Page 147 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

128 A FACE TO THE SHTETL: SOVIET YIDDISH CINEMA, 1924—36
According to Ben-Ari, ‘the government official whose job it was to pass on the
ideological and political complexion of the film brought in another director. He too
was unable to do a satisfactory job.’ This was Ivan Pyriev, an assistant on Sovkino’s
successful Wings of a Serf [1926], and later a prominent Ukrainian director.
Finally, Boris I.Vershilov, the assimilated Jew who had staged Habima’s
production of The Golem, was pressed into service. Vershilov ‘brought some sort
of order in the chaos, but for all his efforts the film had little artistic achievement to
its credit’. 12
Even as Granovsky completed Jewish Luck, Soviet cinema was
accommodating the aspirations of various national groups. In 1924 an amateur film-
maker, Vladimir Ballyuzek, made the first Azerbaidzhani movie, The Legend of
the Maiden’s Tower [Legenda o devich’ei bashne]. The following year saw the first
Uzbek film, the documentary The Starving Steppe Revives [Khlopkovodstvo v
Golodnoi stepi], directed by another amateur, N. Shcherbakov, and the first
Chuvash effort, Volga Rebels [Volzhskie buntary], directed by Pavel Petrov-Bytov.
In 1926 the Georgian Amo Bek-Nazarov directed the first Armenian feature,
Honour [Namus]. By 1927 all these nationalities–as well as Georgians and
Belorussians–had their own local production agencies.
Unlike Georgians, Armenians, Belorussians, Uzbeks, Chuvash and
Azerbaidzhanis, however, the Soviet Union’s 2.6 million Jews had neither republic
nor autonomous region, let alone a movie studio. For the most part, the Soviet
Jewish homeland was negatively visualised as the shtetl and the Jewish cinema
was tied to that of the Ukrainians and Belorussians, the two major nationalities
with whom Jews shared the pre-Revolutionary Pale of Settlement. Over 1.5 million
Jews, more than 60 per cent of the entire Soviet Jewish population, still lived in the
Ukraine. During the brief and bloody interlude of Ukrainian independence, Jews
had enjoyed a measure of national autonomy and there was even a ministry of
Jewish affairs. Although the first few years of Soviet rule were characterised by a
negative attitude towards Yiddish (and Ukrainian) cultural activities, restraints
relaxed after the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923.
In 1926, the same year that a Soviet government commission raised the
possibility of relocating half a million Jews on Ukrainian and Crimean collective
farms, VUFKU itself explored a number of Jewish projects. Commercial
considerations were probably as important as political ones: Jews outnumbered
Ukrainians in the urban areas where most cinemas were located and were
consequently an important segment of the movie audience. Alexander Dovzhenko
developed The Homeland, an unrealised (and presumably anti-Zionist) comedy
about Jews in Palestine, while Abram Room made Jews on the Land [Evrei na
zemle, 1927], a 20-minute documentary on Jewish settlements in the Yevpatoria
district of the Crimea. (A native of Vilna, Room had headed an amateur Yiddish
art theatre there during the First World War.) Lily Brik supervised the production,
while Vladimir Mayakovsky and Viktor Shklovsky collaborated on the script.
Exhibiting a certain amount of ‘Jewish’ irony, Jews on the Land opens with
scenes of a war-devastated shtetl (all that is left of the central market is a single