Page 129 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

110 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
and their reception in more detail, to situate them in the context of the cultural
politics of the era. Recognising the inevitable errors of oversimplification, the
cultural politics of the film industry in the mid-1920s can be briefly summed up as a
struggle between young and old; between avant-gardists (the ‘montage school’) and
realists; between those who inclined toward permanent revolution and those who
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favoured ‘socialism at a snail’s pace’. Fellow-travellers and bourgeois specialists
like Protazanov charted a course that was truly between Scylla and Charybdis.
The one issue that most politically conscious film activists could agree on was the
need to create a totally new Soviet cinema, one which would end the influence of
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the ‘pernicious’ foreign films beloved of Soviet audiences. How to go about
creating this new Soviet cinema was quite another matter, and three broad
approaches to the problem can be delineated.
Once again acknowledging the oversimplification of this division, we can none
the less say that the avant-garde believed that their obligation to society was
fulfilled by creating the art of the future; under the cultural and social
transformation engendered by socialism, the masses would be uplifted and thereby
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able to enjoy and appreciate hitherto ‘inaccessible’ art. The artistic right, on the
other hand, may be characterised as narrative realists. This group was less diverse
than the avant-garde, so it is possible to identify two subgroups splitting along
political lines. The proletarian ‘watchdogs’–especially critics connected with the
All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers [Vserossiikaya assotsiyatsiya
proletarskikh pisatelei] (VAPP) and the staff of the film section of
Glavpolitprosvet, the Main Committee on Political Education in the Commissariat
of Enlightenment–favoured a tendentious kind of realism, either narrowly political
fictional films or strictly educational kulturfil’my. In sharp contrast, the Commissar
of Enlightenment Anatoli Lunacharsky–husband of a film actress and himself
author of several entertaining film scripts as well as many articles and even a book
on film–believed that there was nothing especially anti-Soviet about entertainment. 31
Lunacharsky felt that the goal of Soviet cinema should be to make Soviet films
(focusing on melodramas, adventures and comedies) to entertain the Soviet people.
This was the line vigorously pursued by the state film trust Sovkino and the semi-
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independent studio for which Protazanov worked, Mezhrabpom. To the
proletarians, this brand of cinema realism was tantamount to counter-revolution
and was no less dangerous than the ‘Formalist’ heresies preached by Eisenstein,
Vertov and many others.
These debates were taking shape as Protazanov set to work in February 1923
on his first Soviet film, the science-fiction fantasy Aelita, the tale of a Soviet
engineer who dreams of building a spaceship, taking off for Mars, and falling in
love with a Martian princess named Aelita. Because this dream includes a
‘proletarian’ revolution on Mars, Protazanov was able to exercise his talent for
adventure and fantasy in a movie with a Soviet theme and, in its terrestrial part, a
contemporary Soviet setting.
The production history of Aelita indicates that Protazanov prepared for his
Soviet début with great care and forethought. Though schooled in the break-neck