Introduction Entering the Film Factory
Inside the Film Factory, as its title suggests, begins where our previous collaboration The Film Factory left off. Whereas that anthology of documents aimed to provide the reader with a tool-kit with which to reopen the set questions of Russian and Soviet cinema history, this collection of essays is intended to point towards some of the ways in which those questions might be approached and answered in different ways, to indicate some of the new questions that might profitably be posed and to suggest some of the neglected areas that require further investigation.
It was the underlying premiss of. The Film Factory, as expressed in Ian Christie’s introductory essay, ‘Soviet cinema: a heritage and its history’, that Western—and indeed Soviet—views of the history of Soviet cinema had become overloaded with the canons of the past to the point where overdetermined categorisation and periodisation had left the subject stranded in a whole series of blind alleys:
The history of the early Soviet cinema has become a prisoner of its own mythology. When western historians and critics speak of ‘Soviet revolutionary cinema’, they are invoking a very specific construct which, together with German Expressionism and Italian Neo-Realism, constitutes a cornerstone of the art-cinema tradition.... [The] continuing western preoccupation with a small group of ‘masters’ and their early work in the silent period, together with what seems like a wilful ignorance of their less famous contemporaries and of the furious debates that raged around Soviet cinema’s policy direction throughout the decade before 1935—these suggest that the actual history of Russian and early Soviet cinema has long been the victim of a self-confirming diagnosis, now enshrined in a persuasive mythology.1
It is our intention that Inside the Film Factory should broaden and deepen the challenge to that hitherto so persuasive mythology, taking advantage both of some of the questions raised by The Film Factory and of the major changes taking place in the Soviet historiography of Soviet cinema now that previously unaskable questions can be, and increasingly are being, asked.
If both history and historiography are seen as processes, then it stands to reason that no single historical event can be seen in isolation and no single historical period cut off from the preceding and succeeding periods by the historical equivalent of a scholarly iron curtain. We have after all argued elsewhere against the rigid periodisation of the subject itself. It follows therefore that the re-evaluation of the history of Soviet cinema is not something that has appeared out of the blue, any more than have the processes of glasnost and perestroika that have accelerated that re-evaluation. It is for this reason that we have chosen to include in the volume a number of reprinted articles that share a common questioning of the old shibboleths, by pursuing new approaches, by investigating new areas, by uncovering new evidence, or by a combination of these techniques. The inclusion of two pieces by Vance Kepley is an intentional tribute to his pioneering work: taken together, and with the addition of the translation of the Russian prologue to Intolerance, they exemplify these three basic methods of reappraisal. Similarly, Ian Christie’s essay on ‘Making sense of early Soviet sound’ argues for a more complex reading of the conjunctions that ‘divided’ the 1920s from the 1930s than the oversimplistic good/bad normative judgement that has hitherto prevailed. Richard Taylor’s piece on Boris Shumyatsky, previously merely reviled as the man who stopped Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow, examines the role of the administrator/ bureaucrat during the period of what to current reformist orthodoxy is known as ‘administrative command socialism’ and argues for a more subtly shaded interpretation of his place in the development of Soviet cinema. Both this and Kepley’s essay on ‘The origins of Soviet cinema’ presuppose a consideration of cinema not merely as an aesthetic phenomenon, an art form, but also as an administrative and industrial complex, with all the additional perspectives that this implies.
Part of the re-examination of the subject must also involve an attempt to bring the English-speaking reader up to date with ground-breaking articles published in other languages. For this reason we have included Bernard Eisenschitz’s essay on the relatively little-known director, Boris Barnet, one of ‘the less famous contemporaries’ referred to above, but nevertheless a director whose career spanned a longer period than did those of the ‘small group of “masters”‘in the established canon. For the same reason we have also translated Mikhail Yampolsky’s article on the context of Lev Kuleshov’s theory of acting, which originally appeared in French. But another, and even more compelling, reason for including this is that it represents the very best of the wide-ranging research now being pursued by Soviet scholars, especially those of the younger generation. There is a similar justification for the inclusion of the opening essay by Yuri Tsivian, although the implications of his piece and the issues that he raises provide their own more than adequate justification. Apart from Leyda’s pioneering sketch in Kino and the project supervised by Tsivian himself and only recently published, the pre-Revolutionary period is virtually a blank page in the history of Russian and Soviet cinema.2 Tsivian’s essay opens up numer-ous fields for further investigation, undermines another prevailing periodisation of Russian and Soviet cinema history, that between the pre-and post-Revolutionary epochs, and raises some absolutely fundamental questions.
What was the real relationship between theatre and cinema, and between theatre and cinema workers, in the early period? How widespread was the audience for film before the Revolution; what kind of audience was it; what kind of films did it want to see, and what kind of films did it actually see? How far has the founding ideology of the Revolution and its legitimising mythology obscured the achievements of this early period of Russian film-making? How far has this distorted our subsequent view of the ways in which the immediate post-Revolutionary generation reacted against the tenets of its predecessors, or indeed the ways in which the second generation in the 1930s might have been restoring, consciously or unconsciously, some kind of continuity with the pre-Revolutionary traditions?
To a certain extent the answers to at least some of these questions can be approached through direct contact with the surviving veterans of generations of Soviet film-makers, although memoir materials always have to be treated with a certain degree of caution. In the case of Soviet history the frailties of human memory have been exacerbated by the perceived need to justify past acquiescences, to settle old scores, to ‘set the record straight’ in what can all too often be a very particular and subjective sense. Nevertheless, as the Cinema in Revolution collection amply demonstrated,3 the direct contact afforded by interviews with those who actively participated in the drama more often than not outweighs the difficulties encountered and provides us with a unique insight into the motivations of past film-makers and the conflicting pressures under which they worked. Too often these are obscured by the ‘benefit’ of our own historical hindsight! We have therefore included hitherto unpublished interview material with another ‘less famous contemporary’, Alexander Medvedkin, which clearly demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of this particular method of investigation.
Last, but most certainly not least, Inside the Film Factory includes essays written specifically for this collection which cover new ground in various ways. Two of them, by Ian Christie and Denise J.Youngblood, address complementary aspects of the career of Yakov Protazanov, one of the most popular of Russian and Soviet film directors with mass audiences, a film-maker whose first script was filmed in 1909, whose works encompassed the whole gamut of genres and whose last film was completed in 1943, a pre-Revolutionary figure who went into emigration and came back at a time when others were still leaving—in other words, a man whose career invalidates the conventional stereotypes even more than does the career of Boris Barnet. That we have devoted two contributions out of eleven to his reappraisal is a sign of the importance we attach to the task in hand and to the new perspectives that his re-evaluation opens up. Hoberman’s essay on Soviet Yiddish cinema investigates one of the most important blank pages in Soviet cinema history and illustrates the way in which cinema history is itself caught up in the tide of broader historical patterns. It resonates also upon our conventional overall view of the period that he discusses.
The purpose of Inside the Film Factory is then to open new doors, not to close existing ones. It is no part of our intention to set up a new orthodoxy in place of the one that we find desperately wanting. That is why this volume encompasses a variety of approaches, a variety of materials and a variety of authors, as we hope will the Routledge Soviet Cinema Series as a whole. It nevertheless behoves reformers, in cinema history as elsewhere, to offer at least some indication of the areas towards which they think future efforts should be directed.
One of the most important gaps in the literature on Soviet cinema, or indeed any cinema, in any language is the absence of a thoroughly researched economic history of the industry. In the Soviet instance, this would throw valuable light on the day-to-day workings of the administrative machine and on the constraints that helped to shape policy towards production, distribution and exhibition. It would also illuminate the nature of the relationship between commercial and ideological considerations—including the international dimensions—in the policy-making process and clarify the impact of organisational changes on the kind of films made. Finally, it would help us to understand more precisely the role of the studio and its own administrative hierarchy in the actual process of film production and the ways in which that role has changed from the 1920s to the present day.
There is also a place for a series of monographs examining the roles of particular individuals in the history of Soviet cinema. Readers may wonder why there is scarcely a mention of Eisenstein or his films in the present volume. They may rest assured that it is no part of our intention to devalue his contribution; on the contrary, a volume based on papers given at the 1988 Oxford Eisenstein Conference is in hand under the working title Eisenstein Rediscovered, which explores fresh perspectives on this crucial figure. There is indeed also a need for re-examination of other key figures in the canon—Pudovkin, Vertov and Kuleshov—and an even more pressing need for an investigation of those film-makers outside the established canon, such as Barnet, Protazanov and Medvedkin, or the FEKS group [Fabrika ekstsentricheskogo aktëra (Factory of the Eccentric Actor)], where our own paths first crossed. But the greatest need is simply to broaden the agenda—and not just in the Soviet context—so that we come to consider the history of cinema not just as the history of film directors but as the interactive history of all the individuals involved: directors, scriptwriters, cameramen, actors, designers, studio administrators, politicians—and of individuals who at various times performed more than one of these functions.
There is, for instance, no full study in any language of the role played in Soviet cinema by the man who supervised its first decade, Anatoli Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, whose wife, Nataliya Rozenel, was a popular film actress in the 1920s and who himself scripted a number of films, including the horror hit The Bear’s Wedding in 1925. Even a close examination of his scripts and of the films made from them might well provide us with a valuable new perspective on what was expected officially from Soviet cinema in the early period, and that in turn might throw up new continuities for us to consider. Similarly very little is known of the role played by such ‘enabling’ figures from the studios as Adrian Piotrovsky or Moisei Aleinikov, or by a historian and teacher like Venyamin Vishnevsky.
But cinema history cannot, of course, be merely the history of individuals: it must also be the history of the context within which those individuals were active. This has to include a consideration of the changing audience, its expectations and its reactions, and that leads us on to examine the role played by film critics and historians in the development of Soviet cinema. It also involves an examination of the relationship between that cinema and its audience and, more specifically, the reception of the films that were actually produced. Lastly, it must also include a study of the studio system and its implications and of the overall political context within which Soviet cinema has developed.
Inside the Film Factory is therefore only one step along the road, although we naturally hope that it will be a significant one. The need now is for a more concerted effort to extract more information and to make more sophisticated use of it. As the Soviet Union rejoins the world community, contact between Soviet and Western scholars proliferates. This provides us with an unparalleled opportunity to combine the methodologies that have been developed over the decades by Western scholars and critics—many originally deriving from Soviet sources—with the information that is more easily accessible to Soviet scholars in their archives and libraries. As more blank pages are filled, so others will appear: such is the nature of historical research, but collaboration in the future will bring us closer to the elusive goal of historical truth than have confrontation and all-too-frequently wilful misrepresentation—on both sides—in the past. If Inside the Film Factory and the series that it inaugurates help to promote that collaboration, they will have served their purpose.
We enter the film factory with trepidation, but not entirely without hope.