SOVIET SOCIEI'Y AND ITS CINEMA
93
In their 1930 manifesto on the use of sound in cinema, Eisenstein
and Pudovkin declared: "The contrapuntal method of constructing
the talking film not only will not detract from the
international
[their emphasis] character of cinematography, but will enhance its
significance and its cultural power to a degree inexperienced hitherto.
Applying this method of construction, the film will not be confined
within any national market, as . . . will be the case with the film
'theatre dramas'.m
28
But it was precisely this
international
character of the Eisenstein
cinema that most alarmed the Kremlin.
If
the masses are to accept the
present totalitarian dictatorship as a fully realized socialist society,
they must be cut off from contact with more advanced cultures. And
so,
in
the last ten years, the Soviet Union has been slowly isolated.
Its borders are the most hermetically sealed in the world, and against
foreign book, newspapers, movies, ideas, even more rigidly than
against persons. The mere arrival of a letter with a foreign stamp may
be
embarassing to an artist or intellectual. The present Soviet cinema
is
part of a gigantic campaign to persuade the Russian masses that,
under the wise guidance of Comrade Stalin, they have already
scaled the topmost peaks of culture. This campaign is designed to
reinforce, not to combat, those characteristic defects of backward
cultures: provincial smugness, the ignorant acceptance of inferior,
banal art forms as 'healthy' and 'normal', and a corresponding sus–
picion of more advanced forms. This is what, esthetically, the theory
of 'Socialism in One Country' has meant.
The logic of the campaign has also led to the interdiction of all
communication with the Soviet's own cultural past, so deeply influ–
enced by European tendencies. It is dangerous for intellectuals to
have statements they made in the twenties brought to light again
today. Furthermore, each time the 'line' changes, the preceding
orientation becomes anathema, and another whole cultural period
must
be wiped off the slate. The sheer waste of this process is shock–
ing:
the social-realist cinema, for example, has made no use of the
discoveries made by the Eisenstein school, which have been violently
rejected as 'formalistic' heresy-a matter for the police. Deprived of
all fertilizing contact with its own past or with other cultures, Soviet
culture has become sterile and debased. From the most international
of all modem cultures, it has shrunk to the most meanly parochial.
But the process has had its compensations for the Kremlin, which
finds
such a culture much easier to manipulate for its own quite prac–
tical ends. It worries not at ·all that the final result has been the
erosion of all specifically cultural values, leaving only the hard,
naked
substratum of political aims. These gentlemen of the Kremlin
