Building the future, comrade

Today, I had a training day in London and so, after work, took advantage of that and, thankfully able to avoid those parts of the Tube paralysed by 'industrial action' (surely inaction), travelled to Little Portland Street (just north of Oxford Circus tube station) to attend Kino/Film: Soviet Posters of the Silent Screen at GRAD: Gallery for Russian Arts and Design.  I was first alerted to this exhibition in the free magazine Short Cuts that's left around my workplace break area.  Much of its information on GRAD turned out to be of dubious quality but it piqued my interest before I was aware of this - a glorious mixture of film, art and history from a lost time.
Though the exhibition runs to 29th March, my timetable for things like this has a habit of slipping.  The centre has very generous opening hours, staying available to the general public until 7 p.m. most days.  Had it shut at five I may never have been able to make it and I think this underexplored place serves as a very pleasant post-work treat.  I say underexplored because although it is in the heart of London for the half hour or so I spent there I was the only visitor.  There is a certain ribald delight for some in exclusivity but I think this gem but a couple of minutes walk from the bustle of Regent Street should be 'discovered' by more, especially as it costs nothing to pop inside.
GRAD is not a big gallery, indeed it consists of simply a very large room, staffed by a solitary, pretty receptionist.  That I was by myself to all intents and purposes heightened my appreciation of the exhibits as I could ponder them in quietness and absorb myself in my thoughts with the displays (though neither would I be deterred by a deserved surge in popularity).  There were a collection of original film posters from the 1920s, excerpts from five films being projected onto the walls and two copies of a catalogue placed one on each of the benches to put into context what was being shown, moving and stationary.
As would be the way with a Communist government holding a tight grip on the reins of free expression, much film production focused on revolutionary narratives such as The Decembrists, The End of St Petersburg and The Uprising, that with an industrial theme like Oil (with the Materialism of trains, planes and automobiles - and oil wells), Cement and Engineer Strong's Project or a mixture of both such as Heroes of the Blast Furnace.  There was time for comedy to leaven the mood in the early struggles of Soviet society like Chess Fever where a distracted prodigy tries to wear his jacket only to find his pet kittens have taken up residence in it or The Three Million Case where there are standard but still funny tropes about a man trying to chat up an attractive women in a bar and accidentally toasting a less attractive madam who moved into the space behind him vacated by the more lithe member of the female species.
Of course, no such show would be complete without the contributions of Sergei Eisenstein with his two early masterpieces of Battleship Potemkin (1925, marking the twentieth 'jubilee' of the 1905 disturbances) and October (1927, where the participants did more damage to the Winter Palace than the actual revolution ten years previously).  These and many other movies had their advertising devised and produced by the brothers Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg.  Taking in notions of juxtaposition from their artistic Swedish father, they were leagues ahead of their fellow students at art college when the Tsar was still on the throne (where 'foreign' ideas were frowned upon) and so were ready to embrace the striking Modernism of the early Communist period.  One must never forget though that the Stenbergs and others were romanticising a malignant regime that oppressed far more than it liberated.  Yet one cannot deny them the exceptional quality of their art.  Other works included designing posters for Sport Fever (a predecessor of Monsieur Hulot, whilst riding a bicycle, is savaged in the buttocks by a tenacious dog), Engineer Strong's Project (a thriller where the head of a man shouting into a telephone handset, plus a floating handgun sit atop architectural schematics - its original title was Not for Publication), The Three Million Case (a devious, emerald-eyed femme fatale looms out of the poster above the slapstick thieves she is enlisting for the robbery of her husband, her face divided down the middle like a Jekyll and Hyde without the Jekyll), The Screw From Another Machine (a proto-Harvey Two-Face who has his head planted on a body for a screw.  In the top corner in miniature, a muscular, bare-chested Hero of the Revolution pours celluloid reel into an an industrial town, which could serve as branding for the origin of the film), Death Loop (featuring a naive flapper girl and a fearsome heavy of a clown) plus many more.
Some of the silver screen offerings came from abroad, such as Death Loop and Dare We Stay Quiet that emanate from Germany in its golden era for movie-making and even Denmark and the USA, all with posters specifically designed for the Russian market by the likes of the Stenburgs and their Constructivist associate Aleksandr Rodchenko.  This made up for the shortfall in home-grown output in the straitened times in which the young Soviet Union found itself.
There was also the notorious Storm over Asia (AKA The Heir of Genghis Khan) released in 1928, where a Mongolian fur trapper is found to have descended from Chinggis Khaan (not so special - 9% of Asians have a common genetic ancestor, most likely the Mongol conqueror) and made puppet emperor of a Soviet province but he turns the tables (literally!) on his Russian masters.  It is one of the five films given an airing (all concurrently in different sections of wall) next to its poster, along with The Three Million Case, October, The End of St Petersburg and Man with a Camera.  The latter is especially fascinating as we see some throbbing scenes of what life was like in 1920s Moscow that even propaganda cannot obscure.  It wasn't as bad as portrayed in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets but it was far from a socialist paradise and reminded me very much of the book Strumpet City, a tome that dealt with the various strata of Dublin society, particularly working-class life, in the years leading up to World War One.
This perusal of artifacts and film from an era when the artistic elite of the Soviet Union really did think that they were in the vanguard of the future, before Stalin did his best to stifle creativity, was most uplifting in revealing a slice of Soviet life that is not always given its due - a worthwhile diversion for anyone.  Pictures of the posters can be found at this web location: http://www.grad-london.com/whatson/kino-film-soviet-posters-of-the-silent-screen/