46
PARTI8AN REVIEW
set about producing feature pictures in sound. There was no question
what the great silent-film directors thought about sound. Eisenstein
and Pudovkin re-issued their 1928 manifesto, and in a talk at the
Sorbonne in 1930 Eisenstein added: "I think the '100%-all-talkmg
film' is silly.... But the sound film is something more interesting.
The future belongs to it."18 Dovzhenko stated publicly: "The talking
films still present a large number of deficiencies, and one of the most
important and most menacing for the growth of true cinematographic
culture is language-the spoken word."19 These masters of the silent
film, internationally famous and at the height of their careers, en–
joyed such prestige that even the Stalinist bureaucrats, at the time,
accepted their ideas on sound. "Here in Russia," Solsky, head of the
Moscow Sovkino, explained, "the talkies have practically no advo–
cates. On the other hand, I believe that sound
film
not only
has
4
great future but that it signifies a revolution of film and of art alto–
gether."20
The years 1930-1932 should have witnessed the laying of the
foundations for a great sound cinema along the esthetic lines so uni–
versally agreed on. Instead, a strange lethargy seized on the leading
directors. Eisenstein announced several grandiose projects, but finally
went off to Paris-where he made a sound-short of little consequence
-and thence to Hollywood and Mexico. Kovintsev and Trauberg
made
Alone,
a conventional talkie. Vertov made
Enthusiasm: The
Symphony of the Don Basin,
which he described as "the first forward
step of the camera eye from the optic capture of the visible world,
to the optic-tonal capture of the visible and audible world.
It
is the
ice-breaker-in-chief for the sound-news film."21 But to the dispassionate
spectator,
Enthusiasm
was just a silent film, with realistic "sound
effects" and a canned musical accompaniment. Pudovkin was the only
one to seriously attempt to use sound experimentally, but his
Life
is
Beautiful
was an embarassing failure from both the esthetic and the
box-office viewpoint.*
Revolution and class war were the epic themes of the great silent
film. The inauguration of the first Five Year Plan in 1928 called
for new themes-industrialization and collectivization-which were
harder to dramatize. The only completely successful industrialization
movie was made in 1928: Victor Turin's
Turksib,
a documentary film
on the building of the Turkestan-Siberian Railroad. Turin, who had
*
The mounting pressure on living standards as the Five Year Plan neared it.!
end is perhaps reflected in the successive titles of this film. In December, 1930,
it was caJlcd boldly,
We Live Well;
by February, 1931, this had been hedged
to:
It is Necessary to Live Well;
and when the film was finaJly released in the
summer of 1931, Pudovkin would commit himself to nothing more than
Lif,
Is
Beautiful.
Unlike consumers' goods, beauty costs nothing.
