Page 80 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

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The origins of Soviet cinema: a study in
industry development
Vance Kepley, Jr

In August 1919 Lenin affixed his signature to a sheet of paper and thereby
assigned principal responsibility for the management of Soviet cinema to the
government’s Commissariat of Enlightenment and to that agency’s head, Anatoli
Lunacharsky. The new charge must have seemed anything but promising. The film
industry was in chaos: resources remained in short supply; experienced personnel
either fled the country or refused to cooperate with government authorities; and
numerous theatres had closed or fallen into disrepair. The regime could manage
only a handful of feature productions during this initial period of nationalisation,
and it lacked the necessary distribution and exhibition apparatus to find any
sizeable audience for the few films it did produce. 1
Nevertheless, by the end of 1925 Soviet cinema had emerged as a vital public
institution. Production levels had increased tenfold and continued to rise annually
through the decade; and distribution and exhibition policies assured that even
remote areas of Soviet Russia could expect at least some exposure to cinema. By
any standard of industry development, this represented an impressive record, all
the more so since it was effected despite such adverse conditions as civil war and
political isolation. 2
How might we account for this growth? What measures transformed a national
problem into a national resource in little more than six years? The answers lie in a
developmental history of the Soviet film industry from the late 1910s through the
middle 1920s, one that takes into account the crucial policies of financial
management, investment and resource allocation that nurtured the fledgeling
cinema through this critical period.
Historians have paid surprisingly little attention to the Soviet film industry’s
economic development. General histories of film usually make passing reference to
the sorry state of the industry in the late 1910s, mention Lenin’s nationalisation
decree, then concentrate on the Soviet cinema’s mature period of the middle and
late 1920s, an elliptical narrative that tempts one to conclude simply that Lenin’s
decree eradicated financial problems and led directly to the achievements of
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Eisenstein and his colleagues. Even specialised histories, valuable as they often
are for their information on the industry, provide no systematic developmental
record. In his widely read Kino, Jay Leyda acknowledged that his interest
remained with the careers of individual film-makers rather than impersonal