The polemic around Mikhail Kalatozov’sA Nail in the Boot

Abstract

The banning of Mikhail Kalatozov’s second feature film, A Nail in the Boot (Gvozd′ v sapoge, 1932), represents a critical moment in both the director’s career and the history of Soviet culture in the period of the Five-Year Plans. The polemic that erupted on the pages of the journal Proletarskoe kino [Proletarian Cinema], translated in this cluster, begins with the original review in which Kalatozov is accused of misrepresenting military tactics and Soviet justice and of the sin of formalism. This review was followed immediately by Kalatozov’s response, in which the director passionately argued that, rather than looking for flaws as evidence of crimes for which the artist needs to be punished, the critic’s job was to provide constructive criticism to Soviet artists. Several months later, another article in Proletarskoe kino put an end to the polemic by reasserting the superiority of the critic and unambiguously warning of the consequences for artists who refuse to accept the authority of criticism. This represents a critical moment in the transition to Stalinism in Soviet cinema: instead of working with artists in building a new Marxist art, the role of criticism would now be to police the representation of Stalinist ‘reality’ on the screen. As for Kalatozov, he had learned his lesson and would never again publicly defend his work in the face of criticism or challenge the right of Soviet critics to pass authoritative judgement on his works. He spent the next few years remaking himself into one of the central architects of Stalinist cinema, biding his time until the death of Stalin allowed him to return to his cinematic roots in the films that represent the high point of the cinema of the Khrushchev Thaw.

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