Page 188 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN 169
director and I had four or five directors under me. There we were all
crowded together, terribly crowded, a group of enthusiasts and
romantics. If someone came to us who was idle, who didn’t like getting
up in the middle of the night, he didn’t last long. We’d warn him once,
twice at most, and then quietly, all smiles and without scolding him, we’d
buy him a ticket back to Moscow. We’d shake him by the hand and take
him to the station. The others–we had a complement of thirty-two–
worked an eighteen-hour day. My job was not to drive them on but to
pull them off their jobs when they needed sleep, when they were falling
asleep while working in the laboratory or shooting the titles. That was
how we worked in those days.
Our eleventh Five Year Plan is now coming to an end. Then it was
the first Five Year Plan, when the country was living in great poverty,
very frugally. There were enormous deprivations, great difficulties. As
yet there were no trained cadres, no machinery. One statistic will show
you how difficult it was. In Moscow our leaders were struggling to make
sure that we produced 9 million tonnes of steel. Now we produce
something like 200 million tonnes. 200 million now and 9 million then.
The legacy of old Russia was so rotten and stultifying. The country was
illiterate, starving, unshod, unclothed…torn in half. It was difficult to
manage, to move forward. In the course of these eleven Five Year Plans
we have created an entirely different world. Just look at the people then.
Take just one village, see how it was in 1927. Now everything is quite
different: everything has changed and in my view this great work has
been worthwhile.
Question: You worked with Nikolai Okhlopkov? 5
Answer: I joined Gosvoyenkino at the same time as Okhlopkov and
began my creative career in cinema as his assistant director. The two of
us made a short military training film called The Searchlight
[Prozhektor, n.d.] and then we made a more interesting film called The
Way of the Enthusiasts [Put’ entuziastov, 1930]. This film was
experimental. Without thinking, we experimented and our experiments
went beyond the confines of cinema. We sanctioned a whole series of
incorrect and questionable political truths. The film was philosophically
so confused that it was not released. We’d put our souls into it. There
were a large number of creative innovations in it. Both Okhlopkov and I
realised that it wasn’t really suitable for release. But the great value of
the film lay in the fact that we had made it completely by ourselves,
discovering for ourselves as a group the most critical and unexpected
situations and the most unexpected forms.
Okhlopkov was an unusually interesting actor. He left Meyerhold’s
theatre but took with him Meyerhold’s passion for turning theatrical
stereotypes and clichés on their heads. Okhlopkov took Meyerhold’s
campaign against the old traditional theatre and translated it to cinema.