Page 262 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

NOTES 243
19 Radi P.Pogodin (b. 1925), the screenplay writer for Whistle-Stop, is not to be
confused with Nikolai F.Pogodin (1900—62), the better-known playwright and author
of The Man with a Gun and Kremlin Chimes.
20 Kushnirov, p. 206.
21 The studio logo which appears at the beginning of all Mosfilm productions is a
production of the vast rhetorical statue by Vera I.Mukhina (1889—1953) of ‘A Worker
and a Collective-Farm Woman’, sculpted originally in 1937 for the Soviet Pavilion at
the Paris International Exhibition and now at the main gate of the Exhibition of
Economic Achievements in Moscow. To Western eyes, the now widespread use of
zoom-lens shots in Soviet cinema, which was just beginning at the time of Whistle-
Stop, often seems clumsy and inexpressive.
22 Interview with Otar Ioseliani, Paris, August 1983. Thanks are due to Valérie Pozner
and Irène Ténèze for guiding me safely through the book by Kushnirov.

9
INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDER MEDVEDKIN

1 Alexander Medvedkin (1900—89) was something of an enfant terrible in Soviet
cinema. Best known in the West for his satirical feature Happiness [Schast’e, 1935],
he was also responsible for the film train that focused on, and tried to solve,
industrial problems during the first Five Year Plan in the early 1930s.
2 ARK [Assotsiatsiya revolyutsionnoi kinematografii] had been set up in May 1924 by
Eisenstein and others as a revolutionary film workers’ organisation. In May 1929 it
became the proletarian-orientated Association of Workers of Revolutionary
Cinematography [ARRK, Assotsiatsiya rabotnikov revolyutsionnoi kinematografii].
Like the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers [RAPP, Rossiiskaya
assotsiatsiya proletarskikh pisatelei], ARRK was dissolved by Central Committee
decree in April 1932. Medvedkin must here be referring to ARRK. See also ch. 11,
pp. 196, 205 this volume.
3 Lunacharsky was People’s Commissar for Enlightenment until 1929 and as such had
overall political responsibility for the film industry. His speech defending Medvedkin
was delivered to the Moscow branch of ARRK on 12 July 1931 after his retirement
and published as ‘Kinematograficheskaya komediya i satira’ [Film Comedy and
Satire], Proletarskoe kino, no. 9 (September 1931), pp. 4—15.
4 Chris Marker made a documentary Le Train en marche [The Train Rolls On] in
1971 to accompany the release in France of Happiness. This included a long
interview with Medvedkin in which he talked about the film train.
5 Nikolai Okhlopkov (1900—67) was an actor in the Meyerhold Theatre from 1923, the
director of the Realist Theatre in Moscow from 1930 till 1937 and director of the
Mayakovsky Theatre from 1943 until 1966. He also acted in a number of films,
including Macheret’s Men and Jobs [1932], Romm’s Lenin in October [Lenin v
oktyabre, 1937] and Lenin in 1918 [Lenin v 1918g., 1938], Eisenstein’s Alexander
Nevsky [1938] and Pudovkin’s Kutuzov [1943]. The Way of the Enthusiasts was the
only feature film that he directed.
6 The reference to ‘black bread’ goes back to Lenin’s conversation in 1920 with Clara
Zetkin on the role of art in revolutionary culture. See: FF, p. 51.