As we have seen, several of the early Montage films were successfully exported and were praised at home for their political content. As a result, between 1927 and 1930, the movement’s activities intensified. At the same time, however, criticisms were increasingly being leveled at the Montage filmmakers by government and film-industry officials. The main charge was formalism, a vague term implying that a film was too complex for mass audiences and that its makers were more interested in film style than in correct ideology.
Ironically, the very recovery of the film industry, which the export of Montage films helped create, led to criticisms of the movement. In 1927, for the first time, the industry made more money from its own films than from imported ones. Official policy encouraged the industry to cut back its foreign trade. Sovkino and Lunacharsky came under attack for making films—including those of the Montage movement—that were more appropriate for sophisticated foreigners than for the uneducated peasant population at home. And as Montage filmmakers experimented with increasingly complex techniques, accusations of formalism intensified.
Criticized by the press, the major filmmakers had difficulties getting scripts approved and projects funded. Kuleshov came under fire first. Then Vertov had to move from his base in Moscow to make Man with a Movie Camera for the Ukrainian national company Vufku. Critics also charged that Kozintsev and Trau-berg’s eccentric stylization was frivolous and obscure. Eisenstein’s early prestige, gained through Potemkin, protected him at first, but as he explored the possibility of creating abstract ideas through intellectual montage in the late 1920s, he too faced growing criticisms. For a time, Pudovkin was spared such attacks, and he managed to keep making Montage-style films until 1933, when his Deserter brought the movement to a close.
A turning point for the Soviet film industry came in March 1928, when the First Communist Party Conference on Film Questions was held. Until now, the government had left film matters largely to the control of Narkompros and other, smaller film organizations scattered through the republics. Now the Soviet Union was instituting the First Five-Year Plan, a major push toward expanding industrial output. As part of the plan, the cinema was to be centralized. The goal was to increase the number of films made and to build equipment factories to supply all the industry’s needs. Eventually, it was hoped, imports of raw film stock, cameras, lighting fixtures, and other equipment would be eliminated. Similarly, exportation would not be necessary, and all films could be tailored strictly to the needs of the workers and peasants.
The implementation of the First Five-Year Plan in the cinema came slowly. Over the next two years, the government still put little money into the industry. This delay probably helped prolong the Montage movement. Soon, however, circumstances changed. In 1929, Eisenstein left the country to study sound filmmaking abroad. Spending most of his time working on abortive projects, first in Hollywood and then in Mexico, he did not return until 1932. Also in 1929, control over the cinema was taken away from Narkompros and turned over to the Movie Committee of the Soviet Union. Now Lunacharsky had little input, being only one of many members of the new body. In 1930, the film industry was further centralized by the formation of Soyuzkino, a company that was to supervise all production by the studios in the different republics and to handle all distribution and exhibition of films. The head of Soyuzkino was Boris Shumyatsky, a Communist party bureaucrat without film experience. Unlike Lunacharsky, Shumyatsky had no sympathy for the Montage filmmakers.
Soon the attacks on those filmmakers intensified. In 1931, for example, while Eisenstein was still in North America, an article criticized his films for their supposed “ petty bourgeois” tendencies. If Eisenstein could strengthen his ties to the proletariat, the author concluded, he might “create real revolutionary cinema productions. But we must on no account minimize the difficulties confronting him. The way out of this crisis is possible only through a stubborn campaign for reeducation, through merciless exposure and criticism of his first films.”4 All the major Montage filmmakers, and, indeed, modernist artists in every medium, eventually adopted more accessible styles.
The Soviet Montage movement’s influence lingered, however. Leftist filmmakers in other countries, especially documentarists like Scottish-born John Grierson and Dutch Joris Ivens, adopted heroic, low-angle framings and dynamic cutting for similar propaganda purposes. Pudovkin’s and Eisenstein’s theoretical writings have been read by critics and filmmakers ever since they were translated, and more recently Kuleshov’s essays have become available in English (see “Notes and Queries” following). Few filmmakers have used the full range of radical Montage devices, but in a modified fashion, the movement has had a broad influence.
During the early 1930s, the Soviet film industry moved toward an official policy that required all films to follow an approach called Socialist Realism. We shall examine the early era of intensified government control and Socialist Realism, from 1933 to 1945, in Chapter 12.
World History
