Page 232 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

BORIS SHUMYATSKY AND SOVIET CINEMA IN THE 1930S 213

Figure 25 ‘Chapayev, a film that represents the genuine summit of Soviet film art’
(Shumyatsky).

an irregular pattern and that the emergence of Chapayev was in some way
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accidental. Soviet cinema was, he claimed, ‘the most organised of all the arts in
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our country’ but it should be raised to the level of the best:
The whole Soviet cinema can work better. The whole of Soviet cinema, by
aligning itself with the best films, can and must achieve better results. 95

In order to do this, Soviet cinema had to undergo a radical reorganisation and
overcome its ‘backwardness’. Shumyatsky was keen for Soviet cinema to learn
from the West, just as other spheres of Soviet industry were encouraged in the
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1930s to ‘catch up and overtake’ the West by deploying foreign advisers. In the
summer of 1935 Shumyatsky headed an eight-man commission that visited the
West to study film production methods in the larger studios. Shumyatsky, the
Leningrad director Fridrikh Ermler and the cameraman Vladimir Nilsen visited
Paris, New York, the Eastman Kodak plant in Rochester, NY, Hollywood (where
they were welcomed by Frank Capra, entertained by Rouben Mamoulian and met,
inter alia, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Adolphe Menjou–that later scourge of