26 research outputs found
Red Aesthetics, Intermediality and the Use of Posters in Chinese Cinema after 1949
Abstract: This article focuses on the aesthetic and affective techniques of saturation through which posters legitimated the Party-State in Maoâs China by closing the gap between everyday experience and political ideology. Propaganda posters were designed to put into practice the principle of unity, as conceptua- lised by Mao Zedong. The argument posits that while the âposterâ is normally a printed edition of a painting or design intended for mass distribution in this way, the term may fairly be deployed to capture other cultural objects that function as âpostersâ, in that they provide public, political information that expresses or con- structs a political self in aesthetic form. This approach requires a metonymic understanding of a visual field in which cultural objects are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The essay draws on recent in-depth interviews with poster artists of the 1960s and 1970s
Iconography of power: Soviet political posters under Lenin and Stalin
Masters at visual propaganda, the Bolsheviks produced thousands of vivid and compelling posters after they seized power in October 1917. Intended for a semi-literate population that was accustomed to the rich visual legacy of the Russian autocracy and the Orthodox Church, political posters came to occupy a central place in the regime's effort to imprint itself on the hearts and minds of the people and to remold them into the new Soviet women and men. In this first sociological study of Soviet political posters, Victoria Bonnell analyzes the shifts that took place in the images, messages, styles, and functions of political art from 1917 to 1953. Everyone who lived in Russia after the October revolution had some familiarity with stock images of the male worker, the great communist leaders, the collective farm woman, the capitalist, and others. These were the new icons' standardized images that depicted Bolshevik heroes and their adversaries in accordance with a fixed pattern. Like other "invented traditions" of the modern age, iconographic images in propaganda art were relentlessly repeated, bringing together Bolshevik ideology and traditional mythologies of pre-Revolutionary Russia. Symbols and emblems featured in Soviet posters of the Civil War and the 1920s gave visual meaning to the Bolshevik worldview dominated by the concept of class. Beginning in the 1930s, visual propaganda became more prescriptive, providing models for the appearance, demeanor, and conduct of the new social types, both positive and negative. Political art also conveyed important messages about the sacred center of the regime which evolved during the 1930s from the celebration of the heroic proletariat to the deification of Stalin. Treating propaganda images as part of a particular visual language, Bonnell shows how people "read" them - relying on their habits of seeing and interpreting folk, religious, commercial, and political art (both before and after 1917) as well as the fine art traditions of Russia and the West. Drawing on monumental sculpture and holiday displays as well as posters, the study traces the way Soviet propaganda art shaped the mentality of the Russian people (the legacy is present even today) and was itself shaped by popular attitudes and assumptions. Iconography of Power includes posters dating from the final decades of the old regime to the death of Stalin, located by the author in Russian, American, and English libraries and archives. One hundred exceptionally striking posters are reproduced in the book, many of them never before published. Bonnell places these posters in a historical context and provides a provocative account of the evolution of the visual discourse on power in Soviet Russia
Recommended from our members
Soviet and Post-Soviet Area Studies
The essay traces the origins and development of Soviet area studies from their inception in the early 1940s to the present. The first part examines the institutional framework and the funding sources for Soviet and post-Soviet area studies. The second part concentrates on the connection between area studies and the disciplines. Next, the authors consider intellectual trends and map the major changes that have taken place in the conceptualization of Soviet area studies from the Second World War to the collapse of the USSR. The final section provides an overview of the formation of post-Soviet area studies. The focus of the inquiry is Soviet and post-Soviet area studies in the United States. The paper argues that the institutional context for the study of the region has not changed dramatically since the collapse of communism (despite some changes in nomenclature and the inclusion of "Eurasian" studies). By contrast, the intellectual agenda in both Soviet and post-Soviet studies and the disciplinary distribution of specialists have undergone significant modifications during the past decade