THE SOVIET CINEMA
47
ism. 64 In the cinema, the hunt was led by Shumiatsky himself. Calling to–
gether the directors and scenario writers a few months after the Shostakovitch
affair, he warned them at length against formalism, which he defined as
"an abnormal outgrowth of form in a work of art to the detriment of its
content." On the strength of this innocuously academic definition, Shumiat–
sky scrapped "a great number" of already completed films and had those in
progress closely inspected for traces of the dread pox. As a result, in 1936
only
28%
as many films were produced as were called for in the plan.
65
Twilight of the Gods
The 1935 conference shattered once for all the prestige, and probably
the morale as well, of the three great masters of Soviet cinema. At the con–
ference,
Eise~stein
announce1 that he was beginning work on a new film,
Bezhin Meadow,
which was to be his answer ' to the 'friendly critics' who
urged him to implement theory with action. Two years later, the Central
Administration of the cinema industry halted work on the film and, accord–
ing to
some
reports, physically destroyed the almost completed negative.
66 ,
In the final instalment of this article, I shall go into the details of 'the
Bezhin Meadow
affair'. Enough to note here that the film was suppressed
for the usual reasons: formalism and political leftism. By the end of 1937,
however, the bureaucratic whirligig had made another revolution and
Shumiatsky, who had led the attack on
Bezhin Meadow,
was in disgrace. It
was announced that Eisenstein "has won a chance to come back" and that
he was going to make a historical movie about the struggle between the
Novgorod warriors and the German Baltic knights in the thirteenth .century.67
This time the Kremlin is taking no chances. To preserve him from the
temptations of formalism, Eisenstein is being 'assisted' by the reliable D .
Vassiliev (who also assisted in making the politically and esthetically im–
peccable
Lenin in October)
and has been given for actors such stars as
Okhlopov and Cherkassov. And to make political 'errors' impossible, he has
been assigned a subject on which the views of the Kremlin are well known.
This victory of the Novgorod nobles, led by Prince Alexander Nevsky, over
their Teutonic competitors has been certified in recent history textbooks as
the first victory of Democracy over Fascism. The official announcement of
the film describes it as "dealing with the struggles of the Russian
people
[italics mine) against the German knights".68 For the ideologues who have
transformed Negrin and Azana into defenders of the Spanish masses, it is
no doubt a simple enough trick to turn the Novgorod princes into the
Russian people. "The Kremlin," comments the N.
Y. Herald-Tribune,
"has
decided that patriotism, far from being a bourgeois monopoly, has its
function even in the workers' fatherland.
Alexander Nevsky
is being filmed
to make the workers concious of what they have to defend."
69
I suspect this
is not its only function. The
Tribune
quotes an early chronicler on Nevsky's
