KINO Revolution Part 2
Russian Cinema 1929-1938
June 4 to 25, 2006
The final part of the Film Museum's two-month Retrospective on classic Soviet cinema will focus on the transition to sound film and the extraordinary achievements of Russian directors in this new medium. Starting in 1932, the "second wave" of major works from the avant-garde generation – Vsevolod Pudovkin, Boris Barnet, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Lev Kuleshov, Kozintsev/Trauberg and Fridrikh Ermler – is defined to a large extent by its innovative treatment of sound, music and noise.
Due to the slow introduction of sound film technology in the USSR, the late silent films which were produced up until 1935 (side-by-side with the early sound films) are distinguished by an extreme refinement of style. While in the U.S. and Western Europe the dominant narrative form leaned heavily on dialogue and was often visually static, the Russian cinema continued for a number of years with "visual symphonies”.
They were fast-paced and exuberant, such as Ilya Trauberg's Potemkin paraphrase The Blue Express, which transplanted the uprising of the oppressed from the battleship to an express train travelling between China and Russia, or lyrical and moving like Dovzhenko's masterpiece Earth, which celebrates the triumph of nature over death. Further highlights of the late silent era are Aleksandr Medvedkin's incredible slapstick comedy Happiness and Abram Room's virtuoso surrealistic satire The Ghost That Never Returns about rebellion and resistance in a South American "prison state".
Russian films of the 1930s are often lumped together under the term "Socialist Realism", yet the diversity of forms, genres and narrative methods refutes any such generalization. From 1928 on, film was seen as a cultural-revolutionary counterpart to industrialization and the first 5-year plan, and for the time being, the Party was relatively lenient in allowing the various cinematic schools to co-exist.
It propagated a populist cinema for millions of spectators, yet the "artistic experiment" was still upheld, as long as it renounced "formalism". Sound film brought opportunities for both "camps”. When, in Fridrikh Ermler's Counterplan or in Kozintsev/Trauberg's Alone the first scenes started right off with a polyphony of street sounds, alarm bells and popular melodies, whispering and shouting (together with the film scores of Dimitri Shostakovich), audiences began to cheer.
Vsevolod Pudovkin's counterpoint of image and sound upped the ante even more. In Deserterhe translated his subject, the class struggle in the port of Hamburg, into a fascinating optical-acoustical dialectic. However, the most popular of the early sound films was Nikolai Ekk's The Road to Life, which even today remains a lively, prematurely "neorealist" film on neglected youth in the streets of Russian cities. The official faith in progress and the bitterness of life as it is experienced still find some sort of balance in this work.
As of 1934, the political desire for a popular cinema of emotion, of heroic identification and of movie stars grew more intense. Cinema Commissar Boris Shumyatsky, who was overseeing the centralization of filmmaking, oriented himself towards the Hollywood system. The most "perfect” film for his purposes was Chapaev by Georgi and Sergei Vasilyev.
To this day, the powerful drama about the battle between the "Reds" and the "Whites" during the Civil War retains a special status with Russian audiences. The other, more cheerful side of "Russian Hollywood cinema” is represented by former Eisenstein assistant Grigori Aleksandrov. His musical comedies, especially Jolly Fellows and Volga-Volga, are examples of an eccentric cinema of montage which is full of tricks, disguised as pure showbiz. Alongside such appealing hits, and in light of Stalinist crackdowns in cultural politics, any form of "cinéma d'auteur" became an extremely precarious undertaking in the second half of the 1930s.
An emigré like Erwin Piscator, in exile in Moscow, could still complete an unusual single work (Revolt of the Fishermen); outsiders like Aleksandr Ptushko created their own little "islands” of genre cinema (as, for example, with the fantastic puppet animation film The New Gulliver); and a few incorrigibly melancholic temperaments like Boris Barnet found ways and means to keep working despite everything.
Barnet's unsurpassed masterpieces Okraina (Outskirts) and By The Bluest of Seas are late recollections of the wildness and passion that had been associated with the Revolution's flags 15 or 20 years earlier, and for which there was no further equivalent in the political reality of 1938.
The final part of the Film Museum's two-month Retrospective on classic Soviet cinema will focus on the transition to sound film and the extraordinary achievements of Russian directors in this new medium. Starting in 1932, the "second wave" of major works from the avant-garde generation – Vsevolod Pudovkin, Boris Barnet, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Lev Kuleshov, Kozintsev/Trauberg and Fridrikh Ermler – is defined to a large extent by its innovative treatment of sound, music and noise.
Due to the slow introduction of sound film technology in the USSR, the late silent films which were produced up until 1935 (side-by-side with the early sound films) are distinguished by an extreme refinement of style. While in the U.S. and Western Europe the dominant narrative form leaned heavily on dialogue and was often visually static, the Russian cinema continued for a number of years with "visual symphonies”.
They were fast-paced and exuberant, such as Ilya Trauberg's Potemkin paraphrase The Blue Express, which transplanted the uprising of the oppressed from the battleship to an express train travelling between China and Russia, or lyrical and moving like Dovzhenko's masterpiece Earth, which celebrates the triumph of nature over death. Further highlights of the late silent era are Aleksandr Medvedkin's incredible slapstick comedy Happiness and Abram Room's virtuoso surrealistic satire The Ghost That Never Returns about rebellion and resistance in a South American "prison state".
Russian films of the 1930s are often lumped together under the term "Socialist Realism", yet the diversity of forms, genres and narrative methods refutes any such generalization. From 1928 on, film was seen as a cultural-revolutionary counterpart to industrialization and the first 5-year plan, and for the time being, the Party was relatively lenient in allowing the various cinematic schools to co-exist.
It propagated a populist cinema for millions of spectators, yet the "artistic experiment" was still upheld, as long as it renounced "formalism". Sound film brought opportunities for both "camps”. When, in Fridrikh Ermler's Counterplan or in Kozintsev/Trauberg's Alone the first scenes started right off with a polyphony of street sounds, alarm bells and popular melodies, whispering and shouting (together with the film scores of Dimitri Shostakovich), audiences began to cheer.
Vsevolod Pudovkin's counterpoint of image and sound upped the ante even more. In Deserterhe translated his subject, the class struggle in the port of Hamburg, into a fascinating optical-acoustical dialectic. However, the most popular of the early sound films was Nikolai Ekk's The Road to Life, which even today remains a lively, prematurely "neorealist" film on neglected youth in the streets of Russian cities. The official faith in progress and the bitterness of life as it is experienced still find some sort of balance in this work.
As of 1934, the political desire for a popular cinema of emotion, of heroic identification and of movie stars grew more intense. Cinema Commissar Boris Shumyatsky, who was overseeing the centralization of filmmaking, oriented himself towards the Hollywood system. The most "perfect” film for his purposes was Chapaev by Georgi and Sergei Vasilyev.
To this day, the powerful drama about the battle between the "Reds" and the "Whites" during the Civil War retains a special status with Russian audiences. The other, more cheerful side of "Russian Hollywood cinema” is represented by former Eisenstein assistant Grigori Aleksandrov. His musical comedies, especially Jolly Fellows and Volga-Volga, are examples of an eccentric cinema of montage which is full of tricks, disguised as pure showbiz. Alongside such appealing hits, and in light of Stalinist crackdowns in cultural politics, any form of "cinéma d'auteur" became an extremely precarious undertaking in the second half of the 1930s.
An emigré like Erwin Piscator, in exile in Moscow, could still complete an unusual single work (Revolt of the Fishermen); outsiders like Aleksandr Ptushko created their own little "islands” of genre cinema (as, for example, with the fantastic puppet animation film The New Gulliver); and a few incorrigibly melancholic temperaments like Boris Barnet found ways and means to keep working despite everything.
Barnet's unsurpassed masterpieces Okraina (Outskirts) and By The Bluest of Seas are late recollections of the wildness and passion that had been associated with the Revolution's flags 15 or 20 years earlier, and for which there was no further equivalent in the political reality of 1938.
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