A 'Cinema for the Millions': Soviet Socialist Realism and the Problem of Film Comedy Author(s): Richard Taylor Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 18, No. 3, Historians and Movies: The State of the Art: Part 1 (Jul., 1983), pp. 439-461 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/260546 . Accessed: 20/05/2012 04:07 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Sage Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Contemporary History. http://www.jstor.org
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A 'Cinema for the Millions': Soviet Socialist Realism and the Problem of Film ComedyAuthor(s): Richard TaylorReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 18, No. 3, Historians and Movies: The State ofthe Art: Part 1 (Jul., 1983), pp. 439-461Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/260546 .Accessed: 20/05/2012 04:07
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Sage Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal ofContemporary History.
A 'Cinema for the Millions': Soviet Socialist Realism and the Problem of Film Comedy
If the public is not interested in a picture that we produce, it will become boring agitation and we shall become boring agitators.
Lunacharsky, 1928l
The victorious class wants to laugh with joy. That is its right and Soviet cinema must provide its audiences with this joyful Soviet laughter.
Shumyatsky, 19352
When Boris Shumyatsky became head of the newly centralized Soviet film organization, Soyuzkino, in 1930, he set himself the task of developing an apparatus that would produce films that were ideologically correct and acceptable to the Party and its constituent organs. But this ideologically correct cinema had also to be popular with mass audiences if it were to perform its designated function in elevating the cultural level of the masses in the 'Cultural Revolution' that was to accompany the social and economic upheavals of the first Five-Year Plan period from 1928 to 1933. Soviet cinema in the 1930s could not afford the luxury of an artistic avant-garde: it had to provide what Shumyatsky himself came to call a 'cinema for the millions'.
Lunacharsky, who, as People's Commissar for Enlightenment from 1917 until his resignation in 1929, had presided over the formative period of Soviet cinema and was thus in effect Shumyatsky's predecessor, had pointed out the political dangers of a remote and unpopular cinema in an important speech to film workers in January 1928 from which I have already quoted in my epigraphs:
The cinema public often wants something that it finds especially interesting and if you do not produce a sensation to provide this interest it will not want to eat the dish you offer and will push it away or, if it does eat it, it will only do it very
Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London, Beverly Hills and New Delhi), Vol. 18 (1983), 439-461
Journal of Contemporary History
unwillingly. So we have to combine this interest in film with ideological and artistic consistency. As you will see, this is a very difficult task . . Many of our people do not understand that our film production must whet the public appetite, that, if the public is not interested in a picture that we produce, it will become boring agitation and we shall become boring agitators. But it is well known that boring agitation is counter-agitation. We must choose and find a line that ensures that the picture is both artistic and ideologically consistent and contains romantic experiences of an intimate and psychological character.
In order more fully to understand how the Soviet authorities and their representatives went about organizing a 'cinema for the millions' that would whet the appetite of Soviet film-goers rather than boring the pants off them, we must first of all examine the various factors that affected the development of the Soviet cinema from the Central Committee's resolution of 18 June 1925 'On the Party's Policy in the Field of Literature', which required that literature (and, by implication, all art) must be 'intelligible to the millions',3 to the promulgation of the doctrine of Socialist Realism at the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in August- September 1934. It is not enough simply to say, as John Grierson once remarked and other writers have assumed, that 'after the first flush of exciting cinema the Russian talent faded'.4 We must, as semiologists are constantly urging us to do and as most of them are singularly incapable of doing, 'construct the viewing context'.
Clearly any attempt to systematize historical influences along thematic lines is fraught with dangers: it will tend to oversimplifi- cation and repetition. But, if we bear these dangers in mind, it should also offer some clarification: it is therefore worth at least making the attempt. Rather than indulging in a largely chronological narrative history of the period,5 let us therefore look at it thematically. The context of the Soviet cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s (as indeed at other periods in its history, but these do not directly concern us here) has been formed by four principal factors: the aesthetic, the ideological, the technical and the audience factors. We shall examine them one by one.6
The aesthetic debates among Soviet film-makers in the 1920s are dominated by what amounts to a virtual obsession with the concept of montage and the delineation of the importance of montage is perhaps the most important single legacy of those debates to the development of world cinema.
The concept of montage and its significance emerged at an early
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stage in the arguments over the legitimacy of cinema as an indepen- dent art form. Film-makers saw montage, for which neither painting nor theatre had any equivalent, as the decisive factor that differentiated cinema as a unique and legitimate art form. In particular, montage distinguished cinema from its forerunner, theatre, and this was to prove to be the all-important distinction. As early as 1917, Lev Kuleshov (of whom his pupil Vsevolod Pudovkin rightly wrote later, 'We make films but Kuleshov made cinematography') remarked:
The essence of cinema art in the work of both director and art director is based entirely on composition. In order to make a film the director must compose the separate, unordered and unconnected film shots into a single whole and juxtapose separate moments into a more meaningful, coherent and rhythmical sequence just as a child creates a whole word or phrase from different scattered letter blocks.7
He went on to describe this as 'a primitive concept of composition or montage', using the word 'montage' in that context for the first time. A mere few months later he argued that, 'Montage is to cinema what the composition of colours is to painting or a harmonic sequence of sounds is to music'.8 The whole debate about montage in the 1920s flows from these beginnings. The obsession with montage reflected a genuine desire on the part of the new generation of Soviet film-makers to create a new revolutionary art form appropriate to the new revolutionary era. Given that the majority of the older generation of film-makers had fled abroad, these younger men (in some cases as young as 17-18) were to exercise a uniquely powerful influence on the development of Soviet cinema. The phenomenon of cinema had only a recent past: first demonstrated in the mid-1890s, it was, unlike literature or theatre, free of the ideological baggage of past bourgeois traditions. It was the ideal art form with which to start afresh. It was in addition a genuinely popular cultural form. It already had a mass audience, at least in the towns and cities where it was relatively easily available, and its early associations with music-hall and variety theatre strengthened its appeal for those, like the Futurists9 or the Eccentrists,1? who wanted to have done with all traces of the old world and, in particular, anything associated with the notion of 'high culture'.
The search to turn cinema into the locomotive of cultural revolution preoccupied not only those film-makers who are best known in the west - Eisenstein, Vertov, Kuleshov, Kozintsev and Trauberg - but also others who are less well known. The films that they produced however were essentially experiments and, on the
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whole, they were therefore popular only with the avant-garde both inside and outside the Soviet Union. Those who made Soviet films were concerned above all else to establish cinema (and, more particularly, often their particular genre of cinema) as both a legitimate and independent art form rather than primarily as an effective medium of political communication or propaganda. Towards the end of the 1920s their arguments were becoming more intricate, more incestuous and increasingly more bitter: this led them into a position of some remoteness both from the ideological requirements of the political leadership and from the commercial pressures on the management of Soviet film audiences to satisfy audience demand for diversion and entertainment. It was, however, the advent of sound that destroyed their aesthetic world completely.
The prospect of sound cinema seems to have struck terror into the hearts of some and at least anxiety into the hearts of others. It was a reaction that was not unknown elsewhere, but the theoretical implications of sound were more fully appreciated (and thus viewed with greater alarm) in the Soviet Union, if only because greater theoretical attention had been paid there to the essence of cinema as an art form and, as I have already indicated, especially to the characteristics that distinguished cinema from theatre. Montage was the lynchpin of silent cinema and of the argument. Sound cinema represented a threat to those who feared that, like the dramatic theatre, sound cinema would depend heavily on dialogue, that it would mean not just sound films but 'talkies'. The
scriptwriter, Evgeni Gabrilovich, has vividly recalled the period in his memoirs:
Those who know only sound film can scarcely imagine the confusion that struck
scriptwriters, directors, actors, cameramen and editors when the screen
suddenly, surprisingly and quite unexpectedly began producing sounds. Archive
documents, articles and stenograms are only a pale and fleeting shadow of the
agitation, the anxieties and the alarm. Prominent film-workers fulminated against 'talking' pictures: even the name 'talking' was embellished with quotation marks that brimmed with bile and venom. For the whole poetics of cinema art, whose essence was thought to lie precisely in its silence, had received a fatal blow.
People at that time maintained that silent montage was more intelligent, more
complex, more grandiose, more infinite and more philosophical than words ... At the time people were afraid above all of synchronisation, of realistic sound illustration for the screen: a clock ticks and you hear the sound of the pendulum, or it is raining and you hear the drops falling, etc. etc. They said that films should be made in such a way that the clock and the rain 'moved' silently while the sound of the pendulum or the rain-drops should be heard when the visual image really and
'naturally' did not correspond to it. The theory of counterpoint emerged according
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to which, as far as I recall, the danger was seen to lie in synchronised recorded
dialogue and the general rule was supposed to be a clear disparity between sound and image."
The 'prominent film-workers' who 'fulminated against "talking" pictures' were of course Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov in their famous 'Statement' on sound, published in August 1928.'2
These three film-makers were primarily concerned to preserve the essential distinction, as they saw it, between cinema and theatre: it was montage that lay at the basis of that distinction and it was montage that was threatened by the use of synchronized sound:
It is well known that the principal (and sole) method that has led cinema to a position of such great influence is montage. The confirmation of montage as the principal means of influence has become the indisputable axiom upon which world cinema culture rests. The success of Soviet pictures on world screens is to a significant extent the result of a series of those concepts of montage that they first revealed and asserted. And so for the further development of cinema the significant moments appear to be those which strengthen and broaden the concepts of affecting the audience through montage. If we examine every new discovery from this standpoint it is easy to distinguish the insignificance of colour and stereoscopic cinema in comparison with the great significance of sound. Sound will be a double-edged invention and its most probable application will be along the line of least resistance, i.e. in the field of the satisfaction ofsimple curiosity.
They assumed that, in western countries at least, this 'simple curiosity' would be satisfied by the:
commercial exploitation of the most saleable goods, i.e. of talking pictures - those in which the sound is recorded in a natural manner, synchronising exactly with the movement on the screen and creating a certain 'illusion' of people talking, objects making a noise, etc.
Continued application of this synchronized sound would lead inescapably to its 'unimaginative use for "dramas of high culture" and other photographed presentations of a theatrical order'. In this way not only would cinema surrender its essential uniqueness to theatre: by clear implication all the artistic and technical progress made in Soviet cinema and theatre since the Revolution would be surrendered and both would revert to the ideals of Stanislavskian 'naturalism' as exemplified by the Moscow Arts Theatre prior to 1917. With hindsight these fears may seem to be exaggerated but at the time, as Gabrilovich's recollections suggest, they were all too real.
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Perhaps the other most important debate that characterized Soviet film in the 1920s concerned the distinction between fiction and documentary cinema and, in particular, their competing claims to be the art form most appropriate to the revolutionary epoch. Since fiction films held sway both before and after 1917, it is perhaps not surprising that the more extreme statements came from the documentary side, which viewed fiction films as irre-
deemably 'bourgeois' and therefore also counter-revolutionary. The most prominent documentarist, Dziga Vertov, leader of the influential Cine-Eye group, denounced fiction films as 'leprous'"3 and film drama as the 'opium of the people',14 and announced that, 'The world conflagration of "art" is at hand'.'5 Vertov welcomed sound with open arms: it would enable the Cine-Eyes to achieve an even greater degree of authenticity in realizing their aim, stated in 1924: 'To see and show the world in the name of the world proletarian revolution'.'6 Sound would help to recreate
reality on screen and this was the overriding consideration for the documentarists:17 Vertov regarded arguments about counterpoint as a form of intellectual masturbation irrelevant to the major issue that confronted sound cinema just as it had confronted its silent
predecessor - the distinction between played (fiction) and
unplayed (documentary) film:
On the question of the role of sound in documentary films we stand by our earlier view. We regard the 'Radio-Eye' as the most powerful instrument in the hands of the proletariat, as an opportunity for the proletariat of all nations and all countries to hear and see one another in an organised manner, as an opportunity for agitation and propaganda through facts that is not limited by space, as an opportunity to juxtapose the film and radio documents of our socialist construction with documents of oppression and exploitation, the film and radio documents of the capitalist world. Declarations on the need for a non-correspondence between visible and audible moments, like those on the need to make only natural sound films or talking films are, as they say, not worth tuppence. In sound cinema, as in silent, we distinguish clearly between only two kinds of films: documentaries (with the original dialogue, sounds etc.) and played films (with artificial dialogue, sounds etc. specially prepared for the shooting). Neither correspondence nor non-correspondence between the visible and the audible is obligatory for either documentaries or played films. Sound images and silent images are edited according to identical principles: montage may make them correspond or not correspond or interweave in various necessary combinations. Above all we must end this stupid confusion of dividing films into talking, noise or sound pictures.'8
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Vertov and his Cine-Eyes were unable to realize their aims, as were Eisenstein and his co-signatories to the 'Statement'. Indeed in the 1930s they found it difficult to find work in the Soviet cinema at all, but the reasons for this were ideological rather than aesthetic.
The Soviet authorities were concerned with cinema not as a revolutionary art form so much as a revolutionary medium for political communication. Lenin himself is supposed to have remarked, 'Of all the arts, for us cinema is the most important'.'9 Its importance as a propaganda weapon lay in its visual nature, which gave it of necessity a simply constructed plot and a message that was both international in its appeal, requiring no specific linguistic or literary capabilities of the audience, but also broadly accessible to a mass audience. A contemporary newspaper remarked that 'Cinema is the only book that even the illiterate can read'.20
The Soviet government was, however, faced with more urgent political and economic tasks than the organization of cinema for propaganda purposes and it was not until December 1922 that the industry was centrally organized, first into Goskino and then, two years later, into Sovkino. But these organizations were, under the New Economic Policy, required to finance their own recons- truction and development from their own resources. This meant that they were compelled to show the kind of films that would attract audiences even though these films might not be the ones that the Soviet authorities, for ideological reasons, might wish audiences to see. Initially, for both financial and pragmatic reasons, the authorities themselves were prepared to countenance this situation. Lenin is reputed to have said: 'If you have a good newsreel, serious and educational pictures, then it doesn't matter if, to attract the public, you have some kind of useless picture of the more or less usual type'.21 It may not have mattered so much in the early years when, as I have said, the authorities had more important matters to attend to. But, as Party and state officials gained in confidence, experience and authority, it did begin to matter. It mattered that audiences continued to go to a film to be entertained rather than educated: not only was a tremendous propaganda opportunity being missed, but the population was being immersed in ideologically undesirable, even counter- revolutionary 'bourgeois' values.
In June 1925 the Central Committee called on writers to develop a
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literature that was 'intelligible to the millions' and thus an appropriate vehicle for political communication, a weapon of propaganda and socialization. This slogan rapidly became a cliche and was applied to other media, including film. In March 1928 the first Party Conference on Cinema was held and it was in the financial year 1927/28 that box-office receipts from Soviet films for the first time exceeded those from imported films.22 The proceedings of the Conference make it clear that the authorities were concerned that Soviet cinema was failing either to reflect or instil a distinctively Soviet world-view, that the films it produced were either 'commercial' and unduly imitative of the Hollywood model and therefore 'imbued with bourgeois ideology' or avant- garde experiments that combined a revolutionary political message with a revolutionary artistic technique that largely rendered that message 'unintelligible to the millions'.23 In its first attempt to rectify this situation the Central Committee issued a decree in January 1929 'On the Strengthening of Cinema Cadres':
The heightening of the class struggle on the ideological front cannot fail to
provoke among petty bourgeois groups the desire to influence the most
important lever for the cultural improvement and education of the masses. The task of the Party is to use all measures to strengthen its leadership of the work of the cinema organizations and, by preserving the ideological consistency of the films produced, to combat decisively the attempt to bring Soviet cinema nearer to the ideology of the non-proletarian strata.24
It is significant that, only four months later, the principal organization of film-workers, the Association of Revolutionary Cinematographers (ARK) became the proletarian-orientated Association of Workers of Revolutioary Cinematography (ARRK), echoing similar changes in other fields.25 In the same year Lunacharsky was forced to resign. The proletarian episode in Soviet cinema had begun. Lunacharsky continued to comment upon film matters, but he was no longer responsible for them. Interestingly enough, the authorities were not prepared to make the 'proletarians' responsible for them either: their standpoint, like that of Proletkult before them, was too radical, too revolutionary.
In February 1930 the Soviet film industry was once more reorganized and centralized into Soyuzkino. Its head was to be Boris Shumyatsky. As we shall see, Shumyatsky's prime concern (and perhaps also his brief, but that we shall not know until such time as Soviet archives are thrown open in a manner that in the west is taken for granted) was to create a cinema that was both popular
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and ideologically correct, a cinema that would both entertain and educate: in the title of his own book, a cinema for the millions.
As a result of the 1929 decree, Party cells were created in film studios in an attempt to ensure that the films produced were ideologically correct. Under the aegis of ARRK efforts were also made to exercise positive discrimination (as we should say nowadays) in favour of employees from proletarian backgrounds.26 Stringent standards were applied to new film scripts and a thematic plan (templan) was produced every year to establish the framework for the following year's production.27 These thematic plans reveal an increasing discrepancy between the production planned and that actually achieved and, as we shall see, it was this discrepancy that ultimately brought about Shumyatsky's dismissal in 1938. The guidelines laid down in the thematic plans and the ideological requirements laid down for scripts proved so rigid that Soviet cinema suffered a recurrent 'script crisis'. There was a desperate shortage of suitable scripts because there was a desperate shortage of suitably safe subjects, and attempts to encourage literary people to become involved in cinema or to overcome the crisis through open 'script competitions' met with only very limited success.28 They preferred the safer alternative of writing 'for the drawer'.
The proletarian episode in Soviet cinema came to an end in 1932. The need now was not so much for a full frontal attack on the 'remnants of bourgeois culture' as for a period of consolidation and reconstruction. In January 1932 Proletarskoe kino, the organ of the then still dominant ARRK, signalled a change of direction: the proletarian line of attack that had hitherto reigned supreme was to give way to,a 'developed socialist offensive on the cinema front'.29 In April 1932 the Central Committee issued its decisive decree 'On the Reorganization of Literary and Artistic Organizations' which, in liquidating RAPP and the all-Union ARRK, brought the proletarian hegemony to an end and paved the way for the introduction of Socialist Realism as the guiding doctrine.30 In January 1933 Proletarskoe kino (Proletarian Cinema) changed its name to the more classless sounding Sovetskoe kino (Soviet Cinema).
In February 1933 the film industry was detached from the People's Commissariat for Light Industry and placed under a new controlling body, the Principal Directorate for the Cinema and Photographic Industry (GUKF).31 Headed once more by Shumyatsky, GUKF was directly subordinated to the Council of People's Commissars and had powers similar to those of a fully-
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fledged People's Commissariat. This both reflected the increasing importance attached to cinema and, consequently, brought cinema under more direct political control. It also underlined the shift towards the increasingly 'classless' view of Soviet society adopted by officialdom before the promulgation of the 1936 Constitution.
The reorganization of Soviet cinema increased Shumyatsky's power because it more or less raised him to the level of a People's Commissar. Increased power, however, brought with it increased responsibility: he alone would have to bear the brunt of any failures. In January 1936 he was given a prominent role on the new Committee on Art Affairs, interposed between GUKF and the Council of People's Commissars, to 'raise the cultural level of the
working people'.32 Shumyatsky's most famous error was probably his decision in March 1937 to stop production of Eisenstein's Bezhin Meadow after two million roubles had been spent on it. But this was not the mistake that brought him down: that crucial mistake was his failure to ensure that the Soviet film industry produced the necessary quantity and quality of films to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution in October 1937.33
Announcing Shumyatsky's departure from office in January 1938, Pravda revealed that, whereas the thematic plan for 1935 had
envisaged the production of 120 films, only 43 had been completed, and in 1937 the figure had fallen even further to 24 out of a planned 63: 'The Soviet cinema can work better and produce far more films than it is now doing. It requires a complete overhaul of its whole method of working and the immediate eradication of all traces of the sabotage that has put down deep roots in cinema organ- izations.'34 Shumyatsky was discredited at first as the 'captive of the
saboteurs', but by March he was further implicated as one of the
'Trotskyite-Bukharinite traitors' linked elsewhere with the 'Fascist
reptiles who have been eradicated'.35 In his 1928 speech to film workers Lunacharsky had warned:
I do not agree that we must look for scapegoats because I think that culprits and
scapegoats are always to be found. Hence, if we replace Ivan Ivanovich by Ivan Pavlovich, things will only improve until the next misfortune, when we shall have to find a new scapegoat, and in the final analysis we shall always be able to find one.
Despite this warning a scapegoat had been found. Given the nature of his powers, Shumyatsky must of course take a large share of the
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blame for Soviet cinema's failure to produce the goods but it must not be forgotten that the technical obstacles had been, and continued to be, enormous.
Technical resources, or rather the chronic shortage of them, played a vital formative role in the early years of Soviet cinema. When the Bolsheviks came to power, the cinema industry was in very poor shape. By the end of the Civil War in the spring of 1921 it was virtually in ruins.
The effects of these straitened beginnings were felt for a long time. The Soviet film industry, impoverished by the departure of so much pre-revolutionary talent, battered by the chaos and disruption of first Revolution and then Civil War, emerged only to be told that under the New Economic Policy it was expected to finance its own reconstruction and development from its own resources. It was to receive virtually no aid from outside sources: furthermore, central government was to continue to levy tax on the industry and to retain the revenue for its own devices. The industry had to rebuild abandoned studios, reopen and refurbish shattered cinemas, re-establish the normal networks of production, distrib- ution and exhibition. It had to do this while catering for audiences comprising large numbers who, because of their position at one or other end of the political, social or economic scale, were entitled to free entrance to cinemas: children, pensioners, soldiers, local government officials and their families, etc. One estimate put the figure of non-paying viewers as high as 42% as late as November 1925.36 On top of all this, the film industry was supposed to develop networks for distribution among the workers, Red Army soldiers and the peasantry, in particular.37 In the adverse circumstances it was virtually impossible even to stand still: it was quite out of the question to move forward. The film industry had no option but to cater for public demand and it did this by importing films from the west.
The revenue accruing from these imports did improve the situation during the second half of the 1920s. Cinema was gradually penetrating to the workers' clubs and even more gradually to the countryside. However, much of the equipment and materials had still to be imported. Even where domestic production had begun, there were still numerous problems. One estimate suggests that by the autumn of 1925 there were about 1,500 projectors (most of them produced by GOZ, the State Optical
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Factory) in the Soviet countryside,38 but by the summer of 1926 over half were reported to be out of order and left idle.39 The organization and administration of cinema through the local organs of central government was largely responsible for this state of affairs. There were few trained personnel in the countryside and copies of the small number of films that did penetrate that far were often damaged beyond repair. Sometimes, however, their excesses were quite remarkable: 'Comrades of the Berezovka district ... lubricated the projector with tar instead of oil and then complained that it was not fit for use.'4" It is small wonder that the film industry was in difficulties.
It was only after the March 1928 Party Conference on Cinema and the ensuing decree on cadres and reorganization of Soviet cinema under Shumyatsky that matters were really brought under control. There were, however, further difficulties: the advent of sound meant that the entire industry from production to studio to mobile projector had to be re-tooled for the new medium. It meant virtually starting again from scratch. The Soviet Union was still importing many of its basic film materials well into the first Five Year Plan period. The first Soviet factory that produced film stock was not opened until 1931 and that too ran into difficulties.4' The situation was further complicated by both deliberate delays to ensure first, that sound film was not just a passing whim, and then that the USSR adopted the same system of sound recording as that adopted in the west and by the prolonged wrangles within the Soviet Union over the relative merits of their own Tager and Shorin recording systems. By the middle of 1931 only six cinemas in the USSR were equipped for sound,42 although the thematic plan for 1932 envisaged the production of a hundred sound features. 'We have,' said one writer, 'fallen too far behind. We must start working at a Bolshevik tempo.'43 By the end of 1931 a decision had been taken in favour of the same sound recording system that emerged victorious in the west: to save face both Tager and Shorin were given credit for its development. The first three sound features completed in 1931 were Kozintsev and Trauberg's Alone, Yutkevich's Golden Mountains and Ekk's The Road to Life. After seeing them, Stalin gave orders that more funds should be devoted to the development of sound film 'seeing in elements of sound an enormous additional resource for the artistic expression of our ideas'.44 As Noel Burch has so astutely remarked: 'Political cadres suddenly found themselves confronted with a medium which involved spoken discourse, i.e. the very substance of their political practice. Their competence to intervene far more directly than before
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was suddenly legitimised.'45 Sound film permitted, through the use of dialogue, a much greater development of individual characters and thus also the transmission of a much more complex message.
Enormous difficulties did, of course, continue, but by the conclusion of the first Five-Year Plan in 1933 the number of cinema installations had risen to 18,695, compared with 4,688 in 1928.46 But it must be remembered that this was a period of vast social and economic transformation, of mass migration to the towns and cities, so that efforts to develop the film industry had to be not merely strenuous but gargantuan. That is at least part of the explanation for Shumyatsky's unrealized, and possibly unrealizable, annual thematic plans, for the giant studio complex built on the Lenin Hills overlooking Moscow, and for his grand- iose project for a Soviet Hollywood to be constructed on the shores of the Black Sea. Only the Moscow studios (now the headquarters of Mosfilm) were completed and even those did not go into full production until after Shumyatsky had fallen from grace.
The recognition that, in Lunacharsky's words, 'Cinema is an industry and, what is more, a profitable industry',47 and the decision to place the financial burden of reconstruction and development on the film industry itself made the cinema audience probably the most important factor in the 1920s.
Commercially successful imported films, including those 'imbued with a bourgeois ideology', dominated the Soviet film market until the 1927/8 season. It is small wonder, then, that the names of Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton were as familiar to Soviet film audiences as they were to those in the west: Soviet audiences were, like their counterparts abroad, interested, not in instruction and improvement, but in entertainment and escapism. Hence the most popular films were those with an 'exotic' appeal, films from Germany like Dr. Mabuse, films from Hollywood like The Mark of Zorro, Robin Hood or almost any of the American comedies. Similarly, the most popular Soviet films were not necessarily those that pushed forward the frontiers of experimentation, that defined the essence of cinema as a distinctive and independent art-form, or expanded the horizons of cinematic praxis. Nor indeed were they necessarily the films that would 'elevate the cultural level of the masses' or 'imbue them with communist ideology'. They were,
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quite simply, entertainment films good and proper, films that diverted the attention from reality, and above all films that were enjoyable. Thus the most popular Soviet films were those that imitated the conventions of bourgeois Hollywood: The Bear's Wedding, directed by Gardin and Eggert from Lunacharsky's own adaptation of a Prosper Merimee short story, was seen by twice as many people as saw Battleship Potemkin. Soviet audiences began to enthuse about thrillers like Death Ray or the five-part serial Miss Mend, even the 'Red thriller' The Blue Express, or about 'psychological drawing-room dramas' like The Salamander. Perhaps most popular of all were the extraordinarily witty comedies created around the characters portrayed by Igor Ilinsky such as The Kiss from Mary Pickford, The Doll with the Millions, The Three Millions Trial and The Feast of St. Jirgen. Igor Ilinsky was possibly the greatest box office draw in the Soviet cinema of the late twenties and, ironically, he was also the creator of the leading roles in Mayakovsky's two theatrical comedies The Bed-Bug and The Bath- House. At least in his person theatre and cinema were not independent art-forms: and it is in his career that we see the first lessons for the role of comedy in film under Shumyatsky.
Whereas in the 1920s in the silent film era, but also in the early 1930s with the advent of sound, the leading artists had been primarily concerned with experimentation in the search for new and revolutionary artistic forms to match the political, economic and social revolutions and the attempts to create a new Soviet man, the Party leadership had been determined to develop a Soviet cinema that was 'the most powerful weapon for the deepening of the class- consciousness of the workers, for the political re-education of all the non-proletarian strata of the population, and above all the peasantry'.48 Hence, while artists were concerned with innovation, politicians were concerned with communication and the need for communication meant that Soviet films had to be 'intelligible to the millions', which meant films that were both popular in form and ideologically correct in content. This was Shumyatsky's challenge and his principal aim. But in this task the films from the 1920s that we
regard as distinctively Soviet were useless: experimental films tend to be intelligible only to an initiated elite and for this reason alone they are also ideologically suspect. On the other hand, as we have seen, the popular Soviet films of the 1920s had been those that had successfully imitated Hollywood models. But in the period of cultural revolution and socialist construction the Soviet cinema could scarcely be seen to be aping Hollywood models, even if they had been appropriate.
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The Soviet cinema had to create its own genres and this at a time when its resources were stretched to and beyond their limits in coping with the transition to sound and the ensuing problems.
One thing was made quite clear from the start: documentary films were to play no part in this cinema of mass consumption. Vertov's Three Songs of Lenin, made in 1934, was praised by Shumyatsky as 'good and important precisely because he has abandoned documentarism'.49 The new Soviet genres were not then to be documentary on the one hand and fiction on the other: if documentary were to be excluded, the fiction film would reign supreme and the genres would be sub-divisions of fiction film.
The first serious attempt to define genre in Soviet film theory had been undertaken by the critic Adrian Piotrovsky in his article 'Towards a Theory of Film Genres' published in 1927 as part of the Formalist collection Poetics of Cinema, edited by Boris Eikhenbaum.50 One of the most important genres that he distinguished was that of 'American comedy' and he predicted that in the Soviet Union 'we might construct a brilliant genre of political eccentro-comedy, firmly based on the technical achievements of American comedy'. Piotrovsky's admiration for Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton etc. was, of course, far from unique, but it was his formulation of comedy as one of the principal film genres that, given his prominence as a film critic, made more people take comedy more seriously. Shumyatsky devoted a whole chapter of his book A Cinema for the Millions to 'The Struggle for New Film Genres' and much of this was devoted to a discussion about the importance of comedy. He argued that:
In a country where socialism is being constructed, where there is no private property and exploitation, where the classes hostile to the proletariat have been liquidated, where the workers are united by their conscious participation in the construction of a socialist society and where the great task of liquidating the remnants of the capitalist past is being successfully accomplished by the Party even in the consciousness of the people - in this country comedy, apart from its task of exposure, has another, more important and responsible task: the creation of a good, joyful spectacle.51
Ironically, it was only a few years earlier that one critic had bemoaned the continued influence of commercial considerations and the preoccupation in the Soviet Union with film as an
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'entertainment spectacle' rather than a 'cultural medium'.52
Comedy was to pose particular problems for Socialist Realism precisely because the comedy film took neither itself nor its subject matter too seriously. It was often derided as flippant, whereas it was also essentially subversive.
Comedy films had, as we have seen, proved very popular in the 1920s. The leading American comedy stars were all well known in Soviet Russia, and the films of Igor Ilinsky were very popular. The kind of Soviet film comedy made in the 1920s was, by 1931, no longer regarded as 'Soviet comedy'. That, at least, was the view that Lunacharsky put forward in a speech to the Moscow branch of ARRK on 12 July 1931 in an attempt to support the efforts of Alexander Medvedkin to make film satires.53
Medvedkin's film career had begun in 1927 when, as a Red Army recruit, he had been posted to the military film unit, Gosvoenkino. He had then left the army and teamed up with Nikolai Okhlopkov, one of Meyerhold's leading actors, and the two had made The Way of the Enthusiasts in 1930, but it was regarded as unsuitable for release, probably at least in part because it painted an unflattering portrait of the peasantry and partly because it may have been deemed 'unintelligible to the millions'. Medvedkin himself has said:
This film was experimental. Without thinking, we experimented and our
experiments went beyond the confines of cinema. We sanctioned a whole series of incorrect and questionable political truths. The film was philosophically so confused that it was not released.54
Whatever the reasons for its non-release, it is clear that this film cast a blight over both Okhlopkov's and Medvedkin's careers. Okhlopkov never directed another film, although he acted in many, including Men and Jobs, Lenin in October, Lenin in 1918 and Alexander Nevsky. Medvedkin toured the Ukraine on the new film train that echoed the days of the agit-trains in the Civil War. Here he produced a whole series of one-reel satirical comedies designed to point up weaknesses and failings in local production methods:
Our role was to check that people were doing their jobs properly. If you'd been told to produce certain instruments and you hadn't done so, then we'd film you. After this people were seized with terror in case they appeared on the screen
again. So people worked in front of our camera as if it were a machine-gun. There were, of course, great difficulties but, after seeing our film, people set
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about solving them with such enthusiasm that, by the time we left the area - we worked for a month or two, not less - but in that time we managed to
reorganize everything completely. Where ore had been produced at 40%0
capacity, it was now produced at 110% capacity... That's how this kind of cinema, political cinema, produced, as it were, concrete results.
It was this kind of political cinema, using satire as a weapon, that Medvedkin wanted to transfer to mainstream cinema. But his ideas were regarded with deep suspicion, precisely because satire is essentially subversive, and he was left without work. Medvedkin has remarked, 'People said that the proletariat could do without satire and that it had no need of humour which was a matter for bourgeois culture'. It was at this point that Lunacharsky, by now no longer responsible for official artistic policy, came to the rescue with his above-mentioned report to the Moscow branch of ARRK in July 1931.
Lunacharsky defined two kinds of humour, the cruel and the benevolent. Cruel humour, aimed at the pillars of the old order, had served the revolutionaries well before 1917, but now there was a need for benevolent, though critical, humour:
The proletariat, as the leading class in the country of the Soviets and the vanguard of the workers, is towing the backward masses of the peasantry behind it and re-educating them. In this context laughter can be aimed at many targets. We still have to overcome a lot of things: the remnants of Oblomovism and Asiatic attitudes that we must fight with all our resources, including humour. This humour may be both benevolent and self-critical. Self-criticism is a tool of the class struggle. But when we criticize one another within the same group, the tightly knit band of revolutionaries... our self-criticism, whether it comes through the medium of a humorous journal, an anecdote or a comedy, cannot but be benevolent.
But the more obstinate the problem humour was required to tackle, the more that humour would tend towards the malevolent and satirical. You could not, as it were, make an omelette without breaking eggs: the process of socialist transformation would inevitably hurt and the task of satire was to ensure that the effects of that hurt were positive and constructive: 'It is necessary not only that humour should not be abstract but that it should have a concrete, socially interesting purpose.' However, this requirement did not mean that satire had to be realistic. Lunacharsky noted that, 'Realism by no means implies photographic realism [kodakirovanie]', although, 'Laughter is exceptionally powerful
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when it equates with artistic realism'. He went on to observe that, 'The task of our artists... has at its basis a truthful idea but this does not mean that their works must always be truthful'. The key to truth and reality lay in the artist's ideological position:
The artist sees deformities and vices that are in reality concealed and
exaggerates them, bringing them to the fore and displaying the essence of
things in such a way that he depicts them unrealistically. I am no supporter of the paradoxical view that the truth is always unrealistic but the fact of the matter is that to be truthful means to be influenced by the profoundly elaborated dialectical concept of class. If you depart from this you will not be
truthful, you will not be a realist but a pseudorealistic counterfeit. But if you do adhere to this concept you will be one of the great messengers of truth, even though you have stylized reality and used fantastic forms.
This was precisely what Medvedkin had tried to do in the short satires produced on the film-train and it was precisely what he wanted to do in feature-length films. It was also precisely why he had run into trouble: satire was a double-edged weapon.
Lunacharsky concluded his speech by remarking that to
suppress an artist like Medvedkin would merely:
bear witness to our barbarism. If we 'dealt' with every pioneer like that because of his errors everyone would be afraid of originality and that would mean an end to creativity... I am sure that our comrades who work on satire will find the courage to continue their work, despite the difficulties, and that we shall find the resources to support them in future. Film comedy and satire are an endlessly rich and fruitful field, but one that has been disgracefully neglected. They demand our closest attention.
Lunacharsky's spirited defence had the desired effect and Medvedkin was allowed to shoot his satirical feature film, Happiness, completed in 1934, the very year that Socialist Realism became the touchstone of official artistic policies.
The film's use of caricature is evident from the very first shots: the characters are stylized in an animated version of the traditional peasant lubok. Echoing Lunacharsky's remarks, Medvedkin wrote: 'Happiness releases the writer from the
depiction of false realism and gives him the opportunity to
portray his characters clearly, fully and precisely.'55 Khmyr, the
peasant anti-hero who clings to the old ways and believes that the
happiness of the film's title is to be found through private enterprise and the accumulation of material wealth, has a stiff beard and a funny hat. His wife, with her painted cheeks and
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spotted dress, is the heroine who plays a full part in the life of the collective farm and is rewarded for her high productivity by enormous quantities of food, while Khmyr is almost starving. (In terms of their appearance they are rather like the grotesque characters in the later Hollywood film, The Wizard of Oz!). The wife's repeated attempts to convince Khmyr of the virtues of the collective fall on deaf ears. Even when his private enterprise fails and he is forced by circumstances to join the collective, Khmyr is only a half-hearted member. He is constantly outwitted by the remnants of the old order who include particularly grotesque caricatures of the priest and the kulak. It is only when the latter try to burn the animals and thus sabotage the collective (thus confirming the official Soviet view of the early history of collectivization) that Khmyr sees the light and his revolutionary consciousness is awakened. Like all the best Hollywood films, Happiness has what the Russians term a 'kheppi-end'.
Medvedkin's film contains the two kinds of humour delineated by Lunacharsky: the cruel strain is directed against the representatives of the old order, the saboteurs, while the benevolent strain permeates the treatment of Khmyr, who becomes, as it were, a born-again collect- ivist. The satirical experiment of Happiness proved successful. Shumyatsky praised the film56 and Eisenstein enthused wildly, comparing Medvedkin favourably with Chaplin:
Today I saw how a Bolshevik laughs. . .Chaplin 'in a new guise' - that's how I felt when I saw Medvedkin's Happiness today...
Chaplin's gags are individualistic, whereas Medvedkin's gags are social.
Chaplin always goes off into the distance. Something leads him off, something eternal. One leg here - another leg there. But his individuality is no solution.
The solution is collective. Khmyr begins where Chaplin leaves off... Medvedkin achieves an effect worthy of Goya.57
But Eisenstein's review of Happiness was published only thirty-five years later. Satire, and film satire in particular, continued to be viewed with the utmost suspicion. Happiness succeeded because in 1934 it was still politically possible to admit the continuing existence of remnants of the bourgeois pre-revolutionary past and to argue, as the film does, for the possibility of peaceful transformation. But after 1936, when the new Constitution set the seal on the 'most democratic of all democracies', all forms of opposition, failure or weakness were officially explicable only in terms of sabotage inspired by the enemies
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of Soviet power, grouped in that oasis in the desert of Stalin's paranoid imagination, the 'Trotskyist-Bukharinite-Fascist clique'. They could only be expunged by the more brutal methods for which the Great Purge is infamous: benevolent humour had had its day.
Medvedkin's Happiness underlines the problems faced by the humorist in such a highly charged political atmosphere. His film was popular in form, ideologically correct in content: it was cruel to the enemy who deserved it and benevolent to the pseudo-enemy who could be transformed. It represented a Soviet film-maker's honest response to the tasks he had been set: it was 'intelligible to the millions' - or, at least, it would have been, had it been widely distributed. That it was not is a reflection of the time and in particular of the deteriorating circumstances surrounding Soviet artistic endeavour in the mid-1930s. At least Medvedkin's film was an honest attempt to respond to the challenge set by the proletarian hegemony in the summer of 1931: that Soviet cinema should, in the words of one critic, move 'from intelligentsia illusions to actual reality'.58 It was, in short, a model example of 'cinema for the millions'.
Notes
1. Reported in Zhizn' iskusstva, 24 January 1928. 2. B. Shumyatskii, Kinematografiya millionov. Opyt analiza (Moscow 1935), 249. 3. 'O partiinoi politike v oblasti khudozhestvennoi literatury', Pravda, 1 July 1925. 4. J. Grierson, 'Summary and Survey: 1935', reprinted in F. Hardy (ed.), Grierson
on Documentary (London 1966), 182. 5. For this, see my The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917-1929 (Cambridge 1979)
or J. Leyda, Kino. A History of Russian and Soviet Film (London 1960). 6. I have elaborated an earlier version of this argument in my 'Soviet Socialist
Realism and the Cinema Avant-Garde', Studies in Comparative Communism, summer 1983. I am grateful to Ian Christie and Neil Harding, and also to the members of the seminar on Soviet industrialization at the University of Birmingham's CREES for their comments on my earlier draft and trust that my revisions will go at least some way towards meeting their criticisms.
7. L.V. Kuleshov, 'O zadachakh khudozhnika v kinematografe', Vestnik kinematografii, 1917, no. 126, 15.
9. See, for instance, Mayakovsky's 'The Destruction of "Theatre" by Cinema as a Sign of the Resurrection of Theatrical Art', Kine-Zhurnal, 24 August 1913, and 'The Relationship Between Contemporary Theatre and Cinema and Art', Kine-
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Zhurnal, 8 September 1913, both translated into English by R. Taylor in I. Christie, 'Vladimir Mayakovsky: Film & Theatre, 1913-1927' (Archaeology of Film Theory: 4), Framework (London), no.18, 1982 (January), 4-6.
10. See the collection Ekstsentrizm. Sbornik statei (Petrograd 1922). 11. E. Gabrilovich, O tom, chto proshlo (Moscow 1967), 12. A shortened version
of this piece is translated as 'Adventures and Encounters of a Scenarist' in L. & J. Schnitzer & M. Martin (eds.), Cinema in Revolution (trans. and ed. D. Robinson) (London 1973), 168-169. See also: N.A. Zarkhi, 'O teorii i praktike zvukovogo stsenariya', Iz istorii kino, no.3 (Moscow 1960), 10.
12. S. Eizenshtein, V. Pudovkin, G. Aleksandrov, 'Zayavka', Zhizn'iskusstva, 5 August 1928, 4-5. The significance of this document is discussed in I. Christie, 'Soviet Cinema: Making Sense of Sound. A Revised Historiography', Screen, vol.23, no.2 (July/August 1982), 34-49. A new English translation will be included in R. Taylor & I. Christie (eds.), The Film Factory. Soviet Cinema in Documents, (London 1984).
13. D. Vertov, 'My. Variant manifesta', Kino-Fot, 25-31 August 1922, 11. 14. D. Vertov, 'Kino-glaz', in Na putyakh iskusstva (Moscow 1925), 220. 15. Vertov, quoted in A. Belenson, Kino segodnya. Ocherki sovetskogo
kinoiskusstva. (Kuleshov- Vertov-Eizenshtein) (Moscow 1925), 36. 16. D. Vertov, 'Kino-glaz', Pravda, 19 July 1924. 17. E.g. E. Shub, 'K prikhodu zvuka v kinematograf', Kino, 1929, reprinted in
idem, Zhizn' moya - kinematograf (Moscow 1972), 269. Even Pudovkin, one of the signatories to the 1928 'Statement', soon came to the view that sound might have more value in documentary film-making: V. Pudovkin, 'K voprosu zvukovogo nachala v fil'me', Kino i kul'tura, 1929, no.5/6 (May/June), 3.
18. D. Vertov, 'Otvety na voprosy', dated 25 April 1930 and consisting of answers to a questionnaire from the editors of the monthly Kino-Front. The journal did not publish Vertov's reply, which first appeared in S.V. Drobashenko (ed.), Dziga Vertov. Stat'i. Dnevniki. Zamysli (Moscow 1966), 122-124.
19. G.M. Boltyanskii, Lenin i kino (Moscow 1925), 16-17. 20. Pskovskii nabat, 3 July 1924, quoted in A. Goldobin, Kino na territorii
S.S.S.R. (Po materialam provintsial'noi pressy) (Moscow 1924), 64. 21. Boltyanskii, 16. 22. E.G. Lemberg, Kinopromyshlennost' S.S.S.R. Ekonomika sovetskoi
kinematografii (Moscow 1930), 71. 23. See Krinitsky's remarks in B.S. Ol'khovyi (ed.), Puti kino. Pervoe
Vsesoyuznoe partiinoe soveschchanie po kinematografii (Moscow 1929), 37. 24. N.A. Lebedev (ed.), Partiya o kino (Moscow 1939), 82-85. 25. Novyi zritel', 26 May 1929. 26. See A. Rubailo, Partiinoe rukovodstvo razvitiem kinoiskusstva (1928-1937)
(Moscow 1976), especially Ch.l. 27. E.g. B. Shumyatskii, 'Tvorcheskie voprosy templana', Sovetskoe kino, 1933,
no.12 (December), 1-15. 28. That of 1938 held up the script for Lenin in October as a model; Konkurs na
(May/June), 8. 42. V. Sutyrin, 'O sotsialisticheskoi rekonstruktsii', Proletarskoe kino, 1931,
no.l (January), 9. 43. Liss, 10. 44. Shumyatskii, Kinematografiya, 121. 45. N. Burch, To the Distant Observer (London 1979), 147. 46. A.V. Kol'tsov (ed.), Kul'turnoe stroitel'stvo v R.S.F.S.R. v gody pervoi
pyatiletki (1928-1932) (Moscow 1960), 187. 47. A.V. Lunacharskii, 'O kino', Komsomol'skaya pravda, 26 August 1925. 48. Ol'khovyi, 431. 49. Shumyatskii, Kinematografiya, 173. 50. An English translation, edited by Richard Taylor is available as no.9 of
Russian Poetics in Translation (Oxford 1982). The Piotrovsky piece covers
pp.90-106. 51. Shurnyatskii, Kinematografiya, 234-263. 52. Sutyrin. 6. 53. The speech was published as A.V. Lunacharskii, 'Kinematograficheskaya
komediya i satira', Proletarskoe kino, no.9 (September), 4-15. The critic, Sutyrin, editor of Proletarskoe kino, also supported Medvedkin. His report was published in the next issue as V. Sutyrin, 'O sovetskoi satire', Proletarskoe kino, 1931, no.10/11
(October/November), 4-15. 54. From an unpublished interview given by Medvedkin to Kate Betz and the late
Martin Walsh in June 1977 at a conference held in Varna, Bulgaria. I am indebted to
Keith M. Griffiths, for permission to quote this and the following extracts from my as yet unpublished translation of the interview.
