Page 208 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 189
experienced a severe political defeat. Renn seizes the opportunity to escape from a
difficult situation and stays on after the others return, becoming a valuable member
of a factory shock-brigade. At a mass meeting to celebrate the brigade’s
achievements, his conscience forces him to decline the invitation to join the factory
committee and instead he declares publicly–and haltingly through a translator,
since he has learned little Russian–that he must return to take his place ‘at this
decisive moment of the class struggle’. Pudovkin has described his approach to the
sequence in psychological terms:

At the beginning of this scene we see and hear shots longish in duration, first
of the speaking hero, then of the translator. In the process of development of
the episode, the image of the translator becomes shorter and the majority of
his words accompany the images of the hero, according as the interest of the
audience automatically fixes on the latter’s psychological position. 57

Here the ‘delay’ of translation, coming after the linguistic isolation of Renn’s stay in
the USSR, produces a graphic representation of his alienation, which is ended by a
‘correct’ decision that restores to him the effective power of speech. (A similar
sequence involving translation and the symbolic exchange of halting words in the
other language occurs in Men and Jobs.)

4
In Tommy [1931], Yakov Protazanov’s first sound film, based on Vsevolod
Ivanov’s celebrated 1920s play Armoured Train 14—69, an English soldier serving
with the intervention forces is captured by Red partisans. In a brilliant ‘subjective’
trope the lone soldier on duty day-dreams of the foundry where he works at home
and imagines that a crane knocks him over –just as the partisans surprise him!
The partisan leader, unable to speak English, desperately tries to explain to the
soldier what they stand for: he shouts ‘Lenin’ and gets a glimmer of response; then
he seizes an icon of Abraham and Isaac and with vigorous gestures ‘interprets’ it
as an allegory of the bourgeoisie attacking the proletariat, with the angel standing
for imperialist intervention by Britain and the USA. Tommy finally ‘gets the
picture’ and joins forces with the partisans, while elsewhere his captain chats with
White Russian officers and explains that he learned his fluent Russian looking
after British industrial interests before the Revolution. Here the triumph of non-
verbal communication between ‘natural’ class allies is set against the easy but
empty exchanges of the officer classes and, as so often in Protazanov’s unjustly
neglected work, schematic confrontation is fleshed out in dialectical and satirical
detail.