Page 217 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

198 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
We have largely ignored the implications of Lunacharsky’s observation that in
the Soviet Union too ‘cinema is an industry and, what is more, a profitable industry’ 20
and his subsequent conclusion that:

Many of our people do not understand that our film production must whet
the public appetite, that, if the public is not interested in a picture that we
produce, it will become boring agitation and we shall become boring
agitators. But it is well known that boring agitation is counter-agitation. We
must choose and find a line that ensures that the film is both artistic and
ideologically consistent and contains romantic experience of an intimate and
psychological character. 21

The lessons of Lunacharsky’s remarks may have been lost on ‘many of our people’
but they were not lost on Boris Shumyatsky.
Shumyatsky was appointed head of Soyuzkino when the ‘proletarian hegemony’
was at its height. Many leading directors had turned to making films on
contemporary themes drawn from the everyday experience of the Soviet worker or
peasant. Ermler was making Counterplan [Vstrechnyi, 1932], Ekk The Path to
Life [1931] and Yutkevich The Golden Mountains [1931], while the Kozintsev and
Trauberg film Alone [1931] was greeted warmly by Sutyrin, the editor of the
monthly journal Proletraskoe Kino, in a review significantly entitled ‘From
22
Intelligentsia Illusions to Actual Reality’. (Despite its name, Proletarskoe kino
was not quite the forcing ground for proletarianisation that it might have seemed, or
wanted to seem, to be: its editorial board, in addition to Sutyrin, included the
directors Pudovkin and Ermler while Petrov-Bytov became editor of the mass-
circulation Leningrad film magazine, Kadr.) Shumyatsky himself paid little more
than lip service to the campaign, preferring to concentrate on the broader
problems of Soviet cinema, which were enormous, and as much industrial as
political.
In the year 1927/8 box office receipts from Soviet films had exceeded those
23
from imports for the first time, but this did not mean that Soviet films were
intrinsically more popular. It meant that a shortage of foreign currency had led to a
severe reduction in the number of films imported while the Soviet films that filled
the gap were on the whole imitative of Western models. The rapid expansion of
the cinema network during the first Five Year Plan period accentuated the problem
and the spread of cinemas to the countryside created a new audience for Soviet
films.
While we cannot talk in conventional Western terms of supply and demand, we
can say that those responsible for Soviet cinema, from Lunacharsky and
Shumyatsky downwards, realised that the industry was not producing enough
films, or enough of the right films to meet the demand that they perceived. Hence
the emphases on attracting established authors into writing scripts, on adapting the
established classics and on tackling themes and developing genres that were
immediately relevant to the ever-widening audience. The shortage of foreign