Preface to the Paperback Edition
The Film Factory is a product of the last, remarkable decade of the Soviet Union. Access to texts and films and, more important, first-hand contact with Russian historians, critics and veteran filmmakers became steadily easier during the early 1980s, until in 1986–7 the possibility of a fundamental reassessment of Soviet cinema became thinkable. However, most of the frenetic energy of those years was inevitably devoted to revealing the injustices and guilty secrets of the previous twenty years, since these often affected still-living filmmakers.
But, even before the era oí glasnost and perestroika, radical new perspectives on Soviet cinema were becoming available, although they were not yet publish-able. Maya Turovskaya had started to draw attention to ways in which the Soviet film ‘market’ was routinely manipulated by centralcontrol of film print supply and imports, while evidence started to appear of much wider censorship and ‘shelving’ than was previously realised by many Western historians. The first steps towards that long-delayed study of Soviet cinema as an industry, albeit one operating in a bizarrely distorted monopoly market, had been taken.1 Subsequent progress has been slow – unsurprisingly in view of the dramatic new priorities forced upon many scholars by the collapse of the Soviet system – but continuing interest in the Mezhrabpom studio and in its leading directors of two generations, Protazanov and Barnet, has shed new light on how Soviet cinema precariously juggled its ideological and entertainment goals.2
In 1989, on the eve of the Soviet Union’s demise, a prediction which had been made in The Film Factory and elsewhere was finally realised. Pre-Soviet Russian cinema emerged as a significant body of work deserving study in its own right and as a vital prelude to the early Soviet period.3 Some in the West have openly questioned the cultural merit of this ‘Tsarist cinema’, thus revealing how strong the Soviet ‘myth of origins’ remains, although cinema historiography as a whole has welcomed this latest addition to the revisionist canon of early cinema.4 Once again, it is Russian scholars who have set the agenda. Work by Tsivian, Yampolsky and others has focused on the distinctiveness of early Russian cinema culture, especially in its attitudes to language, theatre and acting – and this in turn suggests how the early Soviet period may yet be rethought in terms of continuity with, rather than a simplistic opposition to, what preceded it.5
But, however suggestive is the idea of linking ‘Russian cinema’ before and after the Soviet era, there remains much unfinished historical business concerning Soviet cinema. Two conferences held in Moscow in 1989 indicated how relatively unknown are aspects of both the early Soviet avant-garde and the later 1930s. The tribute to Leonid Trauberg organised by Natasha Nusinova in December (shortly before his death in 1990) opened up valuable new perspectives on the FEKS group, which has been persistently marginalised in both Soviet and Western historiography, no doubt because of its eclectic non-conformity.6 Earlier in that same year, Maya Turovskaya organised a retrospective and conference within the framework of the Moscow Film Festival to explore the hitherto taboo comparison between Soviet, German and Italian cinema in ‘the era of totalitarianism’.7
Such concerns may not be fashionable in the current climate of ‘post-ideological’ economic and social reconstruction. Yet it would be ironic if, at the very moment when political constraint on freedom of research and publication has been relaxed, these and other neglected themes in the history of Soviet cinema should be buried within a rejection of the Soviet era en bloc. For, as the original introduction to The Film Factory argued, this history is a joint product of East-West tension: it is a ghostly presence which long haunted Western cinema, and a quarantine which until recently preserved Soviet cinema from much that has demoralised filmmaking elsewhere. To penetrate its remaining mysteries and reintegrate it into the global history of cinema should remain a high priority as the centenary of moving pictures approaches.
The original contents have not been changed for this paperback edition, although many more documents will of course become available. Rather than make minor additions to the pre-1917 and post-1930 sections, these have been left as indicative of the tone and bias of public debate at these tense times. Wholly new accounts of both periods, using the full range of sources now accessible, should be a priority. Meanwhile, within this series the translation of Yuri Tsivian’s account of early film reception in Russia opens another unexpected window on Russian cinema which may well have far-reaching consequences for cultural and cinema studies at large.8
Ian Christie
February 1994
Notes