Page 21 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

2 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
If both history and historiography are seen as processes, then it stands
to reason that no single historical event can be seen in isolation and no single
historical period cut off from the preceding and succeeding periods by the
historical equivalent of a scholarly iron curtain. We have after all argued elsewhere
against the rigid periodisation of the subject itself. It follows therefore that the re-
evaluation of the history of Soviet cinema is not something that has appeared out
of the blue, any more than have the processes of glasnost and perestroika that
have accelerated that re-evaluation. It is for this reason that we have chosen to
include in the volume a number of reprinted articles that share a common
questioning of the old shibboleths, by pursuing new approaches, by investigating
new areas, by uncovering new evidence, or by a combination of these techniques.
The inclusion of two pieces by Vance Kepley is an intentional tribute to his pioneering
work: taken together, and with the addition of the translation of the Russian
prologue to Intolerance, they exemplify these three basic methods of reappraisal.
Similarly, Ian Christie’s essay on ‘Making sense of early Soviet sound’ argues for a
more complex reading of the conjunctions that ‘divided’ the 1920s from the 1930s
than the oversimplistic good/bad normative judgement that has hitherto prevailed.
Richard Taylor’s piece on Boris Shumyatsky, previously merely reviled as the
man who stopped Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow, examines the role of the
administrator/ bureaucrat during the period of what to current reformist orthodoxy
is known as ‘administrative command socialism’ and argues for a more subtly
shaded interpretation of his place in the development of Soviet cinema. Both this
and Kepley’s essay on ‘The origins of Soviet cinema’ presuppose a consideration
of cinema not merely as an aesthetic phenomenon, an art form, but also as an
administrative and industrial complex, with all the additional perspectives that this
implies.
Part of the re-examination of the subject must also involve an attempt to bring
the English-speaking reader up to date with ground-breaking articles published in
other languages. For this reason we have included Bernard Eisenschitz’s essay on
the relatively little-known director, Boris Barnet, one of ‘the less famous
contemporaries’ referred to above, but nevertheless a director whose career
spanned a longer period than did those of the ‘small group of “masters”’ in the
established canon. For the same reason we have also translated Mikhail
Yampolsky’s article on the context of Lev Kuleshov’s theory of acting, which
originally appeared in French. But another, and even more compelling, reason for
including this is that it represents the very best of the wide-ranging research now
being pursued by Soviet scholars, especially those of the younger generation.
There is a similar justification for the inclusion of the opening essay by Yuri
Tsivian, although the implications of his piece and the issues that he raises provide
their own more than adequate justification. Apart from Leyda’s pioneering sketch
in Kino and the project supervised by Tsivian himself and only recently published,
the pre-Revolutionary period is virtually a blank page in the history of Russian and
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Soviet cinema. Tsivian’s essay opens up numer-ous fields for further
investigation, undermines another prevailing periodisation of Russian and Soviet