Page 85 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

66 THE ORIGINS OF SOVIET CINEMA: A STUDY IN INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT
undertook inventories which revealed every form of supply problem. Most working
cameras were European imports whose vintage preceded the First World War,
and the dearth of spare parts meant that their working days were numbered.
Commercial theatres were left to re-run ad nauseam old, scratched and worn
prints of pre-Revolutionary features. Although the sea lanes to Russia remained
closed, land routes proved harder to seal, and some material, including film stock,
was smuggled in through Latvia. But such contraband hardly proved sufficient to
supply either the private or public film organisations in Moscow and Petrograd. 13
The Commissariat responded to this situation by initiating several ill-fated
ventures calculated to acquire new resources:

(1) A contract with a Moscow laboratory to produce raw film eventually fell
through; the laboratory lacked the technical sophistication to produce film of
a usable quality.
(2) A Russian chemist devised a scheme to coat exposed film with new
emulsion as a way of exploiting used footage, but the recycled film lacked
adequate resolution to generate decent imagery.
(3) In a plan that betrayed considerable naivety about the nature of
technological research and development, a Russian technician was sent to
Berlin to make notes about state-of-the-art film technology with the
expectation that he would then pattern new Soviet-made equipment on the
Berlin models; the technician received an expenses-paid round trip to Berlin,
but the Commissariat received no workable designs in return.
(4) This comedy of errors culminated in the notorious Cibrario affair,
when a cagey foreign entrepreneur promised to tour the West to purchase
new equipment and film stock for the USSR but then proceeded to bilk the
Commissariat out of more than one million dollars’ worth of hard currency. 14

Such desperate measures, though not unparalleled in other economic sectors
during War Communism, demonstrated the necessity for greater centralisation of
authority. Lenin’s August 1919 nationalisation decree was designed to serve that
end. The action, in fact, was taken as something of a last resort to bring some order
to the activities of local governments and to minimise the squandering of precious
film resources. The measure presented no agenda for future development; instead,
it merely delineated certain forms of authority that the Commissariat of
Enlightenment could exercise should it choose to do so. It transferred the authority
to set film policy to the Commissariat and gave that agency the power to
nationalise existing private firms to supervise future productions, and to issue more
detailed directives. Far from instantly transferring all private assets to government
ownership, the decree simply had the net effect of assigning the Commissariat the
power to manage and ration the industry’s supplies and to nationalise individual
15
industry institutions on a case-by-case basis. Similar to countless such measures
which passed under Lenin’s busy pen, it was a stop-gap device to help an industry
through an inevitable period of capital consumption.