Page 204 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 185
films, disappears. Under Shumyatsky’s regime, many of these tendencies, which
were already evident, were encouraged and welded into a distinctive new policy of
developing exemplary and reproducible models for Shumyatsky’s ‘cinema for the
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millions’. Shumyatsky did not discount the importance of international prestige,
but it was not to be won at the expense of the growing domestic market by making
avant-garde films for the international intelligentsia. Instead The Path to Life was
successfully shown at the Venice Festival and Chapayev [Chapaev, 1934] proudly
inaugurated the fifteenth anniversary year of Soviet cinema, which included the first
Moscow Film Festival in 1935. As an indication of the complicated linkage between
the investment demands of sound as a new technology, the new direction in film
policy and the increasing involvement of the state, Shumyatsky claimed that the
three sound features completed in 1931–The Path to Life, Alone and Sergei
Yutkevich’s The Golden Mountains [Zlatye gory]–were seen by Stalin, who
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decided as a result to devote additional resources to the development of sound. Up
to this point, the Plan imperative to end dependence on imported film stock and
equipment had taken precedence over conversion to sound. But Shumyatsky’s
evident success in curbing ‘Formalist excesses’ and bringing forth exemplary
works such as The Path to Life and Ivan was to gain new political prestige for
cinema.
Burch has suggested that the introduction of sound may itself have precipitated
a new level of political interference in films:

political cadres suddenly found themselves confronted with a medium which
involved spoken discourse, i.e., the very substance of their political practice.
Their competence to intervene far more directly than before was suddenly
legitimised. 48

Given that closer political attention was already being paid to cinema (and to all the
arts) by 1930, it may have been a foregone conclusion that the substance of the
‘talkies’ would attract close scrutiny. But it may be significant that local state
censorship also made its first appearance in the United States shortly after the
arrival of the talkies. The immediacy of spoken discourse clearly invited a detailed
‘textual’ censorship which was unknown in the American silent period. Sound
cinema also clearly invited closer scrutiny at the script stage, since the finished film
was considerably less easy to alter ‘invisibly’ than the flexible silent film with
intertitles. In the USSR this relative ‘rigidity’ of the sound film appears to have
reacted back on the planning stage, lengthening and bureaucratising the production
process. This tendency, together with the concern for ‘exemplary’ works, led to a
drastic slowing-down of production in the 1930s, to the point where only twenty-
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nine films were finished in 1933, compared with the high point of 112 in 1928.
These are the essential features of the transitional period which need to be set
alongside the conventional emphasis on Socialist Realism as the new guiding
doctrine for all Soviet art in the 1930s. Undoubtedly the assimilation of sound
played an important part in the construction of Socialist Realist cinema but the