Byzantine Iconology and Marxist-Leninist Cinema:

History, Theology, FormBy Gleb Sidorkin

Icon: Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council

Photograph: The Council of the Three (Vertov, Svilova, Kaufman

1: Prolegomena

How is a Soviet documentary film by Dziga Vertov like a Byzantine icon? In

what ways is the "textual system" created by Vertov and other artists of the October

revolution congruent in form and function with the marriage of theology, art, and liturgy

that is the textual system of the Orthodox church? Annette Michelson tantalizingly

proposed these parallels on the pages of October magazine in 1990,1 opening up a new

way of exploring the legacy of Byzantium in Modernist artistic practices, especially those

of the radical Left. Leaping over the usual art-historical account of the connection

between icons and Modernism, which credits the neoprimitivist appropriation of icons by

the early Russian avant-garde with contributing to the birth of abstract painting in the

work of Larionov, Kandinsky, and Malevich, Michelson's essay hinted at a deep

structural continuity between Eastern Christian image production and Modernism.

Michelson's insights, which her brief prolegomena left largely unexplored, have

since been developed in the work of Marie-Jose Mondzain, who embarked on a profound

journey of recovering the intellectual legacy of Byzantine iconology and Patristic image

theory. Mondzain has done more than anyone else to show that the Byzantine icon,

forged in the political and theological furnace of the Iconoclast Controversy, is not only a

far more sophisticated way of thinking about the image than the neoprimitivists ever

imagined, but is actually quite modern in its integration of theory and practice, aesthetics

and politics. Introducing the last section of her book Image, Icon, Economy, which is

1 Annette Michelson, "The Kinetic Icon in the Work of Mourning: Prolegomena to the Analysis of a Textual System" October, Vol. 52 (Spring, 1990), pp. 16-39.

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based on a reading of the Antirrhetics of deposed Iconophile patriarch Nikephoros of

Constantinople, she writes:

"There is no alternative system of thought concerning the image capable of

competing with the theoretical and political power of the one that the church

developed during its first ten centuries… We have always been, and are still

today, heirs to a Christian iconocracy… What, then, can I add to all this? First,

I will pause at the point on which the [Iconoclasts and Iconophiles] agree—

their mutual condemnation of idols and idolatry—in order to investigate what

that condemnation signifies. Following this, I have included a brief report on

my efforts to articulate what patristic thought can bring to the study of a few

examples of modern works in the fields of painting, photography, and cinema.

What exactly are our icons today, our iconoclast signs, our idols?"2

In the brief chapters that follow this introduction, Mondzain touches on a wide variety of

modern image practices from the daguerreotype, to Man Ray and Kandinsky, to Andrei

Tarkovsky's film Andrei Rublev. She does not address, however, the answer to her

question that was hinted at by Michelson in her comparison between Vertov's cinema and

Byzantine art:

"[Vertov's film] Three Songs of Lenin corresponds to the register and order of imagery,

originating in the art of Byzantium, imported into Russia in the tenth century… I am

claiming that we may speak of the transformation of Christian themes of martyr and

saint, of Saviour and Paraclete at the heart of a Leninist iconography constructed across

the Soviet culture generally, but most immediately and forcefully articulated in

Vertov's textual system."3

Michelson's essay makes a variety of interesting connections between Russo-Byzantine

art and Soviet image-making, among which the view of Leninist iconography as a

2 Marie- José Mondzain Image, Icon, Economy (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005) pp.173-174.3 Michelson, p.26.

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continuation of Orthodox veneration of the saints is the most fundamental. However, her

engagement with Byzantine thought is limited, and her analyses remain on a formal level.

As I have said, she took a massive step forward in the art-historical discourse about

Byzantine art's impact on Modernism, but she does not get to the central dynamic of

iconophilia, iconoclasm, and idolatry that structures Byzantine art. While I do not find

her formal comparisons, such as the one between Three Songs of Lenin and an

iconostasis, to be very useful, there is a historical argument in play here that complicates

Mondzain's project and makes the Soviet case extremely important for defining the

legacy of Byzantium in the modern period. While Mondzain uses Byzantine thought as a

way of understanding Western image production as a whole, Michelson points to the

immediate historical continuity within Russian civilization between Orthodox and

Communist aesthetic systems.

What interests me is the possibility of analyzing Soviet art in relation to Eastern

Christian iconography, and vice versa, on three levels: the formal, the theoretical, and the

historical. Art historians such as Andrew Spira4 have done extensive work on the formal

genealogy between Byzantine art and avant-garde abstraction; Marie-Jose Mondzain has

proposed that the Iconoclast Controversy "is the genesis of a way of thinking about

images that we are still heirs to today,"5 and Annette Michelson has applied Nikolai

Berdyaev's thesis about Russian Communism being a Christian heresy6 to the study of

Soviet cinema. As I explore both Byzantine art and Vertovian cinema, I ask the reader to

keep all of these approaches in mind. Christian Iconicity is both a conceptual tool for

4 Andrew Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon (London: Lund Humphries, 2008). 5 Mondzain, p. xii.6 Nikolai Berdyaev, "Communism and Christianity" in The Origins of Russian Communism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960) pp. 158-189.

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analyzing Dziga Vertov's attempts to theorize and create a truly Soviet cinema, and a

historical antecedent. My hope is that the following explorations in Patristic thought and

Soviet art history can stimulate unforeseen avenues of exploration within Mondzain's

exciting new hermeneutic mode which is at once so ancient and so contemporary.

The Byzantine devotion to images was formed, crucially, in dialog with the deep

suspicion of images that runs through the Judeo-Christian tradition as a whole. A similar

ambivalence about the image resides at the heart of the Modernist project, especially in

its more radical Leftist incarnations. The connection between Byzantine and Soviet art is

not merely one of iconoclasm in the broader sense; both Christian and Communist art

went beyond simply destroying the iconography of the ancien regime. In both cases, the

art that would represent the new society had to be pure enough to be worthy of the new

citizens. For both Christians and Modernists, if there was to be a new art, it would have to

be immune to the disgusting misuses of images that the old regime used to corrupt and

deceive its subjects—whether these misuses took the form of Pagan blood sacrifice to a

statue, or the placid contemplation of spectacle and melodrama in bourgeois cinema. In

both cases, prominent intellectuals came together to theorize the new role of the image in

a transformed society, while artists attempted to put their theory into practice. What

follows is a recontextualization of the career of Dziga Vertov, the modern theologian-

iconographer par excellence, who saw in his beloved "camera-eye" the potential to create

an unadulterated, non-idolatrous image of the new divinity: the sacralized material world,

animated by the spirits of technology and class struggle, speeding along the tracks of the

Marxist-Leninist dialectic towards heaven on earth.

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2: Incarnation

Polemics against idolatry were present throughout antiquity, launched first and

maintained most stringently by the Jewish tradition but also articulated in various ways

by Pagan philosophers. Roman writers noted the incompatibility of the grandeur of

divinity with mere sculptures made out of profane materials by potentially impure hands,

but deferred to the importance of respecting tradition,7 not to mention the necessity for

loyal Imperial subjects to publicly worship the Emperor's cult image. While the details of

the emergence and early development of Christian image practices remain murky, it is

clear that from the beginning Christians had to navigate the waters between Old

Testament prohibitions against images of God, and the rejection of all polytheist cults

(including that of the Emperor, which set off of their persecution) on one hand, and the

general popularity and usefulness of images on the other. Luckily for the Church fathers,

who fully systematized this theological argument in defense of icons during the

Iconoclast crisis of the eight and ninth centuries, the New Testament of Jesus Christ

overturned the old Law, and provided a loophole: in uniting His divinity with the

physical body of man, God created a sort of "image" of himself in the visible and tangible

form of His son sent down to earth. The infinite YHWH, who previously could only be

indicated by text, condescended to human finitude and the visible nature thereof. Among

the Good News brought by the Incarnation was the possibility for man to worship the

divine through images:

7 Norman Baynes, "Idolatry and the Early Church" in Byzantine Studies and Other Essays (London: Athlone Press, 1955) p. 120.

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"It is obvious to everyone that the Godhead is incomprehensible and

uncircumscribeable, and I may add boundless, limitless, formless, and whatever

adjectives signify the privation of what the Godhead is not… But because of His

great goodness one of the Trinity has entered human nature and become like us.

There is a mixture of the immiscible, a compound of the uncombinable: that is, of

the uncircumscribable with the circumscribed, if the boundless with the bounded, of

the limitless with the limited, of the formless with the well-formed (which is indeed

paradoxical). For this reason Christ is depicted in images, and the invisible accepts

the circumscription natural to His body." 8

The Judaic equivalence between God and the word YHWH as written in the

scriptures privileged the word as the site of contact between the human and the divine.

For theologians writing during the Iconoclast controversy, however, this linguistic

monopoly ever representation was broken by the Incarnation, "For the Word became

flesh and dwelt among us." 9 This movement of God from Word (law) to Image

(incarnation) opened up a space of legitimacy not just for holy images, but for the Church

as a whole, which contained a variety of non-scriptural bearers of truth and tradition:

orally transmitted knowledge about Christ, patristic teaching, liturgical practice, etc.

Since Christ was a visible, audible, tangible object in the world, the divine Word could

now be a multimedia experience.

Overcoming the problem of representing the infinite was not sufficient to fully

justify holy images. The problem is not merely one of representing the unrepresentable,

which was overcome by the Incarnation, but of representation as such: what is the

relationship between the image and its subject? The issue of representation was also one

of veneration. Christians saw the Pagans as having been deceived by the devil into

8 St. Theodore the Studite, "First Refutation of the Iconoclasts", in On the Holy Icons (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1981) p. 21.9 John 1:14.

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worshipping the creation rather than the creator—they were accused of believing that

Gods actually resided within cult objects, of falling prey to an illusion of divine

indwelling and identity between being and representation. Of course one could not

completely deny the connection between image and subject if the image was to have any

efficacy in worship. So one of the most important tasks of the Iconophile theologians was

to create a doctrine of the relationship between Christ and the image of Christ. Once

again, the divine economy10 of the Trinity and the incarnate Son provided a conceptual

basis. St. John of Damascus writes:

"You see, how it was on account of idolatry that He prohibited the fashioning of

images, and that it is impossible to depict God who is incommensurable and

uncircumscribable… But since this discourse is about the image and its veneration,

let us elucidate their meaning. An image is a likeness depicting an archetype, but

having some difference from it; the image is not like the archetype in every way.

The son is a living, natural undeviating image of the Father, bearing in himself the

whole Father, equal to him in every respect, differing only in being caused. For the

father is the natural cause and the son is caused."11

10 Following Mondzain, I use the term "economy" to mean oikonomia in the Byzantine sense of the word. The first sixty pages of Image, Icon, Economy are devoted to analyzing this concept, and it comes to describe a complex circular exchange of forms and values, channeled through the "natural image" and the "artificial image" that structures the relation between the Divine, human salvation, and imperial power. For now I will simply point out that our modern Marxian definition of the economic, which is based on scarcity, debt, and exchange/use value is quite different from oikonomia. The latter comes from the root oikos, which originally described the familial space of the homestead in contradistinction to the political realm of the polis. Unlike economy, oikonomia does not involve the accruing of abstract value by movement from areas of surplus to areas of lack, but rather a shifting equilibrium within an intimate, relational sphere. 11 St. John of Damascus, "Treatise I: Defense against those who attack the holy images by our Father among the Saints John Damascene" in Three Treatises on the Divine Images (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2003) p. 25.

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One of the earliest of the Orthodox writers to take up the defense of icons after the

outbreak of Iconoclasm, composing three major treatises from the early to mid eighth

century, John of Damascus sought to discredit the Iconoclasts with an overwhelming

body of evidence from scripture. Constantly citing both Old and New Testament

passages, as well as major Church Fathers such as Basil the Great, he was more

concerned with justifying icons by attaching them to more stable elements of Orthodoxy

than with articulating a philosophical argument that would lead to a theory of image

production. However, in the passage quoted above we see the beginnings of a complex

economy of identity, archetype, presence, and veneration that would eventually be

developed into a rigorous theorization of the functioning of an icon.

According to Mondzain, it was Nikephoros, writing during the second Iconoclast

crisis, who pushed forward the development of Iconophile thought into a philosophical

system about images in general which remains applicable to this day:

"What makes Nikephoros's personality so modern and so fascinating is of two

different orders… The defense of the production of icons is always a spiritual

obligation connected directly to the thought of the evangelists and church fathers. In

Nikephoros, however, contemplation of the issue has an entirely different breadth: it

concerns the nature of all images and the impossibility of thinking and ruling without

them… The stakes of the image are therefore not only of concern to Christological

orthodoxy; they are political and philosophical, and of the first magnitude."12

The system proposed by Nikephoros hinges on the introduction of a distinction between

two types of image: the natural image and the artificial image. Whereas the Iconoclasts

see consubstantiality or homoousia as inherent to every kind of image, therefore making

12 Marie- José Mondzain Image, Icon, Economy (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005) p.8.

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it impossible to produce non-sacrilegious images of the divine, Iconophile thought saw

consubstantiality as present only in the category of the natural image. In Christianity, the

two important examples of the natural image are the Son as the natural image of the

Father, and the Eucharist as the natural image of Christ (Iconoclasts, incidentally, argued

that the Eucharist was established by Christ as the only true image of himself, and that

creating mimetic images was a betrayal of his commandment). In the artificial image, on

the other hand, the link between image and subject is not one of consubstantiality but

rather a relational one which maintains the aspect of formal resemblance even though the

substances are heterogeneous:13

"The archetype is the principle and the model underlying the visible form that is made

from it, as well as the cause from which resemblance derives. This is the definition of

the icon such that one could use it for all artificial icons; an icon is a likeness of the

archetype, and on it is stamped, by means of its resemblance, the whole of the visible

form of what it is a likeness of, and it is distinct from its model only in terms of a

different essence because of its material. Or: an icon is an imitation of the archetype

and a copy differing from the model in its essence and in its underlying substance…

indeed, if the icon does not differ in anything from the archetype, then it is not an icon,

but nothing other than the archetype itself. Thus, the icon is a likeness and a replica of

beings who have their own existence."14

Laying aside for the moment Mondzain's fascinating analysis of Nikephoros's writings in

relation to images as the basis of the temporal power of the Church and the Emperor, we

see in Nikephoros the doctrine of the icon fully-fledged. While the indwelling of an idol

and the consubstantiality of the natural image are rejected in the theory of the artificial

image, the relation between icon and archetype in this system of thought is far more

13 ibid. p.72.14 Nikephoros, Patriarch of Constantinople, Antirrhetics. Extracts reprinted in Mondzain, pp. 234-245; 236.

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powerful than what we today usually associate with a "picture" of something. Christ is

not merely the "subject" of a painting, he is not just "represented" in the painting. He is

the model, the principle, and the cause of the image; he differs from the image only in the

fact that it is made from a different material. The materiality of the icon does not have the

same material presence as the archetype, but it is a presence nonetheless.

The intensity of the connection between icon and archetype, which is the basis for

the icon's right to veneration, is facilitated by the fact that "the whole of the visible form"

is "stamped" on the surface of the icon. This principle of creating presence by rendering

in line and color the "whole of the visible form of the archetype" is the theological core

that structures the whole formal system of Byzantine painting, which is dominated by

frontal, full-figure renderings of Christ, Mary, and the Saints. Such Byzantine "portraits,"

which are not strictly speaking portraits at all, differ radically from the traditional

Western definition of portraiture. Both aim in some way for an "idealized" form of the

model, but while Western portraiture seeks a psychological synthesis of an individual

personality, the Byzantine portrait does not aim for naturalistic resemblance of any kind.

Rather, it uses a canonical set of characteristic details that allow the archetype to be

instantly recognizable and fully present. One might call it, paradoxically, a form of

"abstract similitude" which forges an identity between icon and archetype that avoids

both the idolatrous consubstantiality and the scopic naturalism of Renaissance art.

The idea of the archetype as a cause, a structuring force, and a presence within the

icon allows for the icon to function as a "portal" connecting the faithful to the saints

physically and spiritually rather than just visually. When an icon is venerated, it transmits

worship to the person depicted, rather than being the object of worship itself. To avoid

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any misallocation of worship, all iconic figures must be instantly recognizable. This is the

reason for the canonical rigor demanded of iconographers, as well as the use of

denotative text, which together create an instant and unmistakable connection between

viewer and archetype.

The face, dress, and position of individual saints bear formal markers of identity for

instant recognizability. This is, however a minimal, ascetic use of detail in an art form

that doesn't otherwise engage in detail-rich individuation. Eastern Christian art is not

corporeal— the bodies are all the same, since the saints depicted in them are all

approaching the spiritual ideal of theosis, of transforming the physical body by bringing

the soul closer to God. Byzantine art thus effaces the dissimilarity of the individual body

in favor of representing the spiritual essence that is common to all.

While the notion of capturing the entire visible form of the archetype is one of the

structuring principles of the formal specificity of Byzantine iconography, Nikephoros's

reference to icons as "likeness and replica of beings who have their own existence"

dictates the content of Byzantine imagery. Only things that have a real existence in the

world, that are or have been viewed by human eyes, are to be represented. This prevents

both idolatrous circumscription of the infinite, as well as the making up of idolatrous

fictions like the Pagan gods and all their attendant nymphs, demigods, and monstrous

creatures.

The importance of the Incarnation for the possibility of representing the divine

comes to the fore here, as does the correlation between text and image. The Gospels,

because they contain eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus, can be illustrated and

presented in visual form. If the Evangelists saw the Christ event taking place in front of

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them as a visual form, why not use paint and mosaic to make copies of a visual

experience which was already present in the world, in the retinas of the eyewitnesses?

Images of on-corporeal beings that have been witnessed and recounted by prophets and

saints, such as angels and demons, as well as depictions of otherworldly events like the

descent of Christ into Sheol, said to have been witnessed by Adam and Eve, can also be

justified in this way. Images of God the Father, such as Renaissance images depicting

him as a bearded older man, are strictly forbidden—as are any other beings or events that

are perhaps known to exist but have not been "captured" by a human eye, and thus have

no visual precedent from which to re-create the presence of the archetype.

The absolute rejection of all fictions in the art of the Orthodox Church is the first

place where I want to draw a parallel to early Soviet art in general and Vertovian cinema

in particular. Later in this essay I will explore the way in which both the Byzantine

tradition and Vertov's the theory of the Kino-Eye anchor their renouncement of idolatrous

fictions by recourse to different versions of a single doctrine of the "image-not-made-by-

human hands:" the acheiropoieta of Christian lore on one hand, and the indexical imprint

of the cinematographic apparatus on the other. For now, however, I want to linger on this

radical injunction in both Vertovian and Christian imagery against the representation of

fictions. Fundamentally, images can either tell truths to the viewer, by replicating real,

verifiable visual experiences, or they can trick the viewer by creating a visual experience

that has no real existence. The potential of believing that a fictional image is actually true

had, in the Christian worldview, consequences greater even than life and death—it

threatened the salvation of the eternal soul. A man who is tricked into believing that an

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idol is indeed real, and worships it, falls out of the divine economy of salvation, which is

thus revealed to be intimately related with representation.

Today, we do not generally believe that our salvation is threatened by the

possibility of believing a fictional image to be true. We have to teach our children to be

critical readers of the media so that they don't get suckered into buying something useless

or voting for a rascally politician, but it's not often a matter of life and death. For the

Communist believer at the moment of the Revolution, however the stakes of

representation were much higher. The salvation of the proletariat was dependent on their

ability to see the true, materialist essence of the world, and not be sucked in by the all the

false idols offered up by the exploiting class, that Great Deceiver, to keep them from the

Truth and the path to salvation.

With this in mind, I would like to propose the following text as an addendum to

Mondzain's preliminary excursions into modern battlefield of the ancient war between

idolaters and iconophiles, and to challenge the reader to find in its rhetoric other parallels

between Byzantine iconicity and Vertovian documentality:

1) Film-drama is the opium of the people.

2) Down with the immortal kings and queens of the screen! Long live the ordinary mortal, filmed in life at his daily tasks!

3) Down with the bourgeois fairy-tale script! Long live life as it is!

4) Film-drama and religion are deadly weapons in the hands of capitalists. By showing our revolutionary way of life, we will wrest that weapon from the enemy's hands.

5) The contemporary artistic drama is a vestige of the old world. It is an attempt to pour our revolutionary reality into bourgeois molds.

6) Down with the staging of everyday life! Film us as we are,

7) The scenario is a fairy tale invented for us by a writer. We live our own lives, and we do not submit to anyone's fictions.

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8) Each of us does his task in life and does not prevent anyone else from working.

9) Long live the kino-eye of the proletarian revolution! 15

3. Pedagogy

While the bulk of extant argumentation about the appropriateness of holy images is

Christological in nature, focusing on the doctrine of the incarnation and the issues

surrounding the representation and veneration of images of a God-man, it was evident

from the earliest centuries of Christianity that the pedagogical power of images to instruct

the illiterate and to supplement the textual narratives of the liturgy was a central concern

for the Church. For all their importance as conduits for veneration and for all the

theological scaffolding that was erected around them, icons were always valued most, I

would argue, as the visual equivalent of the Gospel texts. As Hans Belting has written,

theologians were often the weaker party in a constant back-and-forth with everyday

worshippers who experienced images on various practical levels. Belting sees the

theology of icons as being in large part a game of catch-up in which theologians gave in

to already established cultic practices, attempt to temper and control them by issuing

conditions and limitations governing access to them.16

The following passage is from a 867 homily in honor of the inauguration of a new

mosaic of the Virgin in the imperial cathedral of Hagia Sophia. It was given by Photius,

an important Iconphile thinker, who held the post of Patriarch of Constantinople during

15 Dziga Vertov, "Provisional Instructions for the Kino-Eye groups" (1922) in Annette Michelson, ed. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) p. 71.16 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) p. 1.

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the restoration of icons to churches after the end of the iconoclast period. Its rhetoric

reveals the centrality of teaching in images to the Iconophile project:

"Christ came to us in the flesh, and was borne in the arms of His Mother. This is

seen and confirmed and proclaimed in pictures, the teaching made manifest by

means of personal eyewitness, and impelling the spectators to unhesitating assent.

Does a man hate the teaching by means of pictures? Then how could he not have

previously rejected and hated the message of the Gospels? Just as speech [is

transmitted] by hearing, so a form through sight is imprinted upon the tablets of the

soul… Has a man lent his ear to a story? Has his intelligence visualized and drawn

to itself what he has heard? Then, after judging it with sober attention, he deposits

it in his memory. No less—indeed much greater—is the power of sight. For surely,

having somehow through the outpouring and effluence of the optical rays touched

and encompassed the object, it too sends the essence of the thing seen on to the

mind, letting it be conveyed from there to the memory for the concentration of

unfailing knowledge. Has the mind seen? Has it grasped? Has it visualized? Then it

has effortlessly transmitted the forms to the memory."17

This passage makes an interesting move that brings together Christological

argumentation with the call for teaching in images. There is a very clever logic to the turn

of phrase about the iconoclast having to also reject the message of the gospels. Although

he goes on to make his main point about the equivalence between transmitting knowledge

through images and through text, my slightly speculative reading of this passage would

propose that he is actually describing the incarnate Christ himself as a form of "teaching

in images." Did not the Galilean who witnessed Jesus preaching to her have an image of

Jesus in front of her eyes as she heard the original words of the message transmitted in

the gospel writings? What Photius is getting at is that in their original "staging" or

17 Photius, Homily XVII. in Mango, C., ed. The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312-1453. Sources and Documents. (Englewood Cliffs, 1972) pp.187-190.

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"incarnation," the Gospels were, in fact, "illustrated" by an image of Christ—a

combination of image and text that is replicated in the Iconophile liturgy.

In any event, the point here is that Photius reveals the Church's concern with the

practical matter of using images to spread the Gospel message. Coming out of an

iconophobic scriptural and cultural tradition which privileged the text of the Scriptures

above all other sources of truth, Photius and other defenders of icons argued that images

and text were fundamentally equivalent. Not only that, images were in many cases

superior, both for their immediacy and the greater ease of apprehension—especially for

those who couldn't read. Photius is speaking to an elite Constantinopolitan audience, and

does not address this matter here directly, but the key role of images in proselytism and

the instruction of new converts is implied in the concept of "teaching in images."

The clear importance for the ecclesiastical establishment of teaching the Good

News of the Gospels to unconverted, illiterate people within and beyond the borders of

the Empire partially contradicts Belting's narrative about the struggle over images

between the ecclesiastics and the common believers. Belting claims that theologians

generally resented the power of icons: "Whenever images threatened to gain undue

influence within the church, theologians have sought to strip them of their power…

Rather than introducing images, theologians were all to ready to ban them."18 However,

all four of the Iconophile clerics I have quoted so far include in their discourses a defense

of icons based on the power of images to effectively spread the word of the gospel. If the

ability of images to increase the numbers of their congregations was so evident to these

theologians, they would really have to think twice before renouncing that power.

18 Belting, p. 1.

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Generic convention would prevent the Iconophile writers' texts from discussing

the nuts and bolts issue of converting foreigners to the Orthodox faith, since they were

written in an elevated theological register. However, this task must have been on the

minds of many within the Church hierarchy. The formidable missionary efforts of the

Byzantine empire are well known—and were usually combined with an extremely

effective diplomatic apparatus that allowed the militarily and economically weakening

empire to survive in a hostile world and project power well beyond its apparent means.

Unlike the Western Church, which maintained that only the sacred tongues of Latin,

Greek, and Hebrew could be used as liturgical languages, and refused to translate sacred

texts into the profane languages of the barbarians, the policy of the Byzantines was to

"sacralize" the barbarian languages.19 The most notable example of the success of this

policy was the mission to the Slavs on which the brothers Cyril and Methodius were

dispatched in 862. The brothers created the first written Slavic language, executed a

series of scriptural translations, and were in part responsible for the conversion of the

Rus' to Orthodoxy— the foundation of an important alliance for Byzantium.

The powerful interrelationship between text and image that Photius insists on in

his homily is paralleled in an interesting way in the story of the conversion of the Kievan

Grand Prince Vladimir, as told in the Primary Chronicle. The story of the Rus shows that

the combination of text and image is the most powerful pedagogical medium. From one

side, there was the spread of Orthodox texts through the Slavic lands initiated by Cyril

and Methodius, which allowed the Rus' to worship in their own language. From the other

side, there is the famous chronicle account of how Vladimir's emissaries, who traveled

19 Horace G. Lunt, Old Church Slavonic Grammar (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001) p.2.

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the world on a mission to select the best religion, chose Orthodoxy. The first two trips, to

be Muslim Bulgars and the Catholic Germans, were not impressive.

"Then we went on to Greece, and the Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship

their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there

is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know

only that God dwells there among men… for we cannot forget that beauty."20

This account is a testament to the ability of Byzantine emperors to project power and

righteousness through the awe-inspiring spectacle of their court, which had as its

centerpiece lavish liturgies in the magnificent churches of Constantinople. But the deeply

affective power of images is not only used for the projection of imperial grandeur and

piety, but also for incorporating the viewer on a sensual and emotional level into the

teachings of the church. The Divine Liturgy of John Chrysostom directs the priest to

proclaim in the Final Litany, "Sanctify those who love the beauty of thy house…"

pointing to the importance of visual experience in the process of coming to know God.

The spreading of the Byzantine faith was thus a one-two punch of text and image,

and the power of this combination was not lost on the Soviet authorities either. The

earliest works of Bolshevik art were agitational posters which combined memorable

slogans with iconic imagery:

20 Primary Chronicle, translated by Samuel H. Cross http://web.ku.edu/~russcult/culture/handouts/chronicle_all.html, accessed 2011.

19

Dmitri Moor, "You! Have you Volunteered?" (1920) ; El Lissitzky, "Smash the Whites with a Red Wedge" (1919)

Such integration of image and text into a single visual space, though present in Roman

art, is most characteristic of Byzantine iconography. (Incidentally, both of these posters

use other formal techniques which can be traced back to a Byzantine influence: flatness

and abstraction in the case of Lissitsky, and the frontal, dominating figures of Byzantine

icons which create dynamic exchange of gaze and gesture with the viewer, in the case of

Moor). The mnemonic and persuasive potential of this formal technique of concisely

combining iconic image and accompanying text was well known already to the early

Christians—especially by that great symbolic warrior and propagandist Constantine. The

textual supplementat to the iconic image remains integral to Orthodox representation to

this day:

20

Contemporary icon of Christ the Teacher; Coin with Chi Rho symbol used by Constantine (353)

On first examination, it may seem obvious that the Bolsheviks would turn to

images to aid them in their revolutionary endeavors. They were, after all, operating in the

early twentieth century—a time of huge technical advances both in the production of

images (photography) and their distribution (mass production of printed posters). It made

tactical sense to appropriate the dynamic combinations of image and text that were used

by capitalist to powerful effect in their advertisements and war propaganda. But did this

mean that the Soviet state unesitatingly embrace all modes of image production, merely

seeking efficacy? And if so, is my comparison with the cautious (or downright fearful)

Christian attitude towards images unwarranted? That the Bolshevik Revolution was

iconoclast in the simple sense is evident in the public burning of Russian icons, the

21

dismantling of Tsarist monuments, and the calls by Kazimir Malevich and others to burn

the contents of all the museums. But where they Iconophile in the Byzantine sense of

being suspicious of images in general? The two iconoclasms do not necessarily go hand

in hand; all conquering powers are iconoclast, but they may simply replace the images of

the old regime with their own version of exactly the same types of idols.

A look across a range of aesthetic practices within the Soviet avant-garde shows

that the destructive wave of revolutionary iconoclasm had a profound effect on artists.

(One must allow for some leeway here in periodizing this, since the roots of the avant-

garde extent back many years before October 1917, as does Russian Communism. The

relationship between the avant-garde and the Revolution is a complex one, and the fairly

pluralistic atmosphere of the early years of the Soviet project meant that many fellow-

traveling artists who were not themselves Bolsheviks were empowered by state to

develop a new art for the new society. I think it's reasonable to claim, however, that

broadly speaking Modernism and Socialism developed hand-in-hand in the Russian

context, and the cresting of the Bolshevik wave brought the two together in an extreme

ratcheting-up of the stakes). Around the period of the Revolution, one sees everywhere

proclamations about the end of old image practices. Dziga Vertov announces the death of

fiction film; Kazimir Malevich paints his "Black Square," hanging it in the traditional

corner spot of the icon at The Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10, and proclaims that he has

reached the "zero-point of representation" and the end of the history of painting; Vladimir

Tatlin, who also exhibits in 0,10, gives up painting altogether; and most radically of all,

the Constructivist movement discredits the artist himself as an obsolete figure, calling for

the end not only of autonomous aesthetics but of art itself, and attempting to lead an

22

exodus of artists into the proletarian workforce as designers or facilitators of industrial

processes. In all of these cases, however, the iconoclastic gesture is followed by a

continued production of images in some form. Vertov's practice explodes in a range of

innovative documentary techniques. Malevich continues to experiment with Suprematist

non-objectivity, and then retraces his steps back through art history, filling in the gaps in

his progression between Cubism and Suprematism. Tatlin develops a new form of

counter-relief assemblage, and designs fantastical architectural concepts like his

unrealized model for a "Monument to the Third International" and the non-functional

flying machine "Letatlin." And while a small Productivist offshoot of Constructivism

disappears into the factory to help rationalize industrial production, most members of the

LEF group continue to produce images of one kind or another, whether they are

experimental spatial constructions, patterns for industrial textiles or estranging oblique-

angle photography.

Thus my claim that a neo-Christian iconophobia characterizes Communist

aesthetics as a whole, at least initially, seems to hold water. Further evidence is provided

by Andrés Zervigón, who has recently used the term iconophobia to describe the

Communist movement in Germany. According to him, most Left publications in the

Weimar period, especially the official organs of the KPD, were completely bereft of

images.21 Zervigón's thesis is that having experienced the horrifying manipulative power

of German war propaganda, the KPD leadership was hesitant to employ the deceitful,

illusionist medium of photography in their own endeavors. In order to distance

21 Andrés Mario Zervigón "Russian Iconophiles and German Iconophobes". Paper delivered at the Workshop “Berlin-Moscow 1913-1933,” Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, April 2, 2011.

23

themselves as far as possible from the revolting misuse of images perpetrated by the

imperial and capitalist powers, the KPD appropriated the Protestant and Judaic dogma of

sola scriptura, thinking that the written word could be the bearer of Marxist critique

against the manipulative spectacle of capital. Of the German Communist publications,

only the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung ventured to appropriate the use of photography—

but it was inspired by the Soviet experience and partially funded from Moscow, which, as

Zervigón notes, was extremely committed to visual propaganda.

In contrast to the Germans, the Soviets were true Iconophiles, casting down the

idols of the old regime, but creating a way to tame the power of images through a new

doctrine of the image that would negate the legacy of Capitalist manipulation. Although I

am tempted to attribute this difference between the CPSU and the KPD entirely to a

historical continuity with the iconophilic culture of Orthodox Christianity on one side,

compared with the influence of the more iconoclast religious backdrop of Lutheranism

and Judaism which inflected German Communism, it seems that the driving force behind

Bolshevik acceptance of image production was a more practical one. In 1917 Lenin and

his associates found themselves ruling over a vast population of mostly illiterate peasants,

and realized that it would take an immense propaganda effort to bring these extremely

traditionalist people into the revolutionary class consciousness of the twentieth century.

Not long after achieving complete power, in the waning moths of the civil war,

Lenin proclaimed the cinema to be the most vital strategic weapons system in the arsenal

of the continuing struggle for hearts and minds. In his famous directive to the Commissar

of Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lenin stated that a new cinema, suffused with

Communist ideas, must begin by developing a purely Soviet form of newsreel. He

24

continued: "You must develop production to a larger scale, and especially work to

propagate healthy cinema among the urban masses, and even more importantly—in the

villages… [keeping] firmly in mind that of all the arts, cinema, for us, is the most

important."22 The idea of a "healthy cinema" and its importance for the Communist

education of the masses came to Lenin, who was beginning his career just as cinema was

being born, as he observed the booming cinema scene of Western Europe. In 1907, he

wrote:

" As long as cinema remains in the hands of base speculators it causes more harm than

good, often perverting the masses with the disgusting content of the films. But… when

the masses take command of cinema and it falls into the hands of true champions of

socialist culture, it will be revealed as one of the most powerful means of enlightening

the masses."23

These words strike an imposing imperative note coming from the pen of the Great Leader

of the World Proletariat. More so than the practitioners of other arts, a huge amount of

pressure was put on filmmakers—specifically the producers of documentary newsreel—

to develop a cinema that was maximally pure and maximally effective for the conversion

of the illiterate masses of the Soviet village and factory district.

By far the most successful of those who stepped forward to develop this radically

new Soviet newsreel, Dziga Vertov is the Soviet image maker who felt perhaps more

keenly than any other the difficulty of navigating between idolatry, iconoclasm, and

iconophilia that also confronted Orthodox art. Painters like Malevich and other avant-

garde visual artists working in traditional media, including photographers, were slightly

22 Vladimir Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii Vol. 44. p. 579.23 Vladimir Lenin, Samoe vazhnoe iz vsekh isskustv. Lenin o kino. Sbornik dokumentov I materlialov, (Мoscow, 1963). p.93.

25

buffered from the commissars' demands for an efficacious form of mass propaganda by

the walls of the new Soviet art schools. The effect was such that the other artists could

afford to err on the side of the pure and the new—e.g., retreat into abstraction and purely

formal experimentation— while Vertov had to constantly walk a tightrope between the

imperative to tame the idolatrous potential of cinema, and the need to maximize its

potential as a new Communist "Gospel in images."

Amazingly, he and his collaborators were able to entrench themselves for years in

the pressure cooker that was early Soviet newsreel, and made some magnificent films in

the process. But despite his innovative brilliance as a filmmaker and film theorist, the

stringent and shifting nature of the ideological demands ultimately wore him down; the

late-career success of Three Songs about Lenin was the exception to a constantly

contentious and difficult career that ended in obscurity. Perhaps the collapse of his

cinematic system (which was given new in the 1960s among the Left Bank faction of the

French New Wave, has seen a revival in recent decades within cinema studies, and is

currently being studied24 and celebrated25 in the contemporary art world) proves nothing

else but the ultimate impossibility of creating both a theory and a practice to meet the

politico-aesthetic needs of a new society within the space of a single lifetime. After all, it

took the Byzantines eight centuries, seven ecumenical councils, and two civil wars to get

it right.

4. Iconomachy

24 John MacKay, "A Revolution in Film," Artforum, April 2011, Vol. 49,# 8, pp. 196-20325 The Museum of Modern Art, Dziga Vertov : Career retrospective and lecture series) New York: April 15–June 4, 2011.

26

The position Vertov found himself in vis-à-vis Lenin's commandments, balancing

between the desire for purity and the demand for pedagogical efficacy, was something of

an inversion of Belting's account of the relationship between theology and practice in

Byzantium, or rather an extreme condensation of the process. Instead of adapting theory

to justify and contain long-established artistic practices, Leninist image policy laid out

criteria for how a truly "orthodox" Communist cinema should function, and imposed

them as the law of the land. In this sense, Lenin is a theologian-prince, comparable to the

Iconoclast Emperor Leo III, who inaugurated Byzantine iconoclasm in 726 by

proclaiming an edict against icons and destroying the image of Christ on the palace

gate.26

Unlike the slow development and gradual rise to power of Christian imagery, the

Bolshevik takeover instantly cast down the Tsarist system of representation in Petrograd,

and the race was on to build a new system of representation that would both reflect the

eternal truths of Marxist-Leninist teleology, and project the temporal power of the Soviet

state. For Lenin, the most important element of this new system was to be the cinema—

and like the bishops and church decorators who had to scramble to discern how to best to

adorn their churches in obedience to the new ban against icons, the Soviet film industry

scrambled to fill the cinema temples with the Communist newsreels envisaged by Lenin.

Both Lenin and Leo initiated their iconomachy in the context of an actual war,

and were able to accomplish the overthrow of the old regime of representation only with

the help of an army at their back. The Byzantine army, which marched into battle

carrying icons that were supposed to aid them in their victory, had suffered a series of

26 Belting, p. 147.

27

humiliating defeats at the hands of an Arab enemy that seemed to worship the same God

as they did but which was radically aniconic. A majority of the soldiers thus supported

the Emperor's iconoclast edict, 27 believing that God was punishing them for idolatry and

hoping that setting things right would help them to reclaim their lost territories. Of

course, as various authors have suggested, the Emperor's fears about idolatry may have

been an excuse to strike a decisive blow in a centuries-long tug of war between the

Imperial throne and the Patriarchal seat. Though lacking access to the reins of military or

economic power, the Byzantine Church exercized a strong moral authority over the

Emperors, and had say over important public images—a power which any prince covets

for himself. The ban on icons stripped the church of its iconic power, and gave the

Emperor, whose non-sacred images were still acceptable, a monopoly over

representation. Apparently in response to this, three years after Leo's edict The Patriach

of Constantinople Germanus resigned in protest.28

In a strange convergence of history, which illustrates the historical as well as

conceptual longevity of the Byzantine tradition, both Leo and Lenin technically had as

their adversary in their battles over public representation the Patriarch of Constantinople.

When the Bolsheviks set about destroying churches and burning icons in an effort to

subjugate the Russian Orthodox Church and destroy it’s the power of its images, the

Constantinopolitan see still had primus inter pare status, making the Patriarch there the

honorary head of the Orthodox communion against which Lenin was at war. Strangely

enough, as both Imperial and Communist symbols of power have fallen into the dustbin

27 ibid.28

28

of history, the Orthodox Church continues to project its self-image to hundreds of

millions of people worldwide.

The Bolshevik iconomachy was not directed primarily at the Orthodox church,

although the overthrow of Christianity was a hugely important element of the symbolic

violence unleashed by the Revolution. While Tsarist power incorporated Orthodoxy into

the structure of its symbolic authority, by the twentieth century Imperial Russia had a

very secularized state apparatus in which the church played a rather marginal role.

Instead of founding its iconocracy on a symbiosis with Christian divine economy as did

the Byzantine Emperors,29 the Tsars after Peter the Great projected symbolic power using

the Western imperial model. Vast palaces and plazas, statues of Tsars and classical

statuary including Roman collumns, military pageantry, and the ubiquitous crest of the

double-headed eagle radiated from the imperial seat in Petrograd—a city built on the

Western coast of Russia and designed to imitate and draw closer to the capitals of the

great maritime empires of the West. In the face of all this, it is clear that for the

29 For a full discussion of the interrelationship between the earthly power of the Emperor, iconic representation, and the divine economy, see the chapter 5 in Mondzain: "Iconic Space and Territorial Rule." There is not space here for a full account of this subtle and important philosophical project, which begins with a semantic study of the Greek concept of oikonomia. Suffice it to say that by inscribing his own image into the divine image-economy of the Trinity, the Emperor grounds his finite temporal and territorial power in an eternal hierarchy of representation that already extends across all of space and time. This notion of divine economy and the role of the state within it is comparable to the eternal, superhuman economy of the materialist Dialectic, from which the Soviet state derives a transcendent, trans-temporal legitimacy by claiming for itself a specific place within the historical process. While the Christian economy of salvation is less linear and more relational than Communist teleology, they serve similar functions in their respective societies. Both the Incarnation and the Dialectic contain the promise of salvation, whether in God's kingdom or a utopian final synthesis of the material world. By allowing the state to inscribe its images into representations of the historical movement towards salvation, these structures justify profane, temporal power simply by granting it a supporting role in a sacred eschatology.

29

Bolsheviks iconoclasm was as much a military necessity as it was a moral duty to

overthrow the exploitative, corrupting, yet powerful images of Captial and Empire.30

In the period of the Civil War, Bolshevik image production directed its energies to

propaganda for the war effort, using the new technology of poster art to flood public

spaces with images of heroic Reds, baby-killing Whites, and healthy, muscular

proletarian bodies cleansing the world of crooked, degenerate, aristocratic softies.

Newsreel programs such as the Kino-Nedelya, where Vertov got his start as a filmmaker,

were primarily practical and agitational in purpose, as were most of the other films

produced during the war. Alexander Medvedkin, Vertov's peer in the Soviet film

industry, got his start as a director while serving in Budyonny's Red Cavalry, directing

entertaining agit-theater shows involving horse masks and shooting agitational films on

how to maintain proper hygeine—another militarily important early use of the cinema.

Early in their careers, Vertov and Medvedkin both traversed the new Soviet land in

mobile film theaters and production studios called "agit-trains" or "cine-trains."

Participating in these cine-trains—the media equivalent to the armoured artillery trains

favored by the Red Army— they must have felt quite heroic, chasing the remaining

phantasms of monarchism, capitalism, and religion to their hiding places in the darkest

corners of Siberia and blasting them with the piercing light of a dynamic new technology

that rolls over ossified illusions with it's spinning film reel of untainted images captured

by the Camera Eye.

30 For a striking visualization of Revolutionary iconoclasm see Eisenstein's 1928 film October, wherein he mobilizes the avant-garde technique of montage to animate a statue of Peter the Great, forcing it to fall apart on screen—a scene of dynamic, new media technology and revolutionary technique of representation dancing on the grave of old media and imperial iconography which has been stripped of all its power.

30

5. Incorporation

As the civil war ended and an increase in resources allowed the Soviet film industry to

expand, there was a shift in cinematic production from agitational propaganda designed

to win the war to a self-presentation of the new state to its citizens. As Evgeny Dobrenko

recounts in his essay "Creation myth and myth creation in Stalinist cinema,"31 a first wave

of mythologizing narrative films, inaugurated by Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925)

and epitomized by October, was commissioned by the state to create a common

historical narrative for the Soviet people. The state's interest in the power of images

evolved from the War Communist model of agitation and iconoclasm to the Five Year

Plan model of projecting state authority an creating in people a consciousness of their

role in the new society. A film like October simultaneously projected the power of the

Soviet authorities through the grandeur of its spectacle, and forged a unity between the

state and the people by staging the origin myth of the Revolution. The now established

Soviet state exploited the potential of media, especially narrative cinema, to manufacture

shared communal experience and thus create identification with a Revolutionary

consciousness. The result was a textual system that inscribed individuals into a common

origin, a hierarchical representation of the state and society, and a teleology.

Vertov's film Three Songs about Lenin (1934) is one of the most powerful

examples of using media to incorporate the individual subject into a greater whole, doing

so through the singularity of the person of Lenin. In this film, which shows pride in the

great legacy of Lenin among people living their lives in the bright, new world of the

31 Evgeny Dobrenko, "Creation myth and myth creation in Stalinist cinema." Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Volume 1 Number 3, 2007, pp. 239-264.

31

Soviet Union, and mourns his loss by depicting weeping faces at his funeral, combines

these images with a litany of intertitles to create a hymn of praise and mourning in which

the Soviet people as a whole, as well as each individual, becomes a living testament to

Lenin's greatness. At the same time as it creates the people as an organic whole by

linking each individual to their communal legacy of Lenin, the film situates the individual

heirarchically within this whole. As Michelson has pointed out, the film essentially

anoints the Stalin as the successor to Lenin and the earthly steward of his revelation.

It is crucial to note that Michelson uses her concept of the "textual system," which

also applies very well to the unified and heirarchical representation of the cosmos in

Christian iconography, only in her analysis of Three Songs, and does not apply it to

Vertov's earlier work. While a work like Man with a Movie Camera (1929) may have

something like a language or system of its own, it is not inscribed within a specific

Communist cosmology. The movie camera does not preside over the establishment of a

new symbolic order, but rather rearranges the world into an expression of pure dynamism

and a delerious catalog of cinematic effects. The viewer may be totally immersed in the

radically restructured world revealed to him by the kino-eye in Man with a Movie

Camera, but the effect does not last after he leaves the theater because it is not inscribed

in a unified symbolic system. Other images, herirachies, and modes of representation

appear in his visual space, taking him out of his incorporation in the world of the camera-

eye. This clash of representational systems that marked the early period of Soviet avant-

garde art may have been diverse or even democratic, but it lacked the systematization

necessary to allow a subject to feel incorporated into something larger than himself—a

feeling cultivated by both the Soviet state and the Orthodox church.

32

Creating such a coherent textual system has clear benefits both for statecraft and

religious devotion. The Orthodox Church developed a sophisicated synthesis of the arts

to take advantage of the formal qualities of every concievable medium in the task of

presenting Christian cosmology to its audience. The architectural space of the cathedral

itself plays a key role in various aspects of this incorporation machine, the first of which

is creating a regulated visual space wherein the Church could exert the level of control

necessary for a coherent staging of its narratives, heirarchies, and symbols. In Likeness

and Presence, Hans Belting has written a short history of how the Church began to use

liturgy and architectural space to exert control over images:

"The church was confronted with existing images that were credited with

miraculous power. In order to control their effect and to distract attention from magical

expectations, images had to be explained rationally, emphasizing the immaterial

presence of the archetype and devaluing the material presence of the image as object.

Such theological efforts, however, were far from being understood by the common

people and no powerful weapon against idolatry. The church therefore resorted to the

practical solution of taking the images under firm control and using church decoration

as what we might call an applied theory of images. There always had been churches

with images, but now images were presented in the framework of a well-devised

program that allowed for a carefully guided, strictly limited kind of worship… They

had a predetermined location in the churches and were given a specified function in

church ritual. The church directed attention first and foremost to the official liturgy,

which contributed to the control of the image and was the primary means of

ecclesiastical self-presentation."

Belting's narrative seems to attribute the development of the liturgy almost completely to

the need for controlling and containing the use of Christian imagery, with perhaps the

goal of creating a systematic and reasonable theologal and iconographic practice as a

secondary reason. However, I would argue that the installation and movement of icons

33

between specified locations in the temple is one of a number of techniques used by the

church to create a powerful feeling of a unified world that involved the entirety of human

sensory experience. The Orthodox liturgy combines imagery with architecture, and

engages all of the senses in order to create the feeling of entering into an ordered, eternal,

otherworldy sphere of relations, wherein the lowly worshipper is as much a part of the

unified cosmic representation of God's creation and as the figure of Christ Pantokrator

crowning creation and looking down upon it from the dome of the church.

Upon entering an Orthodox church one immediately gets a sense of a vast,

harmonious heirarchy of angels, prophets, martyrs, and saints, topped with the

aforementioned Christ image in the dome, and extending outward and down from central

image of the Jesus and the Theotokos. Elaborately conceived arrangements of icons

represent the theology of the church through image and space. The different spaces of

church also become representations, and are set off in relation to each other in order to

represent other aspects of theology:

"The signification of each part of the Orthodox church is derived from its

architectural location and its function in the course of the liturgy. The interplay

between the immaterial and the sensory worlds is denoted by the sanctuary and the

nave. At the same time, both these parts constitute an indivisible whole in which the

immaterial serves as an example to the sensory, reminding man of his original

transgression. For Saint Simeon of Thessalonika, the narthex corresponded to earth,

the church to heaven, and the holy sanctuary to what is above heaven. Consequently,

all the paintings in the church, especially those constituting the iconostasis, are

arranged according to this symbolism."32

While the theological aspects of Orthodox church decoration and liturgical practice are

emphasized, and have often been written about in the West, most scholars overlook the

32 Michelson, p.27.

34

purely visual, affective power of the icons in their staging within the liturgical cycle. The

icons and the liturgy are not just there for controlling the veneration of images, or merely

as analytic representations of abstract theology. They are powerful works of media that

successfully achieve the task of incorporation to a degree that, perhaps, only cinema can

rival today. The interplay of icons installed in a church space creates spatio-temporal

effects based on the principle of architectural montage, with narrative and symbolic

meaning emerging from the icons' position relative to one another. Their positioning

relative to other images in the space not only present the church as a hierarchical unity,

but also create dramatic tension within the montage space of the church. The economy of

gazes between icons and viewers, as well as among the icons themselves, creates

energetically charged pathways that act on the participant as he moves through the

liturgy. This elegant ballet of gazes that is staged in a temple is one of the key visual

effects of iconographic art, and has an almost physiological effect.33 When one spends

time over the course of an entire liturgical year standing in front of the iconostasis, a

participatory energetic feedback and a sense of intimate contact the ever-present, familiar

faces of Jesus, Mary, and the Saints is created.

The power of the iconic portrait to create a sense of intimacy was also employed

extensively by the Soviets, first and foremost in the so-called personality cults of Lenin

and Stalin. The ubiquity of their faces, hanging in almost every private and public space,

went hand in hand with the familial and endearing terms like "mustachioed papa" that

33 The combination of architectural space and the use of painting to replicate the effect of eye contact is just one of the formal means by which the orthodox church achieves the feeling of incorporation—the one that functions in the realm of sight. The liturgy also uses incense, choral music, bodily movements like communal prostration, and the illusion of living vibrancy created by gilded and pearled surfaces lit by candlelight to involve all of the senses and the entire body in a unity with the Church. Communion, which is the centerpiece of the liturgy, uses the sense of taste—the most promordial of the senses—to cap the experience of oneness with God.

35

were applied to them. They became family members. All accounts attest to massive and

genuine outpourings of grief after the deaths of both Lenin and Stalin, and the love that

people felt for them was directly related to the power of portraiture to create intimacy.

According to Dobrenko, Socialist Realist cinema exploited this property of the

portrait as well, but combining it with biographical narrative and the Romantic hero. He

writes that the deliberate use of close-ups in films like Chapaev (Vasil'ev Brothers, 1934)

served to plug the viewer in to the mythologizing effect of the film by creating an

intimacy with the hero and following his biography. Dobrenko quotes this brilliant

analysis of the cinematic close-up from an essay by the semiotician Yuri Lotman:

"The close-up in cinema is involuntarily associated with live examination at a very

short distance. Examination of a human face at very short distance is characteristic

either of childhood or of a very intimate world. By these means cinema transports us

into a world where all the characters – friend and foe alike – are placed in an intimate

relationship with the viewer, in close and detailed acquaintance, including not only the

representation of the character’s features, but also a direct view of the patterns of veins

and wrinkles on his face… The feeling of being accustomed to, being acquainted with

this face, transports us to a world where all relations are in principle intimate – the

world of myth."34

Vertov's Three Songs works on this same principle by marshalling the power of the

beloved face of Lenin, tapping the resources of a long-established feeling of intimacy to

incorporate the viewer into a communal Leninist myth. It differs from Chapaev in that it

does so not through narrative but rather through a form of Soviet montage technique

wherein people in spaces all around the USSR are connected through editing into an

imagined space-time where the whole nation unites in a chorus of praise and mourning.

34 Yuri Lotman, ‘Mesto kinoiskusstva v mekhanizme kul'tury,’ in Lotman (ed.), Ob iskusstve, (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo), pp. 658–661.

36

5. Acheiropoiesis

Many critics dismiss Three Songs as a minor work of Vertov's, seeing it as a

collaboration with the Stalinist media apparatus of the Lenin personality cult, and

therefore as a betrayal of his earlier works, which are imagined to be inherently more

democratic, emancipatory, or critical because of their self-reflexivity and formal

innovation. In general, the power of art to incorporate the human being into something

greater than himself, into an imagined totality, is difficult to deal with because its moral

status seems to shift depending on the time and place of its use, and on the ideological

frame from which the moral evaluation takes place. Stalinist and Fascist spectacle

obviously took this effect of incorporation to an extreme, and did so in ways that caused

people to act immorally. On the other hand, contemporary commentators often bemoan

the lack of a modern substitute for lost traditional institutions such as religion, without

which many people suffer from a lack of greater meaning in their lives.

But regardless of how much stock one wants to put in the moral polarity between

critical, reflexive art and affirmative, mythologizing art that appears in contemporary art-

historical debates about Modernism, it's clear that both Byzantine art and Marxist-

Leninist cinema attempted to create images that could bring people together as a

community, educate them about their status as participants in a historical or divine

teleology, and do so in a way that would demonstrate the true, non-manipulative, non-

illusionist, non-idolatrous nature of their representations.

In this framework, one could assert that Three Songs About Lenin is Vertov's most

successful attempt to create a truly Soviet form of documentary. Because it is

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emotionally anchored, centered around the intimately known face of a person rather than

an abstract process as in Vertov's other films, it accomplishes the incorporation of the

viewer into a Soviet textual sytem more effectively than any of his other experiments.

Yet unlike the narrative fiction films which attempt to do the same thing using an actor's

portrayal of Lenin, Three Songs remains true to the iconophile canons laid out in Vertov's

manifestos. Vertov made this film in 1934, at a time when the melodrama he hated so

much was flooding back into Soviet cinema with a vengeance. Meanwhile, he stuck to his

documentary guns, and managed to achieve his first great popular success with Three

Songs.

The powerful effect that Three Songs of Lenin had on Soviet viewers, and the zeal

with which it was embraced and promoted by the authorites, demonstrated that the

documentary image did have a crucial role to play in Soviet aesthetics. Only this fuction

was not, perhaps, what Vertov had first expected it to be. Documentary film, rather than

representing people to themselves and showing a true mirror-image of contemporary

reality, became important as an element in the mythological structure of Soviet history.

The verified, true imprint of Lenin came to serve the same function as the acheiropoietic

image did in Christianity: as the indexical anchor that supports an entire textual system

by verifying the truth of the voice and body of the Savior.

Thus, both Byzantine art and Vertovian cinema use the legend of the uncreated

image—the acheiropoieton, or nerukotvorny obraz— to cement their claims of being

pure, non-idolatrous, authentic systems of representation. Accounts of such images were

widespread in Christianity because they gave a compelling answer to the question, how

does one produce a true image of Christ? The Byzantines, writes Belting, venerated two

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categories of non manufactum images35 whose absolute verifiability made them important

both as proofs of the truth of the Incarnation, and as models from which all other icons

derived and by which they were justified. The first category was that of miraculous

images, which either appeared out of nowhere or were made by an eyewitness who was

guided by the Holy Spirit to make a perfect resemblance. The second category was that of

an imprint made by direct contact with the face or body of the person represented.

The modern relevance of this ancient idea of the indexical image as the true image

is picked up on by Mondzain, Michelson, and even the very historically minded Hans

Belting, who allows a rare moment of anachronism into his discussion of the Mandylion,

a cloth said to bear the imprint of the face of Christ:

"The analogy of today's photography seems appropriate. Priority was given not to art

itself or the artist's invention but to the utmost verisimilitude. This attitude takes us to

the heart of the early use of images. The beholder was in touch with the real presence

in, and the healing power of, the image. These could be guaranteed, however, only by

an exact match between likeness and original, the intervention of the artist being

unwanted."36

For a brief moment, Belting begins to move towards a glimmer of recognition of the

fundamental similarity between Christian and modern artistic practices and the

theoretical terms which framed the debates of both eras as they searched for their

version of the veronica, the true image. But he immediately retreats back behind the

conceptual barrier between ancient and modern images that structures his entire

project, beginning with the book's subtitle: A History of the Image before the Era of

Art. For him, there is a radical break between Christian cult objects and modern art

objects. As if in denial of the obvious parallels with contemporary debates about the

35 Belting, p. 4936 ibid., p. 52

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falsifiability of photographs and their status as record or proof that emerge in his

very own writing, Belting feels compelled to remind us that these Christian concerns

about indexical origin of icons were specific to the "early use of images," and tied to

their efficacy as magical objects. He acknowledges a formal analogy between our

attraction to photography and the Christian obsession with miraculous images, but

believes ultimately that the cult image and the photograph exist within two

fundamentally incompatible ways of relating to images.

But are the issues and at stake in the veneration of the Mandylion so much

different from those that play out in the glorification of Lenin's indexical image in

Vertov's films? This question can only be approached by thinking about the ways in

which something like the technology of photography is, for us, related to a category

of experience that we no longer have a name for, but which could be called magic, or

the sacred. What was sacred for Dziga Vertov, and how did he construct his art so

that the sacred could be legitimately represented without betraying its essence and

purity? What is sacred for us today? Before we can establish what are the idols and

icons that live in today's world, we must answer this question, and ask ourselves:

what truths are important enough to us that we would renounce the temptations of

illusion in order to defend them and preserve them in their truest state.

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