Movies Under Communism
WAGNER, GEOFFREY
Movies Under Communism The Soviet Film Industry. By Paul Babitsky and John Rimberg. Praeger. 377 pp. $5.50. Reviewed by Geoffrey Wagner Author, "Parade of Pleasure"; contributor, "Sight and...
...a list of films (several awarded Stalin Prizes and one written by "a specialist in children's literature") shows American soldiers as drunken savages, who starve, rob and beat Negroes, while the animus aroused against the Germans during the war has also been used against the "beastly imperialism" of the British, who are shown torturing children with monotonous regularity, it seems, and who appear, in their political orientation, facsimiles of Hitlerites...
...As soon as art shows its independent, laureled head, it must be "neutralized...
...It is the old story...
...Indeed, Andrey Olkhovsky's recent Music Under the Soviets: The Agony of an Art shows the identical development of music in Russia that Rimberg and Babitsky outline for the Soviet film...
...The famous ice battle in Alexander Nevsky had to be shot in Russia, of all places, on artificial ice at enormous expense in July, because the Kremlin had suddenly decided that this "movie factory" had to show a triumphant defeat of its schedule date...
...There was also a delay caused by the hissing of lighting equipment...
...One day the crime against humanity of men like Zhdanov will presumably be assessed...
...It is discovered that an actor is holding a different script today...
...and it seems that in his period of employment in Hollywood Eisenstein had most of his scenarios rejected, while his Ivan the Terrible rode roughshod over historical fact and showed autocratic Ivan as a progressive ruler...
...after that, a movie director in an inefficient industry...
...In the same way, even in his period of experiment with Burlyuk and Kamensky, Mayakov-sky never produced a memorable script and in fact fell back on an adaptation of Jack London's Martin Eden for one of his best...
...The imagination is thus deprived of all primary importance, subordinated to "life" somewhat in the manner of the most debased Western advertising...
...Who can doubt, after reading these works, how inconsistent Lenin was in his "diffidence" toward the arts during the Twenties...
...Actor Cherkasov refused to be filmed wearing only a shirt...
...Rain hindered the recording...
...Much of this excellent work, however, is likely to remain relatively uninteresting to the layman...
...Eisenstein's pathetic attempt to rid himself of the man-on-his-back of Party interpretation in a sequel to this film (described here as "a masterpiece in every respect") was banned and, despite the usual cringing confession of "ideological errors," Eisenstein did not live to complete the film...
...It is, of course, important to have down on record the gradual bureaucratizing of the production and exhibition of movies in Russia since 1920, in the way it is rather laboriously set forth here, but it is all rather obvious to those familiar with Chernyshevski's famous thesis of 1855...
...What really emerges is that the less story a Soviet film contained the better it was likely to be, for there would then be the minimum of Party interference...
...A search begins for yesterday's script...
...Sound recording for The Youth of the Poet was delayed four hours because the roof leaked...
...contributor, "Sight and Sound," "Quarterly of Film" Long ago, I decided on what I would least like to be in life--a movie director...
...Eisenstein's Battleship "Potyom-kin" (1925) and Pudovkin's Mother (1926), which incidentally infuriated Gorki, remain largely visual experiences...
...So Babitsky and Rimberg show us in all its grisly detail the period of receptive creativity in the Soviet cinema hardening to the familiar atmosphere of surveillance, purges, arrests, Stakhanovism, and the rest of the fatuous mumbo-jumbo by means of which Soviet bureaucracy has attempted to cover up for its fantastic inefficiency...
...A notebook kept at the Lenfilm studio as late as 1936, after the Soviet cinema had had opportunity to learn much from this country, reads like a caricature or skit: "Filming of the picture Peter the Great was stopped because of the cold in the studio...
...Toward the close of this heavily documented work on what Lenin called "the most important of all the arts for us," a grim note sounds...
...One need not continue...
...Now, having read this scholarly historiography of the Soviet film by Messrs...
...And then the inefficiency...
...Rimberg and Babitsky (the latter a long-time Soviet scenarist), I realize that to be a movie director in Russia must be any civilized person's idea of hell...
...Statistical charts of ethnic nationality of villains, and a number of appendices, reveal the real fraudulence Soviet cinema has been practicing on the Russian people...
...At the booth there are always dramatic scenes, for there is only one booth, while there are many directors...
...Until then, this new study provides a needed and telling indictment in the field of Sovkino...
...I cannot imagine a greater "agent of the opposition" than I would be if ordered--at pistol point--to produce a monthly series of morale films entitled Victory Will Be Ours...
...Since the last war, the falsification of American and British reality seems to have known no bounds...
...Art, for Chernyshevski, was an unruly servant of realism, i.e., of socialism...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 5
