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
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