1919

Source: A.V. Lunacharskii, ‘Zadachi gosudarstvennogo kinodela v R.S.F.S.R.’, Kinematograf. Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1919), pp. 5–7.

The state cinema in Russia faces quite unusual tasks. It is not simply a matter of nationalising production and film distribution and the direct control of cinemas. It is a matter of fostering a completely new spirit in this branch of art and education.

In the present impoverished state of the Russian economy we cannot count on producing films of a purely artistic, literary or even scientifically objective character and competing with foreign firms or replacing Russian private films. For the present, while trade is significantly restricted, we might perhaps borrow this kind of material from films that have already been made or imported from abroad; but this situation will not of course last for ever.

We must do what nobody else is either able or willing to do. We should remember that a socialist government must imbue even film shows with a socialist spirit.

There is absolutely no doubt that in this respect far more newsreel footage must be shot and there is no need for me to say more.

Furthermore, the main task of cinema in both its scientific and feature divisions is that of propaganda.

Generally speaking, every art, as Tolstoy once remarked, is above all a means of instilling the artist’s emotions into the masses. Education in the wider sense of the word consists in the dissemination of ideas among minds that would otherwise remain a stranger to them. Cinema can accomplish both these things with particular force: it constitutes, on the one hand, a visual clarion for the dissemination of ideas and, on the other hand, if we introduce elements of the refined, the poetic, the pathetic etc., it is capable of touching the emotions and thus becomes an apparatus of agitation. We must pay attention to these aspects above all. If there is a place where a stupid fear of tendentiousness becomes even more absurd that place is cinema. Generally speaking, tendentiousness is harmful only if it is petty; the great tendentiousness of a religious idea or of a broad socialist idea that approximates to it can only produce works of art, and it was not for nothing that Chekhov complained that the art of his time had been deprived of God and that no amount of talent on the part of the artist and no outward mastery can, even in isolation, act as a substitute for a life-giving idea.

A Communist government has such a life-giving idea and, with the minimum of attention and experience, this idea can be very easily conveyed in the appropriate artistic guise.

It seems to me that we must first of all produce a cultural-historical picture. It is impossible to imagine a richer source for cinema than the cultural history of mankind as a whole. This is, in the literal sense of the word, an inexhaustible source, and it is worth tapping it, starting with the life of primeval man so that the head really spins at the wealth of images that can be realised most fully through cinema.

But we must not be carried away by the full panoply of the past: we must concentrate only on moments that are important for agitation and propaganda. We must convey the history of the beginnings of the growth of the state in such a way that basic Communist ideas on the criminal nature and at the same time on the necessity of each state, on the development of man and his different forms, on the unique form of the state – the dictatorship of the poor or of the proletariat – are made clear to every viewer.

18 ‘An apparatus of agitation.’ Lunacharsky appeared in and helped script Overcrowding (1918), directed by Alexander Panteleyev for the Petrograd Cinema Committee.

19 Poster for Overcrowding, with Lunacharsky’s name prominently featured.

20 Protazanov’s Father Sergius, based on a story by Lev Tolstoy, was completed before the October Revolution but not released until mid-1918. Its depiction of the corruption encountered by a wandering priest fitted Lunacharsky’s call to show how the idealistic aspects of Christianity ‘have been systematically falsified by ecclesiastics in the service of the state and the wealthy classes’ (Document no. 10).

Just as important is the history of the Church, including the depiction of cults – the cruellest and most senseless – and also of all the abuses committed by the Christian Church but, with historical objectivity, we must clearly distinguish its democratic and positive aspects. It is very easy, having given due credit to the positive and idealistic aspects of Christianity, to show how they have been systematically falsified by ecclesiastics in the service of the state and the wealthy classes.

The history of political conflicts, in particular the history of the great French Revolution, and all kinds of important events of our recent revolutionary history, from the Decembrists to the October Revolution of 1917, must also be treated with all due care.

While in no way denying the enormous importance of a broader range of themes, depicting, for instance, the history of science (an unusually rich theme), including the history of inventions or the history of the highest culture, I think that, with our limited time and resources, we must not hesitate too much and in choosing between two pictures of roughly the same importance and value we must make the one that can speak to the mind and the heart more vividly from the standpoint of revolutionary propaganda.