THE SOVIET CINEMA
47
spent some time in Hollywood, powerfully synthesized the technical
profiCiency of the American movies, the straight documentary subject–
matter of Vertov, and the dramatic showmanship of Eisenstein. But,
although his film was the sensation of the
1929-30
season in Moscow
and was widely shown abroad, he has never made another movie.
When last heard of
(1935),
he was working "in an administrative
capacity."22 The two most notable movies on collectivization were
Eisenstein's
The General Line (Old and New)
and Dovzhenko's
Soil.
Neither was a complete success. A semi-official cryticism is worth
quoting:
"The General Line
took a romantic approach to collective
farming and evaded the social and economic issues by artificially
created trickery, such as the marriage of the bull.... For all its beauty,
Soil
evaded the main social issue of its theme, and the coming of the
new order to the village was sensationalized by a murdering kulak
rather than by the essential changes brought about by social conscious–
ness."22 Despite a certain lack of imagination-the critiC seems to for–
get that the movies cannot express a politico-social situation
directly,
but only in terms of its dramatic
equivalents- this
criticism has some
justice. Brilliant as these films were, for the first time, one senses a
slightly dillentantish split between form and content.
Soil
was an idyll
-slow, poetic, timeless, ahistorical. The struggle between the kulaks
and the collective farmers was a struggle between two elemental,
mythical forces rather than a conflict of economic interests. And
The
General Line
gave the impression at times that Eisenstein, perhaps
a little bored with the theme, was diverting himself with technical
fireworks. Such episodes as the bull's wedding and the milk separator
sequence-witty and eloquent in themselves-were
tours de force
whose very power disintegrated the film as a whole.
To the Shumiatsky bureaucracy, the decline in esthetic quality
was less alarming than the failure to produce films of any wide popu–
larity. At last, late in
1931,
a hitherto unknown director, Nikolai Ekk,
produced
Road to Life,
which was to this period as
Potemkin
was
to the earlier and
Chapayev
to the suceeding period. (It mayor may
not be significant that this film was made for Mejrabpomfilm, owned
by the Workers International Relief, and the one movie enterprise in
the Union which was not controlled by Soyuzkino.)
Road to Life
owed its world-wide popularity to no esthetic pioneering-it was a
100% all-talking film- but to the gusto with which it treated an
almost foolproof theme: the rehabilitation of a gang of
bezprezhornz',
or"wild boys.' This theme also had the advantage, considerable in this
'Iron Age,' of being politically neutral. Everybody is in favor of re–
claiming wayward boys-even the American Federation of Women's
Clubs gave the film its official approval. 23
