BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES REND US

VanceKepley, Jr. In the Serviceof the State:The Cinema of AlexanderDovzhenko. Madison, WI: Universityof WisconsinPress, 1986.xi, 190pp.

JacquesAumont. Montage Eisenstein. Translated by Lee Hildreth,Constance Penley, and Andrew Ross. Bloomington,IN: IndianaUniversity Press and London:BFI Publishing,1987. x, 243 pp. $39.50, $12.95paper. These two books, about directorswho were contemporaries,could not be more different.In the Service of the State is an elegantly written and thoroughly engrossing exposition of Dovzhenko'soeuvre which deservesthe widest possiblereadership. Montage Eisensteinis an obtusetheoretical analysis of importonly to a narrowcircle of specialistsin theory. Although Vance Kepley is a film scholar,not a historian,In the Service of the State is a model historical analysis as well as a perceptiveevaluation of the director and his . By situatingDovzhenko's work and career firmly within its historical context.Kepley effectively proves his thesis that the "poet"of early Sovietcinema was in fact a highly engagedfilmmaker attunedto Sovietpolitical and socialchanges. Kepley briefly sketchesDovzhenko's early life, includingan interestingdiscussion of the artist's association with V APUTE and the Kharkovites, before turning to a systematic, chronologicalevaluation of his films. Dovzhenko's"anomalous" Western-style films, Love's Berry and DiplomaticPouch, are treatedtogether in a fresh readingin whichthe value of Kepley's approach becomes immediately obvious-.appesrances aside, both films deal with topical concerns,the former with changingmores, the latter with the "spy scare."Succeeding chapters provideequally comprehensive treatments of ,Arsenal, Earth, Ivan, ,Shchors, and Michurin. By the end, receivedwisdom has been successfullychallenged, and it is apparent that the previous divisionof Dovzhenko'scareer into two segments-the free artist of the silent films and the slave of the Stalinistsystem in the soundfilms--is aversimplified. Yet Kepley'sstory is more than the story of a single artist, importantthough that artist was. In many ways, Dovzhenko'scareer serves as a paradigm of life under Stalin, nowhere more poignantlydemonstrated than in the chapteron Shchors,Dovzhenko's film about the Civil War hero. During the filming, Dovzhenko'smilitary adviser and old friend Dubovoiwas executed, allegedlyfor assassinatingShdzors (who had actuallybeen killed in battle).Dovzhenko suffered a heart attack, which further delayed the filming, and by the time the movie was completed,the "line" on Shchorshad undergoneseveral revisions. (In the final version,in fact, Shchorslived to fight on.) The pitfalls of revisionismmay be impossibleto avoid. CertainlyKepley has demonstrated that Dovzhenkowas a sociallyengaged artist, but he has at the same time both overstatedthe degree of choice Dovzhenkohad in his later career and under-emphasizedthe purely aesthetic differencesbetween the early and late films.The triad of Zvenigora,Arsenal, and Earth look and feel different from Dovzhenko's later work; despite their topicality, they are strongly individualistic(for whichthey were sharply criticiud). One hesitates,however, even to mentionconcerns such as these in connectionwith a book as good as In the Serviceof the State. It is an importantcontribution to understandingthe interplay ' of cincms=1d society, to a kcy jimpier in Soviet history,and to the creative biographyof a major figure in worldcinema. MontageEiserutein is the work of the Frenchfilm scholar,Jacques AumonL Its publication representsthe collaborationof two well-knownpresses, and the translationwas subsidizedby the Universityof Illinois,Urbana. The publishersapparently expect the workto have a wideaudience, since the book is availablein paperbackas well as hardcover.Yet even giving due weightto the enduringpopularity of Eisensteinand the enormityof the cult surroundinghim, it is difficultto imagine Montage Eisenstein finding any but the most specializedreadership. As a historian working in the field of Soviet cinema, this reviewerhas considerablymore knowledgeabout films, film theory, and film history than the averagescholar. Yet after two carefulreadings, the 240

the book remainedimpenetrable. This is especiallyironic since Aumontstates in his prefacethat all previousbooks on Eisenstein"obscure rather than illuminate"the master'swork. MonLageEisenstein begins with a strewn-of-consciousness"Notes toward a Biography"which sets the stagefor Aumont'svery idiosyncraticstyle. A chapterevaluating Eisensteinian concepts such as fragmentationis followedby one analyzingselected scenes from The GeneralLine and Ivan the Terrible.Aumont then turns to an examinationof montageper se, whichis intendedto prove the consistencyof Eisenstein's"theory." The outline of the work is logical, but the executionis lamentable.The prose is at times so labored and obtuse that it is impossibleto follow. Some of the blame belongsto the translators; but if we are to believe that Aumontreally wrote sentenceson the order of "Eisensteinhad no truck at all with any kind of formlessness"(p. 199),their task was a formidableone. When the translators could not find published English translations of citations from the Russian,they translatedfrom Aumont'sFrench versions,leading to quotationswhich bear only cursoryresemblance to the originalsand to highlyunusual interpretations of Russianwords, e.g., obraznost'is renderedas "imaginicity."Misspellings and inconsistenttransliterations of Russian wordsabound in the text and notes, some with potentiallyserious result; for example,calling the Soviet film historianRostislav Iurenev "Yurinev"makes it difficultfor someonewho does not alreadyknow who he is to track down his works. There are many other examplesof careless copyediting:acronyms familiar only to Soviet specialistsare not identified (RAPP, ARRK); somejournal articlesare cited withoutreference to year or volume;the title of NikolaiL,ebedev's seminalhistory of the is given only in Italian translation,and so on. Given the vast unexplored territory of Soviet cinema, it is difficult to understand why considerableresources were devoted to the translationof a book of this sort from a language commonlyczad by English-speakingscholars. DeniseJ. Youngblood Universityof Vermont

Jan Dellenbrant.The Soviet Regional Dilemma: Planning, People, and Natural Resources. Armonk,NY: M.E. Sharpe,Inc., 1986.ix, 218 pp. It is often observedwith some irony that the best explanationfor the uniformityof the 'sdomestic policymaking is the country'sheterogeneity. Thanks to a growingappreciation of the importanceof multinationalityin whatmay be calledthe "post-modernization"comparative literature,we now have a much more nuancedand sophisticatedview of Sovietaffairs beyond the high politicsof Moscowthan was the casejust a decadeago. Manyanalysts have arguedthat the key aspect of politics outside is "ethno-territorialism."An increasing number of analysts, spurred on by renewed efforts of such institutionsas the Social Science Research Council to develop expertise in the minority nationalitiesof the USSR, have directed their attention to the "ethnic" aspect of this formula. At the same time, surprisinglylittle work has been devotedto the "territorial"aspect. Jan Dellenbrant'sThe Soviet Regional Dilemma represents an attempt to fill this gap by systematicallyanalyzing contemporaryeconomic and political problemsin terms of the literatureand perspectivesof regionalpolicy analysis. The goal of this book is to complementthe author'searlier work (SovietRegional Policy: A Quantitative Inquiry into the Social and Political Developnwntof the Soviet Republics)by explainingthe persistenceof absolutedifferences among the union republics.The book contains eight chapters and an epilogue,twenty-nine tables of statisticaldata keyed to the text, a useful bibliographyof both Western and Soviet sources, and an index. The first chapters deal with theoretical constructs for explaining regional policy. Succeeding chapters deal with the institutionalframework of the Soviet administrativesystem, debates over regional issues- notably Siberian developmeat-and the machinery and results of policy implementation.In addition to the data drawn from standardSoviet data handbooks,the study is based on a close readingof Soviet sourcesfrom a varietyof regions. The basic conceptualmotivation for the book is a simplequestion. What accountsfor the fact that Soviet doctrinal statements, from the earliest days of Soviet power to the most recent pronouncements of Soviet leaders, have championed regional equalization, yet statistical indicatorsand availableanecdotal evidence testify to persistentif not growingregional disparities?