Movies for the Masses:

...Having studied film-making in Russia under men like Sergei Eisenstein, having seen nearly every Russian film it was humanly possible for him to see, and having read, apparently, every book that contains even the remotest reference to movies in Russia, Leyda has manfully molded this vast material into a good-sized book, but, I repeat, he has not written a history...

...Gradually even the hostile Gorky and Meyerhold were won over...

...Soon such men as Tolstoy, Andreyev, Artsybashev, Sologub, Kuprin, Ippolitov-Ivanov, and, later on, Alexander Blok and the constructivist Rodchenko, evinced serious interest in the movies...

...The book begins with Glazunov's enthusiasm for the earliest demonstrations of moving—or rather flickering—pictures...

...unluckily, he died, and, instead, almost anyone wrote the scripts of the early Russian films: It might be the set designer or even the producer's wife...

...In Russia, as nowhere else, film history and social-political history tend to merge...

...From this point on, the story of the ambitious, struggling, bumbling, and often spectacularly successful Russian film faithfully corresponds to that of the Bolshevik Revolution...

...It is an excellent, conscientiously and thoughtfully compiled chronicle, but it is not a history...

...If, however, the reader's shoveling is a match for the authorresearcher's sedulous spadework, the heartwarming reward will be the access to a truly lively art...

...One could very nearly write a competent history of Hollywood without revealing to the foreign reader that it is situated in a country called the USA...

...Not so in the USSR...

...And he resolved to write for the "cinematograph...

...What a pity," Tolstoy remarked, once again demonstrating his wisdom and foresight, "the film might be one of the mightiest means of spreading human knowledge, and yet it only serves to litter people's brains...

...Why should the Bolsheviks have made the film the official art form of the new Russia...

...As once with his camera, now with his pen, Leyda has bravely invaded the Russian scene...

...What better tool to perform this double duty than the silent film which talked in emphatic images to foreigners and illiterates alike...

...But the final irony is that Shchors, under Stalin's narrow-minded supervision and Beria's vicious sniping, turned out to be a decent film...

...Well, the spoilsport got his comeuppance, and I'm giving away no secrets if I tell you the peasants and butlers did it...

...As late as December 7, 1916, the Tsar was writing his wife and giving away to her the identity of "the mysterious hand" in their favorite film serial...

...Don't think that you are bound to anything," Stalin concluded...

...During the last phase of the Tsarist regime the country had a wealthy upper class choking on leisure, ineffectuality and boredom...

...Drama critic, "Hudson Review" Kino by Jay Leyda is not quite what its subtitle claims: "A history of the Russian and Soviet film...

...In a country with less film production and less excellence achieved, and where film was not the official art form, Leyda might have succeeded—though his success would have been rather less interesting than this fascinating failure...

...and second, that to be responsible to one's country when one makes a movie must, even if the government is in many ways reprehensible, fill the movie-maker with salutary reverence, or, better yet, a sense of responsibility...

...How fine it would be to use the movies for the study of peoples and countries...

...The reason may be partly historical: When a new country is formed out of an old one, whatever art shows the greatest nascent vitality in the parent country becomes the birthright of the new nation...

...only a true critic who is further endowed with the skills of philosopher and writer may make that rare and precious thing, a historian...

...Leyda admirably relates this filmic colonization of Russia, not only by France, Germany, Italy and America, but even by Sweden, Denmark and Poland...

...It is a historical fact that such invasions do not fare well, and Leyda, no exception, got snowed under by vast, cold documentation...

...In the initial part of Kino, one of the most gratifying spectacles is that of the interest that novelists, poets, theater men, composers, plastic artists took in this sickly infant among the arts, growing into a mischievous and often foolish adolescent...

...Came the Revolution, and though the already fairly well Russianized movie industry was too busy fighting or fleeing to film it (although some remarkable footage was shot), thenceforward the fortune of the Russian film was not only to photograph but also to mirror Soviet history...

...Thus it is because of the flowering of fiction in 18th- and 19thcentury England that America's main art was to become fiction, too...

...The task Leyda set himself was, it would seem, three-fold: to write a history of the Russian film behind which the reader could espy also the history of Russia and between the lines of which he could read a history of the art of film-making itself...

...Leyda's next sentence begins (I hope with deliberate irony): "Work on Shchors began before the release of Aerograd...

...The virulent rivalries of foreign film interests in Russia, the dilettante endorsement by the imperial family coupled with brutal, not to say insane, censorship, the varying but generally alert responses of the writers and other artists of the period, the rise and Machiavellian dueling of the first two major Russian moviemakers, Drankov and Khanzhonkov —all this makes first-rate reading...

...For to record, year by year, and in some cases even day by day, every available fact or surmise about Russian movie-making between 1896 and 1958, indeed to marshal this manifold information ably, is still only the writing of annals, not analysis...

...hence the emergence of Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville and the rest...

...As James Agee wrote, there was a "libertarian jubilation and excitement under which it was all but inevitable that men like Eisenstein and Dovzhenko and Pudovkin should make some of the greatest works of art of this century...

...But, above all, film was the one immediately available mass medium (the Russian literacy rate was low), and the Soviets needed two things desperately: propaganda abroad, indoctrination at home...

...Leyda relates how Stalin told Dovzhenko, who was still filming Aerograd, that he ought to make a movie about Shchors: "I was merely making a suggestion...

...Granted, serious interest did not always mean active collaboration: When approached by Drankov to pose for newsreels, "Gorky did everything to discourage Drankov, including beating him up and offering him money to be left in peace," but, symbolically, Drankov won out...

...This is a tall order, even for a mental Stakhanovite, and very possibly foredoomed...

...Whereas Lenin put it still rather restrainedly, "Of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important," with Stalin the tenor characteristically changed: "The cinema is the greatest means of mass agitation...

...In this part of his book, precisely because available information is limited and surviving films are few, Leyda is able to impose sufficient control on his material...

...As such, it was the ideal hunting ground for every kind of foreign, and afterwards native, exploitation: It provided a substantial, perfectly idle audience asking little more than steady titillation and an occasional shock...

...Our problem is to take this matter into our hands...

...Still, such as they were, these movies were good enough to delight so discerning a critic as the Tsar: Nicholas II fiddled around with films while Russia burned...

...A young country and a young art developed hand in hand, and, as far as the art is concerned, it was certainly a success story...

...Yet before we jump up in indignation and unconditionally condemn such Government possession of the cinema, let us remember two things: First, that along with much sinister censorship and coercion this also meant the kind of financial and technical support that the movies cannot count on under free enterprise and governmental indifference...