42
PARTISAN REVIEW
the highest award, was bestowed on eleven people, including Shumiatsky,
Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Kozintsev,
L.
Trauberg, Ermler, and the Vassilievs.
The Order of the Red Star, two degrees lower, was given to Vertov. Eisen–
stein had to content himself with the title of 'Honored Art Worker.'
It
was clear which way the tide was setting.
The
1935
Conference
In March, 1935, a 'Film Festival' was held in Moscow to celebrate the
fifteenth anniversary of the Soviet cinema. Its chief purpose was to stimulate
sales of Soviet films abroad, which had fallen off since the advent of socialist
realism. There was little in the festival to interest the cineast. "Most of the
festival visitors from abroad," reported the
New York T imeJ,
"were business
emissaries." Hollywood sent three current masterpieces:
Gentlemen Are
Born, Our Daily Bread,
and
Cleopatra.
These were duly awarded various
degrees of honorable mention by a jury composed of Eisenstein, Pudovkin,
Dovzhenko and-Shumiatsky. First Prize went to the Leningrad studio "for
its affirmation of the realist style of Soviet cinematography". After the
festival--or
w~e--was
over, Ermler and Shumiatsky led a delegation of
film officials to Hollywood, where they spent six weeks learning how to make
movies 'in the American style'.
~6
The festival itself was of slight importance compared to the closed
conference which preceded it. Attended by the leading Soviet directors,
cameramen, actors, scenarists, and film executives, this conference marked
the final triumph of socialist realism. in the cinema. It was held against a
background of five years of sterility aEd failure. Morale was low, nerves
were frayed, tempers short. Since it was out of the question to discuss frankly
the political root of the trouble, scapegoats had to be found. As is the custom
in the Russia of Stalin, the victims of his political line were made the whip–
ping-boys for its ruinous effects. Just as Soviet engineers are punished when
the bureaucracy's high-pressure methods and impossible production quotas
cause break-downs in industry, so Eisenstein and Pudovkin were publicly hu–
miliated because their work had been sabotaged by the bureaucracy and its
policies. The current success of
Chapayev
gave all the sharper edge to the
attack. The 193.5 conference was the turning point in the recent history of
the Soviet cinema. Here the great directors formally disavowed their basic
theories, here the parvenues of the 'Stalin School' openly assumed complete
power, and here the future course of the cinema was fixed once for all–
until the next major twist of the Kremlin's line.
A sympathetic observer gives us some interesting glimpses of this coo–
ference. Writing in
Cinema Quarterly
(Spring and Summer numbers, 1935),
Marie Seton reported : "For four years there has been a crisis among the
cinema artists . . . They failed time and again to find and reveal the spirit
