Page 159 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

140 A FACE TO THE SHTETL: SOVIET YIDDISH CINEMA, 1924—36

Figure 17 Solomon Mikhoels in the first Yiddish talkie, The Return of Nathan Becker
[1932].

According to Lyons, by the year of Nathan Becker’s release, ‘these hordes of
stranded Americans became a real problem’. 32
Nathan Becker has received scant attention in Soviet film histories although, in
a 1935 essay on ‘Film Art in Soviet White Russia’, the film was singled out for
particular praise by Sergei Dinamov. A leading cultural apparatchik, the editor of
Literaturnaya gazeta, Dinamov had set the tone of the January 1935 All-Union
Creative Conference on Cinema Affairs, over which he presided, when he defined
the basis of the new Soviet cinema as ‘optimism, heroism and theatricality’. Dinamov
had publicly dismissed Kuleshov, Eisenstein and Pudovkin, but, in describing
Nathan Becker, he evinces considerable enthusiasm:

The artist, the producer, and the [camera] operator have shown here with
great force the life of a Jewish townlet that preserved its old appearance