ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
actuality that no stage performance, with trained actors and modern lighting,
could touch the fringe of’. 56 This immediacy is detectable in what images of the
production exist: the silhouette of a man standing on a walkway above an
industrial chasm of pulleys, bars and pipes, backlit by an industrial glow. Eisenstein’s
example immediately stands out from the vast body of Proletkult theatre
productions, whose formulaic character leads one to imagine each production
as being more or less the same play with minor variations in personnel and plot.
In Gas Masks, the chasm between quality (of production) and equality (in both
its message and accessibility) seems to have been far less gaping than usual.
Amateur theatre groups also gave rise to related organisations such as the
Living Newspaper (1919) – a theatrical ‘feuilleton’ or dramatised montage,
based partly on political events and partly on local themes emerging from
everyday life – and the agitpop collective Blue Blouse (1923 onwards). 57 By
1927 there were over 5,000 Blue Blouse troupes and 7,000 Living Newspaper
groups in clubs, collectives and factories, as well as hundreds of
peasant amateur theatre companies in each province. This enthusiasm for
theatre extended to pageants and demonstrations; the Austrian writer René
Fülöp- Miller offers an amusing account of these events, which included
allegorical scenes about labour and industry, public trials to enlighten the
people (about health, illiteracy, the murderers of Rosa Luxemburg, and so
on), and a very creative pageant involving diagrams of factory output, and
a funeral and cremation of old farm machinery, with participants dressed up
as turnips and cucumbers. 58 Characteristically, Fülöp- Miller also dismisses
the message of these events as politically simplistic and naive – but it was
only a short step from these parades and pageants to the open- air mass spectacle,
a craze that reached its peak in St Petersburg in 1920.
Before discussing mass spectacle, we should note that art history and
theatre history offer distinct genealogical narratives for this phenomenon.
For art history, the precursor took place in 1918, when Russian Futurist
artists produced a dynamic scenographic reworking of the Winter Palace
and the square in front. In this setting,
Altman, Puni, Bogoslavskaya and their friends decided to stage a mass
re- enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace . . . The realism was
provided by a whole borrowed battalion and their equipment, and thousands
of good Petrograd citizens, the whole dramatised by giant
arc- lights . . . Small wonder that when the authorities heard about it
later – no permission had been thought necessary for a theatrical pageant
– there was a severe reprimand for the commander of the battalion who
had known nothing about it. It might have been real! 59
Theatre historians, by contrast, present mass spectacle as emerging from a
set of theoretical and ideological commitments that had been brewing since
the early 1900s, and never mention the event in 1918. Once again the key
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