Page 220 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

BORIS SHUMYATSKY AND SOVIET CINEMA IN THE 1930S 201
He proposed a rapid return to normal work and an overhaul of methods and
procedures–‘It’s back to how it was at the end of 1930, more like a bivouac than an
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institution’ –but he did remark prophetically: ‘We live in the Soviet Union and we
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shall be reorganised more than once.’ It was on 11 February 1933 that
Soyuzkino became the Principal Directorate for the Cinema and Photographic
Industry (GUKF), headed still by Shumyatsky, but with powers similar to those of
a People’s Commissariat and directly subordinated to Sovnarkom, the Council of
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People’s Commissars. Thus was Shumyatsky’s position strengthened and
apparently secured. He could now devote his time to thought as well as action.
Shumyatsky’s ideas were developed in two books published in 1934 and 1935. 33
By then he had the time and the experience to consider the longer-term aims and
achievements of Soviet cinema: he was no longer dealing with a period of acute
crisis. Like others before him, he asked where Soviet cinema had gone wrong. For
him the answer lay not with a predominance of non-proletarian strata (although he
made the by now standard reference to sabotage by class enemies and their
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exposure by OGPU) but with the primacy of montage in Soviet film theory in the
1930s:
The overvaluation of montage represents the primacy of form over content,
the isolation of aesthetics from politics. 35

The prime object of Shumyatsky’s critique was not, as is usually supposed,
Eisenstein but Lev Kuleshov whose early concentration on montage he denounced
as ‘typically bourgeois’ because Kuleshov had emphasised form and ignored
content. He was therefore a Formalist, one who had no sense of the coherence of
life, one for whom ‘life is a collection of individual phenomena, incidents and
anecdotes’. Kuleshov’s early films, such as The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr
West in the Land of the Bolsheviks [1924], could, in Shumyatsky’s view, have been
produced in the West: there was nothing specifically Soviet about them, while his
most recent film, The Happy Canary [Veselaya kanareika, 1929], was ‘objectively
hostile to Soviet art’. 36
Kuleshov attracted Shumyatsky’s venom because it was he who had first
developed the theory of montage as the essence of cinema specificity. Early film
theorists had sought to justify cinema as an independent art form and they had in
particular to delineate its independence from theatre. In 1917 Kuleshov was the
first to argue that the distinctive feature of cinema was montage:

The essence of cinema art in the work of both director and art director is
based entirely on composition. In order to make a film the director must
compose the separate, unordered and unconnected film shots into a single
whole and juxtapose separate moments into a more meaningful,
coherent and rhythmical sequence just as a child creates a whole word or
phrase from different scattered letter blocks. 37