Page 161 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

142 A FACE TO THE SHTETL: SOVIET YIDDISH CINEMA, 1924—36
eerily underpopulated, halfway towards a ghost town. The natives seem weak and
dispirited; as Dinamov observes, the non-bricks are literally falling out of the
houses. (Seen today, the shtetl’s haunting sense of emptiness and abandonment
carries unintentional associations with the catastrophic, man-made famine that was
then decimating the Ukraine.)
The sense of entropy is emphasised by Yevgeni Brusilovsky’s mournful score,
and the accompanying montage of crooked roofs and empty mud streets. Nathan’s
arrival draws a motley crowd of urchins, layabouts and beggars. A ragged klezmer
plays his clarinet and sings a toneless song. Intentionally or not, this opening is a
parody of those 16mm home movies produced by successful immigrants of their
old world birthplaces: ‘In America, you would become rich with this performance,’
Nathan expansively tells the musician. But, even as the returning son is greeted by
old Becker, the town is honoured with another distinguished visitor. When a pretty
young communist appears in an official car to recruit workers to help build
Magnitogorsk, an enthusiastic mob abruptly materialises, falling over themselves in
their desire to leave the shtetl for the steel city beyond the Urals.
Constructed in the first frenzy of the Five Year Plan, Magnitogorsk was its
crucible. The same year Nathan Becker was released saw Joris Ivens’s 50-minute
documentary paean Song of the Heroes, scored by Hanns Eisler and focusing on
the building of a blast furnace by the young workers of the Komsomol. ‘A quarter
of a million souls–Communists, kulaks, foreigners, Tartars, convicted saboteurs
and a mass of blue-eyed Russian peasants–making the biggest steel combinat in
Europe in the middle of the barren Ural steppe,’ the American welder John Scott
wrote in his first-hand account of the city’s rise. ‘Money was spent like water, men
froze, hungered and suffered, but the construction work went on with a disregard
for individuals nd a mass heroism seldom paralleled in history.’ 35
These new arrivals to south-west Siberia included some 40,000 Jews. Indeed,
one of the outstanding figures of Five Year Plan literature–David Margulies, the
positive hero of novelist Valentin Katayev’s 1932 celebration of Magnitogorsk, Time,
Forward–is nominally Jewish. Margulies, however, is an engineer; most of the
labour was unskilled, with bricklayers such as Nathan and Jim in particular
demand at the beginning of 1933.
Nathan Becker salutes the city of steel with appropriately heroic music. Here,
the shtetl Jews are educated in progressive work methods by enthusiastic young
communists. Nathan is assigned to the Central Institute of Labour as an instructor,
along with a German specialist who has been imported to teach the workers a
regimen of movements that combine efficiency, artistry and pleasure. (This
unspecified form of Taylorism suggests the theories of the ‘Expressionist’ critic
and director Ippolit Sokolov who, dismissing Meyerhold’s Biomechanics as
unscientific, believed that actors must be trained like workers to synthesise
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‘physical culture and the labour process’. ‘Are they studying to become actors?’
the incredulous Nathan asks. ‘The worker plays his work as though it were a
piano,’ the instructor explains–and the solicitous, optimistic construction leader
Mikulich (Boris Babochkin, who would soon become a national hero as the