If you want to come to cinema’s aid, do not rush to the screen.
Pause to think a hundred times, a thousand times, on the doorstep of the film factory.
Best of all: stay in the audience.
Cinema needs that more than anything: an audience that does not succumb to cinema psychosis.
Viktor Shklovsky
It was only in January 1936 that the Soviet film studios became officially known as such, kinostudii. This set the seal on their new artistic-industrial status under the vigorous leadership of Boris Shumyatsky and was no doubt inspired by his visit in the previous year to European and Hollywood studios. Previously the film studio was known simply as a film factory (kinofabrika), as it had been in pre-Revolutionary Russia, although the Constructivists and ‘left’ filmmakers of the 1920s were quick to exploit the metaphoric potential of the term in their fight against the ‘opium’ of film drama. Vertov and Shub called for a ‘factory of facts’ (see Documents 57 and 59), while Shklovsky summarised his experiences as a screenwriter under the title ‘The Film Factory’ in 1927 (Document 66), and ironically structured his third volume of autobiography, Third Factory (written while working at the Third Goskino Factory), around this same metaphor of artistic production in the machine age.
Our use of Shklovsky’s title for this anthology follows in the same metaphoric tradition. It is intended to signal that this collection of documents relates primarily to the making of Soviet cinema, and to the domestic debates that raged around its rapid promotion from a fairground attraction to become the leading cultural industry of the modern Soviet state. As we have pursued our own researches into the Soviet cinema, we have become increasingly conscious of the rigidity of received opinion, which discourages empirical inquiry and fits available information into heavily moralised preconceptions. Drawing on the mass of contemporary documents first accumulated by Richard Taylor during the preparation of his The Politics of the Soviet Cinema 1917–1929, and having the opportunity to test our own evolving views in discussion with Soviet scholars and surviving witnesses of the pre-war era, has made us sceptical of the dominant western historiographical tradition, yet keenly aware of how many questions have still to be asked. We hope that the presentation of these primary sources in translation will help others in various fields of scholarship, as they have helped us; and accordingly we have avoided arranging them in a thematic sequence, so that they remain an open resource – raw material to enable new models and interpretations of Soviet cinema history to be fashioned.
The immediate starting-point for the book was a dossier of translations and reviews, Futurismi/Formalismi/FEKS: ‘Eccentrism’ and Soviet Cinema 1918–36, edited by Ian Christie and John Gillett, and published by the British Film Institute to accompany a 1978 season at the National Film Theatre, London, ‘Russian Eccentrics’. This included a number of Richard Taylor’s translations (mistakenly attributed to another), and when its small print run was quickly exhausted, the need for a more permanent collection became apparent. The fact that many of the films were being shown in that season for the first time, after long years of neglect, and have since become more widely available through distribution, has provided the vital stimulus for a new phase of western interest in pre-war Soviet cinema that will, hopefully, pay more attention to the Soviet context than to the preoccupations of western observers.
During the years of its preparation, while we have both pursued other more specific researches in Soviet cinema, the book has undergone many changes of plan. In selecting documents for inclusion, we have tried 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. As a result, the limits and scale of the anthology have continued to expand, while it remains based on the central tradition of debate that shaped Russian film culture even before the 1917 Revolution. The fulcrum of this debate shifted considerably during the two decades following the Revolution, but we believe it was never reducible to a simple extension of the political command, and instead was constantly animated by the need to reaffirm and reassess the essential elements of cinema specificity, particularly in relation to theatre. There is inevitably a compromise between doing justice to the complexity of the debates and introducing little known texts and authors. We have felt it necessary to include certain key texts that are already available in translation, albeit scattered through many, often ephemeral, publications and in translations of varying adequacy. However, we have tried to shed fresh light on the relatively known positions of Kuleshov, Vertov, Pudovkin and Eisenstein at different points in their careers, and to place these in the context of other contemporary and conflicting views. There remains the familiar problem of those important filmmakers and indeed whole areas of cinema – broadly speaking, the narrative tradition as distinct from the montage avant-garde – which attracted little sympathetic contemporary discussion, yet was to be the bedrock on which later Soviet cinema was built. We have included the polemics directed against notorious examples of bad traditional narrative, and drawn extensively on two major critic-theorists who did not ally themselves exclusively with the avant-gardes: Shklovsky and Adrian Piotrovsky.
The emergent non-Russian national cinemas receive little coverage, partly due to lack of adequate space and partly because the (Russian) journals of the period devoted scant attention to them. On the other hand, we have treated in some detail the ‘proletarian episode’ of 1928–31 and included a large number of hitherto inaccessible texts that reflect the bitter controversies of this phase and the underlying shift of priorities that was to produce a new Soviet ‘cinema for the millions’ under Shumyatsky’s baton in the 1930s. But we are conscious that much work still needs to be done on the 1930s to break down the monolithic, and largely dismissive, view of this decade that still prevails in the West. The fact that this collection ends at a point where public debate had been virtually halted may obscure the essential continuity of serious professional debate within Soviet cinema up to the present. But to relate the public to the private, making full use of the wealth of invaluable memoir material now available, which sheds much light on the 1930s, would have been impossible within the limits of a single volume (although some of the many interviews we have conducted during the period of compilation have appeared, or will, elsewhere). The filmographies and biographical notes, covering both Russian and foreign references, are confined to actual references in the documents and introduction.
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Any list of acknowledgments in a work on the history of Soviet cinema must begin by paying tribute to Jay Leyda’s Kino, which has stimulated and informed us as it has so many others. Yet the very intimacy and passion that motivate this book have also tended to impose their own pattern on the understanding of Soviet cinema, especially in the English-speaking world. We have therefore tried to enlarge our focus where Leyda’s is narrowest and to provide a more explicit analytical framework in our selection of documents and linking narrative.
We would both like to acknowledge the assistance and support of the following institutions in the preparation of this work: the British Film Institute, London; VNIIKI, the All-Union Research Institute for the History of Cinema Art, Moscow; and the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels. We are also greatly indebted to the following individuals in Moscow: Professor Evgeni Gromov, who persuaded us to abandon our earlier plan to periodise Soviet cinema’s development in the book’s arrangement; Naum Kleiman, Curator of the Eisenstein Museum for his invaluable guidance not only on matters relating to Eisenstein; and Leonid Trauberg, who has given us enthusiastic support and encouragement throughout.
Richard Taylor would like to thank the staffs of the following libraries for their seemingly endless toil on his behalf: the VNIIKI and Lenin Libraries, Moscow; the University College of Swansea Library and the British Library, both Reference and Lending Divisions; the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam; the Torsten Lundell collection, Carolina Rediviva University Library, Uppsala; and last, but not least, that marvellous temple of user-friendliness, the Library of Congress, Washington DC, especially the Motion Picture Division. Richard Taylor is also indebted to the Nuffield Foundation, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies (Washington DC), the British Council (Younger Research Workers’ Interchange Scheme), and the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University College of Swansea, for generous financial assistance. He would also like to express profound gratitude to Phyllis Hancock for her unending patience and superhuman efforts at the typewriter, and to Alan Bodger, for his frequent advice on the minutiae of translation and apparently limitless knowledge of matters Russian.
Throughout the compilation of the book, Ian Christie has helped to mount a number of events through the British Film Institute which have greatly increased his understanding of Soviet cinema: these include the NFT seasons ‘Into the 30s’ (July 1982) and ‘Love and Conscience: the Films of Yuli Raizman’ (October 1984), both organised jointly with John Gillett; and the presentation of New Babylon with its original score by Shostakovich restored and played live, under the baton of Omri Hadari. Many colleagues at the BFI have provided advice and assistance, notably Colin McArthur, John Gillett, Anthony Smith and Veronica Taylor. Charles Cooper and the late Ivor Montagu supplied useful first-hand information about the early career of Soviet films in Britain. Bernard Eisenschitz, Roland Cosandey and Anne Thompson all contributed otherwise unavailable references. Invitations to lecture and commissions to write prompted much of the research that underlies the Introduction. Thanks are thus due to: Charles Barr and the University of East Anglia; David Elliott, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; Malcolm Allen, former Film Officer of East Midlands Arts; the Film Department of Bulmershe College; Cordelia Swann and the London Filmmakers’ Co-operative; Simon Field and the Collective for Living Cinema, New York; and the editors of Screen and Framework.
Film stills and other illustrations have come from a variety of sources, including the Stills Library of the British Film Institute (with special thanks to Markku Salmi) and the Central State Archive of Literature and Art (TsGALI), Moscow.
Any work that takes as long to come to fruition as this volume creates a number of personal debts to family and friends that can never be adequately repaid. Some partial recompense may however be made by acknowledgment. Richard Taylor would like to thank his mother, George Boyce, Neil Harding, Emeritus Professor W. H. Greenleaf, Jeffrey Richards and Gareth Evans for their support and encouragement at times when the lights in the auditorium seemed to have been dimmed completely. Ian Christie owes more than he can express to Patsy Nightingale for her forbearance and support over the years; to his colleagues in BFI Distribution for their tolerance, and to his father, Robert Christie, for unstinting support in this, as in all endeavours over the years.
This has throughout been a collaborative work and we have both benefited from the cross-fertilisation of ideas that has occurred – all too frequently for our peace of mind. However, Richard Taylor is responsible for the translations, the linking narrative and the information on Russian and Soviet films and people. Ian Christie is responsible for the Introduction, illustrations and the information on foreign films and people. For the overall conception and selection of material, we are jointly responsible.
Richard Taylor
Ian Christie
December 1986