Red Aesthetics: Rodchenko, Brecht, Eisenstein

Description

Red Aesthetics offers a new way to think about art and politics, focusing on the revolutionary work of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Bertolt Brecht, and Sergei Eisenstein between the wars. Todd Cronan shows how these three artists’ photographs, dramas, films, and writings—centered on class conflict—differ from current left orthodoxies rooted in empathy. Writing against liberal pieties, Cronan contends, following Brecht, that empathy is not the solution to our problems, but more like the source of them. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Page Contents List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Preface Introduction Overview Chapter 1: The Great Production: Rodchenko/Brecht/Eisenstein—with and against Adorno and Barthes Eisenstein and Brecht: The Missed Encounter Anti-intentional Politics I: Adorno on Brecht, Brecht on Eisenstein Composing for the Films: Brecht with Adorno and Against Eisenstein Anti-intentional Politics II: Barthes on Brecht and Eisenstein Chapter 2: Rodchenko’s Photographic Communism “I Live On, Dead” Rodchenko’s Courtyard Series Analytic versus Synthetic Photography The Structure of Intentionality in Rodchenko’s Photographic Sequences Chapter 3: Art and Political Consequence: Brecht’s Critique of Affect Consequences Suggestion/Influence, Empathy/Action “The Effect of Art on Human Beings”: Brecht, Eisenstein, Eisler Chapter 4: Seeing Differently and Seeing Correctly: Brecht on Artistic and Political Abstraction Enabling Abstraction: “On Chinese Painting” Chapter 5: Class into Race: Brecht, Adorno, and the Problem of State Capitalism Chapter 6: Relentlessness: Eisenstein’s Automatic Writing “Everywhere on all sides” Hollywood Screenplays and the Saturation of the Shot The Nonindifference of Nature Reprosecuting Kino-Eye The Aesthetic Principle of Severence Eisenstein versus Tarkovsky Ivan the Terrible, Part III Index