Page 216 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

BORIS SHUMYATSKY AND SOVIET CINEMA IN THE 1930S 197
not life, serve the masses? Yes, they can if they are born again or
regenerated. If their hearts beat in unison with the masses. If the joys and
sorrows of these masses are as dear and close to them….
If they are regenerated in this way, there will be honour and a role for
them in Soviet cinema. If not, the workers and peasants will show them their
proper place. So far they have not been regenerated but they shout from the
house-tops: ‘We shall lead the masses behind us.’ I am sorry, but you will not
lead with ‘Octobers’ and ‘New Babylons’ if only because people do not want
to watch these films. Before you lead the masses behind you, you must know
them. For this you must either be from the masses yourself or have studied
them thoroughly, and not just studied but also experienced what these
masses themselves experience. 12

Petrov-Bytov’s solution to the problem he had diagnosed was somewhat extreme:

The public-spirited artist who works on the masses and leads them must,
before being an artist, spend a couple of years in the worker’s ‘school of life’
and two years in the peasant’s, or he must come from this milieu. 13

But he was echoing the solution favoured by the Party leadership which in January
1929 had issued a decree ‘On the Strengthening of Cinema Cadres’:

The task of the Party is to use all measures to strengthen its leadership of
the work of the cinema organisations and, by preserving the ideological
consistency of the films produced, to combat decisively the attempt to bring
Soviet cinema nearer to the ideology of the non-proletarian strata. 14

The Party viewed the problems of cinema at least in part as a result of its rapid
growth. In 1914 there had been only 1,412 cinemas, 133 of them in rural areas: by
1928 the figures had grown to a total of 7,331, with 2,389 in rural areas and cinema
15
was serving an annual audience of 200 million people. In 1922/3 only twelve
feature films had been released: in 1926/7 the figure was more than ten times
16
higher. In 1924 thirty-four directors had been working in Soviet cinema but by
17
1928 this had risen to ninety-five. But the artists’ trade union Rabis estimated
18
that only 13.5 per cent of these ninety-five were Party members and Party
19
statistics suggested that 97.3 per cent were of non-proletarian origin. That such
figures were taken seriously is itself an illustration of the obsessive nature of the
debate. None the less, the intelligentsia were clearly dominant and, equally clearly,
they were not enamoured of Petrov-Bytov’s proposed solutions. But his diagnosis
that Soviet cinema was producing films that were either unpopular with mass
audiences or popular but ideologically unsuitable was a diagnosis that most
contemporaries would have agreed with. Our conventional approach to Soviet
cinema has tended to obscure that argument by overlooking the wider political
context.