Page 223 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

204 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
That is why we are obliged to require our masters to produce works that
have strong plots and are organised around a story-line. Otherwise they [the
works] cannot be entertaining, they can have no mass character, otherwise
the Soviet screen will not need them. 50

In Shumyatsky’s view then it was the hegemony of montage and the primacy
accorded by montage to the director that represented the root cause of the
dalliance with ‘plotlessness’ that he deplored. Montage lay in complete antithesis to
the entertainment film that he considered so important. Montage represented
‘creative atavism’: plot represented ‘the discipline of the concrete tasks that our
mass audience is setting’. Plot necessitated script and an effective script had to be
worked out carefully, in detail and in advance: ‘At the basis of every feature film
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lies a work of drama, a play for cinema, a script.’ The notion that a script was ‘a
play for cinema’ represented a complete reversal of the general desire that we have
seen among film-makers to distinguish cinema from theatre. It represented in
particular a realisation of the worst fears expressed by Eisenstein, Alexandrov and
Pudovkin in their seminal ‘Statement on Sound’, published in August 1928:

Contemporary cinema, operating through visual images, has a powerful
effect on the individual and rightfully occupies one of the leading positions in
the ranks of the arts.
It is well known that the principal (and sole) method which has led cinema
to a position of such great influence is montage. The confirmation of
montage as the principal means of influence has become the indisputable
axiom upon which world cinema culture rests.
The success of Soviet pictures on world markets is to a significant extent
the result of a number of those concepts of montage which they first revealed
and asserted.
And so for the further development of cinema the significant features
appear to be those that strengthen and broaden the montage methods of
influencing the audience. 52

Those significant features included the development of colour and stereoscopic film
but the most important feature of all was the advent of sound:

Sound is a double-edged invention and its most probable application will be
along the line of least resistance, i.e. in the field of the satisfaction of simple
curiosity….
The first period of sensations will not harm the development of the new
art; the danger comes with the second period, accompanied by the loss of
innocence and purity of the initial concept of cinema’s new textural
possibilities, which can only intensify its unimaginative use for ‘dramas
of high culture’ and other photographed representations of a theatrical order. 53