Page 231 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema
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212 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
The Battleship Potemkin, has ever been accorded such widespread official
sanction so quickly and so repeatedly. Shumyatsky wrote:
In 1934 the best film produced by Soviet cinema in the whole period of its
existence was released: it was Chapayev, a film that represents the genuine
summit of Soviet film art. 88
The strength of Chapayev lay in its action rather than its ‘psychologising’ and in its
simultaneous portrayal of the positive and negative sides of the Red Army in the
Civil War period. The hero of the film was portrayed realistically, warts and all, while
the Whites were depicted as a powerful enemy that could only be defeated by a
considerable effort, an enemy worth defeating:
In Chapayev the heroism of the movement of the masses is depicted
alongside the fate of individual heroes and it is in and through them that the
mass is graphically and colourfully revealed…. The film Chapayev has
proved that in a dramatic work it is the characters, the intensity of the tempo,
the ideological breadth that are decisive. 89
The relative subtlety of the characterisation, the clouding of the absolute
distinctions between black and white (at least in comparison with films like The
Battleship Potemkin or October), involved the audience more closely in the film
and its developing story-line:
Chapayev’s development does not take place on the actual screen (as in
many of our films) but in the audience’s own eyes. Chapayev is not finished
and ready made, as all too often happens: he becomes a type through the
plot, through dramatic changes. There is no head-on confrontation here, no
exaggerated tendentiousness: the tendentiousness derives from the very
essence of the action, from the deeds of the characters themselves. 90
Chapayev then was the model film. In his message of congratulation to Soviet film-
makers on the fifteenth anniversary of Soviet cinema in January 1935, Stalin said:
Soviet power expects from you new successes, new films that, like
Chapayev, portray the greatness of the historic cause of the struggle for
power of the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, that mobilise us to
perform new tasks and remind us both of the achievements and of the
difficulties of socialist construction. 91
It was also Stalin who personally suggested to Dovzhenko that he should make ‘a
Ukrainian Chapayev’, a project realised in 1939 in the film Shchors. 92
Shumyatsky angrily rejected the view, expressed by the writer and former
RAPP activist Vladimir Kirshon among others, that Soviet art was developing in