Page 123 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

104 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
In the context of the stormy cultural politics of the early Soviet film industry,
these figures were significant, and not necessarily attributable to the younger
directors’ inexperience. The first point to be made is somewhat obvious, but none
the less important: the more films he has on the market, the more potential
influence a director has with audiences and studios. This was definitely the case
with Protazanov, whose pictures were crowd-pleasers almost guaranteed to draw
at the box office. The second point is that to the young cohort, Protazanov
symbolised everything they perceived to be wrong with the Soviet film industry in
the 1920s–its emphasis on profits, its lack of support for experimentation, its
‘pandering’ to the tastes of the masses. Why was ‘Soviet power’ banking on ‘the
little Moscow merchant’ to create the new cinema? 5
The social history of Soviet cinema and the history of early Soviet culture
cannot be fully understood without reference to the most popular, really the only
truly popular, native director of the 1920s–Yakov Protazanov. Most of the
‘revolutionary’ masterworks which made Eisenstein and Pudovkin and others
‘household’ names in avant-garde artistic circles in the 1920s were seen by few
Soviet filmgoers–and liked by fewer still. As we shall see, Protazanov’s Soviet films
were widely distributed, enjoyed runs of several weeks in the largest theatres, and
consistently earned profits for the studio. These by themselves serve as adequate
indicators of popularity but, to cite additional evidence, Protazanov’s movies were
frequently named in the ‘top ten’ surveys conducted among audiences. Throughout
his career he seemed to have an uncanny understanding of what viewers liked,
whether those viewers were Russian, French, or Soviet.
Because Protazanov came to Soviet cinema as a mature artist, his career is a
particularly interesting and significant one which has the potential to illuminate key
issues in the development of Soviet society. By virtue of his family background,
education, and professional experience, Protazanov was the quintessential
‘bourgeois specialist’–so his story can shed light on the role of the ‘former’ middle
classes in the formation of the new society. And because he lived and worked
abroad both before and after the Revolution–and made films that were
recognisably ‘Western’ in style–Protazanov and his movies can elucidate the
extent to which nascent Soviet culture relied on Westernised pre-Revolutionary
traditions. That this director, labelled in his time a ‘reactionary’, ‘socially primitive’
maker of ‘shallow entertainment’ pictures, not only survived but prospered as a
Soviet film-maker is a testament to the tenacity of the old tradition and the
adaptability of its leading practitioner. Protazanov, who served as a bridge between
the Russian past and the Soviet present, is an outstanding example of the
importance of ‘transitional’ figures in the evolution of Soviet popular culture.
When Protazanov made the crucial decision to return to Soviet Russia in 1923,
the battle lines on the cultural front were only starting to be drawn. Because the
director was a circumspect individual, writing virtually nothing and responding to
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interviews as laconically as possible, we can only conjecture about his true
reasons for coming back and his reactions once home. Even his Soviet
biographers make no effort to claim a political awakening for him. Given the