Page 228 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

BORIS SHUMYATSKY AND SOVIET CINEMA IN THE 1930S 209
In a country where socialism is being constructed, where there is no private
property and exploitation, where the classes hostile to the proletariat have
been liquidated, where the workers are united by their conscious
participation in the construction of a socialist society and where the great
task of liquidating the remnants of the capitalist past is being successfully
accomplished by the Party even in the consciousness of the people–in this
country comedy, apart from its task of exposure, has another, more
important and responsible task: the creation of a good, joyful spectacle. 78

In this instance he argued for the satisfaction of audience demand:

The victorious class wants to laugh with joy. That is its right and Soviet
cinema must provide its audiences with this joyful Soviet laughter. 79

The two films that Shumyatsky held up as examples were Alexander Medvedkin’s
satire Happiness [1935] and Grigori Alexandrov’s jazz musical comedy The
Happy Guys [1934] which he described as ‘a good start to a new genre, the Soviet
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film comedy’. Shumyatsky was particularly incensed by the criticisms levelled at
The Happy Guys at the Writers’ Congress in August
1934: he compared its detractors to preachers from the Salvation Army and
retorted:

Neither the Revolution nor the defence of the socialist fatherland is a tragedy
for the proletariat. We have always gone and in future we shall still go into
battle singing and laughing. 81

In Shumyatsky’s view, a variety of genres was the spice of socialist cinema art. 82
Shumyatsky used a similar defence for the fairy-tale film:

There is a new genre that we are now trying to introduce into our plan: it is
the fairy-tale film that treats the raw material of scientific fantasy. Here too
any notion that there is a limit to what is permissible is dangerous. Here
everything is permissible, provided only that it is imbued with definite
progressive ideas. 83

But, lest anyone should imagine that Shumyatsky’s blueprint should mean that
Soviet cinema concentrate entirely on comic and fairy-tale escapism, he
emphasised that Soviet science fiction should be based on reality rather than
utopia. Whereas for the scientist, he argued, unfinished experiments

are merely a job half done, it is another matter for the artist. For him the world
of as yet unfinished scientific experiments is a Klondike of creative ideas and
story-lines. 84