Police Aesthetics by Vatulescu Cristina

Author:Vatulescu, Cristina [Vatulescu, Cristina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press

The Many Ways Film Directors Took Shots at Policing

Kino police went far beyond identifying the portrait of the Soviet criminal on-screen; it engaged in an ongoing redefinition of the place of cinema, filmed subject, and spectator in the foundational decades of the Soviet State. Dziga Vertov can be credited with breaching the two main directions to be taken by kino police: exposing criminals and molding the audience in the direction desired by the secret police. Vertov’s involvement with kino police was a fleeting youth affair, quickly abandoned in his search for myriad other innovations, including a complex and dynamic articulation of the audience’s roles. But kino police continued on, as Alexander Medvedkin developed the denunciatory powers of cinema, turning his camera into a prosecutor and, when needed, a weapon. With Ivan Pyr’ev’s Party Card, we see cinema emulating another side of policing, the criminological project of identifying the distinguishing marks of the Soviet enemy to the public. In part, these various types of kino policing keep pace with the major contemporary trends in policing, such as the shift in emphasis from an early model of the investigative agent, who goes out into the world to capture criminals off guard, to the much more theatrical policing style of the 1930s, primarily concerned with exposing and parading the enemy in elaborate public displays, in particular show trials but also film showings. At other times, kino policing seems out of step with its times: Alexander Medvedkin’s attempt to create a critical denunciatory cinema that would document problems wherever they are found, at the time when official artistic dogma was moving toward socialist realism and its ideals of showing reality as it should be rather than as it was, is a case in point. And yet at other times, kino policing seems to take over sides of traditional policing that have become somehow discredited, as in the case of Pyr’ev’s criminological project, undertaken at the time when criminology as a scientific discipline had been largely silenced. While it seems important to uncover the long-neglected policing fantasies at the core of these cinematic experiments, it is also crucial to distinguish between the various examples of kino policing reviewed here. In some instances, and in particular in The Party Card, cinema appears strongly tainted by its attempts to emulate and glorify the secret police at its worst. At the other end of the spectrum stands the filmmaker who gives policing a shot for his own purposes, which can run parallel or even go against those of the police. After all, misappropriating a police uniform is a serious crime, which was quite common in the Soviet 1920s, when not only filmmakers but also various professional criminals made a habit of impersonating the secret police.151 So it is no surprise that the state, and the secret police in particular, had a wide range of reactions to these attempts at kino policing, from ignoring them, to outright banning them, to censoring their excesses, editing, and supporting them. As we

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