Page 203 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

184 MAKING SENSE OF EARLY SOVIET SOUND

Figure 21 Shub’s Komsomol–Patron of Electrification [1932] echoed the Constructivist
faktura, with its self-referential demonstration of the new sound-film technique.

Ivor Montagu has suggested that the centralisation and rigidity of the Five Year
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Plan may in fact have delayed the introduction of sound to cinema, but a crucial
link was forged in 1930 between the new technology and the new themes of the
‘cultural revolution’. The first sound films all dealt with aspects of construction:
whether industrialisation in Abram Room’s The Plan for Great Works [Plan
velikikh rabot, 1930] and Vertov’s Enthusiasm; regional development in Yuli
Raizman’s The Earth Thirsts [1930] and Kozintsev and Trauberg’s Alone; or
social problems in Nikolai Ekk’s The Path to Life [Putevka v zhizn’, in 1931]. Special
emphases of the Plan strategy were also reflected in films with a precision
unparalleled in the 1920s: the training of peasants as construction workers in
Dovzhenko’s Ivan [1932]; the goal of ‘catching up with and surpassing America’ in
Alexander Macheret’s Men and Jobs [1932]. And in a little-known film by Esfir
Shub, KShE (Komsomol: Patron of Electrification) [KShE (Komsomol–Shef
elektrifikatsii), 1932], the technology of sound recording is actually shown as a
prelude to the study of an electrification project.
The fervent debates on the political and artistic role of cinema which had been a
feature of the 1920s were subordinated to the new demand that films should be
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‘intelligible to the masses’. Thus the actual structure of early sound films
becomes more schematic, while the strong vein of social criticism –of bureaucratic
inefficiency, managerial privilege, youthful immorality–so marked in late 1920s