Soviet Propaganda Animation 1.

The first screening in a 2-part program of Soviet propaganda animation offers an insight into the ways of creatively packaging Bolshevik ideology, implemented with a variety of animation techniques. The work of early Soviet visual artists demonstrates how irony, satire, grotesque, caricature, and a streamlined language of political propaganda are put to the service of the new regime, ridiculing and threatening the world bourgeoisie, claiming the moral superiority over capitalism, mocking the vices of the imperial past, and envisioning a bright internationalist and interplanetary future. Nikolai Khodataev, Ivan Ivanov-Vano, Yuri Merkulov, Zenon Kimissarenko, Dziga Vertov, and others are among the pioneers of political animation, which foregrounded rather than masked its agitational message.

INTERPLANETARY REVOLUTION (1924, directors Zenon Komisarenko, Yuri Merkilov, Nikolai Khodataev), 7’50’’
SOVIET TOYS (1924, director Dziga Vertov), 10’48’’
CHINA IN FLAMES (1925, directors Zenon Komissarenko, Yuri Merkulov, Nikolai Khodataev), 31’51’’
WE’LL KEEP OUR EYES PEELED (1927, directed by Nikolai Khodataev), 2’45’’
SAMOYED BOY (1928, directors Zinaida Brumberg, Valentina Brumberg), 7’
THE MUSIC BOX (1933, directed by Nikolai Khodataev), 20’21’’
BLACK AND WHITE (1933, directed by Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Leonid Amalrik), 2’30’’

This screening is the third event in the SHOOTING THE REVOLUTION film series that is part of the WHAT’S LEFT program series organized by the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, which aims to revisit the complex socialist ideological and visual legacy in the year marked by the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The screening is introduced by Dr. Oksana Sarkisova (Blinken OSA)

Free admission.
Limited seats are available on a first come first served basis.
The films will be screened in Russian with English subtitles. The program is in English.

In the framework of the one-year program series “What's Left?”.