Page 229 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

210 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY

Figure 24 The Happy Guys [1934];‘A good start to a new genre, the Soviet film comedy’
(Shumyatsky).

Perhaps the best example of the kind of film that Shumyatsky had in mind is Yuri
Zhelyabuzhsky’s Cosmic Flight [Kosmicheskii reis], a Soviet parallel to Things to
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Come [Great Britain, 1936], released in 1935, although the film can hardly be
said to contain a ‘Klondike of creative ideas’!
Soviet films were to be firmly tied to reality, or at least to the socialist realist
perception of it, by their subject-matter which was to be relevant, topical and realistic.
Shumyatsky designated five principal themes for film-makers to pursue. The most
important of these was the process of the collectivisation of agriculture. The
reasons for this are obvious: it was a policy that had encountered more widespread
opposition than any other and a greater propaganda effort had therefore to be
directed towards making it more palatable, if not to the expanding audiences for
cinema in the countryside, who were after all those most closely affected, then at
least to audiences in the towns and cities. A large number of films can be counted
in this category, from Medvedkin’s already mentioned Happiness and other earlier
efforts such as Ermler’s Peasants [Krest’yane, 1934] through Eisenstein’s abortive
Bezhin Meadow to the series of what are best described as ‘kolkhoz musicals’,