Page 97 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

78 THE ORIGINS OF SOVIET CINEMA: A STUDY IN INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT
Finally, a sustained level of growth in production levels attests to the wise
reinvestment of industry surpluses. From a mere 13 features released in 1923, the
beginning of the growth period, the number of feature releases jumped to 62 in just
two years and continued to increase each subsequent year until it peaked in 1928
with 109. In the meantime Sovkino nearly tripled its total assets; from 4.5 million
roubles in 1924, assets grew to 13.4 million roubles by the end of 1927. Sovkino
was budgeting over 4 million roubles annually to new productions, a figure that
approached its entire 1924 starting capital. 48
The ultimate goal of industry planners was for Soviet cinema to reach full self-
sufficiency, a goal which involved an end to the reliance on imported product and
equipment and which began to become realised by the end of the decade. Under a
mandate set down by the Fifteenth Party Congress in 1927, the Supreme
Economic Council directed that film industry earnings be invested in the
construction of facilities for the production of film stock and equipment. By the early
1930s two massive film laboratories and three equipment factories supplied most
of the materials needed for domestic production and helped reduce reliance on the
overseas purchase of production materials. In fact, terms of trade turned against
the USSR in the late 1920s; wheat harvests dropped and the price of grain and raw
material declined in foreign markets, thus compromising the key export items
which had sustained Soviet foreign trade strategies through the decade. The
Commissariat of Foreign Trade responded by curtailing imports in several non-
essential industries, including the cinema. Foreign films finally began to disappear
from Russian screens; Russian film-makers began to regularly purchase their
resources from plants in Moscow, Leningrad or Samara rather than Berlin and
Paris. 49
The growth strategies which characterised the industry throughout the 1920s
finally levelled off in the 1930s; and after the installation of tighter censorship
50
measures under Stalin, the film industry reduced production levels. It had
achieved the status of a stable industry with sufficient capacity to satisfy the needs
of its market once its resources were used efficiently. And that, after all, represents
the goal of any developing industry.
The Soviet film industry’s early developmental record owed its success to the
stingy management of resources during the period of civil war scarcity and to the
shrewd exploitation of market forces under NEP. No official decree, neither
Lenin’s 1919 nationalisation edict nor his 1922 importation order with its
codicillary ‘Leninist film proportion’, fully accounts for the industry’s eventual
success. In fact, Lenin’s two most celebrated interventions into film history should
best be understood as ingredients of larger developmental formulas, the former
representing a response to the exigencies of net capital consumption and the latter
a part of capital accumulation efforts. The complex and imbricated histories of
early Soviet borrowing, importation and investment explain the quick growth of
the Soviet film industry. Perhaps the ultimate irony stems from the fact that the
revolutionary cinema of Eisenstein, Vertov and Pudovkin owed its existence to the