Page 222 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

BORIS SHUMYATSKY AND SOVIET CINEMA IN THE 1930S 203
writers regarded scriptwriting as a somewhat inferior and even unworthy activity;
this was a view they shared with their colleagues in other countries. Repeated efforts
to encourage writers to play a more active part in cinema culminated in a Central
Committee decree in the spring of 1933 designed to stimulate such participation on
a more regular and organised basis. Gorky was quoted as regarding film scripts not
just as a worthwhile activity in themselves but as ‘the most complex dramaturgical
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work’. For Shumyatsky the principal task facing Soviet cinema in the mid-1930s
was ‘the battle for high-quality scripts’. 47
Montage had, as I have indicated, played a central part in attempts to distinguish
theoretically between silent cinema and theatre: it was prominent in the writings of
Soviet film-makers of different schools, from ‘fiction’ film-makers like Eisenstein,
Kuleshov and Pudovkin to documentarists like Shub and Vertov. In silent cinema
the absence of sound gave the visual image an inevitable primacy over the word. This
had certain political advantages: it could simplify a film’s narrative structure, thus
broadening its appeal. But it also had certain political disadvantages: it could
encourage an experimental search for non-narrative structures of exposition,
emphasising visual continuity or discontinuity through montage leading in some
instances to an abandonment of conventional plot and story-line altogether.
Eisenstein’s ‘montage of attractions’ in which each attraction ‘collides’ with another
is one example that confused worker audiences and Dziga Vertov’s Cine-Eye
‘factory of facts’ and ‘life caught unawares’ is another. Both represented attempts
to replace what were perceived as bourgeois narrative forms imitative of
Hollywood with new forms of exposition deemed more appropriate to a
revolutionary art form.
But the abandonment of conventional narrative structures and the notion that a
film might in some way be ‘plotless’ were a particular bête noire for Shumyatsky:

The plot of a work represents the constructive expression of its idea. A
plotless form for a work of art is powerless to express an idea of any
significance. That is why we require of our films a plot as the basic condition
for the expression of ideas, of their direction, as the condition for their mass
character, i.e. of the audience’s interest in them. Certainly, among our
masters you will find people who say: ‘I am working on the plotless, storyless
level.’
People who maintain that position are profoundly deluded. 48

Accusing them of ‘creative atavism’, Shumyatsky maintained that ‘they have not
yet got used to the discipline of the concrete tasks that our mass audience is setting
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them’. Without a plot, no film could be entertaining:
A film and its success are directly linked to the degree of entertainment in
the plot, in the appropriately constructed and realistic artistic motivations for
its development.