48
PARTISAN REVIEW
death: "The sun of the Russian land has set, my children .. . Grant, merci·
ful Lord, that he may see thy face again in the age to come, for he has
labored for Novgorod and for the whole Russian land." I venture to predict
that Eisenstein's new film will provide another cinematic avatar for Stalin.
First it was Peter the Great, now it is Alexander Nevsky. When may we
expect a re-take of
Czar Ivan the Terrible?
Pudovkin has been working for several years on
The Happiest,
a movie
about the rivalry of two Soviet aviators in setting a round-the-world speed
record. It is reported to have been released in the Soviet Union, but has not
yet reached this country. This is perhaps just as well, judging from the
account given by a British group which visited Russia last year: "We met
Pudovkin in a cutting room in the Mosfilm studios, where he was editing
a sequence of his second sound film,
The Happiest.
The moment of our
meeting amused all of us, for Pudovkin was in the act of examining a strip
of film which he had just had frame-cut for a speed effect. We chided
him. on indulging in the old tricks, and he apologized, saying thitt there was
very little of this sort of thing in the new film, which has turned out to
be a study of character revealed in dialogue and simple camera work–
'no good for foreign audiences'."
70
Even Pudovkin, the only one to make
a serious effort to do something with sound despite the Stalinist bureaucracy,
even he seems to have given up the struggle.
Finally, there is Dovzhenko, who since 1930 has made four movies as
against .one apiece for Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Whether it is because his
approach is emotional, instinctive, comparatively little guided by conscious
theory, or whether it is because his films, unlike those of the cosmopolitan,
internationally-minded Eisepstein and
Pudo~kin,
are deeply rooted in the
soil of his native Ukfaine*-whatever the explanation, there is no question
but that Dovzhenko has been able to adapt himself to the present regime
better than either of his colleagues. Since 1935 he has completed one film:
Aerograd
(American title:
Frontier).
This has some very beautiful land–
scapes--he borrowed Eisenstein's cameraman, Tisse-and some experimental
use of sound, or rather of silence. But as a whole it is destroyed by the con–
tradiction between the crudity of its theme--a melodramatic conspiracy
between Japanese agents and religious fanatics to sabotage the Soviet Far
Eastern government-and the epic grandeur with which this infantile plot
is presented. Old-fashioned intrigue, patriotic flag-waving-these are inade·
quate to sustain the impassioned rhetoric of Dovzhenko and are dwarfed
to inanity against the grandiose scenic background supplied by Tisse. There
are several extremely fine effects, as the ski journey across the Siberian snow
• His first film,
Zvenil(ora,
was so impregnated with Ukrainian folk lore as to
be
at
times unintelligible to non-Ukrainians.
Arlenal, Soil,
and his current film,
Schom,
are all definitely, at times mystically Ukrainian. Thus his work conforms to Stalin's
well-known formula: "National in form, socialist in content."
