Prepared by Javier O'Neil-Ortiz for Why War?
Soviet Origins of Colliding Airplanes and Skyscrapers
(In American WWII Animation)
American architects and animators, principally during the 1930s, received from Soviet postrevolutionary avant-garde art a new formal language for the fetishizing of functionalist objects and symbols. The skyscraper and airplane would occupy an ideal position according to this new visual code, and, as product of the Soviet constructivist evolution from abstractionism to functionalist Internationalism, this code would increasingly seize American animation and architectural drawing.
Attached to this Soviet evolution from abstract "unbuilt and unbuildable" [1] buildings to built (and buildable) buildings was a change in representation of the airplane, a functional object thereby paired with the skyscraper according to the idealized sharing of an outward, exclusive, and visible bound, which, in turn, presented a new space for a technologically-allowed form of seeing. The airplane would frequently serve as a new ideal object for the new Internationalism, a radical departure from the avant-garde reverence of it for its form and material innovation.
Towers, Skyscrapers, Airplanes, Flight
The evolution of Soviet avant-garde architectural drawings is an evolution of the tower, a general progression of form toward verticality. But before the famous ABC issue 3/4 (1925) redirected abstractionist architectural drawings toward functionalist Internationalism, formal developments of the tower were unprescripted and without overt precedent. For instance, a number of Vladimir Krinsky's "Formal Compositions" from 1919-1920 [Figure 1] follow the tendencies of Nicolai Kolli's "The Red Wedge" (1918), and anticipate Ivan Lamtsov's "Student Assignment on the Expression of Mass and Weight" (1922) [Fig.2]. And both Konstantin Melnikov's and Alexander and Viktor Vesnin's design for the "Moscow Bureau of the Newspaper 'Leningrad Pravda'" (1924) anticipate the (vertical) urbanist, efficient, and functionalist program Lissitzky would announce the next year.
So while the tower as a geometrically minimal form crept into Soviet abstractionism under the facade of a functionalist (and socialist) agenda, a new form of looking entered the fold with it. The no-longer-abstract buildings retained a real-world point-of-view in the architectural drawings. With the progression of both the tower and the functionalist real-spatiality prescribing it, the aerial perspective entered the medium of drawing as a mode of viewing the object, and furthermore as a mode of seeing that was not demanded by any technology (unlike the camera). Until the early 1930s, Soviet architectural drawings were only presented to the viewer as if on a shared horizontal plane focused on either the center of the building or as if standing on the blank street looking slightly up at it. But within the first years of the ABC doctrine, an aerial perspective quickly entered architectural drawing and Internationalist exports to American animation. In 1929 Alexei Shchusev draws the "Government Center for Samarkand" [Fig.3] from an aerial perspective, which Alexander, Leonid, and Viktor Vesnin mimic two years later with their "Palace of Culture of the Proletarsky District" (1931-1937, executed) [Fig.4].
Georgi Krutikov's "City on the Aerial Paths of Communication" (1928) wholly complicates the visual linear progression of a (vertical) form; flight as theme is paired with the aerial-eye taken from it. With collaged panels illustrating the motif "Man's Mastery of the Cosmic Atmosphere Surrounding the Earth", images fetishizing airplane flight dominate the collection; an apartment house-commune floats in the clouds though the view itself is not framed above. Thus while the eye of the airplane creeps into the visual modes of representation - representations of towers and skyscrapers - the airplane itself suffers passage from ideal of material innovation to ideal of withdrawing to the "cosmic atmosphere surrounding the earth". Airplanes begin to be quite frequently included in the architectural drawings themselves, seemingly as realistic decorative flourishes which, for the first time, could realistically fall within the ambit of an aerial view. It is as if since there are now airplanes, the god-eye of art must move beyond them in order to include them within the new implied totality of scenes of representation. Indeed, Konstantin Melnikov's "Commissariat of Heavy Industry, Narkomtiazhprom" (1934) [Fig.5] includes, strangely, an airplane flying low above the main palisade and heading toward, it seems, the buildings.
This aerial perspective and assumed positioning of (drawn) architecture for circumspection is, incidentally, reproduced, formally, in Disney's Victory Through Air Power (1943) [Fig.6] nine years later, when the visual-mode had thoroughly permeated American drawing. This introduction of the aerial perspective into both avant-garde architectural drawings and its consequent debut in American drawing is both sudden and strikingly formally similar. Disney's vision of the world is one as empty of people as Soviet architectural drawings, a sentiment not at all at odds with the film's depiction of war. "The film recommended that long-range bombers form an essential part of military strategy...[and] advocated instead a policy of mass aerial bombing. In an animated history of airplanes, the early days of aviation segue into the uses of airplanes for mass destruction...The film did not give any hint of death." [2]
The Daily Worker condemned the film for such a people-empty machine-kill-machine fantasy, a complaint that complied with more fundamental social criticisms of Disney animation. More social realism was wanted, presumably to comply with the skyscraper aesthetic which Soviet Internationalism considered a structural and ideological ideal. In the autumn of 1943, in the months after Victory Through Air Power was released, radical animators (from Disney) presented their ideas at a UCLA Writers' Congress organized by the Hollywood Writers' Mobilization. John Hubley, who left Disney in the wake of the recent strike, condemned Fantasia as pure formalism devoid of any social role. Victory Through Air Power, however, did not receive the same lambasting, perhaps since it was Disney's first 'adult' film and sought, specifically, to influence military policy. Churchill and Roosevelt soon watched the cartoon at a conference on the Allied Invasion of France, resigning themselves to full consideration of its propagandistic feature-length advertisement of the book of the same name by the pseudo-military theorist and Russian aviator Major Alexander P. de Seversky.
Both the book and film called for a greater dependence on air forces and the strategic bombarding of enemy cities and positions, a sentiment that by nature eliminates people from the target-earth below and, in the film, literally removes them from the tactical event. Indeed the publicity still-image from the Disney film was of an empty shipyard seen from high above. In The Saturday Review of Literature on September 4, 1943, the caption read, simply: "As Walt Disney sees the shipyards." [3]
The aerial perspective, where both the airplane and the skyscraper circumspectively gaze downward, is not only a premise to the new mode of seeing, but also the preferred, hyped, and publicized geometric distance from the earth, from the viewer. The previously-mentioned Melnikov architectural drawing of the same aerial perspective - nine years before Victory - was challenged by Ivan Leonidov's drawing [Fig.7], but of a skyscraper with, instead of an aerial perspective, a low-shot looking up the gleaming tower. An airplane is predominantly included in the scene; while low and across the frame (which is also shaped as a tower) a trail of thin smoke diminishes, presumably from the airplane now just above, and dangerously close to, the skyscraper. It is as if the viewer and the airplane have temporarily switched back to where the two parties ought to be; the viewer is low with the smoke, the plane high again with the tower.
As with the Daily Worker's protestations of an aesthetic depicting an empty American world where machines seem to run themselves, Melnikov's drawing too assumes a visual perspective where the few people scattered in the scene can only appear as thin dots dwarfed by structures they certainly did not build. They are incidental at best and contribute to an ethos common to both sources of illustration, namely a visual detachment from the body and its labor.
The international elements that would introduce their respective modes of representation to each other were well in place in the decade before World War II. Malevich, a Soviet avant-garde artist seized upon by Lissitzky's adopting of suprematist geometric forms (as well as constructivist) for new Internationalist skyscraper forms, was interpreted by thinkers as formally referential to cinema, not according to themes or tropes, but as mode of representation. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a founder of constructivism, wrote:
The development of the suprematist Malevich may serve as an example. His last picture: a white square on a square white canvas is clearly symbolic of the film screen, symbolic of transition from painting in terms of pigment to painting in terms of light. [4]
Cinema as painting with light conformed well to Malevich's garbled explanations of his work in terms of energy and light, a rhetoric not new to contemporary Soviet art experimenting with animation. Viking Eggeling was making scroll pictures, which were essentially long strips of paper broken into frames: one drawing was repeated with variations again and again. This was not such a new idea but already part of an emerging narrative incorporating abstractionism into film and animation. Duncan Grant worked on a series of "Abstract Kinetic Paintings with Collages" on a scroll several yards long, which was then unrolled through a light-box in time to Bach. Thus the milieu of media and formalisms at work in this decade alone engineered many of the intersections of thematic tropes and formalized objects of them. Sergei Eisenstein happened to serve as an envoy between schools, nations, and media, through a particular two years that would carry him to both Disney and future experiments in simulating flight as cinematic perspective.
1929 was an especially busy year for Eisenstein. He spent the time travelling around Europe, mostly between Switzerland, Berlin, London, and Paris. In Berlin, he met with Hungarian artist and (newly formed) Bauhaus professor Moholy-Nagy to see if his students would build him a house-set for his experimenting in navigating continuous space, a theoretical break from general montage. He had met with Freud and Lissitzky, and found the former's model of an architectural representation of the mind intriguing (as inspired, strangely, by the "Dreamland" park at Coney Island) and the latter's space-continuous functionalism applicable to film versions of continuity. Though the Freud-Lizzitsky Navigator is eventually to be abandoned, he is able to meet with Edwin Link, an American engineer in Berlin, who has designed the so-called Link Trainer, a flight simulator for pilots which reproduces the cockpit and all its controls, but lacks a visual display. Eisenstein conceives of adding a projected film to the simulator. Link has connections in Hollywood so sends him on his way to the United States, in 1930, to meet Walt Disney. [5]
Eisenstein's confrontation with flight simulations and his apparent desire to achieve the aerial visuals for them is simultaneous to, and in fact manifests, a larger problem of attempting to redefine continuous space within film, a problem avant-garde constructivist architectural drawings were solving, in 1929, in a similar way, but through adopting the surrogate mechanical eye of the airplane in depicting the functionalist skyscraper. The two objects are now not simply objects within the scene of representation but firmly donate something of their cultural function and symbolism to the representational mode itself. Thus the eye of the airplane and skyscraper is employed to see the airplane and skyscraper.
The airplane itself is consistently attached to both the skyscraper, as fetishized locale of visual omniscience, and to the imaginary ideal of a free vehicle offering continuous, perfectly-navigable space. The animators in America, beyond mere Victory Through Air Power, begin subsuming the symbolism of the two earth-free objects of the new functionalist mechanical age, and confounding them as not just the co-symbol of the endless possibilities of animation (and therefore human creation, drawing and drawing…) but are also concealing the constitution of a limit inherent in the symbol of the endless. Animation allows the animators to depict the outlandish, the seemingly endless, and absurdly excessive while simultaneously assigning tropes, themes, and limits to what is symbolic of the endless. The skyscraper and the airplane are habitual vehicles of this possibility of omniscience.
The skyscraper and the airplane achieve, however, a newfound excess in the war years, as if the continuous (and possibly endless) vertical construction of buildings and the endless, free horizontal navigation of the airplane in the same heightened detached space would inevitably intersect in their excesses of the same iron, earthy material not meant to fly or defy the order of their creators, that is, of 'man'. A confusion of sight, sound, material, and identity between the two objects characterize World War II propaganda depictions of them. The original Soviet avant-garde constructivist obsession with material relapses on itself to no longer depict the material assemblage and integration (of parts) of the airplane and skyscraper but the material disintegration and destruction of the whole (back into parts). The materialism of Malevich's 1915 "Airplane", though lost on the more materialist constructivists, is minimalist and 2D geometric, thus all the more hauntingly functionalist in its image of detached squares, presumably parts of the assembled whole airplane. The airplane, washed through both the bare utilitarian geometry of Internationalist architecture and the mass material destruction of World War II, would reinvent the avant-garde forms into an American cartoon airplane manufactured for probable destruction. This new relation to the image of the inescapably-material airplane would furthermore establish new relations with the skyscraper, its twin symbol of the upper air.
Airplanes, Skyscrapers, WWII Danger
There are the typical propagandistic uses of the airplane as an aesthetic device, in much the same way that the Nazi sign is made aesthetically pleasing in its incorporation to the symbolic matrix that demonizes it. In "The Spirit of '43" (1943), for instance, Donald Duck is confronted with whether to be a spend thrift and hurt the war or save his money for taxes to help the government purchase more airplanes. The cartoon turns over to overt, deep, male, narrator-voice commands "To Do Your Part", as it is written in the blurry zero-point of the invisible and infinitely-fast propellers of the plane. The propellers, like the airplane, are a symbol that outlasts the temporary assignment of them to a specific category. At one time, they are overtly incorporated with the personified written words of America, and at another time they appear, as in the first Snafu cartoon (produced by the US Pictorial Center), as indistinct symbolic informers of new symbols, that is, as formal origins of images drawn from them. Thus, with Snafu, the sizzling microphone breasts of a dame Nazi spy are, via the imposed circularity, rendered as ghostly derivatives of the propeller.
The American World War II cartoon airplane furthermore thematically intersects with its counterpart skyscraper, that is, beyond the co-identification with a single gaze and locale of transcendence. Principally, the airplane and skyscraper are reduced to symbols for the 'height' which, as a pinnacle, stands in for the whole surface of the object. A specific upper boundary of the skyscraper, built for its contrast against seeming 'nothing', is achieved in mock animated 'pans' upwards, while the airplane is depicted as 'moving towards' a height inparticular in its locations - for it is aimed at an uninhabited and empty sky. The plane must always fly and the skyscraper's top is always shown; the height achieved by the former is dramatically instantaneous while the achieving of the height of the latter is typically a laborious process for the long pan of the 'camera' to get to. Thus, in "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips", the plane chase is instantaneous, and is furthermore enlisted as a plot device only to drop the 'Nip' from the achieved height; while in "Scrap Happy" the vertical pan up the scrap tower takes far too long, dramatizing its needless endlessness. And in this twisting and unstable scrap tower lurks the skyscraper as a formal origin and reference [Fig.8]. The vertical pan imposes the image and material of its feared destruction (scrap metal) on the pinnacle structure of American modernity, while yet nervously asserting an invincible endlessness to the vertical dimension of architectural construction.
The skyscraper, like the airplane, is an excuse to fall from it. In "Seein' Red, White, and Blue", the top floor of the skyscraper-setting for the Army recruitment office is improbably selected so that, minutes later, Bruno can jump through the window to get himself "disabled" in an attempt to avoid war duty. But Popeye races down a winding set of late constructivist stairs [Fig.9] reminiscent of Tatlin's famed "Monument to the Third International" [Fig.10], the piece on which he formally, in a statement, broke from abstractionism to Internationalist-styled constructivism. Popeye, through the gyred spirals, beats the straight line, and (impossibly) catches Bruno.
The plummeting cartoon death, however, is joined to the airplane as harbinger of mechanical and material failure. Something goes wrong with the machine, the material. The total excess of height, as allowed by the machine, can be taken away at the rate of sudden gravity plus time-until-awareness, as the familiar cartoon-equation of life-meets-death is known to go. Thus the Nip in "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips" falls straight down when he realizes he is only in the cockpit, the body of the plane having been ripped out from under the 'visual parts', which can, it seems, stand in for the whole, at least temporarily, just as Eisenstein presumed when encountering the Link Trainer. Likewise, a rarely defeated Bugs Bunny, in "Falling Hare" (1943), narrowly evades plummeting from the plane he cannot seem to stay in or stay out of, depending. At one moment he goes too far across the interior of the plane, and so continues out the door, skids, realizes, and barely returns with the help of twisted, and selective, natural laws; but he slides and skids across, now, the airplane's interior floor laced with banana peels which have anticipated his path, as conspired by the clever gremlin who holds the other door open, the door he had, before, come in from, and out he goes again. Space, as it is meant to be cornered and cut up, with doors and walls and windows, so as to preserve an interior of the object, is here questioned. The plane itself is steady and unswerving, a force of motivation too pure for, and incompatible with, the vicissitudes of its creators and animators. Its aerial course is, when left alone to itself, unchanging and dependable. But it has, admittedly, been launched - and by those who it cannot contain appropriately, thus extending a certain comical law of the modernized machine to its creators: the comedy of errors of the latter will provoke an unanticipated tragedy of errors wrought by the former.
"Falling Hare", one of a series of 1943 gremlin cartoons, specifically responds to Disney's Victory Through Air Power of the same year. The cartoon begins with Bugs reading "Victory Thru Hare Power" while laughing and dismissing-as-absurd the read pilots' myths of gremlins who disassemble the plane as they fly it, encouraging its, and possibly their own, destruction. The overt and contrastive fact of the gremlin's existence is the initiation of this war cartoon fascinated with the materialism of the airplane, a fascination that, more specifically, equivocates material and failure. When the airplane is well under the very much active decontrol of the gremlin, the airplane is seemingly magnetically drawn, but in fact steered by the gremlin, toward a cluster of skyscrapers that have suddenly appeared, as if the only two citizens of the upper air must inevitably meet in an apocalyptic collision of shared material destruction [Fig.11].
The skyscraper and tower, during the Nazi air raids on London, left crumbled images of the airplane's betrayal of its own partner in modernity. The former benevolence of Soviet stylized planes shining beside the skyscraper, as if as passive and still as the architecture it graced, gave way to a contrary American (and Soviet) unconscious of relapsing materialism crowding upwards, machines destroying machines. A Victory Through Air Power Disney animated promotion asks the audience: "Will our home cities and homes be bombed?" while yet, without irony, publicizing the mechanical instrument that did in fact bomb homes and cities and of which the film pretended to fear.
New modes of seeing - new modes of visual perspectives in animation - came with new tropes and symbols of them; the mechanical and material objects of an Internationalist functionalism and efficient mass production in excess confounded the symbols of it in a co-identifiable war of the very signs and representations of the visual language it once initiated. The skyscraper and the airplane are at material (war) and symbolic (image) odds; and therefore, beyond the flag that adorns the wing or pinnacle, the objects themselves confound their respective ontologies and connotations. When Bruno leaps from the top floor of the skyscraper, in "Seein' Red, White, and Blue", he acts as an airplane would, his body whistling now with the sound effects reserved for the plummeting cartoon airplane [Fig.12]. It is as if the two are interchangeable in the moment of their respective destruction, whether in the overt image of collission or in the exchange of symbolic qualities. Their identical aerial perspectives confound the two heights as identical sources for indistinguishable behavior. Bruno in the skyscraper is an airplane in the skyscraper, falling from it as a symbol for the expected real material intersection of the two forms.
The new modes of representation introduced by the airplane were not strictly in the context of war, and not only in the sense of the airplane-as-spatial-eye replacing the surveillance balloon above the battlefield, its perhaps original function. Soviet postrevolutionary art of the same time as architectural drawing constructivism (launching Internationalism) adopted the airplane as ideal innovative object of material, the obsession of Tatlin who was then in critical opposition to, within the little avant-garde circle, Malevich's suprematist and more minimal play with geometry and light, an aesthetic seized upon by filmmakers and experimental light-animators like Moholy-Nagy. Tatlin was involved with a different form of the airplane, but one that would be incorporated into realist and narrative-continuity films of the new mid-1930s Eisenstein in full departure from montage.
Tatlin's Picasso-influenced "counter-reliefs" of bits of timber and metal were later materially consistent with, only rearranged as, "Letatlins", flying wings strapped to the human form in order to "give back man the feeling of flight." "We have been robbed of this by the mechanical flight of the airplane. We cannot feel the movement of our body in the air." Yet while a total rejection of just the engine somehow meant the liberation, or return, of the body, a rhetoric of placing the 'body of man' in harmony with the materials at his service answered Eisenstein's question posed by Link's flight simulator. He later shoots a scene for Alexander Nevsky (1938) where the battle is seen through the point of view of a character who flies over the battle using wings he constructed. Stalin later cuts the scene, knowing it a reference to Tatlin's "Letatlin".
The same functionalism, however, had already taken Tatlin's imagination, as clear in the statement for his "Monument to the Third International" (1920), well before Lissitzky would codify it; material, volume, and construction suddenly represented "laboratory models" for the solution of "utilitarian tasks" posed now, after the Revolution, "in our task of creating a new world." What would soon be Internationalism had already got to him so that, years from then, even when he was preaching the "principle of life, of organic forms" behind the "Letatlin", in the next sentence he claims "the most aesthetic forms are the most economical". He discovered this coincidence "through...observation", which was really his years of dissecting birds and breeding young cranes for study at the Experimental Scientific Research Laboratory in Moscow. A functionalism permeated even the aesthetic renderings of the airplane, one that had departed that abstractionism and materialism of the "unbuilt and unbuildable" structures of the early postrevolutionary years.
This functionalist "Letatlin" was likewise part of the material-obsessed narrative of airplane failure that reared its head everywhere during the war, but was in steady avant-garde incline in the years before. The essence of the airplane was not essentially successful flight, but attempted flight. All that metal was not expected to fly, but it was a marvel when it did. The Peuegot and Michelin firms in Paris had been staging competitions for effective "aviettes" in Paris, which all generally failed to fly too, not unlike Tatlin’s engineless machine.
In America as well as Soviet Russia, the name Icarus consistently appeared in the pubic lexicon of flight, but with strangely positive, heroic, and somewhat inexplicable connotations. Tatlin’s pupil D. Danin wrote of the “Letatlin” exhibit: “Thousands of Muscovites, especially children, walked into the Museum of Fine Arts to look at the Tatlin bird, flying out of the past from the time of Icarus, and out of the future from an unknown time.” Likewise in America, Victory Through Air Power was publicized as “Mickey Icarus, 1943: Fusing Ideas with the Art of the Animated Cartoon”, the title of the mentioned Saturday Review of Literature review that adored Disney’s worker-less shipyards [10]. To plummet down into the seen panorama of buildings, ships, and structures was to fulfill the mandate of the machine’s material, namely to collide with its own parts arranged in merely other efficient forms.
Later, in the post-war years, buildings would collapse on their own. “Rhapsody in Rivets” featured the orchestrated construction of a skyscraper which, unable to stop, continues through the clouds, turns left, right, any which way, but it must keep going. When the music ends, the skyscraper is crowned and the door is closed, but then, detached from the labor that made it, it collapses.
[1] Ingberman, Sima. International Constructivist Architecture, 1922-1939. 1994. p.x
[2] Leslie, Esther. Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde. 2002. p.213
[3] Smoodin, Eric. Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era
[4] Moholy-Nagy: An Anthology. Edited by Richard Kostelanetz. 1991. p.132
[5] some information from the paragraph is from: Manovich, Lev and Norman Klein. "Freud-Lissitzky Navigator". http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/v5n2/fl.html
[6] Tatlin interviewed by K. Zelinsky. Letatlin in Vechernaya Moskava, 6 April 1932, p.2
[7] quoted in: Cooke, Catherine. Architectural Drawings of the Russian Avant-Garde. 1990. p.17
[8] quoted in: Milner, John. Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde. 1983. p.217
[9] quoted in: Ibid. p.224
[10] Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom. Edited by Eric Smoodin. 1994. p.44-47