Page 122 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

6

The return of the native: Yakov
Protazanov and Soviet cinema
Denise J.Youngblood

Among the many film-makers who left Russia during the Civil War was Yakov
Protazanov (1881—1945), one of the flourishing pre-Revolutionary film industry’s
most prominent directors. The more than eighty movies he had made since his
directorial début in 1911 included the top-grossing film of Russian cinema, The
Keys to Happiness [1913], and the most infamous product of its dying days, Satan
Triumphant [1917]. From 1920 to 1923, Protazanov lived in Paris and Berlin,
1
making a name for himself in both French and German cinemas. In Berlin, in
1923, he received a visit from Moisei Aleinikov, one of the directors of the Rus
studio (soon to become Mezhrabpom-Rus), who persuaded Protazanov that the
2
time was right for him to return home. Three weeks later he was back in
Moscow, and shortly thereafter at work on his first Soviet film, Aelita. A recent
Soviet reference book on film says that Protazanov was among the originators of
3
the ‘acting school’ in Soviet cinema but, to aspiring young directors, the return of
the king of Russian silent cinema meant something quite different indeed.
Protazanov quickly re-established himself as a major, if not the preeminent,
director of the Soviet screen. It is probably safe to assert that no other director in
the first decade of Soviet cinema had as varied–and unpredictable–an oeuvre.
Certainly no other Soviet director was as prolific and as consistently successful at
the box office. The consummate professional, Protazanov was immune to the
political and artistic controversies bedevilling his younger, more ‘Soviet’
colleagues, both due to his temperament and his record of commercial success. 4
He made ten silent films for the Mezhrabpom-Rus studio in six years, beginning
with Aelita in 1924 and ending with The Feast of St Jorgen [Prazdnik svyatogo
Iorgena] in 1930.
By way of comparison, the output of those young directors whose names are
virtually synonymous with Soviet silent cinema (in the West, anyway) was
dramatically lower. Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Dziga
Vertov, Alexander Dovzhenko and the team of Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid
Trauberg each made only four full-length features in the same period. These men
made ‘difficult’ films not intended as light entertainment for mass audiences, but the
figures are also comparable for those major directors from the younger generation
who did make movies more easily accessible to general audiences. Boris Barnet
made six films, Fridrikh [Friedrich] Ermler four, and Sergei Yutkevich, two.