Page 189 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

170 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
Question: How did you come to make Happiness [Schast’e, 1935]?
Answer: Fiction film had always attracted me. I had a longing for art
6
but this was all black bread, a job for an unskilled worker. It was a
reaction not to my own inner spiritual requirements, but to the need to
help at a most difficult moment, to use the film camera as a weapon, as a
machine gun, an offensive weapon, a weapon of mobilisation. This was,
of course, a long way removed from art.
Then I made Happiness: it was my greatest achievement. I’d like to
tell you something that seems to have escaped the attention of the critics
and journalists who’ve written about the film. I’ve never managed to
ensure that people understood the real meaning of this film, which is as
follows. When the first kolkhozes appeared around 1929—30 the country
was still impoverished; we hadn’t cleared up the devastation and we had
a very poor inheritance. The railways had no engines, no wagons. The
factories had no machinery, and so on. Things were generally hard. It is
through heroic effort that we’ve completely transformed the country in
the past fifty or sixty years.
In the history of our country there is one very significant page. That
was when the peasants, exhausted by the war and deprived of the most
elementary comforts and material conditions, took the road to socialism.
But we couldn’t give them what they wanted overnight. Lenin said that
we must emerge from misery and poverty by small steps. But the
peasant himself–and this is not just true of our country, it’s part of the
social psychology of mankind in all civilised nations–dreams of
ownership. He wants a prosperous life, to set himself apart from his
thousands and millions of neighbours; he wants to creep ahead and have
his own barn, his own horses, his own grain. In short, he wants to be his
own boss.
Of course, for every 1,000, only one will manage it: the other 999
will remain farm-hands and starve, but this dream lives on among the
peasants. Just imagine what happened when the vast millions of the
peasant mass said yes and rejected the kulak path, and we created a
collective economy together! But the peasant joined the kolkhoz
dreaming of owning his own barn and his own horse. It was hard for him
to cast all that aside: it was very deeply ingrained. Working on the film
train, we travelled to different areas, to the Ukraine, to Siberia, along the
Kuban River, and everywhere we came across the same thing: people
who had joined the kolkhoz thinking they’d get everything they wanted
straight away. They didn’t. But, you know, it’s a very difficult step to give
up your horse, to blot out your dream and become involved in a
completely different way of life when you don’t know what’s going to
happen. So a peasant like Khmyr lived with the dream of his own horse,
his own barn, his own grain, his own fence, because his next-door