THE SOVIET CINEMA
41
made under the supervision of Anatole Lunacharsky, Commissar of
Education. Lunacharsky was cultivated, Europeanized, and tolerant
of radical experiments in art. But he seems to have seen in the movies
only a means of giving the workers the great Russian classics. Under
his influence--often he wrote the scenarios himself-the Moscow
Art Theatre acted out before the camera such works as Pushkin's
The Station-Master,
Tolstoi's
Polikushka,
and Gogol's
Taras Bulba.
These films were 'artistically' set and lighted, but their only interest
today is in the acting. But even while Lunacharsky was laboriously
reproducing literary works on the screen, new seed was sprouting.
By
1924
the underlying conditions for an esthetic upsurge had been
created. (Political; Sovkino, State film council; social: formation of
workers' film groups; economic: the liquidation of "War Commu–
nism," and the possibility of importing film and other supplies.) In
a single year, the "new" cinema had swept Lunacharsky's realistic–
theatrical tradition into oblivion, where it remained until it suited the
interests of the Stalinist regime to revive it.
Seed
These new tendencies were richly varied, agreeing only on a rad–
ical overthrow of all previous conceptions. The "FEKS" group ("Fac–
tory of the Eccentric Actor") was organized in
1922,
and in
1924
shifted its activities from the stage to the cinema.
8
"They base their
technique on the grotesque but exact eccentrics of the circus, on the
balance of acrobats. They repudiate all realism." (The influence of
the circus, which combines stylization with popular appeal, has been
great in the Soviet theatre and cinema.)
Kozin~ev,
L.
Trauberg and
Yutkevitch were members of the FEKS group. They believed that
acting, lighting, and sets should be frankly artificial and symbolic
instead of imitating reality, as in Hollywood or in the Moscow studios
of today. Their work has been called "expressionist melodrama." At
the opposite extreme was Dziga Vertov, fanatic of the
'doc~.mentary'
film,
whose program was: "Only documentary facts! No illusions!
Down with the actor and scenery! Long live the film of actuality!"9
During the Civil War, Vertov made newsreels with the partisan army
of Kozhevnikov. He founded
his
"Kino-Eye" group in
1919.
For a
time, he was head of the cinema department of the All-Russian Cen–
tral Executive Committee.
to
Years before anyone else, Vertov pro–
claimed the theory, and acted on it, that the arranging of the indi–
vidual shots in the cutting room ("montage") is the basic creative
process in cinema. He was also the first to reject the professional actor.
But he carried these theories, for whose discovery he must
be
given
historical credit, to such doctrinaire extremes that in practice he tended
