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Abstract:

One of the most understudied movie projects associated with Mayakovsky is the project of Lily Brik’s film “Love and Duty” (“Liubov’ i dolg”, 1929), in which Mayakovsky and his friends planned to participate. The film did not receive a censorship permission; it could have become an artistic interpretation of the practice of film rewiring. The boundless power of artistic technique and its ability to fulfill any social order was asserted. The very fact of the rewiring became a shocking instrument to influence the viewer — an attraction. On the other hand, the film that was proclaimed a “satire on foreign hackworks”, was no less, if not more, targeted at the type of alterations made in the USSR. This fact was immediately noticed by the censorship and became the main reason for the ban. It is highly probable that the application became one of the episodes of the conflict between “Sovkino” and “Mezhrabpomfilm”, resulting in a change of the latter’s management. The group nature of the film (only the REF group participants) could be related to the ongoing split in left-wing art. An episode from Mayakovsky’s early biography can be correlated with this idea: his participation in the filming of “Drama in the Cabaret No. 13”.