Page 212 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

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Ideology as mass entertainment: Boris
Shumyatsky and Soviet cinema in the
1930s

Richard Taylor

A film and its success are directly linked to the degree of
entertainment in the plot…that is why we are obliged to require our
masters to produce works that have strong plots and are organised
around a story-line.
Boris Shumyatsky, 1933 1

The conventional approach to Soviet cinema looks at the films produced almost
exclusively in terms of the men who directed them: Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov
head a long, and lengthening, list of what film critics and historians would,
borrowing from their French counterparts, nowadays call auteurs. Yet our
approach to Hollywood, which is both more familiar to us, and more influential
over us, is rather different: the auteur theory persists in the discussion of such
important individual directors as Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford but we are much
more prepared to concede that a film is the result of a variety of influences,
perhaps even of a collective effort–at best a collective work of art, at worst a mere
industrial commodity destined for mass consumption. In the Hollywood context,
therefore, we talk of a studio style or of the influence of a producer like David
O.Selznick. We group American films according to their scriptwriter (Jules
Furthman or Clifford Odets), their genre (the western, the musical, the war film) or
their star (Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean). But we never apply
these criteria to Soviet cinema.
There are, of course, good historical (and ideological) reasons for this: one of the
principal reasons is quite simply lack of adequate information. But, if we do not ask
different questions, we shall never get different answers or, indeed, much new
information at all. In concentrating exclusively on directors, our approach to Soviet
cinema lacks an important dimension. We ignore the different styles that emanate
from different studios and we ignore the role of a man like Adrian Piotrovsky, head
of the script department of the Leningrad studios in the early 1930s, in creating a
studio style. We ignore the threads of continuity in the work of a scriptwriter like
Mikhail Bleiman, whose first script was filmed in 1924 and who was still active in
the 1970s, or Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko, who scripted films for both Eisenstein
(The Battleship Potemkin, 1926) and Pudovkin (The Deserter, 1933). We ignore