THE SOVIET CINEMA: 1930-1938
Dwight Macdonald
W
HEN
Eisenstein's
Potemkin
was released in 1925, it made an
international sensation. Even Hollywood was impressed by its power
and originality
j
Douglas Fairbanks, Cecil B. de Mille, and other
American movie celebrities made pilgrimages to the Soviet Union.
In
more intellectual circles, it was recognized at once that the cinema had
at last spoken in its own language. The building up of a rhythrriic
structure in the cutting room ("montage"), the use of real settings and
non-professional actors, the use of pictorial symbols corresponding to
Wagner's musical 'themes,' the abandonment of the old literary–
theatrical unilinear narrative in favor of a many-threaded episodic
development ("the compound plot"), the emphasis on the mass rather
than the 'individual protagonist-these radical innovations freed the
cinema from its bondage to the theatre and gave it for the first time
its own esthetic.
It
was soon evident that
Potemkin
was not a happy
accident, but rather the first product of a new school of cinema which
had grown out of a rich soil. The freshness, the vitality, the scientific
vigor and intelligence of the new ,Soviet society received their highest
expression in the cinema of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Ver–
tov, Kozintsev, Trauberg, Kuleshov, and the other Soviet directors.
In
the next few years the Soviet Union produced one film after an–
other to which the adjective "great" could scrupulously be applied.
Those were the years when one went to the 'little' movie houses
which showed Russian films as one might visit a celebrated cathedral
or museum-reverently, expectantly. One joined a congregation of
avant-garde
illuminati, sharing an exhilirating consciousness of ex–
periencing a new art form-many, including myself, felt it was
the
great modern art.
In
the darkened auditorium of the theatre, one
came into a deep and dynamic contact with twentieth century life.
The excitement of those years seems far away today.
In
the last
ten years, Eisenstein has made in Russia only one film, which was
destroyed by the bureaucracy on political grounds. Pudovkin and
Dovzhenko have made some interesting failures.
In
the space of a
few years, the great directors have been successfully discredited as
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