Page 139 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

120 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
The Tailor from Torzhok and The Three Millions Trial are not anomalies in
Protazanov’s work any more than are His Call, The Forty-First and Don Diego.
Given these parameters, how does one situate The Man from the Restaurant and
The White Eagle in this oeuvre? By the late 1920s, due to the rapidly changing
political climate, audience reactions to movies rarely appeared in the press, but
both films are so relentlessly downbeat that it is hard to imagine lines at the box
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office. Yet both these films, and certainly The White Eagle, demonstrate that, in
his own unspectacular way, Protazanov was willing to take the risks that all true
artists need to take to advance their art and grow creatively, despite the perception
that he was a director who cared only for box-office success.
While there can be little doubt of Protazanov’s popularity with the
mass audience in the 1920s, he was held in very low repute by another audience
that cannot be lightly dismissed: Soviet critics, especially those critics who rejected
film as entertainment. Their point of view was summarised by B. Alpers in his
review of The Feast of St Jorgen, which he, unlike others, disliked. Alpers attacked
Protazanov as a master at making superficially Soviet films that enjoyed
widespread appeal due to their ‘social neutrality and external decorativeness’. He
admitted that Protazanov knew how to craft films so well that they held one’s
attention, a talent Alpers found deplorable. Alpers charged the director with
adhering to the ‘traditional’ path, a path which he awkwardly described as
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‘balancing on a thin and swaying tightrope of shallow entertainment’. Yet,
significantly, Alpers’ opinion was echoed by critics much more talented than he.
Viktor Shklovsky, who wrote the screenplays for The Wings of a Serf [Kryl’ya
kholopa, 1926], By the Law [Po zakonu, 1926] and Bed and Sofa [Tret’ya
Meshchanskaya, 1927] (among many others), called Protazanov a representative
of ‘the old cinematography of the European type, a little out-of-date’. Adrian
Piotrovsky, artistic director of the Leningrad studio and friend of the avant-garde,
saw Protazanov as the head of the reactionary ‘right deviation’. Even a supporter
and practitioner of the entertainment film like Commissar of Enlightenment Anatoli
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Lunacharsky called Protazanov a good director, but ‘not of our time’. The times,
however, were changing in a way that favoured Protazanov.
Yakov Protazanov made six more movies in the last fifteen years of his life and
completed his final film in 1943, two years before his death in 1945 at the age of 64.
The best known of these was his handsome 1937 adaptation of Ostrovsky’s play
Without a Dowry [Bespridannitsa]. While his absolute rate of production declined,
the total of his films is comparable to the output of other directors at this time. The
decline represents the slow recovery of cinema after the havoc wrought by the
Cultural Revolution and the coming of sound.
Protazanov’s legacy extends beyond his impressive body of work, the sum of
which proved to be greater than any of the parts. First, he provided an element of
historical continuity to the Soviet film industry; the importance of this link with the
Russian past became more evident as revolutionary fervour subsided, and Stalin
sought to emphasise stability and continuity. The cultural values and tastes of the
educated, Westernised bourgeoisie remained a strong influence on early Soviet