1933

Date: 10 February 1933.

Source: A. V. Lunacharskii, Sobranie sochinenii v 8 tomakh. Tom 8 (Moscow, 1967), pp. 615–16.

The Socialist Realist is in complete harmony with his surroundings and with the tendencies in their development as a warrior for the morrow that is in process of realisation. But he does not accept reality as it really is. He accepts it as it will be. From this derives the need, dictated by his position as a warrior, to stylise reality in its artistic representation with the aim of re-creating it in practice.

In endeavouring, for instance, to synthesise the gigantic collective resources of his class in monumental images the Socialist Realist is not obliged to stick to the limits of realism in the sense of verisimilitude. The creation of the image of a proletarian Prometheus is by no means the fruit of a thirst for illusion, but is merely the fruit of a thirst for the artistic embodiment of infinite resources that cannot be transformed into a concrete image, employing a real human person. In just the same way, in his struggle with negative phenomena, the Socialist Realist may of course resort to all sorts of hyperbole, caricature and utterly improbable comparisons – not to conceal reality but, through stylisation, to reveal it.

A Communist who cannot dream is a bad Communist. The Communist dream is not a flight from the earthly but a flight into the future. Communism should not be unfamiliar with vivid, graphic conjectures about the future (cf. Cherny-shevsky’s What Is To Be Done?). Here too we should devote a great deal of space to bold fantasy.

Source: Bol’shaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya, 1st. edn, vol. XXVI (Moscow, 1933), pp. 482–4.

Creative work on the making of sound films began significantly later than the corresponding technical researches and is for many reasons developing more slowly. A number of questions that are more or less clear theoretically have either not been completely resolved in practice or are still in their original rudimentary state. Sound is by no means a simple mechanical adjunct to the visual representation that merely enhances its naturalism. The role of sound in film is significantly outgrowing the primitive aims of crude naturalism. To an enormous degree it increases the semantic load of the film and in comparison with silent film it allows us to communicate the artist’s ideas to the audience more broadly and profoundly within the same period of time. This explains the enormous sociopolitical significance of the creative inclusion of sound in the production of films of all kinds.

Sound, when used in a film, brings first and foremost the living full-value word (silent cinema made use of the impoverished word or intertitle). The intonation of the voice or the stress in speech, highlighting one thing or another in a whole phrase, deepen and enrich the semantic content of the word. At the same time we see the emergence of a freer and easier assimilation by the audience of the spectacle that is being communicated to them and, consequently, a stronger influence by this spectacle on the audience. Let us take the simplest schematic example of an educational film that does not have any complex artistic ambitions. Let us suppose that it shows a difficult surgical operation requiring detailed explanation. Sound cinema allows us to accompany the detailed visual depiction of the operation in close-ups with a simultaneous verbal explanation of the most important manipulations.

Whereas in reality a surgeon in the course of operating cannot provide those around him with detailed explanations, in a sound film, where speech can be recorded separately, he can combine a clear picture of his work with considered and tested words. There is no doubt that the introduction of sound (above all of the living word) into a scientific teaching film significantly increases its cultural and educational value. The sound teaching film is destined to play a most important role in the process of educating the broad masses. Its development may raise correspondence tuition to new and unforeseen heights. The same is true of the so-called newsreel, i.e. of those films that fix the most interesting and most important events of the current moment just as do the illustrated magazine and the newspaper. With the appearance of sound, the paths of development of the newsreel similarly lie in the direction of using the living word to broaden and deepen the semantic content of the film. The sound newsreel acquires particularly great significance in the conduct of political shock-work campaigns: a widespread agitational demonstration of the illustrative achievements and the characteristic inadequacies of work involving the skilful use of words can achieve a vividness and powerful effect that were quite inaccessible to silent cinema. There is no doubt at all that the next stages in the development of sound newsreel will be closely linked to the development of radio broadcasting and television.

Things are different and much more complex where the so-called ‘played fiction’ film is concerned. The introduction of sound into a film will initiate certain contradictions with a number of specific methods that have already been elaborated and canonised by the art of silent cinema. The principal method that furnished the power of the specific effect of a film on an audience was the art of rhythmical and semantic composition from separately filmed sequences that were different in both form and content – so called cinema montage. The art of cinema montage, which was taken by individual masters to a high degree of virtuosity, made it possible, through the rapid and creatively meaningful alternation of comparatively short sequences, to saturate a film with an exceptional wealth of visual images, leaving a theatrical spectacle far behind in this respect. What did sound bring with it? In the first place we must note that our hearing when it registers the alternation of different sounds is much less flexible and mobile than our sight, when it is following the alternation of visual images: the rhythmic course of alternating visual images. It therefore follows that in constructing sound cinema we must not follow the path of mechanical addition of the corresponding sound accompaniment to each visual sequence. A rejection of the silent film’s methods of montage in the sense of a rapid succession of visual images means to transform the rhythmical alternation of different shots into lengthy scenes shot from a single angle in which the action develops not through montage but in the main through spoken dialogue of the theatrical kind. This is the path of least resistance, leading to the theatricalisation of cinema in the pejorative sense of the word and transforming it into a photographic surrogate for theatre. Both the aforementioned instances presuppose a necessary naturalistic connection between image and sound. In this conception sound is a mere adjunct to image and nothing more.

The genuine development of sound cinema is only possible on the basis of the independent rhythmic course of both sound and image, linked to one another by the semantic result that derives from their interaction. The words of a character, whom we have seen only at the beginning of his speech, may continue while on the screen we see an alternation of new visual images that have a quite new and indirect connection with the person speaking. Any sound, speech, noise or music may constitute a protracted continuous sequence while the visual images alternate in a more rapid montage of short sequences. The visual sequence may in turn be protracted while the sound sequences linked to it may alternate at their own pace. Street noise or the babble of water may be linked to the image of a man dying in the desert, if the director needs this to communicate that man’s state of mind.

Unity of sound and image is realised through their semantic interaction beyond a primitive naturalistic unity. It goes without saying that the possibility of showing an object or a person on the screen, accompanied by a sound that is peculiar precisely to it in reality, is not excluded. But this is only a particular instance in the general course of a free composition of sound and image.

Developing along these lines, sound cinema can really be regarded as the highest stage of development of the theatrical spectacle. Having within its range the very wide mass audience that is inaccessible to theatre, it emancipates itself at the same time from the conventional focus of action purely on the dialogue between the characters that is typical of theatre or equally on the immobile and rarely changing sets that transform the world that surrounds man into a conventional and frequently unnecessary background. It is interesting and important to note that the development of cinema in the West under the capitalist system followed precisely this line of least resistance and could not in fact have done otherwise. Being still a novelty, sound cinema has aroused the curiosity of the public by the very fact of its existence. It was enough to release a film of the most primitive kind and an elemental flood of curious spectators was assured. In order to give the spectacle an elementary interest the easiest thing was to utilise the banal attractions that had been tried out in theatre: a tuneful song, a declamation by a well-known actor, etc., etc. From these kinds of attractions it is easy to cobble together a simple plot and your profits from the film’s rental are guaranteed.

As quick as a flash the competition that is essential under capitalism has levelled down the artistic demands made of creative workers by their bosses and transformed labour on a work of art into a pursuit of the cheapest and fastest way of manufacturing the required banalities.

The capitalist cinema is unable to set itself the task of raising the artistic quality of a film unless this is linked to an immediate increase in profit. What is more, a solitary phenomenon of a work of art of high quality jeopardises the closed market for low quality potboilers. Artists in the West have found themselves under the heavy and irresistible pressure of the power of the capitalist boss. Sound films have been transformed into operettas, revues, saccharine melodramas with singing, all made especially by theatrical methods, because other methods would have required a great deal of unprofitable experimental work. The powerful effect of silent cinema has been lost. A catastrophic decline in cinema art was at hand. In the West you can now hear voices asserting that sound cinema is unnecessary and advocating a return to silent film. The sense of this assertion is of course justified only in the conditions obtaining in capitalist countries.

Soviet sound cinema is setting itself above all the task of increasing the artistic and ideological quality of the film. It must develop along the lines of free composition of visual image and sound, along the lines that will set sound film on a higher plane than silent film, along the lines that will not destroy the legacy of theatre and silent cinema and that will not tie sound cinema to them but will pass dialectically to the new methods of a powerful new art that is part of the multifarious creative activity of the proletariat …

Source: S. M. Eizenshtein, ‘Kino i klassiki’, Literaturnaya gazeta, 23 December 1933.

As well as working with contemporary authors it is very important for film-makers to pay attention to the literary classics. However, work on the classics must not be organised along the lines of superficial borrowing but as a matter of studying all the elements that constitute their specificity. We must interpret their signs and observe how a particular element should develop into a new one, passing through different stages in time and class. This applies equally to the technique of depicting characters and to the means and methods of embodying them. It applies to an even greater degree to what first and foremost we must learn from them, namely: the composition of the plot [syuzhetoslozhenie]. It seems to me that in all the energetic efforts to assimilate the classics not enough attention has been devoted to this element, the correction of their signs for historical and class reasons.

Neither the method nor the character of the depiction of the old man Grandet, nor the specific quality of the dramatic embodiment of Shylock, can be directly translated into the depiction of a kulak. Similarly, the scene of Fortinbras’s arrival, if directly borrowed, would do little to help elaborate a scene depicting the arrival of the head of the political sections. In exactly the same way the specific quality of the pathetic structure of Mark Antony’s speech over Caesar’s dead body requires a more complicated qualitative reinterpretation if it is to suit, let us say, a scene depicting the murder of a selkor. Without the same kind of alteration Lysistrata would scarcely produce the dramatic elaboration of scenes of women’s rebellions that regularly break out in our scripts.

Only a more acute recognition of the qualitative differences will permit us to utilise productively the permissible common denominator in the treatment.