Page 215 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

196 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
Sovkino’s continuing problems came under closer scrutiny at the First All-Union
Party Conference on Cinema in March 1928. The resolutions passed by this
conference reflected the same kind of Party balancing act that can be seen in earlier
resolutions on literature and theatre. The Party was unwilling to endorse any
particular group or school but offered a framework for the guidance of Soviet film-
makers:

In questions of artistic form the Party cannot support one particular current,
tendency or grouping: it permits competition between differing formal and
artistic tendencies and the opportunity for experimentation so that the most
perfect possible film in artistic terms can be achieved.
The main criterion for evaluating the formal and artistic qualities of films
is the requirement that cinema furnish a ‘form that is intelligible to the
millions’. 8

But the Party’s endorsement of the importance of ‘entertainment quality …
proximity to the worker and peasant audience and a form that corresponds to the
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requirements of the broad mass audience’ left the door open to the more
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vociferous critics of Sovkino in the hierarchy of ARRK, the film-makers’
equivalent of RAPP, to insist on the supremacy of their own positions.
The widespread criticism of Eisenstein’s October [Oktyabr’, 1927] for
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obscurantism and self-indulgence was symptomatic of an emerging attempt to
establish a so-called ‘proletarian hegemony’ in Soviet cinema, such as RAPP was
trying to establish in literature. It was no use making films on contemporary
themes set in a working-class milieu if those films were made by effete intellectuals
whose contact with that milieu was tenuous in the extreme. The faults of Soviet
cinema were thus laid at the door of an intelligentsia severed from the proletariat
and an avant-garde portrayed as making films largely for its own benefit. Because
the films that they produced were divorced from the masses and therefore from
reality (or so the argument went), their achievement was an empty and a purely
formal one. Thus the avant-garde intellectuals were tarred with the brushes of
aestheticism and Formalism as well.
One of the leading exponents of the proletarian hegemony was the scriptwriter
and director Pavel Petrov-Bytov. In April 1929 he wrote:

When people talk about Soviet cinema they brandish a banner on which is
written: The Strike, The Battleship Potemkin, October, The Mother, The
End of St Petersburg [Konets Sankt-Peterburga, 1927] and they add the
recent New Babylon [1929], Zvenigora [1929] and The Arsenal [1929]. Do
120 million workers and peasants march beneath this banner? I quite
categorically state that they do not. And never have done.
…the people who make up Soviet cinema are 95% alien, aesthetes or
unprincipled. Generally speaking, none of them has any experience of life.
Can these people, who are capable of understanding abstract problems but