Page 157 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

138 A FACE TO THE SHTETL: SOVIET YIDDISH CINEMA, 1924—36
was heavily populated by FEKSniks, including Sergei Gerasimov. Milman,
married to a prominent economist and related to Osip Brik, served as assistant
director on all five of Shpis’s features, co-scripting The Avenger [Mstitel’, 1931], his
semi-documentary on the modernisation of the Tungus tribe in Siberia.
Nathan Becker gave Jewish national aspiration a similar twist: after twenty-eight
years in America ‘laying bricks for Rockefeller’, Nathan Becker (David Gutman,
who had played the department-store owner in Kozintsev and Trauberg’s The New
Babylon [Novyi Vavilon, 1929]) leaves the land of bread-lines and Depression for his
Belorussian home town and thence, having been reunited with his aged father
Tzale (Mikhoels), the new industrial centre of Magnitogorsk.
Released almost simultaneously, Nathan Becker and Dovzhenko’s Ukrainian-
language Ivan were the ethnic components in a cycle of Soviet talkies dealing with
social conflict and epic industrialisation. Alexander Macheret’s Men and Jobs [Dela
i lyudi, 1932] pitted a Russian worker against an American engineer during the
construction of the Dneprostroi power station; Fridrikh [Friedrich] Ermler and
Sergei Yutkevich’s Counter-plan [Vstrechnyi, 1932] showed ‘bourgeois specialists’
sabotaging Bolshevik work targets at a Leningrad factory; Boris Barnet’s Outskirts
[Okraina, 1933] evoked divided national loyalties in a Russian village during the
First World War.
Like Men and Jobs, Nathan Becker also belongs to a group of early talkies
involving foreign visitors to the Stalinist utopia. These include Tommy [1931], in
which a British soldier is converted to Bolshevism, and Pudovkin’s The Deserter
[Dezertir, 1933], which concerns an exiled German communist. The most
ambitious exercise in proletarian internationalism was undoubtedly Black and
White, conceived in early 1932 to dramatise American racial problems. Set in the
steel mills of Birmingham, Alabama, the movie was to be made in English with
American actors but was never completed, perhaps a casualty of improved
relations between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Nathan Becker, too, is distinguished by a certain ambivalence regarding the
realm Jewish immigrants called di goldene medine (the golden land). America the
decadent is briefly (and pragmatically) represented by stock footage of the
Manhattan skyline. In a startling hommage to the most radical aspects of silent
Soviet technique, the image of a boat steaming out from New York harbour is
intercut with a stroboscopic montage of cars, cosmetics and can-can dancers–the
images, culled mainly from German magazines, held as briefly as two frames. A
mock-lyrical shot of garbage floating in the harbour provides a segue to Nathan
aboard the ship. ‘Well, Mayke, we are going home,’ he informs his dubious wife
(Yelena Kashnitskaya). The couple are travelling with Nathan’s black colleague Jim
(Kador Ben-Salim). ‘You, also, are going home,’ Nathan tells him.
An actor whose mere presence signified American injustice, Ben-Salim had
recently appeared in P.Kolomoytsev’s Black Skin [Chernaya kozha, 1931] a
Ukrainfilm production that favourably compared Soviet racial attitudes to those of
the United States; his first and most famous role was as the street acrobat Tom
Jackson in Georgian director Ivan Perestiani’s popular Civil War adventure Little