Page 185 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

166 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
with the new, rich political genre of satire. That was my starting-point
and I must say that at first not everything worked out, but that’s only
natural. The tasks that I set myself could scarcely be realised at that
time: there was no experience of this kind of film satire either in the
Soviet Union or abroad.
So that you will understand what I did, let me explain that I decided
to make one-reelers, films with a maximum length of eight or ten
minutes. This was forced on me by the fact that you needed a year to
make a full-length film on a large-scale theme and I wanted to release
one or two films a month. What were these films about? Their themes
were prompted by conditions in the country. It was very difficult for us to
embark on the construction of socialism because we had no skilled
personnel. There were a large number of foreigners who were more
interested in hindering us than in helping. We had no experience of
construction and our building materials were not always of good quality.
We’d lost our specialists during the Civil War and hadn’t yet managed to
train new ones.
I’ll tell you the plots of two of my films, so that you’ll understand
what I was doing. Some bricklayers are putting up a new building.
They’ve already put seven floors up and they’re putting the eighth up there
on top somewhere. A shoe factory has already moved in downstairs. All
this is done in a grotesque circus-like manner. A fantastic machine churns
out shoes, but the shoes are useless because you can’t put them on.
Suddenly there’s an enormous crack like lightning through all seven
floors. All seven have split open. The shoemaker runs out and shouts,
‘Hey, what are you up to?’ They reply, ‘We’ve got no time. We’re shock-
workers.’ He protests, ‘You mustn’t do that!’ They go on building, but the
edifice has been destroyed. Suddenly from somewhere up above an
enormous brick sails down until it hits the shoemaker on the head and
crumbles to dust. It’s a bad brick. The shoemaker picks up a piece of the
brick, rubs it between his fingers and, looking the audience in the eye,
says, ‘Is this really a brick?’
And the second plot: a crowd of people with clubs, sticks and
stones are running along a street: ‘Stop him!’ Stop him!’ The intertitle:
‘Stop him, he built the house.’ It’s the same bricklayer.
These were very topical subjects. They couldn’t have been more
topical. They were received by audiences with great enthusiasm because
our first new buildings, and the whole conditions for construction, were
not ideal. We didn’t know how to build: we had neither the experience,
nor the skilled men, nor the materials. The people were well aware of
this. But there were still a lot of enemies in our country. There were
remnants of the White Guards, small groups of kulaks and our rabid
enemies who used, or could have used, these films to discredit us by