Page 20 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

Introduction Entering the film factory

Richard Taylor and Ian Christie

Inside the Film Factory, as its title suggests, begins where our previous
collaboration The Film Factory left off. Whereas that anthology of documents
aimed to provide the reader with a tool-kit with which to reopen the set questions of
Russian and Soviet cinema history, this collection of essays is intended to point
towards some of the ways in which those questions might be approached and
answered in different ways, to indicate some of the new questions that might
profitably be posed and to suggest some of the neglected areas that require further
investigation.
It was the underlying premiss of. The Film Factory, as expressed in Ian
Christie’s introductory essay, ‘Soviet cinema: a heritage and its history’, that
Western–and indeed Soviet–views of the history of Soviet cinema had become
overloaded with the canons of the past to the point where overdetermined
categorisation and periodisation had left the subject stranded in a whole series of
blind alleys:

The history of the early Soviet cinema has become a prisoner of its own
mythology. When western historians and critics speak of ‘Soviet
revolutionary cinema’, they are invoking a very specific construct which,
together with German Expressionism and Italian Neo-Realism, constitutes a
cornerstone of the art-cinema tradition…. [The] continuing western
preoccupation with a small group of ‘masters’ and their early work in the
silent period, together with what seems like a wilful ignorance of their less
famous contemporaries and of the furious debates that raged around Soviet
cinema’s policy direction throughout the decade before 1935–these suggest
that the actual history of Russian and early Soviet cinema has long been the
victim of a self-confirming diagnosis, now enshrined in a persuasive
mythology. 1

It is our intention that Inside the Film Factory should broaden and deepen the
challenge to that hitherto so persuasive mythology, taking advantage both of some
of the questions raised by The Film Factory and of the major changes taking place
in the Soviet historiography of Soviet cinema now that previously unaskable
questions can be, and increasingly are being, asked.