Page 186 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN 167
saying, ‘What kind of builders are they? They can’t build socialism. They
can’t even build a simple house, let alone socialism!’
This serious situation provoked a very pointed and wide-ranging
discussion in our cinema organisation, which was called the Association
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of Revolutionary Cinematography, or ARK. We had some very heated
discussions there and in the course of them some quite improbable
arguments were put forward against my films. People said that the
proletariat could do without satire and that it had no need of humour,
which was a phenomenon of bourgeois culture. Things were not very
pleasant for me at that time because the question arose of stopping my
experiments. When things were already bad, and I was no longer
allowed to work, Anatoli Vasilevich Lunacharsky got to know about my
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difficulties. He viewed my films and realised that this was an exceptionally
valuable experiment that must be allowed to continue at all costs, but at
the same time he criticised me very severely for the carelessness of my
aim. He said, ‘You knock your own side and others. But you shouldn’t
knock your own people. You have to knock the others without touching
your own people.’ But how could I knock the others without touching my
own side? If I took such sharp and severe criticism seriously, if I got hold
of an idiot, dragged him to the screen and said, ‘This is an idiot,’ the
enemy would still see it [and be able to make capital out of it]. Or
perhaps I shouldn’t concern myself with these idiots at all? Nevertheless,
he said, ‘This is a very valuable and necessary lesson. Cinema must
employ satire and for this reason we must give Medvedkin every
assistance.’ So I made five comedies like that, taking no notice of what
my colleagues were doing. When these comedies were released, there
was an enormous scandal.
People began to criticise me. They tried to drive me out of cinema
but Lunacharsky spoke up for me. He took me under his wing and then I
made a special pronouncement that cinema is a weapon. Satire is an
offensive weapon, not just something that satisfies the aesthetic
requirements and interests of the audience, but a weapon that attacks
shortcomings, that lashes like a whip, that lashes everything that
interferes with life. So you can see that I advocated using cinema in a
way that nobody else used it. I think that cinema can be a very real
weapon in the battle for construction, in the battle against our enemies,
against the people who get in our way.
It was in this light that I decided that I could make films on the film
train. I decided to build up a team from scratch, equip three railway
carriages and travel on wheels whenever there was something wrong.
This was a kind of special fire brigade to put out problem fires.
Wherever there was something amiss, like the plan not being fulfilled,
wherever there was bad management, there our train went, gathered
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information and filmed. So much has been written about the train since