Page 226 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

BORIS SHUMYATSKY AND SOVIET CINEMA IN THE 1930S 207
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kinematografii, State Cinema Enterprise] and reiterated that, ‘It was inadmissible
to allow a film to go into production without establishing beforehand a definite
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script and dialogues’. The ban on Bezhin Meadow was not an isolated incident
and certainly not the result solely of any antipathy between Shumyatsky and
Eisenstein. The tone of the argument in this instance was characterised as much
by sorrow for a master gone astray as by anger. In the spring of 1934 there had
been a much greater public furore over Abram Room’s failure to shoot more than
5 per cent of the footage for his projected film comedy Once One Summer
[Odnazhdy letom] after spending more than half a million roubles. On that
occasion both Pudovkin and Dovzhenko had joined the chorus of denunciation. 65
None the less, by stopping the production of Bezhin Meadow, Shumyatsky
claimed, ‘the Party has shown once again the Bolshevik way of resolving the
problems of art’. 66
This ‘Bolshevik way of resolving the problems of art’, this enhanced role for
management, was in fact of course a way of resolving the political problems of art.
When the Central Committee had turned its attention to the strengthening of film
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cadres in January 1929 its concern had been to improve the political rather than
the artistic performance of Soviet cinema. Similarly, Shumyatsky’s emphasis on a
prepared and detailed script facilitated the elimination at an early stage of
undesirable elements from the completed film, whose undesirability derived from
ideological as well as aesthetic considerations. Nevertheless he claimed:

This organisation frees creativity and promotes the creative independence of
each participant in the film. 68

We have seen the main thrust of Shumyatsky’s critique of Soviet cinema: primacy
of montage and the hegemony of the director had led to a series of ‘script crises’
and to the production of films that were all too often ‘unintelligible to the millions’.
But we need to consider also the kind of films that Shumyatsky wanted to put in their
place. The negative critique was balanced by the positive exhortation. How then
was this ‘creative independence’ to be used?
The Conference of Film-Makers held in the wake of the August 1934 Writers’
Congress in Moscow in January 1935 under the slogan ‘For a Great Cinema Art’ 69
revealed, as Shumyatsky himself admitted, that:

We have no common view on such fundamental and decisive problems of
our art as the inter-relationship between form and content, as plot, as the
pace and rhythm of a film, the role of the script, the techniques of cinema
and so on. 70

The first tasks therefore were: (1) to create a common language of cinema, in
which sound was to play a vital role and (2) to train suitable masters to use that
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language. Just as the management leadership of the film industry was to
intervene to revise the relationship between the director and other participants in a