Page 224 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

BORIS SHUMYATSKY AND SOVIET CINEMA IN THE 1930S 205
It is significant that the shortage of suitable scripts led Shumyatsky to encourage
54
film-makers to turn their attention to adaptations of the classics thus producing
precisely those ‘dramas of high culture’ that the 1928 ‘Statement’ was denouncing.
It is also significant that the advent of the doctrine of Socialist Realism and the
proclaimed need to produce films that were ‘intelligible to the millions’ led to an
increase in ‘photographed representations of a theatrical order’, and a
reinstatement of more familiar conventional narrative structures so that Eisenstein
could write in the spring of 1938, a few months after Shumyatsky’s fall from grace,
that:

There was a period in our cinema when montage was declared ‘everything’.
Now we are coming to the end of a period when montage is thought of as
‘nothing’. 55

But for the time being the primacy of montage and the hegemony of the director
were blamed by Shumyatsky for the shortage of suitable scripts.
Similarly the downgrading of the actor’s role had in his view led to a
deterioration in the standard of film acting. This had even been formalised by some
directors. Eisenstein had renounced professional actors for his first four films (The
Strike, The Battleship Potemkin, October and The Old and the New [Staroe i
novoe, 1929, a.k.a. The General Line]) and resorted to ‘typage’, where non-actors
were selected who simply looked right for the part, who were in some way ‘typical’
of the mass: this process culminated in the use of worker Nikandrov as Lenin in
56
October. Kuleshov had also renounced a conventional theatrical style of acting
and deployed the quasi-Meyerholdian naturshchik or model, a specialised cinema
actor highly trained in specific external movements and gestures that would replicate
his internal state of mind. As two recent Soviet critics have observed:

What was required above all else from the naturshchik was the appropriate
external trappings–speed of reaction, accuracy and precision of movement–
that is, external qualities more reminiscent of the requirements of sport than
of the criteria of art. 57

In Shumyatsky’s view the use of both the naturshchik and typage had led to a
breakdown in communication with the audience who had no one in the film real
enough for them to identify with. The cardboard effigies on the screen were not the
psychologically real ‘living men’ that RAPP and ARRK had demanded: they were
not convincing.
To some extent of course this lack of realism and exaggerated dependence on
mimetic gesture was an inherent attribute of silent film: in the absence, or virtual
absence, of words there was no alternative means of communication. But the
dependence on the external trappings of mimetic gesture vitiated against a
psychologically convincing development of characters and led to
an underestimation of the actor’s full potential. The film actor’s role was a two-