Tasks of the State Cinema in Russia

Anatolii Lunacharskii, The Tasks of the State Cinema in the RSFSR. 1919

Film came to play an important role in the efforts of the new regime to reach and influence a largely illiterate or semi-literate population, and Soviet film gained world-wide fame in the 1920s and 1930s. As in other areas of the arts the government was able to give only fragmentary attention to it at first, but the film industry was nationalized in 1919 and Lunacharskii, under whose commissariat it fell, asserted that "a socialist government must imbue even film shows with a socialist spirit." Film was intended to serve the cause not only of winning the Civil War but of remaking society. This essay was written as an introduction to a collection of essays on the cinema.

Original Source: A.V. Lunacharsky, Zadachi gosudarstvennogo kinodela v R.S.F.S.R. Kinematograf. Sbornik statei (Moscow 1919), pp. 5-7.

The state cinema in Russia faces quite unusual tasks. It is not simply a matter of nationalizing production and film distribution and the direct control of cinemas. It is a matter of fostering a completely new spirit in this branch of art and education.

In the present impoverished state of the Russian economy we cannot count on producing films of a purely artistic, literary or even scientifically objective character and competing with foreign firms or replacing Russian private films. For the present, while trade is significantly restricted, we might perhaps borrow this kind of material from films that have already been made or imported from abroad; but this situation will not of course last forever.

We must do what nobody else is either able or willing to do. We should remember that a socialist government must imbue even film shows with a socialist spirit.

There is absolutely no doubt that in this respect far more newsreel footage must be shot and there is no need for me to say more.

Furthermore, the main task of cinema in both its scientific and feature divisions is that of propaganda.

Generally speaking, every art, as Tolstoy once remarked, is above all a means of instilling the artist's emotions into the masses. Education in the wider sense of the word consists in the dissemination of ideas among minds that would otherwise remain a stranger to them. Cinema can accomplish both these things with particular force: it constitutes, on the one hand, a visual clarion for the dissemination of ideas and, on the other hand, if we introduce elements of the refined, the poetic, the pathetic etc., it is capable of touching the emotions and thus becomes an apparatus of agitation. We must pay attention to these aspects above all. If there is a place where a stupid fear of tendentiousness becomes even more absurd that place is cinema. Generally speaking, tendentiousness is harmful only if it is petty; the great tendentiousness of a religious idea or of a broad socialist idea that approximates to it can only produce works of art, and it was not for nothing that Chekhov complained that the art of his time had been deprived of God and that no amount of talent on the part of the artist and no outward mastery can, even in isolation, act as a substitute for a life-giving idea.

A Communist government has such a life-giving idea and, with the minimum of attention and experience, this idea can be very easily conveyed in the appropriate artistic guise.

It seems to me that we must first of all produce a cultural-historical picture. It is impossible to imagine a richer source for cinema that the cultural history of mankind as a whole. This is, in the literal sense of the word, an inexhaustible source, and it is worth tapping it, starting with the life of primeval man so that the head really spins at the wealth of images that can be realized most fully through cinema.

But we must not be carried away by the full panoply of the past: we must concentrate only on moments that are important for agitation and propaganda. We must convey the history of the beginnings of the growth of the state in such a way that basic Communist ideas on the criminal nature and at the same time on the necessity of each state, on the development of man and his different forms, on the unique form of the state-the dictatorship of the poor or of the proletariat-are made clear to every viewer.

Just as important is the history of the Church, including the depiction of cults--the cruelest and most senseless---and also of all the abuses committed by the Christian Church but, with historical objectivity, we must clearly distinguish its democratic and positive aspects. It is very easy, having given due credit to the positive and idealistic aspects of Christianity, to show how they have been systematically falsified by ecclesiastics in the service of the state and the wealthy classes.

The history of political conflicts, in particular the history of the great French Revolution, and all kinds of important events of our recent revolutionary history, from the Decembrists to the October Revolution of 1917, must also be treated with all due care.

While in no way denying the enormous importance of a broader range of themes, depicting, for instance, the history of science (an unusually rich theme), including the history of inventions or the history of the highest culture, I think that, with our limited time and resources, we must not hesitate too much and in choosing between two pictures of roughly the same importance and value we must make the one that can speak to the mind and the heart more vividly from the standpoint of revolutionary propaganda.

Source: Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 22-23.