Page 258 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

NOTES 239
Eisenstein’, Viktor Shklovsky compares ‘Eisenstein’s flight of steps and the steps in
Granovsky’s film’ to show that Eisenstein, and not Tisse, is the visual intelligence
behind Potemkin: ‘The flight of steps is the same, and the cameraman is the same.
The goods are different.’
9 Leyda, p. 218.
10 Cited in J.-L.Passek (ed.), Le Cinema russe et soviétique (Paris: 1981), pp. 122—3.
11 Jewish Theatrical News (New York), 16 February 1926, p. 2.
12 R.Ben-Ari, Habima (trans. A.H.Gross and I.Soref) (New York: 1957), p. 144.
13 Babitsky and Rimberg, p. 135.
14 S.Daytsherman, ‘About Jewish Films (A Letter to the Editor)’, Der emes [The Truth,
cf. Pravda] (Moscow), 15 March 1928, p. 5. In fact, Mishka Vinitsky remained an
Odessa folk hero throughout the 1920s because his gang had protected the city’s Jews
against White pogroms.
15 ibid.
16 Leyda, p. 230.
17 I.Babel’, Bluzhdayushchie zvezdy. Kino-stsenarii [Wandering Stars: A Film-Script]
(Moscow: 1926), p. 3.
18 I.Babel, ‘Wandering Stars: A Film Story’, The Forgotten Prose (ed. and trans.
N.Stroud) (Ann Arbor, Mich.: 1978), p. 111.
19 Theatre and Film: Wandering Stars’, Der emes, 19 February 1928, p. 4. Although
this review has been cited as part of the political attack on the film, the actual thrust is
far less ideological than aesthetic. Dismissing Wandering Stars as an inept American-
style melodrama (‘empty and heavy-handed’, ‘a puzzle whose pieces do not fit
together’), Lubomirsky blames Gricher-Cherikover for failing to realise Babel’s
‘brilliant, cinematographically rich’ scenario.
20 Babitsky and Rimberg, pp. 134—5. See also: Goldman, p. 18.
21 ‘Motion Pictures’, in: V.Kubijovyc (ed.), Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopedia (Toronto:
1971), vol. 2, p. 664.
22 Kino (Moscow), no. 20 (1928), quoted by Youngblood, p. 162.
23 The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (New York: 1982), vol. 29, p. 531a.
24 I.Fefer, ‘Through Tears’, Kino (Kiev), no. 3/39 (1928), p. 3.
25 M.Makotinskii, ‘Trilogy’, Kino (Kiev), no. 39 (March 1928), pp. 8—9.
26 I.Fefer, ‘For a National-Minority Film: Regarding a Jewish Cinema’, Kino (Kiev), no.
3/39 (1928), p. 2, quoted by Goldman, pp. 21—2.
27 A.Abshtuk, ‘On Alien Paths’, Prolit [acronym for ‘Proletarian Literature’] (Kharkov),
no. 8/9 (1928), p. 78, quoted by Ch. Shmeruk, ‘Yiddish Literature in the USSR’ in:
L.Kochan (ed.), The Jews in Soviet Russia (Oxford: 1978), p. 259.
28 Goldman, p. 23.
29 Although Kushnirov’s play was anti-Bundist, it did not wholly escape ideological
error. In the January 1934 issue of The International Theatre Bulletin Osip
Lubomirsky wrote:

Kushnirov sees in Lekert a personification of the passionate urge of the
working masses to revolutionary action against the evasive tactics of the
conciliatory leadership of the Bund. Kushnirov’s political orientation is
communistic, but by his lending justification to certain opinions expressed by