40
PARTISAN REVIEW
little could be done witp. the movies, partly because the
Alliedblo~kade
cut off all imports of raw film, partly because the chiefs of the Revo–
lution had more urgent matters on their minds. "At first, upon Lenin's
advice, only topical news films were produced."4 Later on, a few crude
agitational features were made for the troops at the front. But once
the Civil War was won, the Bolshevik leaders turned to the cinema for
mass education and propaganda. In
1921
Lenin said, "The cinema is
for us the most important of all the arts." "Here is an instrument we
must secure at all costs," said Trotsky, who wrote a famous series of
articles in
Pravda
proposing that for the Czar's great chain of State–
owned vodka shops there be substituted a similar chain of State–
owned movie theatres, and summoning Soviet artists to use the movies
to break the hold of religion over the masses.
S
At the same time, the
Rapallo Treaty and the Soviet-German trade agreement linked Russia
once more with the rest of Europe, and made it possible to import
some badly needed raw film. (Not until
1931
did the Soviet Union
begin to manufacture its own film stock.) The NEP caused exhibiting
companies to spring up like mushrooms, trading in pre-Revolutionary
films whose physical condition was as moth-eaten as their ideology.
Most of them were shut down in
1923.
The NEP men didn't venture
to make any new movies. At first, the State looked abroad. In
1923,
a group of foreign capitalists actually secured a joint monopoly (with
Goskino, the State film trust) on aU movie production. But the con–
cessionaires failed to meet the terms, and the contract was voided.
Later, Goskino negotiated with the Stinnes interests in Germany, with–
out striking a bargain. At length, in
1924,
in the seventh year of the
Revolution, the Bolsheviks began systematically to attack the problem
of the movies. Most of the existing producing companies were merged
into a State trust called
"Sovk~no."
With the slogan, "The Proletarian–
ization of the Screen
!,"
a drive was organized to form workers' film
groups as a nucleus for a wide class-conscious audience. A central
Council was set up, to which all scenarios had to be submitted in ad–
vance of filming, and which functioned as a censor and ideological
guide. The extraordinary thing is that such steps were not taken years
earlier.
6
By
1924,
the Soviet cinema was at last in process of being inte–
grated with Soviet society. It continued, however, to follow meekly in
the wake of the European industry. Most of its feature pictures were
Civil War melodramas:
The Red Devils
("constructed on the model
of the detective films of America; the action takes place during the
battle of the Soviet cavalry against Makhno"),
In the Service of the
People, The Commander of the Ivanov Brigade,
etc.' A few more
ambitious productions) modelled on the 'art' films of Germany, were
