section on the narrative
strategies employed by the writers and compilers of secret police personnel
files in the early Soviet Union, but also in the decades of communist
dictatorship in Romania. Her distinction between the Stalinist and postStalinist file relies on a close observation of these texts. During the 1920s
and 1930s, the typical file progressed through distinct narrative stages that
formed, nonetheless, a coherent storyline. Accused and interrogated
‘enemies of the state’ were asked to become authors of their own files by
internalising the ideology of the authorities (41). Melodramatically, Stalinist
files followed a Manichean logic where the ‘autobiography’ of the arrested
and interrogated person had to pass through the stage of ideological
purification and in the process give way to the ‘confession’ that
acknowledges the ‘sins’ committed. In contrast, the post-Stalinist file did
not cohere. Today, it reads as a montage of distinct surveillance transcripts
with observations collated into a single document using a hyper-realistic
language.
The difference between the two strategies of creating the file becomes most
vivid as Vatulescu illustrates the two distinct policing eras through Isaac
Babel’s encounters with the secret police, and Mihail Bulgakov’s conscious
use of the police file’s language as a storytelling device. Babel, who was
interrogated by the secret police about his alleged crimes, blends in his
surviving confession the autobiographical voice with the wooden official
language in order to atone for his ‘sins’ against the communist state. The
dialogism between the two distinct voices present in the text ends with the
writer’s conversion, but the narrative technique of mixing various
discourses is retained. Babel’s case dramatically shows that the acceptance
of the official interpretation of one’s actions does not lead to complete
surrender: the writer uses dialogism to maintain continuity between two
distinct stages of the self. Bulgakov, however, has made a more conscious
use of the post-Stalinist file’s hyper-realistic rhetoric that did not converge
towards a melodramatic conclusion. The omniscient narration of The Master
and Margarita (1967) is similar to that of the investigator who tries to track
down Woland by collating a file on him. The diegetic character in
Bulgakov’s book uses the poetics employed by the secret police, which
results in a patchy narrative similar to the post-Stalinist surveillance report.
This narrator-secret police connection reveals how ‘art and policing put on
each other’s masks, step into each other’s shoes, but do not necessarily walk
the same walk’ (76). As the chapter shows, Babel and Bulgakov have been
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able to turn the experiences of their encounters with the Cheka into novel
stylistic and narrative strategies. The writers turned the existentially
repressive presence of the secret police into creative surviving strategies.
The state authorities soon realised that they too can take advantage from this
symbiosis.
The second larger unit of Vatulescu’s book turns towards various
motion pictures produced during the Stalinist and post-Stalinist years. The
first of the two chapters investigates how early Soviet cinema internalised
the young Soviet state’s obsession with control and policing. Vertov and
Medvedkin’s documentaries on criminality are fascinating examples of how
the new communist system attempted to establish a new morality based on
proletarian values. The documentary Kino-Pravda no. 8 (Dziga Vertov,
1922) singles out criminals by visually fingerprinting them: the camera
regularly captures close-ups of their hands before tilting up towards their
faces.2 In other segments, the director records trials of enemies of the state,
where the focus largely falls on the audiences, and their ‘proper’ reactions to
crimes and criminals. Vatulescu’s study reveals important connections
between documentaries and the fictional texts, which were part of the same
political context: both cinematic modes were deeply involved in
establishing the identity and the outlines of a new communist society. The
feature film The Party Card (Ivan Pyr’ev, 1936), which revolves around a
saboteur assuming the identity of a heroic communist is also busy
displaying how the collective ‘we’ is often hardly distinguishable from the
criminal ‘them.’ This leads to the ideologically correct conclusion that the
true communist is always alert to infiltration. The social role of the
documentary and the fiction film overlaps almost entirely in their function
of agitation, which brings up the question of whether there is a need to
distinguish between the two in the context of early Soviet cinema. Although
Police Aesthetics does not engage with this problem, whether there are
differences among them in their textual strategies (i.e. do both employ
melodramatic address, didactic mise-en-scène in similar ways) seems to be
an important question.
Not only did cinema directly reflect major social concerns of the
times (identity, policing, control), but also the authorities were involved in
the production of motion pictures that attempted to manipulate the
audience’s social-political perceptions. Vatulescu’s next chapter analyses
two documentaries and a major blockbuster produced by the secret police.
Her analyses of the two documentaries reveal a major shift in the image of
2
Vatulescu at times uses the terms of film language in confusing ways, which seems to be
related repeatedly to mobile compositions. On page 78 she notes how the camera ‘pans up’
to reveal faces, which is most probably a tilt. On page 81, we read that the camera ‘zooms
out;’ given the fact that in 1924 no zooms lens existed, this seems improbable. Later on
page 105 she notes that the camera ‘pans closer;’ here the movement might have been a
non-panoramic readjustment, if the sequence ends up with a closer framing.
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the criminal, and how perplexed the secret police initially were about the
role of visual representation.
Solovki (A. A. Cherkasov, 1928) depicts life in a labour camp as a
vacation at a holiday resort, pointing at the authorities’ efforts to humanise
the re-education of criminals via an aesthetics of normalcy. Vatulescu
shows how the film’s afterlife exemplifies the secret police’s hesitation
about the uses of representation: Solovki was first widely distributed across
the Soviet Union, but later banned, as workers, who lived among
significantly worse circumstances than the convicts, complained that the
state treats criminals much better than the faithful communist. The later
documentary, Belomorsko (Belomor-Baltic Canal, Alexander Lemberg, ca.
1935) is much more suspicious, and the image of the soon-to-be-re-educated,
ignorant criminal is replaced by a mistrustful police mug-shot aesthetic. In
concert with the official image of the criminal, and more importantly, with
the intended reception of this image by audiences, it seems that the depicted
convicts in Belomorsko cannot be easily singled out and identified, which
suggests that spies and enemies lurk everywhere. Thus the film aims not
only to teach the viewer about threats to society, but also to warn about the
power of the state that can crush resistance. Accordingly, ‘the boundary
between the audience and its show - the prisoners - is collapsed; the
audience finds itself on shifting ground as art breaks the fourth wall and
imposes itself as a living art of prescribed self-fashioning’ (160). The
convicted characters in Belomorsko failed to fashion their selves, and are
now put on display as a warning. The plasticity of the line between
criminality and normalcy is the topic of Road to Life (Nikolai Ekk, 1931),
the secret police blockbuster dealing with the topic of criminal street
children. While the film employs a melodramatic ending, audiences are
‘asked to occupy a variety of shifting positions [in relation to the children,
but the] film elicits the viewer’s intimate identification with particular
victims of heartrending violence […] and thus creates the justification for
the police’s own fierce retaliation’ (145). The narrative strategies of the
secret police financed films clearly show that stylistically and narratively,
the authorities became increasingly aware of the power of political
propaganda through the rhetoric of the image.
The two chapters richly illustrate Vatulescu’s main argument about
the close ties between artistic representation and the need for the Soviet (and
the Romanian) state to present a perceivable national identity to its citizens.
Although the emphasis is on the young Soviet state, the book also addresses
the connection of the Romanian secret police and resistant writers during
the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the last chapter, which illustrates how the
theoretical concept of estrangement was deployed not only by writers to
resist state repression but also by secret police to break the resistance of
uncooperative intellectuals such as Nicolae Steinhardt. Police Aesthetics is a
convincingly argued, thoroughly researched and well-written book. The
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attention Vatulescu pays to the texts’ efforts to influence the audience’s
subject position in relation to the social transformations occurring in both
societies is readily applicable to contemporary documentaries and fiction
films, especially in the post-1989 world of Eastern-, or East-Central Europe.
While the book’s comments do not coherently delineate how the state
authorities predesignated a vantage point for the audiences from which to
behold these stories about collaboration and resistance, this is largely due to
the wide historical focus of the study. It is this last strategy of Police
Aesthetics that deserves the attention of scholars of contemporary cinema.
The two eras of the book’s chapters emphasise the formative
decades of the Soviet Union after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and the
post-WWII years in Romania, where the newly established communist
regimes were attempting to project a coherent image of communist identity
towards their audiences and simultaneously to tighten their control over
cultural life. Vatulescu’s methodology consists of analysing the rhetorical
repertoire of various texts and highlighting how these narrative and stylistic
qualities are in direct connection with the audiences’ perception of political
events, social transformations and changing population, i.e. the historical
memories of entire societies. This methodology has crucial consequences
for anyone interested in the cultural history of the post-1989 world. The
documentaries, television broadcasts and fictional cinematic interpretations
dealing (however loosely) with the tectonic shifts in Eastern European
societies of the past twenty years are the single most important sources for
the formation of historical memories for large segments of these populations.
Therefore, the stylistic-narrative analyses of these aforementioned
representations is a project that would significantly contribute to our
understanding of the expectations and frustrations, hopes and concerns
currently surfacing in the cultural products of the post-Soviet region of
Europe. I am convinced that for example the new Romanian cinema,
currently hailed at almost every international film festival as one of the most
original new currents in world cinema, needs to be investigated from the
perspective of how the rhetoric of the texts dealing with social
transformation and historical change influences its viewer’s capacity to
form memories about the recent past and the contemporary world. This is a
perspective the reader can take along with her from Cristina Vatulescu’s
study Police Aesthetics.
Bibliography
Falkowska, Janina (1995) ‘The ‘Political’ in the films of Andrzej Wajda and
Krzysztof Kieslowski.’ Cinema Journal, v. 34. n. 2: 37-50
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