“The cinema asked questions, and the audience waited for answers” ​​– Weekend – Kommersant

On November 16, the II Moscow Film Festival of Archival Films begins. One of his programs, “The Third of Three”, is dedicated to the transitional era of Soviet cinema – between the triumph of the avant-garde and the establishment of socialist realism. Igor Gulin talked with its curator Naum Kleiman about white spots in the history of our cinema and how Soviet classics mastered sound, made films tools of public discussion and were forced to submit to both censorship and mass tastes.

Your program is dedicated to the turn of the 1920s-1930s. What is interesting about this period of Soviet cinema today?

I wanted to show an underrated movie. When I was a student at VGIK, we were told that the classics of silent cinema could not stand the test of sound. Teachers quoted a witticism attributed to Eisenstein: he seemed to say that in the early 1930s the “twilight of the gods” had come (after the title of Wagner’s opera, which we usually translate as “The Death of the Gods”). Eisenstein himself, Pudovkin, Kuleshov, Room, Barnet – all the leaders of the previous period – allegedly lost their temper, made bad films, all of them turned out to be unsuccessful. Years have passed. And when I was already working at the State Film Fund, we reviewed or even watched for the first time some of the films of that time. It turned out that everything was not quite as we were told. The view of contemporaries was one-sided. What then seemed unfortunate, absurd, even wild, was often an epiphany or a premonition of future discoveries.

But didn’t sound really present a challenge for silent films and require some simplification of the language?

Of course, this was a controversial phenomenon. It partly simplified, and partly complicated the processes. The directors believed that the photographed theater should be avoided, that the dialogue recorded synchronously on film would abolish the visual language developed in silent cinema – the expressiveness of facial expressions and gestures in actors, directorial mise-en-scenes and camera photography, editing rhythms and metaphors. Therefore, our innovators proclaimed the counterpoint of sound and image. At the same Barnet at the beginning of “Outskirts” there is a famous shot: the horse turns to the cabman and suddenly lets out a sort of “ohohohoho”. It is clear that the driver actually sighed, but it seems that even the horse sighs from the state of affairs. And this is with Barnett, who was not an aesthetic radical. A lot of ingenuity has been invested in mastering the sound. In our country, for example, cartoon sound appeared long before the films of the famous animator Norman McLaren. There was such an inventor Evgeny Sholpo; Gosfilmofond and the Museum of Cinema store his experiments, which for many years lay under the author’s bed. On the other hand, the sound made the camera static; long shots arose because the sound was first recorded along with the image on the negative.

Why did contemporaries then not understand these experiments?

Partly, the fact is that the public was eager to hear the voices of actors, music, songs from the screen. But in general, the misunderstanding began before the sound came. The fact is that avant-garde cinematography demanded from the audience a high culture of perception, while in our country the majority of the public was illiterate. In addition, advanced cinema sought to educate the viewer as an active citizen, and therefore asked questions, and the audience was mainly waiting for answers and entertainment. For example, such a classic film as “The Third Meshchanskaya” by Abram Room, written by Viktor Shklovsky, is not at all a dirty threesome love story. This movie is about the attitude of two front-line friends who fought together for a new world to a woman not as a person, but as an object of pleasure. The film ends with the heroine refusing both and leaving pregnant – where to? The Sixties later called this final open. But then, in the 1920s, it was assumed that the session was literally followed by a discussion: the audience remained in the hall and discussed the position of women in society and in the family. Another thing is that already in the late 1920s, discussions were not very possible. Since 1928, the Stalinist coup began, Trotsky was expelled, Bukharin was removed, there is no talk of any public controversy. From above, the task was set to create a utilitarian cinema, agitprop for economic needs. And since the second half of the 1930s, socialist realism has been established in the cinema. The entire transitional period, full of various contradictions – 1929-1934 – seems to hang between the relatively free era of NEP and the already more totalitarian era that began in 1934.

Can you delineate the boundaries of this period through iconic films?

We start the program with “The Captain’s Daughter” by Yuri Tarich in 1928. He had just become famous for “The Wings of a Serf” according to the script of the same Shklovsky. And then they film, almost turning inside out, Pushkin’s story: Savelyich becomes an associate of Pugachev, Shvabrin turns out to be the forerunner of the Decembrists. In part, this was Pushkin’s “class revision” corresponding to the spirit of the era, and in part – a kind of estrangement according to Shklovsky, which can be treated simply with irony, or you can look closely. Pushkin himself gave two variations of the image of Pugachev: a ruthless dictator-beast in the History of the Pugachev Rebellion and an intelligent, merciful person, more noble than Catherine, who forgives the innocent Grinev in front of her – and deceives him: promising to take on the maintenance of his descendants, does nothing for this (at the end of the story, the Grinev estate belongs to ten landowners). The film of Tarich and Shklovsky, rejected by both traditionalists and avant-gardists, was branded as “vulgar”, but now we have become more tolerant of the “modernization of the classics.” The Love and Hate cycle is completed by Albert Gendelstein, whom Eisenstein considered one of the best young directors of that era. The film was shot in 1933-1934. It was remade several times, it was not really released on the screen, it was forgotten for many years. This is a very unusual tragic movie about the fate of women during the Civil War. The success of Chapaev, released a little earlier, overshadowed Love and Hate. A few years later, Gendelstein will make a wonderful film about Lermontov, after which he will be expelled into popular science cinema. There he will become famous for several works, but it turns out that we have lost one of the most original film directors of fiction. The retrospective did not include the most original “Happiness” by Medvedkin, filmed just in 1934, because now it is already a recognized classic, but its failure at that time was the result of the same suppression of experimental cinema.

And what does Eisenstein’s “General Line” do in the program? It’s also like a recognized, classic film.

The General Line is an unfortunate film. After all, he still has a reputation for painting to the glory of Stalinist collectivization. Usually its name is written like this: “Old and new (General line)”. As if the matter was limited to renaming – by the way, at the initiative of Stalin. In fact, these are two completely different pictures. Due to the re-editing and change of credits, the film turned into an agitation for the collective farm system. But in the author’s version, Eisenstein advocated artel management – for cooperation, in which the peasants remained the owners of the land, livestock, machines and products of their labor, which they could freely sell. It was actually the concept of Alexander Chayanov. The film was also supposed to bring up the question for discussion: can a peasant become a master, not a slave? That is, in fact, this is the fourth part of the revolutionary tetralogy of Sergei Mikhailovich: the economic struggle in the Strike, the political struggle in the Battleship, the coup d’état in October and the beginning of the country’s revival in the General Line. Fortunately, the negative of the author’s version has been preserved in Gosfilmofond, and it is this version that is shown at the festival.

How did directors deal with these changes?

The important thing is that they were all young and full of hope for a better future. Of course, this was not their first encounter with censorship. But in the 1920s, the dictates of censorship were incomparably less. From the beginning of the 1930s, all films were corrected during production: the party leadership intervened in the script, made corrections during the production and when the film was accepted. What we know now are already more or less distorted works, they are full of wounds and mutilations. Any intervention of censorship is a trauma, and sometimes the film was destroyed entirely, it was for the author like the loss of a child. And of course, it was insanely difficult for directors and screenwriters to switch to other rails. They were just developing their aesthetics, and suddenly the situation changed. And all this happened very quickly. Between 1924, when Strike came out, and 1929, there were only five years. It’s like the whole “golden period” of classical Greece – 50 years of Pericles. So it is here: the flowering of innovative cinema of world significance did not last long in our country. Of course, there are masterpieces from the 1930s and 1940s, but there was no longer a variety of trends – that mass of buds ready to bloom into flowers. All the buds seemed to have withered under the influence of the beginning frosts – in order to come to life in the social and moral climate of the thaw.

But at the same time, almost all avant-garde artists remained in the film process after the mid-1930s, changing their style to one degree or another. How did they make sense of this situation?

Two of our classics – I won’t name them – once told me the same phrase: “We realized that in the 1920s the people did not understand us, and we began to speak in a language understandable to the people.” I asked: would it not be more correct to raise the people to your level? And both answered me in exactly the same way: “Do you know that it takes decades? We didn’t have time!” But on the other hand, as one of my colleagues noted, they also wanted success in their lifetime. This is also true: I wanted a response, it was impossible to wait until someday the descendants would recognize … It’s not even about fame, it’s about the feeling of clarity. I cannot condemn those “formalists” who betrayed themselves yesterday in order to be understood today. But I am aware of the drama of those who did not want to lower the bar of creativity – Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, Vertov and even Barnet, who has always been understandable, but not fully understood and not fully recognized to this day …

Apart from this period of the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, are there any other eras in our cinema that require rediscovery?

Of course. In fact, every period of history must be constantly reviewed; in each there are misunderstood in time, underestimated creations and creators. However, we still had a whole cinematography that needs a new discovery. I mean films made by Russian cinematographers in France, Germany, partly in Italy and Britain. In 1919, after the nationalization of cinema, most of the pre-revolutionary filmmakers emigrated. Protazanov was one of the few who returned. But Alexander Volkov, Ivan Mozzhukhin and many others remained. They left with the negatives of pre-revolutionary films, which turned out to be unclaimed, and then they began to make new films. During the NEP period, many of these films were also shown in Russia. But then they were forgotten. By the way, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Albatros film studio, which was organized in France by Alexander Kamenka. His grandson, director Patrik Kamenka, has been pushing for years to have a retrospective of the Albatross films.

What kind of movie was it?

There were relatively traditional films, among which were masterpieces. Volkov shot in the spirit of painting “The World of Art” one of the best staged films in world cinema of the 1920s – “Casanova” (it was recently restored in color by the French Cinematheque). The same Volkov and Mozzhukhin later made a film adaptation of Hadji Murad in Germany under the title The White Devil. But there were also truly avant-garde films – for example, The Blazing Bonfire, where Mozzhukhin acted not only as an actor, but also as a director. Emigrant cinematography was killed by sound – Russian actors spoke with an accent. However, producers, cameramen, artists continued to work. Kamenka, for example, was the director of Hiroshima, my love by Alain Resnais. These people, these films are simply absent in our history of cinema! Here is a paradox, but a fact.

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