52
PARTISAN REVIEW
because it offers an interesting comparison with an important silent movie on
the same subject. In the category of films with an immediate political tendency,
I have selected
Peter I
and
Lenin in October,
and in the category of apolitical
escapist films,
The Rich Bride.
These three films have been officially recog·
nized as the cinema's greatest achievements. Those concerned in making
them have been showered with awards and orders. The new chief of the
cinema industry, Semyon Dukelsky, recently wrote of them: "These great
victories were won as a result of constant attention to the Soviet cinema ...
on the part of the Party, the government and, personally, of Comrade
Stalin."80
Paris Commune
(Director: Gregory Roshal ; Russian title:
People of
the Eleventh Legion).
This picture was released on March
18, 1937,
to
celebrate the anniversary of the
1871
Commune. On the same date in
1929,
Kovintsev and Trauberg' released a film on the same theme:
The New
Babylon.
These are both studio films, contriving their effects methodically
out of plaster and Klieg lights and highly trained actors, as against Eisen·
stein's method, which is to lie in wait for reality, surprising the moment
when the face of an unknown in the crowd gives him what he wants, seizing
the one detail and camera angle out of many which forces a ship, a statue,
a palace to yield up its precise meaning for that instant of film. But there is,
just the same, a difference. Kozintsev.Trauberg-1 am speaking of the
creators of
New Babylon,
not the manufacturers of the Maxim films-accept
the responsibilty imposed by their greater control over their material and
press on to a new frontier which can be reached only by calculated, con·
trolled artificiality. They carry the studio approach so far as to make it
radical, experimental, positive-in short, an esthetic
principle
from which
effects can be obtained that can be had no other way. Roshal's exploitation
of the studio is as opportunistic as theirs is principled.
If
he works with
studio sets and professional actors, it is for the same reason Hollywood
dqes: because it is easier. His use of the studio is tame, banal, purely utili·
tatian, simply a crutch to help him to realism.
New Babylon
is stylized,
Paris
Commune
merely artificial.
Politically, there is also a significant contrast.
New Babylon
is a revo·
lutionary film. Its camera shuttles between the squalid misery of the masses
and the vulgar luxury of their exploiters, weaving the two into a fabric
of class conflict.
Paris Commune
is a Popular Front film. It contains no
anti.capitalist propaganda, little sense of the existence of opposed classes.
The bourgeoisie has dwindled to a pair of skulking, villainous factory
owners, while the proletariat has been inflated into 'The People,' as rep·
resented by a few brave, noble and generous character actors and a mob of
supers. These strictly non·political heroes . are fighting for nothing more
specific than 'democracy' and 'a better life.' One has the impression of the
entire population of Paris, except for a few sneaking entrepreneurs, march·
ing out to fight the proto.fascist troops of Thiers.
New Babylon
emphasized
the class struggle inside Paris: the massacre of the Communards at the
end is brutally portrayed. But the Second Republic which was founded on
the corpses of the Communards is today the Popular Front ally of the
Soviet Union. Roshal has therefore wisely limited himself to the parlia.
