Page 150 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 131
eventual political activist: ‘One can say of Rachel that her love of science is as
great as the love of truth, of Lenin, of Darwin, or of Spinoza.’ 18
In his introduction, Babel maintains that the script was in constant flux as he
reworked it to meet the contradictory requirements of the various actors and
directors successively involved with the project. (The one constant stipulation,
according to the writer, was that the protagonists be forced to flee abroad.) But,
however it originated, Wandering Stars ultimately wound up at VUFKU, directed
by Gricher-Cherikover, who made his own revisions. The finished film omitted the
Yiddish theatre troupe altogether– thus erasing ‘the last traces of Sholom
Aleichem’, as Osip Lubomirsky complained in Der emes when, optimistically
advertised as ‘The hit picture of the season!’, Wandering Stars opened in mid-
February 1928 at two centrally located Moscow cinemas. 19
Babitsky and Rimberg report that, although Wandering Stars was ‘an original
combination of bitter humour and a melodramatic plot of persecution in a Jewish
village’, critics regarded the film as ‘ideologically deficient’, as well as ‘over-involved
20
with the Jewish past’ and ‘provincial’. This is hardly surprising: most VUFKU
treatments of Ukrainian history and literature were attacked in analogous terms
and, along with the Ukrainian Communist Party, the movie studio underwent an
anti-nationalist purge during 1927—8. Although Wandering Stars travelled to Paris
21
and Berlin as part of an exhibition of recent VUFKU releases, its domestic
distribution was further complicated by the Sovkino purge of 1928: in May,
Wandering Stars was one of eighteen films withdrawn from circulation because,
according to the film magazine Kino, ‘they idealise the pathological and decadent
mood of the decaying bourgeoisie, popularise covert prostitution and
debauchery’. 22
The first nationality films tended to deal with the Civil War and pre-
Revolutionary traditions. After 1927, emphasis shifted to the new life of
the present. Although Sholom Aleichem remained a standard of the state Yiddish
stage and a talismanic figure in Der emes (as well as the only Jewish culture-hero
who has never fallen from Soviet grace), his writings provided material for only
one further film, Gricher-Cherikover’s Through Tears [Skvoz’ slezy], also released
by VUFKU in 1928.
More self-contained than either of the Babel productions, Through Tears
elaborates the critique of the pre-1917 shtetl initiated with Jewish Luck. The film
has no single protagonist: Sholom Aleichem’s ‘The Enchanted Tailor’ is
interwoven with several tales of the orphaned cantor’s son Motl Peyse, to create an
overall view of two imaginary towns, Zlodyevke and Kozodoyevka. For Sholom
Aleichem and his commentators, the impish Motl is a figure with a particular
resonance: the Jews were sometimes said to be a faryossemt folk, an ‘orphaned
people’. For the film-makers, however, Motl may have offered the most politically
safe of Sholom Aleichem adaptations. In its entry on the author, the third edition of
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia singles out the Motl cycle in particular for ‘posing
the question of the fate of the masses under capitalism’. 23