Page 202 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 183
Vertov’s statement, of course, was made after the period of anticipation and at the
beginning of actual sound production and it challenges not only the ‘Statement on
Sound’ but other widely held views of the period. In a later article, after the release
of Enthusiasm, he described the film as a ‘negation of the negation’ proposed by
the critic Ippolit Sokolov, who had claimed that neither nature nor everyday life were
‘sonogenic’ and that efforts to record natural sounds would result in a ‘concert of
caterwauling’.
For Vertov and his group what is of most interest is a ‘many-sided’ analysis of
the film, not as a ‘thing in itself’, but as a part of ‘all our work in switching rails from
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the silent to the sound cinema, in this branch of our socialist film industry’. While
Vertov boldly seized the opportunity to link his polemic for documentary with the
new technology, Eisenstein chose to travel abroad –ostensibly to study sound film
techniques–and other film-makers, less famous or more fearful, devised long-term
projects to help them weather the coming storm. 39

INDUSTRIAL AND CULTURAL REVOLUTION
Recent studies of the introduction of sound in Hollywood have stressed the
economic imperatives at work in what had hitherto been regarded as a
technological and aesthetic process. In the Soviet case, an even greater range of
processes is implicated in assessing the transition to sound, as I have argued
elsewhere: the following main elements may be sketched. 40
The essential dynamic of the late 1920s in the USSR was the accelerating
development of a ‘command economy’ which would eventually bring all areas of
Soviet work and life under centralised authority, eliminating independent initiatives
and concentrating resources behind imposed policies. This dynamic took the form
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of preparation for and implementation of the first Five Year Plan in 1928—9, with
its central theme of industrialisation and, superimposed upon this without warning,
Stalin’s forced collectivisation of agriculture. A ‘cultural revolution’ was planned to
accompany the Five Year Plan and preparations for this ran in parallel through
1927—8 with work on the Plan. Richard Taylor has already charted in detail the
intense debate that surrounded the First All-Union Party Conference on Cinema in
March 1928: the essential issues at stake were close Party control of cinema and
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the development of cinema as an efficient mass medium. When the Party finally
succeeded in establishing controls in 1930, with the reorganisation of all cinema
affairs under Soyuzkino, headed by Boris Shumyatsky, Soviet film-makers and
administrators had, for the first time, an authoritative–if ultimately contradictory–
brief:

In the period of socialist construction cinema must, first and foremost, be the
most powerful instrument for deepening the class consciousness of
the workers, for the political re-education of the non-proletarian strata of the
population and the peasantry. 43