Page 88 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 69
sufficient income to cover their working expenses and, in theory at least, their
expansion. 22
The film industry adapted to NEP by following this model. The relative
prosperity of private film firms during the Civil War indicated that the Soviet
market harboured sufficient demand to sustain considerable commercial cinema
activity. NEP permitted the old renegade firms to operate above board. Many of
the ones that had not fled the country entirely relocated in Moscow, making it once
again the nation’s centre of private film activity. By early 1922 at least five major
firms were involved in production and/or distribution activity in the Moscow area.
The single strongest film company at the beginning of NEP, however, was
Sevzapkino of Petrograd, which had evolved from the old Cinema Committee of
the Petrograd Soviet of Deputies and had changed from a public to a private
concern with the advent of NEP. The absence of significant competition from
private film entrepreneurs in the Petrograd region permitted Sevzapkino to
dominate its market and fund quick expansion. It soon integrated production,
distribution and exhibition functions and gained control of Russia’s north-west
region, hence its new name Sevzapkino, or ‘North-Western Cinema’. 23
The central government in Moscow, meanwhile, placed its administrative chips
on a film trust called Goskino, which it created in 1922 to supplant the old,
unwieldy bureaucratic apparatus VFKO. But bureaucratic duplication survived, in
that Goskino was to answer to the Soviet government in the form of three
separate official agencies: the Commissariat of Enlightenment, under
Lunacharsky, continued to hold sway over most policy decisions; the Supreme
Economic Council [Vesenkha], the state’s chief economic planning board, had
control over the allocation of raw materials and producers’ goods, and could,
where cinema was concerned, ration such resources as film stock; and the
Commissariat of Foreign Trade took over the management of film-related imports
when serious film trading began in 1922. Initial assets of the trust, appraised at just
3.5 million roubles, consisted largely of the production facilities in the Moscow area
which VFKO had controlled and a few movie theatres, though most previously
nationalised theatres had been leased back to private management. 24
Goskino remained woefully undercapitalised considering that it was designated
the government trust for cinema and expected to take the lead in industry
development. The government proved willing to capitalise other enterprises in
crucial sectors of the economy such as agriculture and construction with direct
investments and credits, but cinema did not initially merit such support. For all the
talk of cinema being the most important of the arts, the government quite simply
had more pressing responsibilities than subsidising movies–like feeding, clothing
and housing a population recently visited by the scourges of war and famine.
Lunacharsky’s frequent requests in 1922 and 1923 for direct government support
of Goskino went unheeded. Goskino, and by extension the rest of the film industry,
went on notice that, for the time being at least, they would have to accumulate
capital through their own initiatives rather than government subvention. 25