COLLECTIVE FARMS AT A TIME OF COLLECTIVE GRAVES:

THE STATUS OF LABOR IN SERGEI EISENSTEIN'S THE GENERAL LINE (1929)

1
Abstract

Labor is a central concept to both Marxism and to the Soviet Union, especially during the
1920s with the push for industrialization. As the founding father of Soviet cinema, Sergei
Eisenstein played a vital role in the visual production and the transmission of the authorities'
discourse on labor to the laboring masses who were the targeted audience and the main critics
of his films. Nonetheless, this aspect of his work has been neglected in favor of the extensive
research on his montage theories and film form innovations. This presentation distinguishes
itself from earlier work on Eisenstein because it examines the changing status of labor,
mainly farming, in his ill-fated film about collectivization The General Line(1929), which
borrows its title from Joseph Stalin' speech in 1925 about the transition of Soviet society from
agrarian to industrial. The film attempted to facilitate the creation of collective farms by
representing the peasant Marfa Lapkina letting go of traditional agricultural methods and
opting for mechanized farming so as to finance the industry, yet although filming was to
begin on October 1 st 1926, and end on February 1 st 1927, Eisenstein only managed to finish
his work in 1929, and the film was ultimately shelved. So why was such a film, already in
line with the official discourse and approach to labor, constantly interrupted, delayed, and
eventually considered obsolete?
The interplay between the political sphere producing strategies and the aesthetic sphere
producing symbols was already at the heart of the Bolshevik revolution's promise of both
justice and beauty so as to make the life of the Soviet citizen harmonious through a politicalartistic plan by which the Communist Party leadership was transformed into a kind of artist

COLLECTIVE FARMS AT A TIME OF COLLECTIVE GRAVES:

THE STATUS OF LABOR IN SERGEI EISENSTEIN'S THE GENERAL LINE (1929)
2
whose material was the entire world and whose goal was to overcome the resistance of this
material and make it pliant, malleable, capable of assuming any desired form1. The politicalartistic aspect of the Five-Year Plan (1928-1932) was on one hand, mechanization and the
end of agrarian society, and on the other hand the aesthetization of the new living conditions
through the representation of their symbolic images as opposed to their reality. For this
reason, my presentation will examine the depiction of farming as both political and aesthetic:
1/ Political: In the context of a micro-managed film industry weakened by political instability
in the late 20s, The General Line had to fully accommodate not only the Soviet agricultural
policy that ultimately culminated in the extermination of the Kulaks as a social class in 1929,
but all the changes of strategies in-between. The authorities' constant meddling with the film
perfectly paralleled Stalin's ever-shifting and contradictory decisions stemming from the
inability to integrate the Kulaks into a viable socialist economic system. I will examine these
political decisions and their direct impact on the equivocal status of farming in the movie.
2/ Aesthetically: Eisenstein had to harmonize the disparity between the official discourse on
the alleged values of collectivization and the brutal reality of the extermination of the Kulaks
that these collective farms entailed. The pliant material in The General Line is none other
than the docile body of the farmer adjusting to the arrival of the machine, and this body
constituted the crux of the spectator's identification. Eisenstein theorized this link between the
filmed body and the feelings of the viewer in 1924 in his theory of film attraction, so as to
help sway the Bolshevik struggle from the realm of the intellect to the realm of the visceral,
and to engage the two bodies on the opposite sides of the screen with ideology. I will
1

Groys, B. (1992). The total art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and
Beyond. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. p.3

COLLECTIVE FARMS AT A TIME OF COLLECTIVE GRAVES:

THE STATUS OF LABOR IN SERGEI EISENSTEIN'S THE GENERAL LINE (1929)
3
introduce his theory and highlight his use of aesthetization of labor, not to depict farming as
such, but to visually generating its symbolic values.