Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema
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Inside the Film Factory SOVIET CINEMA General editors: Richard Taylor, University College of Swansea Ian Christie The Film Factory Russian and Soviet cinema in documents 1896—1939 ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY New approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie EISENSTEIN REDISCOVERED ed. Ian Christie and Richard Taylor Stalinism and Soviet Cinema ed Richard Taylor and Derek Spring Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception Yuri Tsivian Inside the Film Factory New approaches to Russian and Soviet cinema Edited by Richard Taylor and Ian Christie London and New York First published 1991 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 The collection as a whole © 1991 Routledge; individual chapters © 1991 the respective contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Inside the film factory: new approaches to Russian and Soviet cinema. 1. Soviet cinema films, history I. Taylor, Richard II. Christie, Ian 791.430947 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Inside the film factory: new approaches to Russian and Soviet cinema/edited by Ian Christie and Richard Taylor. p. cm.–(Soviet cinema series) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Motion pictures–Soviet Union. 2. Motion pictures–Political aspects– Soviet Union. I. Christie, Ian. II. Taylor, Richard. III. Series. PN1993.5.R9157 1991 791.43′0947—dc20 90—40795 CIP ISBN 0-203-99278-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-04951-2 (Print Edition) for Naum Kleiman without whom no tour Inside the Film Factory would be complete At work shooting a film; photograph of an unidentified production from Yevgeni Petrov’s book, What the Cinema Actor Needs to Know (Moscow: 1926). Contents Illustrations ix Notes on contributors x Notes on contributions xii General editors’ preface xiv Acknowledgements xvi Note on transliteration and translation xviii Introduction: Entering the film factory 1 Richard Taylor and Ian Christie 1 Early Russian cinema: some observations 7 Yuri Tsivian 2 Kuleshov’s experiments and the new anthropology of the 31 actor Mikhail Yampolsky 3 Intolerance and the Soviets: a historical investigation 51 Vance Kepley, Jr 4 The origins of Soviet cinema: a study in industry 61 development Vance Kepley, Jr 5 Down to earth: Aelita relocated 81 Ian Christie 6 The return of the native: Yakov Protazanov and Soviet 103 cinema Denise J.Youngblood 7 A face to the shtetl: Soviet Yiddish cinema, 1924—36 123 J.Hoberman 8 A fickle man, or portrait of Boris Barnet as a Soviet 149 director Bernard Eisenschitz viii 9 Interview with Alexander Medvedkin 163 10 Making sense of early Soviet sound 175 Ian Christie 11 Ideology as mass entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and 193 Soviet cinema in the 1930s Richard Taylor Notes 217 Index 253 Illustrations Frontispiece: Shooting a film 1 Poster for Stenka Razin 15 2 Boris Godunov 22 3 ‘Action score’ for a Kuleshov Workshop étude 34 4 Kuleshov Workshop performance 43 5 Intolerance 55 6 The Bear’s Wedding 72 7 ‘Koloss’ cinema foyer 79 8 Aelita 84 9 Aelita 89 10 Aelita 96 11 Satan Triumphant 108 12 His Call 115 13 The Tailor from Torzhok 115 14 Without a Dowry 121 15 Jewish Luck 125 16 Through Tears 132 17 The Return of Nathan Becker 140 18 The Girl With the Hat-Box 153 19 The Old Jockey 156 20 Happiness 171 21 Komsomol–Patron of Electrification 184 22 The Deserter 188 23 Soundproofing the first Soviet sound studio 199 24 The Happy Guys 210 25 Chapayev 213 Notes on contributors Richard Taylor is Senior Lecturer in Politics and Russian Studies at the University College of Swansea. His books include The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917—1929, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, The Poetics of Cinema (editor and part translator) and, with Ian Christie, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896—1939. He is currently working on A Cinema for the Millions: Socialist Realism and Soviet Cinema, 1929—38. Ian Christie is Head of Distribution at the British Film Institute where he has helped to foster a renewed interest in both classic and contemporary Soviet cinema. His books include FEKS, Formalism, Futurism: ‘Eccentrism’ and Soviet Cinema 1918—36 (co-editor, with John Gillett), Powell, Pressburger and Others (editor), Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and, with Richard Taylor, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896—1939. Yuri Tsivian is a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Language and Literature of the Latvian Academy of Sciences in Riga and headed the team of scholars in charge of the programme to restore the prints of pre-Revolutionary Russian films held in the Gosfilmofond archives. He has published widely on cinema in the Soviet Union and edited Silent Witnesses: Russian Films, 1908— 1919. Mikhail Yampolsky is a Senior Research Fellow of the All-Union Research Institute for the History of Cinema in Moscow. He has published widely on film theory, with special reference to France and Russia. Vance Kepley, Jr is Associate Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. He has published In the Service of the State: The Cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko and a number of articles on Soviet cinema, and is currently working on a book on Eisenstein. Denise J.Youngblood is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Vermont. Author of Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918—1935 and a number of articles on early Soviet film, she is currently working on a book on popular cinema and Soviet society in the 1920s. xi J.Hoberman writes on film for The Village Voice and is an adjunct Professor in the Cinema Studies Department at New York University. He is author of a forthcoming history of Yiddish cinema, to be published by the New York Museum of Modern Art. Bernard Eisenschitz is a writer, film critic and cinema historian, formerly a member of the editorial board of Cahiers du cinéma, who has written widely in French on various aspects of Soviet cinema. Alexander Medvedkin (1900—89) was a Soviet film director best known in the West for his film Happiness released in 1935. He was also responsible for the film train that toured the Donbass region in the early 1930s. Notes on contributions Ian Christie’s ‘Down to earth: Aelita relocated’, Denise Youngblood’s ‘The return of the native: Yakov Protazanov and Soviet cinema’, and J.Hoberman’s ‘A face to the shtetl: Soviet Yiddish cinema, 1924—36’ were written specially for this volume. Yuri Tsivian’s piece on ‘Early Russian cinema: some observations’ was written specially for this collection and is a considerably expanded version of ‘Some Preparatory Remarks on Russian Cinema’, in Yuri Tsivian et al. (eds), Silent Witnesses. Russian Films, 1908—1919 (London and Pordenone: 1989), pp. 24— 43. It was translated from the Russian by Richard Taylor. Mikhail Yampolsky’s ‘Kuleshov’s experiments and the new anthropology of the actor’ has been slightly expanded from ‘Les expériences de Kuleshov et la nouvelle anthropologie de l’acteur’, which first appeared in Iris, vol. 4, no. 1 (1986), pp. 25—47. It was translated from the Russian by Richard Taylor. Vance Kepley’s ‘Intolerance and the Soviets: a historical investigation’ is a slightly revised version of the article that appeared in Wide Angle, vol. 3, no. 1 (1979), pp. 22—7. The Russian prologue to Intolerance was first published by Viktor Listov in Iz istorii kino, no. 9 (Moscow: 1974), pp. 188—91, and is here translated from the Russian by Richard Taylor from a draft by Betty and Vance Kepley. ‘The origins of Soviet cinema: a study in industry development’ first appeared in Quarterly Review of Film Studies, vol. 10, no. 1 (Winter 1985), pp. 22—38, and is published here with minor revisions. Bernard Eisenschitz’s ‘A fickle man, or portrait of Boris Barnet as a Soviet director’ is a revised version of ‘Un homme léger, ou Boris Barnet en metteur-en- scène soviétique’, which appeared in: F.Albera and R. Cosandey (eds), Boris Barnet. Ecrits. Documents. Etudes. Filmographie (Locarno: 1985), pp. 174—93, and is here translated from the French by Ian Christie. Alexander Medvedkin was interviewed by the late Martin Walsh and the Swedish researcher Kate Betz at the FIAF Congress in Varna, Bulgaria, in June 1977 and again by Richard Taylor at Dom kino, Moscow, in March 1985. Richard Taylor has translated, condensed and annotated both interviews from the Russian. xiii Ian Christie’s ‘Making sense of early Soviet sound’ is a revised version of the article which first appeared as ‘Soviet Cinema: Making Sense of Sound’ in Screen, vol. 23, no. 2 (July/August 1982), pp. 34—49. Richard Taylor’s ‘Ideology as mass entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and Soviet cinema in the 1930s’ is a slightly revised version of the article which first appeared in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 6, no. 1 (1986), pp. 43—64. The editors and contributors are grateful to the above-mentioned for the necessary copyright permissions.