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PARTISAN REVIEW
has been Eisenstein's capitulation to the demands of the Stalinist bureauc–
racy that a friend of mine thinks he is satirizing Stalinist culture by
wholly conforming to it. He cites the case of Ernst Jiinger, whose
Auf
den Marmorklippen
we reviewed in July-August, who several years ago
satirized the Nazi blood-and-race ideology by publishing, in Germany,
a work carrying it to extreme conclusions. This theory is psychologically
possible, from what I know of Eisenstein's personality. Two considera·
tions, however, seem to make it unlikely: (1) Eisenstein's failure to
produce anything of interest in the last decade (which argues that he
made a sincere, opportunist effort to conform); (2) the fact that this
mode of behavior, fantastic to our eyes, is the norm in the Soviet Union
today, as was shown in the Moscow trials and in the esthetic capitulations
of artists like Pudovkin and Shostakovich.
There is a modern sentimentality about the artist and intellectual which
pictures him as a Prometheus defying the gods of totalitarianism in the
name of Art and Culture. Such defiances are not unknown, hut they are
generally delivered from a safe distance--California is an ideal location.
When, as in Russia, the artist-intellectual has remained within the totali–
tarian borders, he has reacted pretty much as Eisenstein has, submitting
in esthetic as well a·s political matters. About the only heroes in the
tragedy of Stalinist culture were Mayakovsky and Yessenin, who in·
stinctively chose suicide to creative death. The Nazi order is by now old
and extensive enough for some further evidence to begin to appear. Braque
has accepted a high artistic post in occupied France, and Vlaminck, de
Segonzac, and Derain are reported to have toured Germany on a "cultural
mission."
Pour la Victoire
for Sept. 26 quotes from Marcel Deat's Paris
paper,
L'Oeuvre,
a recent announcement that Louis Aragon (together
with his old Stalinist comrade-in-arms, Marcel Cachin-and Prince Ed–
mond Bonaparte) has joined the Deat-Doriot fascist party. In an interview
in the
N. Y. Herald-Tribune
of Aug. 16, Dr. John Altmann revealed that
the greatest of German film directors, G. W. Pabst, famous for the anti-war
films,
West front,
1918 and
Kameradsclwft,
and for his wonderful cinema·
tization of Brecht's
Dreigroschenoper,
edited the Nazi documentary terror·
film,
Victory in the West.
According .to
Pic
for Aug. 18, Pabst was
secretly working for Abetz while he was in Paris before the war, ostensibly
an artist-refugee from Nazism. Such reversals cannot but shock us, just
as a hook like
The Film Sense
is shocking coming from Eisenstein. But
I think we had better get used to such shocks; there are probably more
unheroic tragedies to come.
DWIGHT
MACDONALD
