Page 214 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

BORIS SHUMYATSKY AND SOVIET CINEMA IN THE 1930S 195
from a story by Prosper Mérimée adapted for the screen by Anatoli Lunacharsky,
the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, with Lunacharsky’s wife, Nataliya
Rozenel, playing the female lead. The story is set in the forests of Lithuania and
contains the stock horror-film elements of murky castles, human beasts, hereditary
insanity, storms and dungeons. It was unashamedly a commercial film aimed at
attracting audiences through entertainment and diversion rather than through
edification, agitation or propaganda. Showing in Moscow at the same time as the
state film organisation’s The Battleship Potemkin, it attracted more than twice as
4
large an audience and was advertised as ‘the first hit of 1926’. Later in the year
‘public demand’ led to Potemkin being replaced by Douglas Fairbanks in Robin
Hood. 5
Since Soviet cinema was expected to stand on its own two feet financially,
Sovkino had to make films that were commercially rather than ideologically
orientated. What surplus, if any, was left from the production and distribution of
kassovye (cash) films was to be used to finance klassovye (class) films. Sovkino
was bitterly attacked from all sides for its heavy-handed attitudes and for its failure
to make any real attempt to combine ideological rectitude with box-office success.
Mayakovsky, echoing Lenin’s remarks to Clara Zetkin, commented in an October
1927 debate on ‘The Paths and Policy of Sovkino’:

We’re merely saying that the masses who pay to see films are not the upper
stratum of NEP or the more-or-less well-to-do strata but the many tens of
millions of the mass of those same textile-workers and students who pay
kopeks but produce millions. And, however much you might try and try,
however much profit you make from the public by catering for their tastes,
you are doing something foul and nasty. 6

Adrian Piotrovsky, the critic and scriptwriter who was later to become the head of
the script department of the Leningrad film studios, argued that Sovkino should
tackle its problems not by a rigid division between the commercial and the
ideological, not by a slavish imitation of ‘bourgeois’ cinema but by a more efficient
concentration on low-budget films offering a quick return on capital expenditure:

Our businessmen would probably agree that they need a quick return on
their capital expenditure, a quick return even on small amounts. It is only
average-cost topical contemporary films that can provide this. In their own
way these films are the cruisers of our cinema fleet and it is certainly no
accident that in our current naval fleet it is the fast and light cruisers that are
replacing the expensive armoured hulks. A stake in the average-cost Soviet
film should be the basis of our production. This should become clear from
distribution too and that will then put an end to the complaints that not
enough is done to make Soviet films popular: these complaints are after all
caused by the distributors’ secret distrust of the commercial possibilities of
Soviet ‘ideological’ films. 7