48
PARTISAN REVIEW
For
th~
clue to the sudden sterility which struck the Soviet movie
industry in
1930
is to be found neither in the problems of sound nor
of new themes, but rather in the 'forcible proletarianization' of arts
and letters which was carried on by a set of ultra-leftist sectarians,
theologians, and bureaucrats. The most notorious case was the dicta–
torship exercised over literature, with Stalin's blessing, by the RAPP
(Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), whose slogan was, "Art
is a class weapon." For a time, the cinema had its own RAPP,
in
the Kino-Eye school of Vertov, whose documentary fanaticism seemed
well adapted to turning out propaganda for the Five Year Plan. Over–
night Kino-Eye was inflated into a quasi-dictatorship over the entire
industry. Vertov's contempt for the 'bourgeois artificialities' of Eisen–
stein and Pudovkin was as violent as RAPP's for the 'estheticism' of
the more talented Soviet writers. His insistence on using only unposed
shots of 'real life' is echoed in such RAPPist eccentricities as Tretya·
kov's celebrated 'bio-interviews.' Above all, both tendencies were sec–
tarian to the point of being totalitarian, forbidding all other schools
even to exist. In
1921
the Kino-Eye group issued a manifesto demand–
ing that only
25
percent of all movies shown in Russia "at the most"
should be acted films, the rest to be documentaries. This was called
"the Lenin Proportion," since Lenin had once expressed himself as
especially interested in the newsreel. 24 Now this extraordinary demand
was, for a time, actually honored: documentary films rose to 70%
of the total output. The bad results of this line became evident sooner
in the movies than in letters, and it was sooner abandoned. A critic
friendly to Stalin has aptly described this Kino-Eye interlude as
"another ideological expression of the severity of the first Five Year
Plan."2s
Nor were more direct expressions lacking. During the Iron Age, a
theological censorship was enthroned, alert to track down the slightest
trace of 'bourgeois' heresy. Every film was scrutinized closely from
the stanclpoin,t of
"100%
class art." A movie called
Sniper,
for exam–
ple, was criticised in the press because it "naievely attempted to reo
concile the bourgeois-Christian precepts of pacifism with Lenin's
policy
of turning imperialist wars into civil wars."26 The greatest reputations
were not spared. A despatch from the Moscow correspondent of
La
Revue de Cinema
(July,
1931)
is illuminating: "According to cer·
tain rumors published abroad, Pudovkin, aiter the release of
Life
Is
Beautiful,
was deprived of his working card and expelled from the
Party because of the 'petty-bourgeois idealism' of this film. We are
authorized to expose these falsehoods, whose propagandist nature
j
clear when one realizes that a scenario is submitted, before it is
filmed,
to three different control bodies, whose function it is to pass on its
