38
PARTISAN REVIEW
a mass-revolutionary one, and he was unable to resist experiments with
sound. Hence he was guilty, after April
23, 1932,
of two heresies: 'Leftism'
and 'Formalism.'
Deserter
had to be taken ,off the screens of Moscow's two
biggest movie theatres after eight days playing to half-filled houses. The
press criticised it for dealing too much with politics
'40
tThe Stalin School'
Early in
1933
Ralph Bond called attention to the rise of a new school
of Soviet cinema, 'The Stalin School.' "Stalin," he explained somewhat
vaguely, 'insisted on the creation of real people in Soviet art, and the di–
rectors have successfully followed this advice."'l As the better-known
directors failed to adjust themselves to the demands of the bureaucracy,
the members of the Stalin &hool began to push them aside. These new–
comers had certain things in common. They were without exception talents
of the second rank. Most of them had been making movies for many years,
without much success. Now that the elder gods were losing their prestige,
there was room on Olympus for these small fry.
The founders of the Stalin School were F. M: Ermler and S. Yutke-
I
vitch. Both have long and, until the rise of Stalin, rather undistinguished
careers in the 'cinema. Yutkevitch was one of the founders of FEKS.
Throughout the twenties he made routine documentary and educational
films. In
1931
he produced an early talkie,
The Golden Mountains,
a tedious
affair with long stretches of slow dialogue, whose chief virtue was its
imi–
tation of Pudovkin. But since it had an il)dividual theme, it was, correctly
enough, hailed by Professor Yesuitov, the1cremlin's voice on cinema esthet–
ics, as "a picture of great ideological significance." The
Soviet Culture
Bulletin
added: "Its greatness lies in its profound and earnest social
thematics."'2 Ermler made a number of obscure films in the twenties. His
one success was
Fragment ot an Empire,
significant because it centers about
an individual, and because it casts a professional actor-Nikitin-in the
leading role.
In
1932
Ermler and Yutkevitch collaborated on
Counterplan.
This was
the show piece of the celebration that fall of the fifteenth anniversary
of the Revolution, as
October
had been the feature of the tenth and
Lenin in
October
was to be the showpiece of the twentieth anniversary festival.
(The progressive deterioration of the Soviet cinema may be roughly gauged
by comparing these three films.)
Counterplan
took its text from one of
Stalin's gnomic sayings, "The realization of our Plan depends on us, on
living men."43 The powers on high spared no effort or expense with the
film: it was to show the world, and particularly the other Soviet directors,
just what Stalin wanted in the cinema. Ermler studied at the Communist
Academy for two years to prepare himself for his great task. Shostakovitch
wrote the musical score. The theme was the foiling of an attempt at sabo–
tage in a steel plant, obviously of the utmost political significance. But
