Page 218 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

BORIS SHUMYATSKY AND SOVIET CINEMA IN THE 1930S 199

Figure 23 Soundproofing the first Soviet sound studio with ‘torfoleum’, a derivative of peat.

currency meant that Soviet cinema also had to try to achieve self-sufficiency in the
production of film stock, projectors and other equipment and to achieve this as
quickly as possible.
Lastly, the Soviet Union had, like other countries, to come to terms with the
advent of sound film. This meant ‘the agitation, the anxieties and the alarm’ that
the scriptwriter Yevgeni Gabrilovich detected among ‘script-writers, directors,
actors, cameramen and editors when the screen suddenly, surprisingly and quite
24
unexpectedly began producing sounds’. It also meant a further massive
investment in re-equipment and yet another headache for Shumyatsky.
Initially Shumyatsky had then to devote his attention to the immediate day-to-
day problems of running Soviet cinema. Symptomatic is the battle he was forced
to fight for sound cinema equipment, the battle he describes in his first published
25
article, ‘Alarm Signal’ in Proletarskoe kino, May/June 1931. In October 1930
Soyuzkino had ordered a thousand sound projectors but the producing
organisations would agree only to a target of 700, which they further reduced in
December 1930 to 500. In February 1931 production ceased altogether for a month