278
PARTISAN REVIEW
powerful means are necessary to close this gap. The double nature of
the film as photography and arranged spectacle makes it the
perfect
instrument for this end. The gap is filled with documents of indisputable
correctness, films of actual events and of frequent personal manifestationa
of the leaders. But the astutely selected events, sometimes even
pre–
arranged for reproduction in the newsreels, teach us little about
the
hidden reality, and the direct confrontation of the public by the leader
reveals nothing of his motives.
Yet in concealing political facts, the film betrays to some extent
the real situation. In
Mission to Moscow
the antagonism of capitalist
society and of Russia as
a
workers state, however corrupted and undemo–
cratic, is completely veiled. The two systems are finally identified
aa
one through the common moral sincerity and democratic spirit of their
leaders and envoys. In Russia one is offered caviar and the genuine
Ballet Russe, hut nothing of the Bolshevik revolution. The Rul!l!ian
workers are no different from the American, and some of them may rile
like our own to become factory managers. But the people themselva
are never politically active, as they were in the twenties in the
great
films of the Revolution; the democratic process is nowhere to he
seen
in the picture. Everything follows from the action of an invisible
power
in the Kremlin.
In an English propaganda picture made before the war,
The Thirty·
Nine Steps,
the hero, fleeing a gang of foreign agents, finds himself
on
the platform at a political election meeting. He is altogether ignorant
of the issues, yet he is able to improvise a speech which wins the applaU8e
of the crowd. By this cynical detail the makers of the film indicate their
belief about the emptiness of democratic forms; the real fate of
the
country is decided by the struggles between secret agents.
In Mission to
Moscow
these forms have disappeared from both Germany and Russia;
in the United States they still survive in the short scornful sequences
on
Congress, the Senate Committee before Hull, and a public meeting ad·
ressed by Mr. Davies; hut they add nothing to the nation's wisdom and
are even obstacles
to
the truth. The destiny of the nation is in the hands
of the President who knows and plans all in advance. Those who chal·
lenge him are discredited from the start.
MEYER
ScHAPIRo
April
30, 1943
