Page 235 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

216 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
conversion to sound ignored. All Shumyatsky’s exhortations had been in vain, all
the rewards for film-makers in the shape of prizes, 116 of fast cars and luxurious
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dachas on the Hollywood model, had failed to produce their intended results.
A Soviet anecdote relates that at some time in the course of 1937, when he was
already under attack in the press, Shumyatsky complained to Stalin that Soviet
film-makers would not co-operate with his plans. Stalin is said to have replied, ‘But
they are the only film-makers we have.’ 118 Shumyatsky was not, however, the only
administrator at Stalin’s disposal. He was arrested on 8 January 1938 and
denounced in Pravda the following day, 119 reviled as a ‘captive of the saboteurs’ in
Kino on 11 January 120 and as a ‘fascist cur’ and a member of the ‘Trotskyite-
Bukharinite-Rykovite fascist band’ in the film monthly Iskusstvo kino in
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February. 121 Sent into internal exile, he was executed on 29 July 1938, his
reputation in ruins and his name mentionable in public only as a term of abuse.
But 1938 was not a very good year for reputations.
Shumyatsky’s replacement, Semyon Dukelsky, was appointed on 23 March
1938 123 but sacked on 4 June 1939. 124 He was in turn replaced by Ivan Bolshakov
(of whom Leonid Trauberg has said that ‘He had as much connection with cinema
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as a policeman on point-duty’ ), who was to survive the war to become the first
USSR Minister of Cinematography in March 1946. 126
Shumyatsky’s achievement, even if not realised or fully appreciated in his own
curtailed lifetime, was to have laid the foundations for a popular Soviet cinema, one
that entertained, amused and attracted audiences as well as providing the agitation
and propaganda that the political authorities required. He recognised that film-
makers needed a certain freedom to experiment and that they needed protection
both from administrative burdens and from outside financial pressures: pace
Eisenstein, Shumyatsky is remembered now by veteran Soviet film-makers as the
man who understood their needs and let them get on with the job. 127 He was a
complex man in a complex position. But he recognised above all that cinema was a
popular art form or it was nothing. A film without an audience was useless, even to
the director who made it, and what a socialist film industry had to produce was
encapsulated in the title of Shumyatsky’s most important book: a ‘cinema for the
millions’.