Page 106 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 87
Mezhrabpom-Rus releases, while also revealing such rudimentary Party attitudes
to cinema as existed at this time. Four and Five was described as showing

the desperate struggle over a terrible death gas invented by aviator and
chemist Dimitri with the intention of defending the Republic. The subject is
not novel, but technically it is a great success and you watch it with
unwavering attention. Ideologically it is not our film…. It is not shown clearly
that the invention of the gas was only for the defence of the USSR and not
for imperialist needs. For us there are other means of defence. Nothing is
shown of our Soviet reality, only the millionaires and a statue of Pushkin….
The film could be shown successfully in a Parisian cinema of today and
could have been a pre-war hit…. For a technically well-made film coming from
Rus, the organ of Mezhrabpom, such ideological emptiness is both
unexpected and unpleasant. 26

The same review covered Young Pioneers [Yunye pionery], a short film by Alexei
Gan, the editor of Kino-Fot and supporter of Vertov, which is described as ‘a film
attempting to have no scenario or director’. Significantly, this is judged mediocre
and unsuccessful, but ‘it is our film’.
Here already is the polemical stance against compromised/escapist/
Westernised cinema more familiar from the writings of Vertov, Eisenstein and the
LEF group, which amounts to a rejection of ‘NEP culture’ and a repudiation of
Lunacharsky’s declared strategy to counter the appeal of foreign cinema–then
flooding Soviet screens–by competing in entertainment terms with ‘relaxed’
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ideological requirements. Mezhrabpom-Rus seems to have been condemned
from the outset to incur both Party strictures and ‘left’ wrath, while in fact fulfilling
state policy by achieving economic self-sufficiency and creating potential export
products, as well as winning back the disenchanted mass audience for domestic
production.
More research is required to reveal exactly what influence their German
partners may have exerted on Rus. Did WIR perhaps take part in the negotiations
for Protazanov, the most successful pre-Revolutionary Russian director still
abroad, to come back and create a ‘box-office hit’? Or, more likely, did Aleinikov’s
overall strategy to develop the studio coincide with Lunacharsky’s interest in
persuading famous artists to return? At any rate, Protazanov, who had directed in
both France and Germany from 1920 to 1923, was not invited specifically to make
Aelita, but for an historical project, variously reported as Taras Bulba or Ivan the
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Terrible. That neither of these materialised and his Soviet début became Aelita
was probably linked with the contemporaneous return of another distinguished
émigré, Alexei Tolstoi. WIR may, however, have been involved in the struggle to
keep Aelita going as the production costs rose far beyond Mezhrabpom-Rus’s
modest resources. But the offer of additional investment by a German company in
return for monopoly distribution rights in Europe was apparently declined,