Page 257 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

238 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
69 On Ermler, see: D.J.Youngblood, ‘Cinema as Social Criticism: The Early Films of
Fridrikh Ermler’, in: A.Lawton (ed.), Red Screen (Washingon, DC: 1990). For the
reminiscences of actors who worked with Protazanov, see, for example, in YaP:
O.V.Gzovskaya, ‘Rezhisser–drug aktera’ [The Director, the Actor’s Friend], pp. 324—
39, and A.I.Voitsik, ‘Kak uchil menya Protazanov’ [How Protazanov Taught Me], pp.
375—82. Laudatory tone aside, both Gzovskaya and Voitsik speak with convincing
detail of his calm personality and unflagging professionalism.
70 TsGALI, in the ARK files: 2494/1/99, ‘Don Diego i Pelageya’ [Don Diego and
Pelageya], pp. 3—4. On Vertov’s problems with One-Sixth of the World, see:
Youngblood, pp. 139—41.
71 For example, Istoriya sovetskogo kino, vol. 1, 1917—1931 (Moscow: 1969), p.373,
rates him sixth after ‘the Five’: Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin and
Dovzhenko.
72 Zorkaya, Portrety, p. 175. It is worth emphasising that these favourable reevaluations
of Protazanov come from the ‘old guard’ of present-day Soviet film historians, that is,
those who established themselves long before Gorbachev and glasnost.

7
A FACE TO THE SHTETL: SOVIET YIDDISH CINEMA, 1924—36
J.Hoberman

1 I.Babel, Lyubka the Cossack and Other Stories (New York: 1963), p. 131.
2 The most substantial survey in English is: E.A.Goldman, ‘The Soviet Yiddish Film,
1925—1933’, Soviet Jewish Affairs (London), vol. 10, no. 3 (1980), pp. 13—27. A shorter
version appears in: idem, Visions, Images and Dreams: Yiddish Film Present and
Past (Ann Arbor, Mich.: 1983).
3 Z.Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union,
1881 to the Present (New York: 1988), pp. 123—4. The destruction of the shtetl was so
overwhelming, Gitelman notes, that between 1918 and 1921 some three-quarters of
the Russian Jewish population was without regular income (p. 122).
4 A.Yarmolinsky, The Jews and Other Minor Nationalities under the Soviets (New
York: 1928), p. 131.
5 A.Granovsky, letter to Mendel Elkin, 19 September 1924, cited by F.Burko, ‘The
Soviet Yiddish Theater in the Twenties’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Southern
Illinois University at Carbondale: 1978), p. 148.
6 M.Gordon, ‘Granovsky’s Tragical Carnival: Night in the Old Market’, The Drama
Review (New York), no. 108 (Winter 1985), p. 92.
7 B.Gorev, ‘Russian Literature and the Jews’, in: V.Lvov-Rogachevsky, A History of
Russian Jewish Literature (ed. and trans. A.Levin) (Ann Arbor, Mich.: 1979), p. 16.
Vasili Golovnin (1776—1831) was a navigator in the Russian navy who was held
captive by the Japanese in 1811—13 and subsequently published an account of the
experience.
8 This sequence, singled out for particular praise by Soviet critics, is nearly a full reel.
The location–not to mention the crediting of Sergei Eisenstein’s cameraman Eduard
Tisse as one of Jewish Luck’s three cameramen–has fuelled speculation that it
inspired Eisenstein’s own use of the Odessa Steps in The Battleship Potemkin,
which was also shot during the spring and sumer of 1925. In his ‘Five Essays About