THE SOViET CiNEMA
45
Within a year after Soyuzkino was formed, the movie industry
had slumped both qualitatively and quantitatively. It is true that there
were extraordinary difficulties at that time: the introduction of sound,
the economic pressure of the Plan, the necessity for a new and more
difficult kind of propaganda content. But it was precisely to solve
these problems that the bureaucracy had tightened its grasp on the
cinema. Strangulation rather than soiution was the result, however.
"A few years ago," Shumiatsky admitted in the fall of
'1931,
"we
seemed to create many big pictures. Of late, it looks as though we
were creating fewer. In reality, such isn't the case. The taste of our
audience has developed very fast. Yesterday's films aren't up to today's
cultural standards."l? But the decline was not an optical illusion, and
its cause was not an advance in cultural standards- which had, on the
contrary, rapidly deteriorated-but the policies which Shumiatsky, as
the instrument of the Stalin bureaucracy, carried out in the cinema.
For the past ten years the Soviet movie directors have been
struggling to solve two major problems. One is technical- the use of
sound. The other is how to treat a new theme: the everyday life of
the Soviet Union. These are difficult problems and, to the observer of
1930-2
it could not have been at all clear whether the failure to solve
them was due to their inherent difficulties or to an unfavorable change
in
the social environment. But by now the historical drift is unmis–
takeable. Not only have the Soviet directors failed to progress towards
a solution, but in recent years a definite retrogression has been
noticeable.
In their
1928
manifesto, Eisenstein and Pudovkin proclaimed
that montage remained the basis of cinema form, and that realistic
sound effects and the literal reproduction of speech were to be con–
demned because "the sound would destroy the montage." Their own
theory they announced in clear terms- embarrassingly clear, as
it
turned out later: "Only the use of sound as counterpoint against
visual cutting opens up new possibilities and will further perfect the
art of editing. The first experiments with sound must be directed to–
wards its proriounced non-coincidence with the visual image. Only
such an approach will bring the desired effect and in time create a new
orchestral counterpoint of sight images with sound images." Sound
was late in coming to the Soviet cinema. When Warner brothers
electrified the world with
The Jazz Singer
in
1927,
the Soviet direc–
tors had hardly begun to explore the possibilities of the silent film.
The Soviet had to work out its own sound systems, since it could not
afford to pay license fees for German or American systems. By
1930
workable-though little more- sound apparatus had been developed
by
Soviet engineers. With a great flourish, the newly formed Soyuzkino
