THE SOVIET CINEMA
37
place in the Soviet Union. The individual, not the masses, say the socialist
realists, is the proper theme for Soviet art. This may mean the Great Leader
-as Tolstoy's
Peter I,
obviously designed to suggest certain present-day
parallels, which has been disseminated as a novel, a play, and an elaborate
two-part movie. Or it may mean a rather sentimental emphasis on the petty
joys and sorrows-always letting it be well understood that they
are
petty–
of some individual member of the masses. To quote Sergei Vasiliev, co–
director of
Chapayev :
"The new idea is to focus attention on the individual
as a facet of the mass instead of developing the meaning of the film through
mass movement. . . And to reveal the complete fusion of the human being
with the mass does not mean that the individual has to disappear into the
mass. The crowd is composed of human beings and this must be presented
by every form of art."S7·a
The glorification of the masses, the expression of collective, socialist
ideals-these tasks are no longer held to be 'necessary' in Soviet art. A recent
interview with a cinema executive gives a glimpse of the official 'line,;
" 'How about propaganda?' I asked. 'Conscious agitational propaganda for
communism or socialism is out: came the answer. There has been little
or none of it in the last twp years.
It
was bad art, for one thing and besides,
the Russian people don't need it any more. They are thoroughly sold on this
new economic and social order."s8
The great directors throve little better under socialist realism than
they had under RAPPism. Political censorship was relaxed in
1933
and
1934,
but the new crusade against 'formalism' began to gather headway.
Dovzhenko's
Ivan
(1932)
tried to show the adjustment of an individual
worker to the Five-Year Plan, but the only memorable sections are those
showing the Dneiper River and the construction of the great dam- passages
of poetical description, with only an incidental bearing on the theme.
Kozintsev and Trauberg made
T he Youth of Maxim
(1934) ,
skillful
enough and even moving, but a conventional talkie, with musical accom–
paniment. Eisenstein produced nothing at all. Pudovkin again attempted
an experimental use of sound, but his
Deserter
(1933) ,
while more suc–
cessful than
Life
is
Beautiful,
was on the whole a failure. It took -him two
years to finish it. In the discreet words of Paul Rotha : "Political events
developed more rapidly than the film, and to save it from being out of
date in its ideology
[!),
the scenario was changed during editing and
whole sequences were suppressed. Technically, Pudovkin became absorbed
in his complex montage methods and made several experiments with sound,
but the social content of his theme escaped him."s9 In plainer language,
Pudovkin had completed filming
Deserter
before the invention of socialism
realism, and tried to patch it up in the cutting room to conform to the
new dogma. The result was the usual one: he merely injured the film
esthetically, without making it acceptable politically. His theme remained
