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PARTISAN REVIEW
"formalist" and "bourgeois," their concepts about the abstract use of
sound denounced as heretical, and they themselves- the final turn of
the screw which Stalin so well knows how to administer-have public–
ly recanted and publicly hailed as the highest summit of cinematic art
a talkie-Chap
aye
v-which might have come out of the Metro-Gold–
wyn-Mayer studios. The big film jobs have long been assigned to the
members of the so-called 'Stalin School'--second rate talents which
have been able to adapt themselves more successfully to the political
requirements of the regime. Their films differ from those of Holly–
wood only in being technically less competent. Every single one of the
radical innovations which Eisenstein and his peers introduced, and
which were·the base of their entire theory of cinema, everyone has
been discarded-officially proscribed, indeed. Montage is hardly a
memory, the professional actor has been reinstated, the camera stays
timidly inside the studio walls, the photographed play or novel has
come back, and the slightest effort at experiment is a state offense. Any
attempt to rebel against this degeneration is denounced as 'formalism,'
an affair for the police.
As
for the mass-as-hero, most socially sig–
nificant innovation of all, one has but to see a film like the recent
Peter the First
to understand who is The Hero in the Russia of Stalin.
In 1928, Eisenstein and Pudovkin issued a manifesto denouncing
the realistic use of sound in the cinema and outlining a new "contra–
puntal' approach, based on montage, which promised to revolutionize
the sound film as their theories had already recreated the silent cinema.
In 1928, Trotsky was exiled, the other makers of the 1917 revolution
were humbled, the Stalinist clique assumed full power, and the first
Five Year Plan was launched. In 1930 the Plan was extended to the
cinema, the production of sound movies was begun, and the bureau–
cracy swept all branches of the industry under the control of a single
"All Union Soviet Film Trust." Everyone except a few Trotskyist
grumblers expected that great things would be done with sound, and
that the new trust would enormously increase production. But even the
severest critics of Stalinism could hardly have been prepared for the
debacle that followed. Eisenstein and Pudovkin in 1928 predicted that
the capitalist cinema would use sound "according to the laws of least
resistance" and that the commercial sound film would enter into "a
terrible . .. epoch of automatic utilization for 'high cultural dramas'
and other photographic performances of a theatrical nature."l Their
prophecy has come true, but for their own cinema as well.
The bureaucracy, however, worries not at all about this sort of
degeneration-in fact, it can say with F. D. R., "We planned it that
way." What they did not plan was a chronic crisis in production,
which year after year fell far behind the 'norms' of the Five Year Plan.
