"La línea general": Representación del campo desde la ciudad

Abstract

The article analyzes the Soviet film The General Line / Old and New (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1928) as an intent of the filmmaker to show not only the collectivization process in the Soviet Union, but one of the old aspirations of the Communist program as well, namely the overcoming of the historical divisions between country and city. For this, the article sets as a basis a critical history of Socialism, its most important authors and its key concepts, as well as the landscape genre as a form of ideological expression –in a Marxist sense of the word, that is, as false consciousness– which aims to shadow or even hide the differences between country and city (specially the life conditions of the peasantry) and, therefore, legitimize them in what constitutes a form of 'aesthetical dispossession'. After that, three key scenes of the movie about the mechanization of the countryside and the final scene are analyzed in detail. The Eisensteinian project of political pedagogy gained momentum ironically when the campaign of collectivization and the so called 'Socialist original accumulation' promoted by Stalin reached its highest point.