THE SOVIET CINEMA
49
wastes, but the film as a whole seems mannered, overstrained, fragmentary.
As in
Soil
and
Ivan,
Dovzhenko escapes from his political theme-which,
perhaps, did not interest him very much-into pictorial lyricism. The leit–
motif of the film is the question, repeated several times by the main char–
acter: "Is there anywhere in the werld such beauty?" Eisenstein is said to
have been disappointed by
Aerograd,
and to have remarked: "The building
up of the film on the pretext of the danger to the Far East represented
by the religious community is rather ridiculous."71
When Stalin in 1934 gave Dovzhenko the Order of Lenin, he 'sug–
gested' to him that he make a film about Schorss, 'the Chapayev of the
Ukraine.' "Dovzhenko was very keen about the idea and discussed it with
the Ukrainian authorities," who were also 'very keen' about it. Soyuzkino
built him a special studio after his own designs, and thousands of Red Army
troops were put at his disposal.
72
Schorss
was scheduled for release
last ~all,
but has been delayed. Perhaps it was the lingering effects of the pneumonia
Dovzhenko contracted while making
Aefograd
in Siberia. Or perhaps it
was another kind of disease, endemic in the Russia of Stalin. "One had the
impression," .reported the English technicians who talked to him last year,
"that Dovzhenko fully realized the basic difficulty of the task which the
Soviet state has set its artists in requiring them to deviate neither to the
right nor to the left in following the path toward the ideals of the State.
73
The Cinema of Socialist Realism: 1935-1938
In the last three years the Stalin School has perfected its monopoly on
Soviet film production. All the major pictures, except for
Aerograd,
have
come out of its workshop. These films cannot be classified on any esthetic
basis because all tendencies, from the expressionist melodrama of FEKS to
Eisenstein's 'Intellectual 'Cinema,' have been swallowed up in the morass of
socialist realism. As Eisenstein declared at the 1935 conference : "At the
present stage, we craftsmen of the cinema have no difference of principles,
no disputes about a whole series of program postulates such as we had in
the past. There are, of course, individual shades of opinion within the
comprehensive conception of the single style : socialist realism."7'
Baltic
Deputy
is a better film than
Paris Commune,
and
It Happened One Night
is better than
The Divorce of Lady
X, but all are in the same banal tradi–
tion of realistic stage drama.
Recent Soviet . films, however,
can
be analyzed as to subject matter.
There seem to be three major categories.
First, there are those on the classic Civil War or revolutionary themes.
Almost all the more successful films are in this class:
Chapayev, The Last
NiKht, Baltic Deputy, WeAre from Kronstadt,
the Maxim series,
etc.
These owe their relative superiority partly to having a theme peculiarly well
