Politics & Aesthetics

This week we're discussing the relationship between society and culture, politics and aesthetics. The idea is that there is a dialectical relationship between a civilization's social, economic, and political structures and its art, expression, and thought.  To help illustrate this point, let's look at a few historical examples...

Cultural theorist Raymond Williams defines structure of feeling as being:

...as firm and definite as 'structure' suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity. In one sense, this structure of feeling is the culture of a period: it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization. And it is in this respect that the arts of a period, taking these to include characteristic approaches and tones in argument, are of major importance. (1965)

German Expressionism



What are some of the salient aesthetic characteristics between these films? What correlation can you find between the stories being told, the way in which they are told, and the historical context of post WWI Germany?

Soviet Montage

Films, like Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, were clearly inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution. But not just in regards to their subject matter. What correlation can you find between the aesthetics employed in this sequence and the politics of early Communist Russia?