Boris Shumyatsky and the Soviet Cinema in the 1930s: ideology as mass entertainment

Abstract

The conventional approach to Soviet cinema looks at the films produced almost exclusively in terms of the men who directed them: Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov head a long, and lengthening, list of what film critics and historians would, borrowing from their French counterparts, nowadays call auteurs. Yet our approach to Hollywood, which is both more familiar to, and more influential over us, is rather different: the auteur theory persists in the discussion of such important individual directors as Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford but we are much more prepared to concede that a film is the result of a variety of influences, perhaps even of a collective effort--at best a collective work of art, at worst a mere industrial commodity destined for mass consumption. In the Hollywood context, therefore, we talk of a studio style or of the influence of a producer like David O. Selznick. We group American films according to their scriptwriter (Jules Furthman or Clifford Odets), their genre (the western, the musical, the war film) or their star (Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean). But we never apply these criteria to Soviet cinema. There are, of course, good historical (and ideological) reasons for this: one of the principal reasons is quite simply lack of adequate information. But, if we do not ask different questions, we shall never get different answers or, indeed, much new information at all. In concentrating exclusively on directors, our approach to Soviet cinema lacks an important dimension. We ignore the different styles that emanate from different studios and we ignore the role of a man like Adrian Piotrovsky, head of the script department of the Leningrad studios in the early 30s, in creating a studio style. We ignore the threads of continuity in the work of a scriptwriter like Mikhail Bleiman, whose first script was filmed in 1924 and who was still active in the 1970s, or Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko, who scripted films for both Eisenstein (The Battleship Potemkin) and Pudovkin (The Deserter). We ignore the importance of Soviet actors like the comedian Igor Ilyinsky or the more serious Nikolai Cherkasov or massively popular stars like Lyubov Orlova or Tamara Makarova. And we ignore the significance in Soviet cinema of genres like musical comedy (The

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