Page 187 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

168 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
then but it has all missed the point. It was a kind of public prosecutor’s
cinema.
Basically we made newsreels from documentary materials. These
were unusual films and the shows were quite extraordinary. We rejected
the idea of shooting a newsreel and screening it as information with
musical accompaniment: something that would have first a fire, then
someone killed, next a flood, then someone who’d hanged himself, and
so on. We weren’t interested in that sort of thing. Nor did we require
music, which would have been out of place because this cinema was not
there to give the audience aesthetic pleasure. We used the technique and
genre of newsreel as the occasion to raise the great issue of construction
on the screen in a very relevant manner and in various genres.
It was rather like the prosecutor’s speech in a courtroom: it showed
what was wrong on screen. It painted a nasty picture, some problem
that had not been put right, and this was always accompanied by the title,
‘What are you doing, dear comrades, what are you doing?’ This was
followed by a fearless presentation of the problems: a ‘document’, a ‘film
document’, a newsreel. It was like a word spoken in the midst of utter
silence and the film ended with a contrast with model examples.
Somewhere we’d found a good mine, a good kolkhoz, a good factory
and we said, ‘Look at them!’ Our subjects, the people we were
castigating, always made the excuse that this or that was missing, that
there was no bread, that there were no people. Nothing, nothing,
nothing! So we told them to look at other places. After that there was a
sort of production conference where they all put their cards on the table,
examined what was wrong and passed a resolution. We didn’t leave
until, with the aid of our films, the tide had turned and everything that was
wrong had been eliminated.
That’s how I accumulated my experience of satire: comedy, satire,
farce, cabaret, burlesque–everything the screen can use to open the
audience’s eyes, to surprise them. I’ve used it all without worrying about
appearances. It did a great deal to define my later paths. The film train
made seventy-two films in one year: they were shown straight away and
were effective…. That means around 25,000 metres of film. Seventy-two
films. Usually one-reelers, because they weren’t just shown but also
discussed and resolutions were passed. They were all silent films. In
1932 sound film was only just getting off the ground.
That’s the story of the film train. It was the second stage of my
work but even on the film train I was busy with satirical comedies. Our
train was conceived on a grand scale: we had the capacity to process
ourselves 2,000 metres of film every day on the train, whether it was
stationary or in motion. We worked round the clock. There were eight
cameramen: they did all the shooting for these films. I put them together,
approved the script. I was in charge: I was the scriptwriter and the chief