very terms of politicallyengaged art,includingthe relationship between aesthet-
ic emotions and political emotions.
Operativity inTretyakovrefersto the ability of the work not onlytoreflect
but alsoto intervene in social reality.“The attention of constructors of our
life,”he explains,“must be focused not upon perfect works of art,but upon
the perfect individual, full of organizational skill and the will to overcome the
obstacles that lie along the path to the total mastery of life.”²Understood in
this way, operativity involves the montageofraw materials,orfacts, for the pur-
pose of cognitive and emotional stimulation–inKuhleWampethrough the
montageoflocations, situations,activities, andBerlin workers for whatTretya-
kov would call a“film madeoffacts.”Mass media such as newspaper,photog-
raphy, and film proved especiallysuited for this kind of operative method, given
their technicalavailabilityto collective modes of production and reception and
their thematic affinity for everydaymaterials taken frommodern life. The ulti-
mategoal of operative literature accordingtoTretjakovwas to make writers
and readers active participants in the transformation of social reality;the
same can be said aboutKuhleWampeas an example of operative filmmaking.
RereadingKuhleWampefrom the perspective of operativity also moves the
conception of political filmmaking beyond two aesthetic paradigms,oftenseen
as mutuallyexclusive:the aesthetics of ruptureand critique, associated with
montage, and the aesthetics of continuity and immersion, associated with clas-
sical narrative.Asifanticipating later leftist positions in favorofacinema of dis-
tanciation,Tretyakov emphaticallypromoted both,“cinema as an intellectualiz-
er and cinema as an emotionalizer: these are the twowaysthat cinema serves to
actively construct our new reality.”³Confirming his point,KuhleWampedraws
on the entirerangeofcognitive and emotional faculties as it models the condi-
tions under which the habitus of“not liking it”amountsto more thanastate-
ment of opinion. Specifically, the film providesadialectical model for engaging
the emotional and cognitive faculties that,through theirmutualarticulation, in-
SergeiTret’iakov,“Art in the Revolution and the Revolution in Art,”October118 (2006): 18.
This book uses the moretraditional spellingofhis name but reproduces the different spellings
in the citations fromthe English and the German.Tretyakov was acquaintedwith manyofthe
participants in theKuhleWampeproject.Hetraveled repeatedly to Berlinduringthe early
1930s and translated German literatureintoRussian, wrote short portraits of Eisler and Brecht,
and published the first biography of Heartfield.Foranappreciative critical assessment, seeWal-
terBenjamin,“TheAuthor as Producer,”inSelected Writings,Vol. 2, 1927– 1934 ,trans.Rodney
Livingstone et al., ed. MichaelW. Jennings,HowardEiland, and Gary Smith(Cambridge,MA: The
BelknapPress of HarvardUniversity Press, 1999), 768 – 782.
SergeiTret’iakov,“Our Cinema,”October118 (2006): 36.
320 Chapter 18