Page 22 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INTRODUCTION: ENTERING THE FILM FACTORY 3
cinema history, that between the pre-and post-Revolutionary epochs, and raises
some absolutely fundamental questions.
What was the real relationship between theatre and cinema, and between
theatre and cinema workers, in the early period? How widespread was the
audience for film before the Revolution; what kind of audience was it; what kind of
films did it want to see, and what kind of films did it actually see? How far has the
founding ideology of the Revolution and its legitimising mythology obscured the
achievements of this early period of Russian film-making? How far has this
distorted our subsequent view of the ways in which the immediate post-
Revolutionary generation reacted against the tenets of its predecessors, or indeed
the ways in which the second generation in the 1930s might have been restoring,
consciously or unconsciously, some kind of continuity with the pre-Revolutionary
traditions?
To a certain extent the answers to at least some of these questions can be
approached through direct contact with the surviving veterans of generations of
Soviet film-makers, although memoir materials always have to be treated with a
certain degree of caution. In the case of Soviet history the frailties of human
memory have been exacerbated by the perceived need to justify past
acquiescences, to settle old scores, to ‘set the record straight’ in what can all too
often be a very particular and subjective sense. Nevertheless, as the Cinema in
3
Revolution collection amply demonstrated, the direct contact afforded by
interviews with those who actively participated in the drama more often than not
outweighs the difficulties encountered and provides us with a unique insight into the
motivations of past film-makers and the conflicting pressures under which they
worked. Too often these are obscured by the ‘benefit’ of our own historical
hindsight! We have therefore included hitherto unpublished interview material with
another ‘less famous contemporary’, Alexander Medvedkin, which clearly
demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of this particular method of
investigation.
Last, but most certainly not least, Inside the Film Factory includes essays written
specifically for this collection which cover new ground in various ways. Two of
them, by Ian Christie and Denise J.Youngblood, address complementary aspects
of the career of Yakov Protazanov, one of the most popular of Russian and Soviet
film directors with mass audiences, a film-maker whose first script was filmed in
1909, whose works encompassed the whole gamut of genres and whose last film
was completed in 1943, a pre-Revolutionary figure who went into emigration and
came back at a time when others were still leaving–in other words, a man whose
career invalidates the conventional stereotypes even more than does the career of
Boris Barnet. That we have devoted two contributions out of eleven to his
reappraisal is a sign of the importance we attach to the task in hand and to the new
perspectives that his re-evaluation opens up. Hoberman’s essay on Soviet Yiddish
cinema investigates one of the most important blank pages in Soviet cinema
history and illustrates the way in which cinema history is itself caught up in the tide