Boris Shumiatskii, A Cinema for the Millions. 1934
Presented here are excerpts from a longer article, in which Shumiatskii gloats over the success of Chapaev, which represented the triumph of his simple, audience-directed policies over the politically correct, but aesthetically suspect proletarian productions that had driven Soviet audiences out of the movie theaters.
Original Source: B. Z. Shumiatskii, Kinematografiia millionov (Moscow, 1935), pp. 148-60 and 234-40.
In 1934 the best film produced by Soviet cinema in the whole period of its existence was released: Chapaev as a film represented the real summit of Soviet film art.
The film is distinguished by its exceptional simplicity. This simplicity, which is a characteristic only of high art, is so organic to Chapaev, it constitutes such a striking contrast to every Formalist device that in the first period after the film’s release a number of ‘critics’ were unable to explain the reasons for its success to their own satisfaction.
The strength of Chapaev lies in the profound vital truth of the film. The directors, the Vasilievs, have depicted superbly the positive heroes and the positive features but they have not been afraid to show in their film a number of the negative aspects that existed in the Red Army at that time. The film shows individual incidents of looting: these took place from time to time because class enemies were trying to infiltrate the Red Army. It shows a disturbance in the ranks when the kulaks tried to create panic during a battle and thus upset the outcome. It shows the cowardice of individual Red Army soldiers unable to withstand the enormous influence of the Kappelites’ psychological attack. But these negative features are depicted realistically and truthfully. The film depicts in every negative feature the traces of its demise. It depicts the struggle against these negative phenomena and rightly shows the whole difficulty of uniting the partisan divisions, the partisan ‘outlaws’, in the Red Army, cemented together by the iron will of Lenin’s Party.
The central character of the film, the wonderful figure of the heroic divisional commander Chapaev, is drawn in rich and vivid colors. Chapaev is not embellished. There is no touching up of his character. Chapaev is politically illiterate; he does not realize that there is no difference between a Bolshevik and a Communist, he is unaware of the existence of the Second and Third Internationals, he does not know the history of the Party. Chapaev knows nothing about Alexander the Great and presents himself at the beginning of the film as a typical ‘innate’ Bolshevik.
Chapaev is embarrassed about his ignorance. At a meeting he tells the peasants and soldiers: ‘I’ve never been to an academy and never graduated from one.’ These words contain at one and the same time both bitterness and a recognition of his natural strength, of his brilliant mind and the enormous willpower which will permit people of his caliber to graduate from more than one academy. Chapaev is firmly convinced that truth is on Lenin’s side. Chapaev knows what he is fighting for and his dreams of the magnificent life that will come after the war is over are beautiful.
Chapaev learns avidly himself and at the same time teaches others. Alongside this heroic divisional commander’s ‘brave folly’ there dwell the exceptional talents of a strategist. His lesson on a commander’s place in battle, his elaboration of plans of attack on the Whites, his astounding tenacity and sharp-wittedness that do not leave him for a moment, all these are extraordinarily precious and convincing strokes in depicting the image of the Bolshevik captain.
Chapaev is stern: he does not hesitate before the fire of an enemy ready to stab the Revolution in the back, but Chapaev is a marvelous comrade, Chapaev is a sensitive and sympathetic human being. He dreams, loves a good song, laughter, jokes. When at a meeting Chapaev utters his famous phrase: ‘Am I right, comrades?’, this reflects both peasant cunning and a fine knowledge of the mass and his close proximity to his troops.
G. and S. Vasiliev cleverly and sensitively and with the great tact of the artist, stroke by stroke and dash by dash, depict the character of Chapaev and show how this spontaneous Communist grows into a genuine Bolshevik, a disciplined member of Lenin’s Party. Essentially, the whole film is about this: the growth of Chapaev and his comrades-in-arms under the attentive, careful and concerned guidance of the Party. The whole film is about our Party training the Red Army.
How cleverly and tactfully Furmanov, without yielding on questions of principle but at the same time carefully and lovingly, teaches Chapaev. Chapaev breaks a stool and Furmanov responds with a discreet remark, even a smile: ‘Alexander the Great was also a great general but why break the stool?’
After the scene of Zhikharev’s arrest, in which Furmanov shows himself to be a real Bolshevik who does not lose his head in complicated circumstances, Chapaev threatens to expel Furmanov from the division. Furmanov discreetly and calmly rejects Chapaev’s reproaches and declares that he can only be removed by the Party that sent him. The mistrustful and quick-tempered Chapaev is then convinced from his own experience that Furmanov is not ‘clinging’ to his own fame, that Furmanov is not discrediting him as a commander but, on the contrary, by tactfully and skillfully correcting his mistakes, is enhancing his, Chapaev’s authority. In dramatic, acting and directing terms in this episode the enormous psychological transformation that Chapaev undergoes is beautifully illustrated, as is the change in his attitude to Furmanov, whom he meets with mistrust and sternness and from whom he takes his leave with sadness and with love.
In this episode (as in others) there is none of the ‘psychologizing’ that was so characteristic of the pre-Revolutionary cinema and that has been retained, albeit in altered form but nonetheless quite clearly in Soviet cinema. Chapaev does not ‘experience’ this transformation in theatrical pose and mime. No, the transformation is depicted through a number of clever and delicate strokes, through action. The audience sees this transformation in the gesture with which Chapaev buttons up his shirt when the peasants come, in his conversation with them, in the glance that he throws at the arrested Zhikharev who was looking out of the door, in his conversation with Petka (‘and you thought they’d send Chapaev someone puny?’), and lastly in Chapaev’s speech to the meeting (‘What does this mean, Comrade soldiers?’).
From this point of view the scene of Chapaev’s nocturnal meditation over the map is well done (effectively, cinematically): it is a scene in which it would have been easy to drift into ‘psychoanalysis’, a scene in which Chapaev’s moods are superbly communicated in his song, his exclamations, his conversation with Petka.
Chapaev’s growth takes place not off screen (as in many of our films) but before the audience’s eyes. Chapaev is not presented ready-made, as is often the case: his character is formed through the plot, in dramaturgical twists and turns. There is no head-on depiction, no exaggerated tendentiousness: the tendentiousness derives from the very essence of the action, from the deeds of the characters.
It seems to us that Comrade Khrisanf Khersonskii, who has tried to reproach the film for its inadequate depiction of the Party’s influence, for carelessness in depicting the commissar’s role, has made a mistake precisely because he has not appreciated the methods the Party used to teach the Chapaevs, he has not understood Chapaev and he has not realized that every great work is a new qualitative step in cinema.
It is difficult to talk about the good scenes in Chapaev because that would mean re-telling almost the whole film but we should like to cite one more example. This is the scene before the battle when Chapaev, on horseback, is watching for the Whites. Chapaev is the leader: that is what the composition of these shots tells us. It transpires that the squadron is not in position. Chapaev is furious and threatens to shoot the squadron commander. But Petka brings a report that ‘there’s been a disturbance in the squadron and they’ve killed the commander’. Chapaev is shaken both by the ‘disturbance’ and in particular by the murder of his comrade-in-arms. ‘What? Killed him?’ he cries and gallops off alone toward the rebellious squadron. Once again the essence of Chapaev is depicted in an active situation. There Chapaev is, the stern and brave leader who does not hesitate to shoot a comrade who has not carried out a military order, and there he is, the brave man expressing his grief for a fallen comrade-in-arms and an utterly courageous friend.
There is nothing superfluous in Chapaev. ‘Few words but many ideas’ (remember, for example, the scene where Petka captures a White that crosses into the next scene, ‘And you retreated?’). Here there are no titles to explain or illustrate the action, nor are there any didactic cues.
In Chapaev there are none of the clich»s or the hackneyed depiction of the bourgeoisie and our class enemies as they were usually depicted in earlier films, indulging in orgies and drinking bouts like sadists, and so on. The Whites in Chapaev are a powerful enemy that it requires enormous efforts to defeat. The character of Colonel Borodin is depicted negatively through his aristocratic exterior and his liberalism. Colonel Borodin plays the Moonlight Sonata, he is intoxicated by the sounds and dreams but that same Borodin, a typical bourgeois humanist, substitutes for shooting a still worse punishment, flogging, and the brother of Petrovich, his batman, dies under the cane-strokes. This is a profound characteristic of their new version of Iudushka Golovlev.
Remember the Kappelites’ psychological attack, their purely cavalier attitude to life, all those cigars and whips with which the officer class goes into battle: here you sense an enemy ready to fight to the last drop of blood and you realize the enormous effort the Soviet Republic had to make to defeat an enemy like this. In this contrast the amount of heroism, effort and resources in the battle that our young and sometimes poorly organized and inadequately trained Red Army waged emerges dramatically. In this contrast Chapaev’s character also emerges dramatically.
A work of art as great as Chapaev by its very appearance resolves a whole number of disputed issues. Chapaev depicts both the heroism of the mass movement and the fate of individual heroes and it is in and through them that the mass is vividly and graphically revealed.
We recall somewhat unwillingly the arguments that theatre dramatists have been having over a long period of time. A. Afinogenov, N. Pogodin, V. Vishnevskii, V. Kirshon and others have each advanced their own principle of composition as the only correct one, remarking in the process that Shakespeare wrote like this and in no other way and that it was precisely this method of writing that had every prospect of taking precedence in Soviet drama.
The film Chapaev has demonstrated convincingly that a variety of dramaturgical concepts have the right to exist on condition that these concepts contain strongly formed characters, that there is a strong plot linking the heroes and events, that there is dramatic tension, an adequate but not superfluous amount of detail, and that every detail has its place. The film Chapaev has demonstrated that the decisive factors in a dramatic work are the characters, the profundity of the subject and the breadth of ideas. The fact that we are promoting character to first place does not in any way mean that we are forgetting situations. We emphasize the significance of character because the whole development of Soviet cinema in the period 1924-8 led, as we have seen, to a situation in which character became submerged in events. Even now we have films in which events are opposed to character (for instance, Kurdium’s The Last Port, made to a script by A. Korneichuk). It is for precisely this reason that we must stress heavily the significance of character.
On the other hand, we do not need to point to the other extreme here and warn against it. We have already said that there is a tendency among us to regard the entire history of Soviet cinema from the standpoint of the primacy of the character: we have noted the errors that this tendency has led to.
As is usual in a great work of art, all the component parts of the film Chapaev are of the highest quality. In the film there are neither bad actors nor ones who merely play their parts satisfactorily. The entire cast of the film, even the bit parts, are full-blooded characters. Babochkin is quite exceptional: he is an actor who responds with all his inner qualities to the role he has created. Blinov, Kmit, Pevtsov, Miasnikova, Shkurat, etc., play their parts beautifully. Even the minor parts in the film, e.g. the role of the prevaricating middle-peasant played by Chirkov, develops into a great and memorable character.
We think that, apart from the great contribution of the directors and the talented acting collective, the greatest role in this successful piece has been played by the exceptional quality of the dramatic script material at the disposal of the actors in the film.
For some reason the camera-work in Chapaev has so far escaped attention. Nevertheless this simple and, in its pattern and tones, powerful photography, which contains nothing superfluous or obtrusive, no admiration of nature for nature’s sake, harmonizes beautifully with the content of the film, sets off the principal object beautifully in the shot, singles out the thing to which attention must be drawn.
The same must be said of the composer’s work.
Unfortunately, in very many of our sound films both the director and the composer have until now followed the line of least resistance, using music as publicity material or as a means to seduce the audience. These are frequently the source of so-called ‘hits’, memorable little songs that do not play a dramatic role even in the film. This is how songs are used in the majority of bourgeois films. What we have said does not of course apply to those Soviet films in which there is one song but a song that typifies a character and has a dramatic function in the film.
In the film Chapaev there is a beautiful old song that the composer has plucked from everyday, from real life: the song ‘The Storm Roared’. This song has an independent dramatic function in the film: it distinguishes the mood of the episodes marvelously. In the night scene when Chapaev’s men, resting, sing this song, it represents a very good transition to the battle in which Chapaev will die and, in musical terms, it explains the actual character of Vasilii Ivanovich and his comrades-in-arms.
At the same time the use of the song ‘The Storm Roared’ in the film represents an exceptionally successful revolutionary rehabilitation of this very song which originated as a colonists’ song (it poeticizes the colonization of Siberia by Ermak). In this context the song loses its old meaning and acquires a new one. We know a whole number of instances where audiences watch the film several times and await this very song with particular impatience.
On the other hand we cannot fail to note in this same film that a certain admiration for the vocal and musical material (the song, the Moonlight Sonata) on the part of the composer and the director have led to a slowing-down of these scenes and thus to a reduction in the pace of the film.
The whole film in its entirety sustains a dynamic pace that corresponds to the style of socialist realism and to the very essence of cinema but individual scenes are drawn out. The scene with the Moonlight Sonata cited above, the songs before the final battle, Furmanov’s departure, and a few others are all drawn out …
Chapter Six: The Battle for New Genres
From the point of view of the elevated technique and film language that we spoke of in previous chapters we have obviously underestimated the significance of the film The Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows. The Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows is good because of its technique, its skilled use of trick photography and its work with sound …
The Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows was a good start for a new genre: the Soviet film comedy. The Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows played this part successfully. We have an optimistic film sprinkled with joy, laughter and merriment. The film is a marvelous relaxation and audiences that have seen The Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows will find it easier to work afterwards. The numerous enquiries conducted among audiences and the large attendances for the film (in Moscow it took second place in box-office terms to Chapaev) testify to this. The ‘Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows’ March’ has become one of the favorite songs of our younger generation.
A lot of polemical copy has been wasted on The Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows. It is curious that the fight against The Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows intensified at precisely the time of the Venice Festival when the film, both in the USSR and abroad, was receiving widespread recognition among connoisseurs of the art of cinema.
At the Writers’ Congress, which was taking place at the same time, many things were said about cinema that were wrong. Comrades who did not take account of the difficulties involved in the path we have taken were unaware of the real state of affairs and asserted that cinema had lost its Bolshevik style (Comrades Ehrenburg and Lidin said this and, however strange this might seem, individual scriptwriters succumbed to this general mood). Our comrades talked suspiciously about The Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows and The Storm and other attempts to film the classics, and contrasted these films (which, in their view, were ‘worthless’) with the brilliant Battleship Potemkin and Mother …
The majority of the accusations leveled at cinema were wrong both in essence and in form: individual correctly diagnosed shortcomings were generalized and on the basis of the particular shortcoming of a single film the whole path of cinema was thrown into doubt.
The Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows was mentioned more than once in this context.
The address by the poet A. Surkov was characteristic:
In this country in recent years there has, among both the people who make artistic policy and the people who put that policy into effect, been a growth in the large number of those who support the cultivation of comedy and entertainment at all costs.
One deplorable result of this ‘lemonade’ ideology is, in my view, the film The Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows that we saw recently. The film is the apotheosis of vulgarity: for the sake of making people laugh at all costs’ every creature is driven in pairs into a timeless and unidentifiable palace as into Noah’s Ark, for the pleasure of the ‘esteemed public’ real music is mockingly parodied …
Why does Surkov think that in the epoch of proletarian revolution the proletariat does not need poetry, laughter and love? Neither the Revolution nor the defense of our socialist fatherland are a tragedy for the proletariat. We have always gone into battle, and we shall go into battle again in the future singing and, at times, laughing …
Both Chapaev and Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows are fully entitled to exist within the framework of Soviet cinema. Both films are the necessary and regular work of Soviet masters.
In fact we have the Moscow Art Theatre but the same city of Moscow has a Satire Theatre and a Music Hall that are successful with the public. The Philharmonia gives concerts of strictly classical music but alongside it there are those who perform folk songs and there is Utesov’s Theatrical Jazz Ensemble.
We know very well that the puritans view Utesov’s jazz or the Music Hall in the same way as they view The Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows but nobody has made the absurd deduction, because of the presence of jazz in Soviet art, that the Moscow Art Theatre’s successes are accidental. Not only does the presence of various genres not impoverish art, as the puritans believe: on the contrary, it enriches it …
Its shortcomings do not deprive The Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows of its great significance, especially if you note that it is the first step on the path towards mastering the comic genre and, in particular, that most difficult genre, the eccentric musical comedy film …
Tsarist and capitalist Russia were not acquainted with happy joyful laughter in their best works. The laughter in Gogol, Shchedrin and Chekhov is accusing laughter, laughter derived from bitterness and hatred … We believe that, if Gogol, Shchedrin and Chekhov were alive today, their actual laughter would in the Soviet Union acquire joie-de-vivre, optimism and cheerfulness …
In a country building socialism, where there is no private property or exploitation, where the classes hostile to the proletariat have been liquidated, where the workers are united by their conscious participation in the construction of socialist society and where the enormous task of liquidating the remnants of the capitalist past is being successfully accomplished by the Party even in people’s consciousness – in this country comedy, apart from its task of exposure, has another, more important and responsible task: the creation of a cheerful and joyful spectacle. It is not for nothing that a number of comedies have appeared here recently in which the authors try to remove only the positive characters.
The director Aleksandrov and the whole creative collective for The Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows had to pave the way for this genre not merely because we had no comedy films but because the genre antecedents of The Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows, our early comedies (even the best of them: Two Friends, a Model and a Girlfriend, Don Diego and Pelageia, etc.) were heavyweight in form and lightweight in content. The audience was not amused by these comedies even though, given their time and level, they were not bad. Trite morality, pretentiousness and schematism weighed heavily on our comedies …
The Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows is good precisely because there is nothing and or pretentious in it.
On the contrary, even the hostile reviews of The Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows cannot completely deny the good things there are in the film: its cheerfulness, its joie-de-vivre and its laughter. The victorious class wants to laugh with joy. That is its right, and Soviet cinema must provide the audience with this joyful Soviet laughter.
Source: Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 358-369.