THE SOVIET CINEMA
This paralysis reached a climax last year, when just 25 full-length
feature pictures were released, as against the 123 called for by the
Plan.
2
Stalin followed his usual course: he dismissed as a 'wrecker'
Shumiatsky, the all-powerful chief of the movie trust, whom he had
set up as dictator in 1930-and who had, of course, been faithfully
carrying out his directives ever since.
Quantitatively and qualitatively, the Soviet cinema has been in a
state of crisis, varied with periods of collapse, ever since 1930. The
roots of this condition go deeper than Boris Shumiatsky, deeper also
than pure esthetics. It is true that no art form can maintain itself at
a high level indefinitely, and that the causes of its decay are sometimes
largely technical. But this decline has set in not after the pOs:>ibilities
of the new approach had been exhausted, but after only five years
of growth and at the moment when the introduction of sound seemed
to open up vast new fields for development. It came also with peculiar
swiftness- as abruptly as an electric light is switched off. The clue
to the decline of the Soviet cinema is to be found in politics and not in
esthetics.
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The Early Years
The pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema was a poor relation of the
European industry. French capital financed the State railroads and
the Putilov Steel Works, and French capital- the great firms of
Gaumont and Pathe-controlled most of the Russian movie industry.
The few films that were made in the small, antiquated Russian studios
were provincial imitations of the European commercial product. When
the Bolsheviks took power,
Kino-Gazetta,
trade paper of the Russian
movie industry, issued an editorial warning against "the grave con–
sequences that will result from the government's seizure of the
cinema." "The art of the cinema wiII be destroyed," stated
Kino–
Gazetta,
adding, somewhat obscurely, "Barter and speculation wiII
replace pure art."l Most of the actors and directors emigrated with
their employers. Unlike the theatre, where Stanislavsky and Meyerhold
were in full career at the time of the Revolution, the cinema had to
be built up on entirely new foundations. Protazanov is the only im–
portant Soviet director whose career bridges the Revolution. Before
1917, Eisenstein was a student of engineering, Pudovkin an industrial
chemist, Dovzhenko a painter.
The cinema was at first put under the control of the Supreme
Economic Council, which treated it neither as art nor propaganda but,
with bureaucratic bluntness, as a branch of light industry. Not until
the summer of 1919 was the cinema nationalized. At this time, it was
transferred to the jurisdiction of the People's Commissariat of Educa–
tion, a sensible move. But in all these years of War Communism, very
