Cinema has been the predominant popular art form of the first half of the twentieth century, at least in Europe and North America. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the former Soviet Union, where Lenin’s remark that ‘of all the arts for us cinema is the most important’ became a cliché and where cinema attendances were until recently still among the highest in the world. In the age of mass politics Soviet cinema developed from a fragile but effective tool to gain support among the overwhelmingly illiterate peasant masses in the civil war that followed the October 1917 Revolution, through a welter of experimentation, into a mass weapon of propaganda through entertainment that shaped the public image of the Soviet Union – both at home andabroad and for both élite and mass audiences – and latterly into an instrument to expose the weaknesses of the past and present in the twin processes of glasnost and perestroïka. Now the national cinemas of the successor republics to the old Soviet Union are encountering the same bewildering array of problems, from the trivial to the terminal, as are all the other ex-Soviet institutions.
Cinema’s central position in Russian and Soviet cultural history and its unique combination of mass medium, art form and entertainment industry, have made it a continuing battlefield for conflicts of broader ideological and artistic significance, not only for Russia and the Soviet Union but also for the world outside. The debates that raged in the 1920s about the relative revolutionary merits of documentary as opposed to fiction film, of cinema as opposed to theatre or painting, or of the proper role of cinema in the forging of post-Revolutionary Soviet culture and the shaping of the new Soviet man, have their echoes in current discussions about the role of cinema vis-à-vis other art forms in effecting the cultural and psychological revolution in human consciousness necessitated by the processes of economic and political transformation of the former Soviet Union into modern democratic and industrial societies and states governed by the rule of law. Cinema’s central position has also made it a vital instrument for scrutinising the blank pages of Russian and Soviet history and enabling the present generation to come to terms with its own past.
This series of books intends to examine Russian and Soviet films in the context of Russian and Soviet cinema, and Russian and Soviet cinema in the context of the political and cultural history of Russia, the Soviet Union and the world at large. Within that framework the series, drawing its authors from East and West, aims to cover a wide variety of topics and to employ a broad range of methodological approaches and presentational formats. Inevitably this will involve ploughing once again over old ground in order to re-examine received opinions but it principally means increasing the breadth and depth of our knowledge, finding new answers to old questions and, above all, raising new questions for further enquiry and discovering new areas for further research.
The Film Factory, which first appeared in hardback in 1988, presented for the first time in English – or, indeed, in any language – a mass of hitherto unavailable documentary material on the history and development of Russian and Soviet cinema from 1896 to 1939. The editors aimed to provide the reader with what they termed ‘an open resource – raw material to enable new models and interpretations of Soviet cinema history to be fashioned’. In selecting documents for inclusion, they aimed ‘to balance the issues that concerned the makers of Soviet cinema themselves: the aesthetic, the political, the economic, the social and, more often than not, a complex blend of these, together with more personal factors’. Since 1988 events have moved further and faster than could then have been envisaged and the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 has unleashed a wealth of new material, especially material relating to the 1930s on which the editors quite specifically argued that much work still needed to be done. They have, however, resisted the temptation to revise The Film Factory, apart from eradicating some typographical and similar errors. They have taken this decision partly because the warm critical reception for the book suggested that it would remain useful in its present form for years to come, and partly because to do justice to the 1930s and subsequent decades would require a separate volume, a kind of After the Film Factory. The publication of the paperback edition will, we hope, bring the volume within reach of a wider audience concerned with the history of Russian and Soviet cinema and with the issues around which that history revolved.
The continuing aim of the series is to situate Russian and Soviet cinema in its proper historical and aesthetic context, both as a major cultural force in Russian history and Soviet politics and as a crucible for experimentation that is of central significance to the development of world cinema culture. Books in the series strive to combine the best of scholarship, past, present and future, with a style of writing that is accessible to a broad readership, whether that readership’s primary interest lies in cinema or in Russian and Soviet history.
Richard Taylor
February 1994